Individual bidder behavior in first-price private value auctions

Individual bid functions display sensitivity to the strategic considerations inherent in first-price auctions. However, several formal models, including heterogeneous Nash equilibrium bidding models with constant relative risk aversion, perform quite poorly.     

Unemployment insurance and union bargaining — an insider-outsider approach

A trade union is required to tax its own members to fund unemployment benefit paid to its unemployed members in an insider-outsider model of union bargaining over wages and employment. An increase in unemployment benefit imposed by the government increases employment overall but not necessarily the employment of insiders if the tax rate is exogenously fixed by the government.This paper has benefited from comments of Mick Common, Dipak Ghosh, Bob Hart, and Robin Ruffell. The comments of two anonymous referees and the advice of the Editor have greatly improved the presentation of the paper. Any remaining errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.     

Simultaneous versus sequential information processing

Subjects update prior information simultaneously versus sequentially. The mean prediction is remarkably close to the correct Bayesian estimate with simultaneous information, but differs significantly conditional on whether good news precedes bad news or vice versa.     

美国：危险的消费者借贷

次贷危机又被称为次级房贷危机,是一场发生在美国,因次级抵押贷款机构破产、投资基金被迫关闭以及股市剧烈震荡引起的金融风暴。它致使全球主要金融市场出现流动性不足危机。美国次贷危机从2006春季逐步显现，在2006年之前的5年里，由于美国住房市场持续繁荣，加上前几年利率水平较低，美国的次级抵押贷款市场迅速发展。由于短期利率的提高，     

When did firms become more different? Time-varying firm-specific volatility in Japan

We document how firm-specific volatility in sales, earnings and employment growth evolved year by year in Japan. Our volatility measure also indicates the evolution of firm turnover. We find that patterns in firm-specific volatility have changed when macroeconomic circumstances have. Firm turnover declined during the economic stagnation of 1991–1997. The deep downturn of fiscal years 1998–2002 coincided with a substantial increase in turnover in market, profit and employment shares. Firm volatility tended to decline during the recovery after 2002. We assess whether the rise in firm turnover and deep downturn in 1998–2002 indicate that after a period of stagnation, weak firms were finally allowed to shrink or fail. Our evidence suggests that the widening in the firm growth distribution at that time did not reflect weak firms shrinking relative to healthy firms, indicating that the two recessions in 1998–2002 were not “cleansing”.     

Cable television and competition : Theory, evidence and policy

There is currently widespread discussion in the USA of the merits of amending legislation to allow competition in the cable television market, notably from the telecommunications companies. This article explores what economic theory can contribute to this debate, and adduces empirical evidence on the effects of competition in the cable market where it presently exists. The authors conclude that blocking entry into cable, and indeed into telecommunications markets, is likely to be poor policy, and that increased competition would foster the development of an efficient modern broadband network.     

Estimating the price elasticity of demand in the London stock market

The hypothesis that demand curves for individual stocks slope downwards is typically investigated by empirical analysis of stock price movements following events that cause shifts in demand or supply. However, it is difficult to attribute observed price movements between downward sloping demand curves and information conveyed by the event. In this paper an econometric approach, based on market-maker response to unexpected changes in inventory, is used to separate out the slope of the demand curve from information effects and estimate the slopes of the demand curves for twenty stocks included in the Financial Times-Stock Exchange 100 Share Index (FTSE100). The analysis suggests that downward sloping demand curves would decrease the price by about 7.5% for a 1% increase in the number of outstanding shares.