Market Structure and Risk Taking in the Banking Industry

We demonstrate that the common view according to which an increase in competition leads banks to increased risk taking fails to hold in an environment where homogeneous loss averse consumers can choose in which bank to make a deposit based on their knowledge of the riskiness incorporated in the banks outstanding loan portfolios. With an exclusive focus on imperfect competition we find that banks incentives for risk taking are invariant to a change in the banking market structure from duopoly to monopoly. Finally, we show that deposit insurance would eliminate the gains from bank competition when banks use asset quality as a strategic instrument.revised version received October 15, 2003     

Cultural Inertia and Uniformity in Organizations

We analyze aspects of the structure of organizational culture.We show that old and culturally uniform organizations are proneto cultural inertia, that is, they are reluctant to adopt adifferent culture in response to a change in the environment.Cultural uniformity can be beneficial because the associatedinertia ex post protects and therefore ex ante encourages culture-specificinvestments by agents. We also explore the model's implicationsfor such issues as cultural uniformity within an organization,cultural heterogeneity across organizations, the destabilizingeffect of growth and mergers, and the conflicts arising in themanagement of culture.     

The Extended Generalized Gamma Model and its Special Cases: Applications to Modeling Marriage Durations

The paper demonstrates how various parametric models for duration data such as the exponential, Weibull, and log-normal may be embedded in a single framework, and how such competing models may be assessed relative to a more comprehensive one. To illustrate the issues addressed, the survival patterns of marriages among 1203 Swedish men born 1936–1964 are studied by parametric and non-parametric survival methods. In particular, we study the sensitivity of model-choice with respect to level of aggregation of the time variable; and of covariate-effects with respect to the model chosen. In accordance with previous works our empirical results indicate that the choice of a parametric model for the duration variable is affected by the level of time aggregation. In contrast to previous results, however, our analysis shows that estimates of covariate effects are not always robust to distributional assumptions for the duration variable.     

第三方物流服务商开展电子商务的竞争策略研究

通过对我国第三方物流服务商开展电子商务的SWOT分析,提出了其利用电子商务整合企业资源,实现整个供应链最优化从而获得竞争优势的策略。     

Aggregation of Directional Distance Functions and Industrial Efficiency

Three main objectives are pursued in this paper. First, we intend to analyze the aggregation problem of directional distance functions from a constructive viewpoint. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions concerning the structural properties of the production technology and of the nature of groups of firms. Indeed, exact additive aggregation holds for a linear technology and for a direction solely defined in the output space. Second, since these conditions are somewhat restrictive, we are interested in providing a measure for the aggregation bias through the relationship between industrial and structural technical efficiency. Finally, we show that this aggregation bias is a lower bound for industrial allocative efficiency.     

论转型期中国的"两栖人"现象

随着中国经济和政治体制改革的深入,社会成员的结构发生了重大变化,在阶层分化的过程中出现了特有的“两栖人”现象。本文指出了在改革初期和世纪之交两个阶段分别出现的“两栖人”现象的实质,以及这种现象对社会的影响,最后提出了解决这一问题的思路与对策。     

Price-Cost Margins and Profit Rates in New Zealand Electricity Distribution Networks Since 1994: the Cost of Light Handed Regulation

From 1994 to 2003, New Zealands corporatized electricity lines networks operated with no industry regulator, but under the spotlight of mandatory information disclosure. As a result there exists a large body of detailed, audited and publicly available accounting data on the financial performance of these businesses. Using that data, this paper finds that price-cost margins have widened substantially since deregulation. We estimate the extent to which light-handed regulation has allowed profits to exceed the levels which would have been acceptable under the old rate-of-return regulatory framework, and find that the answer is about $200 million per year, on an ongoing basis.We thank colleagues at Victoria University, and two anonymous referees for this journal, for constructive comments on this paper. Any remaining errors are entirely our responsibility.JEL classification: D21; K23; L11; L43; L51     

Modeling Cyclical Asymmetries in European Imports

This paper applies smooth transition models to capture the nonlinear behavior in the imports data of six major European economies and to assess whether such nonlinearities are related to business cycle asymmetries. Two classes of switch between regimes are considered: endogenously determined transition that assumes nonlinearities are generated by idiosyncratic components specific to foreign trade, and exogenous transition based on GDP growth as a more direct indicator of the cyclical state of the economy. The results support the proposition that the dynamics of imports are nonlinear. In Belgium, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom, regimes change over the business cycle, while in Germany and Italy the switch between regimes is endogenous. National characteristics play a role in defining the position of extreme regimes, the smoothness of the transition, and local dynamics within each state.Previous versions of this article have been presented at the 57th International Atlantic Economic Conference (Lisbon, Portugal, March 10–14, 2004) and at the VII Encuentro de Economía Aplicada (Vigo, Spain, June 3–5, 2004). The authors thank the conference participants and an anonymous referee for their comments.