New product price controls in France

Price controls on existing products frequently incite firms to drop low-margin products and to re-introduce them later with a higher margin under a new name. This creates the need for price regulations dealing specifically with new products. The article describes the development of new product price controls in the context of the overall French price control system. An effort is made to assess and to explain the actual effectiveness of the new product price controls.Two major explanations for its apparent lack of effectiveness are advanced. First, the regulation demands complex judgements by the implementing bureaucrats, without providing sufficient operational guidance. Secondly, firms dispose of a variety of strategies to circumvent the regulations.

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Preiskontrollen für neue Produkte in Frankreich

Zusammenfassung Preiskontrollen für bereits eingeführte Produkte führen häufig dazu, daß Produkte mit niedrigen Gewinnspannen aus dem Markt genommen werden und später mit höheren Spannen unter einem Namen wieder eingeführt werden. Daraus ergibt sich die Notwendigkeit, Preiskontrollen auch für neu eingeführte Produkte durchzuführen. Der Beitrag beschreibt die Entwicklung solcher Preiskontrollen für neue Produkte im Rahmen des umfassenden französischen Preiskontrollsystems. Er versucht, die tatsächliche Wirksamkeit dieser Kontrollen abzuschätzen und zu erklären.Die Wirksamkeit ist offenbar sehr gering. Dafür werden zwei Erklärungen geboten. Zum einen sind für die Preiskontrollen komplizierte Produktbeurteilungen durch die ausführenden Behörden erforderlich ohne daß es dafür ausreichende Handlungsanweisungen gäbe. Zum anderen haben die Unternehmungen zahlreiche Möglichkeiten, die Preiskontrollen zu umgehen.

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Reinhard Angelmar is Associate Professor of Marketing at the European Institute of Business Administration (INSEAD), Boulevard de Constance, F-77305 Fontainebleau. Bernard Yon is Associate Professor of Marketing and Food Distribution at the Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales (ESSEC), B. P. 105, F-95009 Cergy.

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A previous version of this paper was presented at the 1977 Annual Meeting, European Academy for Advanced Research in Marketing, Saarbrücken.     

Potenziale der Globalisierung zugunsten der Umwelt

H?ufig wird die Globalisierung und auch die Welthandelsorganisation WTO für den verst?rkten Raubbau an der Umwelt verantwortlich gemacht. Eine wichtige Rolle beim Schutz der Umwelt spielen die Eigentumsrechte. Wie kann erreicht werden, dass der Eigentümer vom Schutz der Umwelt profitiert, die externen Kosten also internalisiert werden? Prof. Dr. Peter Zweifel, 60, ist ordentlicher Professor für Volkswirtschaftslehre am Sozial?konomischen Institut der Universit?t Zürich, Dr. Reinhard Madlener, 42, ist Oberassistent am Centre for Energy Policy and Economics (CEPE) der ETH Zürich, Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am DIW Berlin und Gastdozent an der Universit?t Zürich.     

Market Structure, Capital Regulation and Bank Risk Taking

This paper discusses the effect of capital regulation on the risk taking behavior of commercial banks. We first theoretically show that capital regulation works differently in different market structures of banking sectors. In lowly concentrated markets, capital regulation is effective in mitigating risk taking behavior because banks’ franchise values are low and banks have incentives to pursue risky strategies in order to increase their franchise values. If franchise values are high, on the other hand, the effect of capital regulation on bank risk taking is ambiguous. We then test the model predictions on a cross-country sample including 421 commercial banks from 61 countries. We find that capital regulation is effective in mitigating risk taking only in markets with a low degree of concentration. The results remain robust after accounting for financial sector development, legal system efficiency, and for other country and bank-specific characteristics.     

Subsampling realised kernels

In a recent paper we have introduced the class of realised kernel estimators of the increments of quadratic variation in the presence of noise. We showed that this estimator is consistent and derived its limit distribution under various assumptions on the kernel weights. In this paper we extend our analysis, looking at the class of subsampled realised kernels and we derive the limit theory for this class of estimators. We find that subsampling is highly advantageous for estimators based on discontinuous kernels, such as the truncated kernel. For kinked kernels, such as the Bartlett kernel, we show that subsampling is impotent, in the sense that subsampling has no effect on the asymptotic distribution. Perhaps surprisingly, for the efficient smooth kernels, such as the Parzen kernel, we show that subsampling is harmful as it increases the asymptotic variance. We also study the performance of subsampled realised kernels in simulations and in empirical work.     

Seasonality, Cointegration, and Forecasting UK Residential Energy Demand

Much of the short‐run movement in energy demand in the UK is seasonal, and the contribution of long‐run factors to short‐run forecasts is slight. Nevertheless, using a variety of techniques, including a recently developed estimation procedure that is applicable irrespective of the orders of integration of the data, we obtain a long‐run income elasticity of demand of about one third, and we are unable to reject a zero price elasticity. An econometric model is shown to provide superior short‐run forecasts to well‐known seasonal time series models ex post , but is inferior to Box‐Jenkins SARMA models when the determinants themselves have to be forecast. However, the relatively short data sample and small number of forecasts suggest caution in generalising these results.     

Digital transformation: a review,synthesis and opportunities for future research

Management Review Quarterly - In the last years, scholarly attention was on a steady rise leading to a significant increase in the number of papers addressing different technological and...