Advertising, Its Determinants, and Market Structure

This study derives a formal model of firm advertising behavior and applies it to the industry level to figure out the relationship between advertising and market structure. The firm advertising model shows that both consumer preference andfirm-specific advertising competence jointly determineprofit-maximizing advertising intensity. At the industry level, advertising intensity is represented multiplicatively by consumer preference and a measure of market structure, which reflects the joint distribution of the levels of advertising competence and market shares among firms. The new market structure measure suggests that those single-dimensional measures of market structure such as seller concentration and the Herfindahl index are inadequate in explaining interindustry differences in advertising intensity, and that the long-debated advertising-concentration relationship differs depending primarily on the appropriability of advertising. An empirical analysis of 426 five-digit Korean manufacturing industries shows that an inverted U-shaped relationship between the Herfindahl index and industry advertising intensity is observed for consumer goods industries but a lazy J-shaped relationship for producer goods industries.     

Luft zum Atmen

Mehr Sicherheit im Umgang mit Trachealkanülen - Pflegende, die Patienten mit einer Trachealkanüle betreuen, müssen den Kanülenwechsel sicher beherrschen. Denn bei Komplikationen kann das Warten auf den Arzt katastrophale Folgen haben. Daher muss der Umgang mit den Kanülen zur Routine werden.     

Not all trade restrictions are created equally

There has been great focus in the recent trade theory literature on the introduction of firm heterogeneity into trade models. This introduction has highlighted the importance of the entry/exit decision of firms in response to changes in trade barriers. However, it is typical in many of these models to use iceberg transport costs as a general form of trade barriers that can be interchangeable with ad valorem tariffs. I show that this is not always an appropriate conclusion. Specifically, I illustrate that profit for an exporter is more elastic in response to tariffs than iceberg transport costs, which affects the entry/exit decision of firms. This has implications for welfare analysis and empirical specifications.     

Should multivariate early warning systems for banking crises pool across regions?

Most extant work on prediction of banking crises has utilised global samples, which are in turn dominated by observations from middle-income countries, and rely on a single estimator. However, economic and financial structures as well as the pattern of shocks may differ substantially across regions, while a range of specifications is desirable to check robustness. Accordingly, in this paper we test the implicit pooling assumption in earlier multivariate work on Early Warning Systems using both logit and binary recursive tree specifications separately for crises in Asia and Latin America, as well as the pooled sample. Results suggest markedly different crisis determinants across regions, implying global samples are inappropriate.