Anchor stores

Planned shopping malls usually have one or more department (anchor) stores and multiple specialized retailers selling substitutable commodities in each commodity category. If consumers know their taste for the anchor's commodity and its price, but learn about a retailer's commodity only by costly search, collocation may benefit both store types. Intra-mall competition reduces markups, but anchors guarantee a minimum surplus from search. A mall with many retailers makes finding a suitable specialized commodity highly probable. For some parameters, additional consumer search dominates the loss in retail markups, so a profit-maximizing land developer would rent mall space to both store types.     

Partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering

This paper analyzes the optimal partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering policies in a model with electoral competitions in policy positions and transfer promises. Party leaders have both office‐ and policy‐motivations. With complete freedom in redistricting, partisan gerrymandering policy generates the most one‐sidedly biased district profile, while bipartisan gerrymandering generates the most polarized district profile. In contrast, with limited freedom in gerrymandering, both partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering tend to prescribe the same policy.     

Demographic change,human capital accumulation and R&D‐based growth

Employing an overlapping generations model of R&D‐based growth with endogenous fertility and education decisions, we examine how demographic changes induced by an increase in life expectancy influence the long‐run growth rate of the economy. We demonstrate that life expectancy, when relatively low (high), positively (negatively) affects economic growth. This paper also compares the growth implications of child education subsidy policies (i.e., policies for enhancing basic education) and child rearing subsidy policies (i.e., pro‐natal policies) and demonstrate that while the child education subsidies consistently foster economic growth, child rearing subsidies may negatively affect economic growth.     

Testing for negativity in a demand system: A Bayesian approach

The paper introduces Bayesian inference into a demand model. This allows us to test for the negativity condition of the substitution matrix which is difficult to handle directly in the traditional approach. To illustrate the Bayesian inference procedures, we estimate the Rotterdam model and test the demand properties using Japanese data. The empirical results show the importance of specifically considering negativity in demand analysis. First version received: September 1997/final version received: February 1998     

Long-term effects of labor market conditions on family formation for Japanese youth

This study aims to examine how each cohort’s family formation is affected by labor market conditions experienced in youth in Japan. Although the deterioration in youth employment opportunities has often been blamed for Japan’s declining fertility rate, the effect of slack labor market conditions on fertility is theoretically unclear. We estimate the effects of regional labor market conditions at entry to the labor market and contemporaneous conditions on fertility, controlling for nation-wide year effects and prefecture fixed effects, and find the following. First, high school-educated women who experienced a recession while entering the labor market are less likely to have children. In contrast, a recession rather increases fertility among college-educated women. When summed up, the aggregate impact of labor market conditions experienced in youth on fertility is weak. Second, the unemployment rate at entry to the labor market is positively correlated with the probability of having two or more children conditionally on having at least one child. Third, the contemporaneous unemployment rate is negatively correlated with marriage of women in the local labor market, although the correlation is weak and concentrated on the less educated group.     

The Minimum Wage Law and Teenage Crime: Evidence From the US

What is the effect of minimum wage regulation on youth crime? Masanori Hashimoto, of Ohio State University, argues that in the USA the evidence suggests that the minimum wage causes both unemployment and teenage crime.     

Incentive Travel: A View from the Top

Meetings, incentives, conventions, and exhibitions are an important segment of the hospitality and tourism industry. The extant study focuses on the incentives or incentive travel. While incentive travel has existed for decades it is a relatively under-researched sub-field of hospitality. The goal of this article is to examine the current state of incentive travel, how it has changed over the past few years, and how it is likely to change in the future. Rather than examine every aspect of incentive travel, this research only looks at “buyers” of incentive travel rather than users or recipients and obtains data only from top-level corporate executives. Thus, the results are of the highest level and highest caliber. It was found that companies have been using incentive travel for decades and find it to be an effective employee motivator and as an incentive to sell product. It also builds morale and relationships.     

Existence of steady – state equium in an overlapping-generations model with production

Summary This paper establishes an existence theorem of a non-trivial (positive capital stock) steady-state equilibrium in Diamond's (1965) overlapping-generations model with production by employing the steady-state consumption curve introduced in Ihori (1978). The assumptions on preferences and production technologies that ensure the existence of a nontrivial steadystate equilibrium are separated from each other, unlike in Galor and Ryder (1989). We also provide two simple examples which illustrate the importance of two conditions in the theorem.Detailed comments by Tomoichi Shinotsuka and the referees of the journal were quite helpful. We also thank Marcus Berliant, Mark Bus, John H. Boyd III, Ban Chuan Cheah, Rajat Deb, Jim Dolmas, Oded Galor, Greg Huffman, Toshihiro Ihori, Radhika Lahiri, Lionel McKenzie, Arundhati Sen, and the seminar participants at the Midwest Mathematical Economics Conference in Ann Abor and at University of Rochester. The second author gratefully acknowledges the financial supports from the European Community Human Capital Mobility Program.     

Concentration of competing retail stores

The geographical concentration of stores that sell similar commodities is analyzed using a two-dimensional spatial competition model. A higher concentration of stores attracts more consumers with taste uncertainty and low price expectations (a market-size effect), while it leads to fiercer price competition (a price-cutting effect). Our model is general enough to allow for the coexistence of multiple (possibly) asymmetric clusters of stores. We provide sufficient conditions for the nonemptiness of equilibrium store location choices in pure strategies. Through numerical examples, we illustrate the trade-off between the market-size and price-cutting effects, and provide agglomeration patterns of stores in special cases.