Horizontal mergers and the balance of trade

This paper explores the relationship between market structure and the balance of trade in a dominant firm/competitive fringe model. It is shown that, absent efficiency effects, a horizontal merger between the dominant producer and a domestic fringe firm leads to a deterioration in the balance of trade, but, where efficiencies arise, this effect may be reversed. A sufficient condition for such reversal to occur is derived.     

Estimating Homeownership Costs: Owners' Estimates of Implicit Rents and the Relative Importance of Rental Equivalence in the Consumer Price Index

This paper discusses the relative importance of Rental Equivalence (REQ) in the U.S. Consumer Price Index. A hedonic model of rents is estimated, and the resulting parameters are then used to compare hedonic estimates of implicit rents to homeowner estimates like those actually used to estimate the REQ expenditure weight. There are several reasons why hedonic estimates might be below actual implicit rents, and these effects are controlled for in the model. Owner estimates of implicit rents are then shown to be comparable to such hedonic estimates. Results support the method used to estimate the expenditure weight.     

Making a difference

Despite the potential for free‐riding, workers motivated by “making a difference” to the mission or output of an establishment may donate labor to it. When the establishment uses performance‐related compensation (PRC), these labor donations closely resemble a standard private provision of public goods problem, and are not rational in large labor pools. Without PRC, however, the problem differs significantly from a standard private provision of public goods situation. Specifically, in equilibrium, there need not be free‐riding, decisions are non‐monotonic in valuations, and contribution incentives are significant even in large populations. When PRC is not used, the establishment tends to favor setting low wages, which helps to select a labor force driven by concern for the firm's output. Expected output can actually fall with the wage in this situation. When wages are optimally set, the introduction of PRC, even if perfect and costless, may lower expected output and firm profits in comparison to the non‐PRC outcome.     

The dynamics of long-term growth

The authors have studied the effect of tool-making on man's evolution. They argue that growth is not exponential, but hyperbolic, and that a positive feedback exists linking technological development to population. Exploring the nature of this mechanism in order to improve the predictive capability of global models is the goal of the article.     

Information transfer and conference calls

A long-standing literature documents intra-industry capital market co-movements around earnings releases, yet the dynamics of these information transfers remain largely unexplored. We provide evidence on both the sources and channels of information transfers by separating two distinct events within the reporting window using intra-day data and by exploring potential mechanisms of information flows. We document that the co-movement of absolute and signed stock returns over the conference call windows of announcing firms and their industry peers are statistically and economically larger than the co-movement over the corresponding earnings announcement windows. Turning to mechanisms, we find that shared analyst coverage, coverage by analysts providing industry recommendations, shared institutional ownership, and joint financial media mentions are each individually and incrementally associated with higher rate of information transfer over both the earnings announcement and conference call windows. Textual analyses reveal that peer mentions and macroeconomic discussions both significantly contribute to conference call information transfers.     

Food Price Pass‐Through and the Role of Domestic Margin Services

The recent volatility in international agricultural markets has drawn attention to the impact of rising international agricultural prices and the induced price‐insulating measures on consumer food prices. Analyses based on simulation models on this topic typically ignore the role of domestic margin services. We extend the standard Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model to allow for variations in the share of domestic margin services in consumed food across countries. This approach enables us to differentiate consumer prices from producer prices. Following the extension, the results show that domestic margin services reduce the consumer food price volatility for all countries, especially in high‐income countries, where the share of domestic margin services in final food consumption is higher. The effect of price‐insulating border policies is also reduced in the extended model. We find that our extension of the GTAP model greatly improves simulations of the 2007 surge in international agricultural prices. We validate our extension of the GTAP model by showing that the econometrically estimated food price pass‐through is decreasing with income and thus, is smaller in high‐income countries.     

Rhetorical History as Institutional Work

Rhetorical history has emerged as a useful theoretical construct that bridges the long recognized gap between historical and organizational scholarship. Despite its growing popularity, the precise nature of rhetorical history as a construct, its scope conditions, and its utility in resolving critical issues in historical organizational analysis remains unclear. This paper addresses these issues. We define rhetorical history and contextualize the construct by elaborating its relationship to associated concepts like collective memory, rhetoric, and narrative. We ground the construct by reviewing literature that has applied rhetorical history in both theory and empirical research. Our inductive review identifies four recurring themes in which rhetorical history is used to construct perceptions of; (a) continuity and discontinuity, (b) similarity and difference, (c) winners and losers, and (d) morality and immorality. We conclude with a discussion of how rhetorical history is an essential mechanism of institutional work.