Oligopoly and welfare: A unified presentation with applications to trade and development

We develop a unified sequence of models to examine the determinants of price, output, profitability and concentration for different kinds of oligopolistic market. We relate various magnitudes of significance to judges of welfare and to policy makers, such as consumer surplus, profit, or added benefits of employment or trade surplus, to observable magnitudes such as the size and concentration of the market. It emerges that various appropriately formulated Herfindahl indices are useful in several of these relations. We attempt to present results in a way that is useful for empirical investigations and pay particular attention to applications in trade and development.     

What Do Bettors Want? Determinants of Pari‐Mutuel Betting Preference

A bstract .   This paper is an analysis of the demand for thoroughbred racetrack wagers, examining evidence that would support the existence of two types of bettors: the risk-averse informed bettor versus the uninformed bettor. Looking at 12 major racetracks over the fall of 2002, we undertake an empirical examination of the determinants of bettors' preferences for particular wagers on specific races. The goal is to try to determine what individual aspects of a race (conditions, surface, participants, etc.) will encourage increased wagering dollars. With the advent of simulcasting, the competition for the wagering dollar is fierce, as the bettor can choose from more than 100 races daily, each race offering numerous betting options. We find for most wagers that higher quality participants, larger and more competitive fields, and turf races increase betting volume while higher pari-mutuel takeout, poor track conditions, and other races run concurrently reduce volume. However, more competitive fields reduce betting volume in the show and trifecta pools. Optimal field size is determined to be between 10 and 12 betting interests. Overall, we find support for the existence of a significant share of risk-averse informed bettors.     

VOTING AND SOCIAL PRESSURE UNDER IMPERFECT INFORMATION

We develop a model in which costly voting in a large, two‐party election is a sequentially rational choice of strategic, self‐interested players who can reward fellow voters by forming stronger ties in a network formation coordination game. The predictions match a variety of stylized facts, including explaining why an individual's voting behavior may depend on what she knows about her friends' actions. Players have imperfect information about others' voting behavior, and we find that some degree of privacy may be necessary for voting in equilibrium, enabling hypocritical but useful social pressure. Our framework applies to any costly prosocial behavior.     

Emerging Market Multinationals: Coopetition for Global Growth

Since the dramatic geopolitical shift toward liberalization in the last century, emerging‐market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) have become major players in global markets and continue to account for an increasing share of global foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. Given this trend, the questions of how and why EMNEs pursue FDI deserve greater attention. This article builds on recent work that uses resource dependence theory (RDT) to explain EMNE internationalization strategies. We propose that EMNEs, while often resource deficient relative to their developed‐market competitors and, therefore, more dependent on others in the external environment, are uniquely positioned to overcome these deficiencies over time through simultaneous cooperation and competition—coopetition—with their global rivals and host‐ and home‐country governments. These propositions contribute to the EMNE internationalization literature by more fully incorporating RDT into current theories of internationalization, highlighting the importance of managing dependencies over time to maximize global growth. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Substantive or Symbolic Environmental Strategies? Effects of External and Internal Normative Stakeholder Pressures

Different forms of stakeholder pressures drive different environmental strategies in organizations. This article differentiates between internal and external normative stakeholder pressures to test their potentially unique effects on environmental strategies. The findings suggest that internal, normative stakeholder pressures primarily drive substantive commitments to environmental practices, reflecting an internalized, voluntary commitment to the natural environment and dedication to environmental leadership by the firm. External, normative pressures instead primarily drive symbolic commitments to environmental practices, aimed at managing the image of the organization to establish and reinforce an appearance of commitment to the natural environment. This novel perspective accounts for the institutionally plural contexts of organizations and their environments, in which internal pressures directly drive substantive environmental commitments and external pressures drive symbolic responses. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

British relative economic decline revisited: The role of competition

This paper examines the role of competition in British productivity performance over the period from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A detailed review of the evidence suggests that the weakness of competition from the 1930s to the 1970s undermined productivity growth but since the 1970s stronger competition has been a key ingredient in ending relative economic decline. The productivity implications of the retreat from competition resulted in large part from interactions with idiosyncratic British institutional structures in terms of corporate governance and industrial relations. This account extends familiar insights from cliometrics both analytically and chronologically.     

Trade openness and government size of small developing countries

This paper examines the causal effect that trade openness has on government size in small developing countries (SDCs). We use the construction of the trade cost variables based on Baltic Dry Index in primary goods as instruments of trade openness to address the endogeneity issue. We find that the increase in trade openness leads to an increase in government size: a 1 percent expansion in trade openness (trade GDP ratio) raises government consumption over GDP ratio by approximately 0.1–0.2 percentage points on average. Its quantitative significance emphasizes the importance of rethinking the costs and benefits of trade openness for SDCs.     

Disaggregated Earnings and Stock Prices: Evidence from International Listed Shipping Firms

The goal of this study is to investigate the impact of earnings from vessel sales on stock prices for international listed shipping firms. The empirical findings show that operating income from vessel sales has a higher power in explaining stock prices than operating earnings only as a sole piece of accounting information for future profitability, investment opportunities, and firm valuation. The testing period is from 2000 to 2009. The methodologies are those of panel cointegration and panel causality tests. The implications are very crucial, since managers may manipulate annual earnings by such non-operating activities.