Policy Implications of the Effects of Concentration and Multimarket Contact in China’s Airline Market

Unlike many other mergers in developed countries, which might have been assessed and their effects estimated by antitrust authorities before being granted antitrust immunity, the airline mergers that swept China’s airline industry in 2002 occurred with no antitrust challenge. These mergers provide the opportunity to study important market power issues in China’s airline markets. Given that increased concentration and multimarket contact are the main legacies of an airline merger, the effects of mergers on these variables can raise the potential for the exercise of market power. However, an examination of the period 2002–2004 during which the Chinese airline mergers occurred shows that the resulting increased concentration and enhanced multimarket contact did not have important consequences for airfares in Chinese city-pair markets. The presence of Hainan Airlines appears to have played an important role in suppressing the airfares charged by China Eastern and China Southern.     

Einflussfaktoren auf die Bereitschaft von Privatkunden, Ökostrom nachzufragen

The present study investigates impacts of attitudinal and perceptual characteristics of residential electricity consumers on their intention to use a green power tariff/supplier in the future. The work rests on a standardized telephone survey of 267 household electricity consumers of a German power supplier. Multivariate Partial Least Squares analysis indicates that, regardless of a person’s level of actual power consumption in the recent past, the intention to use green electricity is significantly higher among customers who have a positive general attitude towards environmental protection measures and who report an endorsing valuation of green power by their close social contacts. In a subsample of participants with a low actual electricity consumption in the year preceding the survey the intention to use green energy is significantly positively affected by the weight an individual attaches to electricity prices in one’s own supplier selection decisions and the person’s belief that one’s present power company takes over social responsibility. In contrast, in the subgroup of respondents with a high actual electricity consumption customers’ intention to use green energy is significantly enhanced by the degree of perceived dissimilarity among power company offerings. The findings are used to derive suggestions for green energy marketing measures of power companies and future energy consumer research.     

Capital liquidity and residents’ consumption decision: An asymmetry analysis of economic prosperity

Among the current literatures that discuss the influence exerted on residents’ consumption behavior by capital liquidity, some often independently decide the demarcation point of the liquidity restriction that affects residents’ consumption behavior, without taking into account when the economy is flourishing whether residents will be influenced by the restriction of the liquidity that their consumption behaviors can not be fully carried out. We introduce a threshold model which varies according to the actual GDP and other financial indicators (money supply, average stock index and balance of bank loans) to discuss residents’ consumption behavior in China under different economic states. The empirical results show that when the economy flourishes or resuscitates, residents’ income of the same period have not notable influence on their consumption, which suggests that residents’ consumption behavior does not considerably change according to the fluctuation of the current income, but conforms with the constant income-life cycle hypothesis. Moreover, two estimated values 0.7504 and 0.8597, as economic boom measures, all fall in the boom stable stage—basically consists with the early-warning index of the macro-economy boom issued by National Bureau of Statistics of China. It shows that the macro-economic boom is not notablely influenced by capital liquidity, so is residents’ consumption behavior.     

Financial liberalization and sectoral reallocation of capital in South Africa

We examine the impact of financial reforms on efficient reallocation of capital within and between sectors in South Africa using firm-level panel data for the period 1991–2008. The measure of efficient allocation of capital is based on the Tobin’s Q. We find that financial reforms are associated with improvements in within-sector, but not between-sector allocation of capital. These results imply that for South Africa to unleash the potential for take-off that is often associated with reallocation of resources from the primitive to modern sectors, reforms that focus beyond the financial sector are necessary. While more research is necessary to determine what would fully constitute such additional reforms, our analysis shows that reforms that improve the quality of economic institutions may be a step in the right the direction.     

Unemployment dynamics in an OLG economy with public pensions

Pension benefits in old age establish a disincentive to save in youth, thereby yielding lower levels of capital stock and the wage rate. As a result, the trade union has an incentive to change the composition of its two targets: employment and the wage rate. This paper develops a model that includes employment effects of public pensions via capital accumulation and union wage setting. Within this framework, we consider how contribution rates to the pension system influence the level and time path of the unemployment rate. It is demonstrated that (1) a higher contribution rate results in a lower unemployment rate, and (2) the economy with a high (low) contribution rate experiences monotone convergence towards (oscillatory convergence towards or a period-2 cycle around) the steady state. The author would like to thank an anonymous referee, Kazutoshi Miyazawa, and seminar participants at Osaka University for their useful comments and suggestions, and Masako Ikefuji and Hiroaki Yamagami for their research assistance. Financial support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) through a Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) (No.17730131), the Asahi Glass Foundation, the Japan Economic Research Foundation and the 21st Century COE Program (Osaka University) is gratefully acknowledged. All remaining errors are mine.     

Spatial welfare economics versus ecological footprint: modeling agglomeration,externalities and trade

A welfare framework for the analysis of the spatial dimensions of sustainability is developed. It covers agglomeration effects, interregional trade, negative environmental externalities, and various land use categories. The model is used to compare rankings of spatial configurations according to evaluations based on social welfare and ecological footprint indicators. Five spatial configurations are considered for this purpose. The exercise is operationalized with the help of a two-region model of the economy, that is, in line with the ‘new economic geography.’ By generating a number of numerical ‘counter-examples,’ it is shown that the footprint method is inconsistent with an approach aimed at maximum social welfare. Unless environmental externalities are such a large problem that they overwhelm all other components of economic well-being, a ‘spatial welfare economic’ approach delivers totally different rankings of alternative land use configurations than the ecological footprint.      

Capital asset pricing model in Portugal: Evidence from fractal regressions

We examine risk profiles of the Portuguese stock market index component stocks using a novel approach to the classical capital asset pricing model (CAPM). Specifically, we estimate the CAPM via fractal regressions that allow studying the marginal effects at selected scales. In this way, we can reveal whether the risk is perceived differently by market participants with different investment horizons. Apart from the analysis itself, we provide new statistical insights into the issue of separating and comparing the scale-specific effects with statistical validity. We find several stocks deviating from an expected risk perception homogeneity across investment horizons. This is true for both analysed periods, i.e. before and after the global financial crisis. There are also several stocks that changed their relationship to the market portfolio in between, which has strong implications for possible portfolio construction. The proposed methodology is not limited to financial topics but can be used in any discipline where the scale-specific marginal effects might be of interest.