Download or read book Essays in Industrial Organization and Applied Microeconomics written by Peichun Wang and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays in the areas of Industrial Organization and Applied Microeconomics.The first essay studies high-tech firms' product portfolio choices under competition. I develop a model of dynamic portfolio adjustments in the context of the Chinese smartphone market, using the product life cycle as an empirically tractable heuristic to capture firms' dynamic incentives in new product introductions. I first show that product life cycles endogenously arise in markets with rapid technological innovations, are heterogeneous across products, and are affected by the level of market competition. I then estimate smartphone demand and manufacturers' variable, maintenance and sunk introduction costs on a detailed monthly market-level dataset of Chinese smartphones between 2009 and 2014. Finally, I use a 2012 large-scale pro-competitive policy introduced by the Chinese government as an experiment to decompose the handset manufacturers' incentives to introduce new products and show that the increased competition reduces the average product's short-run profits by 5% but its lifetime profits by 41% by shrinking its product life cycle. These dynamic incentives have large implications for both consumer welfare gains from product variety and the speed of technology adoption in this market.In the second essay, my co-authors and I explore the sensitivity of the U.S. government's ongoing incentive auction to multi-license ownership by broadcasters. We document significant broadcast TV license purchases by private equity firms prior to the auction and perform a prospective analysis of the effect of ownership concentration on auction outcomes. We find that multi-license holders are able to raise spectrum acquisition costs by 22% by strategically withholding some of their licenses to increase the price for their remaining licenses. We analyze a potential rule change that reduces the distortion in payouts to license holders by up to 80%, but find that lower participation could greatly increase payouts and exacerbate strategic effects.The third essay studies whether liberalizations of gun permits in the U.S. deterred violent crimes. Setting off an ongoing controversy, Lott and Mustard (1997) famously contended that so-called shall-issue laws (SILs) deterred violent crime. In this controversy the weapon of choice has been the differences-in-differences (DD) estimator applied to state and county panel data spanning various intervals of time. By treating violent crime as a career choice, this essay brings to bear a more general method, a cohort panel data model (CPDM) that incorporates the fundamental dynamic insights regarding entering and exiting a career. Our model distinguishes among three key parameters that jointly determine the effect of SILs on crime, (i) a direct effect on entry decisions, (ii) a surprise effect on exit decisions by individuals who entered criminal careers prior to the passage of SILs, and (iii) a selection effect on exit decisions by those who entered in the presence of SILs. We find significant and time-invariant results that reject the deterrence hypothesis as well as the DD model specification. Our results suggest that passages of SILs contribute to about one third of total violent crimes in 2011, particularly through higher turnover of violent criminals.

Download or read book Essays on Microeconomics and Industrial Organisation written by Pablo Coto-Millán and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on Microeconomics and Industrial Organisation aim to serve as a source and work of reference and consultation for the field of Microeconomics in general and of Industrial Organisation in particular. Traditionally, Microeconomics is essentially taught as theory and hardly ever an estimation of a demand, production and cost function is offered . Over the last two decades, however, Microeconomics has greatly broadened its field of empirical application. Therefore, this text combines microeconomic theories with a variety of empirical cases. The standardised microeconomic analysis of demand, production and costs is set forth along with appropriate econometric techniques. The text consists of four parts: Demand, Production and Costs (Supply), Market and Industrial Structure and Failure of Market and Industrial Regulation. It includes eleven new chapters with respect to the first edition.

Download or read book Empirical Studies in Industrial Organization written by David B. Audretsch and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empirical Studies in Industrial Organization brings together leading scholars who present state-of-the-art research in the spirit of the structure-conduct-performance paradigm embodied in the work of Leonard W. Weiss. The individual chapters are generally empirically or public policy oriented. A number of them introduce new sources of data that, combined with the application of appropriate econometric techniques, enable new breakthroughs and insights on issues hotly debated in the industrial organization literature. For example, five of the chapters are devoted towards uncovering the link between market concentration and pricing behavior. While theoretical models have produced ambiguous predictions concerning the relationship between concentration and price these chapters, which span a number of different markets and situations, provide unequivocal evidence that a high level of market concentration tends to result in a higher level of prices. Three of the chapters explore the impact of market structure on production efficiency, and three other chapters focus on the role of industrial organization on public policy. Contributors include David B. Audretsch, Richard E. Caves, Mark J. Roberts, F.M. Scherer, John J. Siegfried and Hideki Yamawaki.

Download or read book Industrial Organization Trade and Social Interaction written by Gregory K. Dow and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: B. Curtis Eaton is one of Canada's leading microeconomists. As an applied economic theorist, Eaton has contributed greatly to industrial organization literature and has also worked in labour economics, economic geography, and organizational theory. The essays in this volume, by former students and present and former colleagues, call attention to the path-breaking work of Professor Eaton. The first two chapters provide a short overview of Eaton's research contributions and argue that his work laid the foundation for important research programs across the country. The remaining chapters, including an unpublished paper by Eaton himself, consist of original work that can be divided into the three broad categories of industrial organization and spatial competition, trade and productivity, and social interaction. Not only a collection of laudatory essays, Industrial Organization, Trade, and Social Interaction presents cutting edge research by leading scholars.

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Hassan Faghani Dermi and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation investigates effects of policies on the behavior of economic agents. Economic models of individual decisions, which are affected by policy environment, have been developed. These models have been estimated using the appropriate estimation methods. The results have been used to quantify the effects of implemented or alternative policies. Both chapters of this dissertation use economic reasoning to shed light on policy relevant questions. In the first chapter, I investigate the effect of the clean air act amendments of 1990 on the behavior of coal mines using a standard entry/exit model in industrial organization (IO). In the second chapter, I investigate the effect of tort policies on the performance of the litigation system for medical malpractice cases using a bargaining game between patient and physician's lawyer. So in the first chapter I quantify the effect of an implemented policy while in the second chapter I quantify the effects of alternative policies.

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Suraj Shekhar and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My research interest lies in applying microeconomic tools to issues in Industrial Organization and Development Economics. I like doing research which helps me understand something about the world. For example, in my job market paper (Signalling, Reputation and Spinoffs), I study the following environment. Employees often leave their firm to form a new firm (spinoff) of their own. The literature attributes most of these spinoffs to the worker getting a private new idea. In this paper, I propose a different channel for new firm formation based on signalling and reputation concerns. If high ability workers are mistakenly perceived to be low type then they would like to signal their ability to earn more. Consider a two period principal-worker problem where the worker's type is his private knowledge. If the prior belief about the worker's type is low (high type with low probability) then, despite the principal's ability to offer contracts to persuade the worker to stay, there may exist a separating equilibrium where the high type worker signals his ability by forming his own firm. This result provides theoretical support to the findings of Skogstrom (2012), who observed high rates of entrepreneurship amongst Norwegian workers with low education and high ability. When moral hazard is introduced into the environment, I show that the separating equilibrium may generate the highest incentives to work. This may have policy implications for non-compete clauses.My paper on ethnic conflicts and rumours (Ethnic Conflicts, Rumours and an Informed Agent), with Pathikrit Basu and Souvik Dutta) studies coordination and strategic information disclosure in the context of ethnic conflicts. Rumours often precipitate ethnic conflicts and cause immense damage to life and property. There may exist an agent who knows if the rumour is true or false. We analyze a cheap talk game with multiple audiences (ethnicities) to see how this informed agent (b) may influence the outcome of rumours by sending strategic signals. Since b is biased towards her own ethnicity, she finds it difficult to convince the other ethnicity that she is giving them correct information. We show that even if b is known to be biased towards her own ethnicity, peace is possible in equilibrium. Additionally, we prove that there are only three equilibrium outcomes possible in symmetric strategies. Conflict is inevitable in one. The other outcomes have the following features. One, there may be peace whenever b deems it possible. Two, while b gives more informative signals to her own ethnicity, she may misinform a segment of her own ethnicity in equilibrium. In another paper (What's in a Name? Reputation and Monitoring in the Audit Market), my co-author Somdutta Basu and I explore the difference in the incentives in a collective reputation environment as compared to an individual reputation environment in the context of the US Audit industry. Unlike audit reports in some countries, an auditreport issued in the USA does not include the name of the engagementpartner. In December 2015, a new rule was passed (pending approval from the SEC) which requires that the name of the engagement partner be disclosed in audit reports issued after January 2017. We study the incentives of auditors under the two regimes - withand without disclosure of partner names. We argue that if the levelof monitoring within the audit firm remains the same under the tworegimes, then audit quality will be higher under the disclosure regime.However, an unintended consequence of the new rule is that partners (an engagement quality reviewer or a successor partner)have lower incentives to monitor a fellow partner under the disclosureregime. As a result, under some parametric conditions, audit qualitymay be lower if partner names are disclosed. This problem can be addressedthrough a realignment of incentives inside the accounting firm, externalmonitoring from regulators or through increased audit fees.

Download or read book Microeconomic Essays on Technology Labor Markets and Firm Strategy written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays in applied microeconomics. These essays investigate different aspects of the impact of technology on labor market outcomes and firm strategy. The first essay, co-authored with Ronald L. Oaxaca, is in the area of labor economics and it investigates the relation between non-neutral technological change and the gender gap in wages. This essay is the first to address the issue of the recent narrowing of the gender wage gap in the context of technological change by using a novel approach to separately estimate the effects of technological change and discrimination on the gender wage gap. Using a constant elasticity of substitution production function and Current Population Survey data on employment and wages by industry and occupation, the results show that changes in non-neutral technological change explain between 5% and 9% of the narrowing of the wage gap between 1979 and 2001. The latter two essays span topics across applied industrial organization, firm strategy and labor economics. The second component of my dissertation investigates the relation between technological knowledge diffusion through the labor mobility of scientists and the organization of R & D activities by innovative firms. Using a labor mobility measure from the Current Population Survey March Supplements as a measure for inter-firm technology spillovers and a panel of R & D alliance data for 18 U.S. industries between 1989 and 1999, a Poisson estimation shows that firms facing a 10% increase in the labor mobility of scientists have a 5% increase in the annual number of R & D collaborations. The third essay is an empirical analysis of the impact of knowledge dissemination generated by the labor mobility of scientists and engineers on a measure of the pace of innovation. Using an unbalanced panel of firms containing patent data matched with firm data across eight innovative industries, from 1989 to 1998, along with a measure of the labor mobility of scientists and engineers, this essay provides evidence that firms in industries exposed to levels of labor mobility of scientists and engineers that differ by 1%, have an expected time lag between sequential generations of technologies that differs by 0.56 years.

Download or read book Essays in Industrial Organization and Microeconomics written by Michael Dannen Egesdal and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 3 studies the manipulability of stable matching mechanisms and shows that manipulability comparisons are equivalent to preference comparisons: for any agent, a mechanism is more manipulable than another if and only if this agent prefers the latter to the former. It is also shown that generalized median stable matchings exist in many-to-many matching markets when contracts are strong substitutes and satisfy the law of aggregate demand.

Download or read book Essays in Industrial Organisation and Applied Microeconomic Theory written by Pornthep Benyaapikul and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Mitchell H. Hoffman and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays. All are in personnel economics, using data from the trucking industry. Training by firms is a central means by which workers accumulate human capital, yet firms may be reluctant to train if workers can quit and use their gained skills elsewhere. "Training contracts" that impose a penalty for premature quitting can help alleviate this inefficiency. The first essay from this dissertation studies training contracts in the U.S. trucking industry where they are widely used, focusing on data from one leading firm. Exploiting two plausibly exogenous contract changes that introduced penalties for quitting, I confirm that training contracts significantly reduce quitting. To analyze the optimal design of training contracts and their welfare consequences, I develop and estimate a structural learning model with heterogeneous beliefs that accounts for many key features of the data. The estimation combines weekly productivity data with weekly subjective productivity forecasts for each worker and reveals a pattern of persistent overconfidence whereby many workers believe they will achieve higher productivity than they actually attain. If workers are overconfident about their productivity at the firm relative to their outside option, they will be less likely to quit and more likely to sign training contracts. Counterfactual analysis shows that workers' estimated overconfidence increases firm profits by over $7,000 per truck, but reduces worker welfare by 1.5%. Banning training contracts decreases profits by $4,600 per truck and decreases retention by 25%, but increases worker welfare by 4%. Despite the positive effect of training contracts on profits, training may not be profitable unless some workers are overconfident. A robust finding in experimental psychology and economics is that people tend to be overconfident about their ability. However, much less is known about whether overconfidence can be reduced or eliminated, particularly in field settings. The second essay of this dissertation provides new evidence using data from the workplace. A field experiment with a large trucking firm shows that workers tend to systematically overpredict their productivity and that their overconfidence is unaffected by whether workers receive financial incentives of different sizes for accurate guessing. Randomly informing workers about other workers' overconfidence reduces overconfidence in the short-run, but the effect fades within two weeks. Neither the incentives or information treatments have any effect on worker satisfaction or search behavior. Using long-term survey data from a second firm, I show that experience reduces overconfidence, but only quite slowly. Although workers at both firms exhibit aspects of Bayesian updating, overconfidence appears to be sticky and difficult to change. The third essay analyzes worker referrals. Many firms use referrals in their recruitment and hiring procedures. Are these practices profitable, and if so, why? A model is developed where referrals may improve selection and reduce moral hazard. The model is tested using extremely detailed personnel and survey data from a leading firm in the trucking industry. Referred workers are similar to non-referred workers across a large number of background characteristics and lab experimentally-measured dimensions of preferences. Referred workers are between 10-25% less likely to quit; the effects are strong across all groups of drivers, including new workers for whom the firm invests in expensive firm-sponsored general training. However, referred workers attain similar initial productivity and productivity growth as non-referred workers, and are no more likely to engage in various forms of moral hazard. The accumulation of friends after the starting work does not positively affect retention, productivity, or moral hazard. On net, the evidence is consistent with the idea that referrals benefit firms by selecting workers with a better fit for the job, as opposed to selecting workers with higher overall quality, by affecting worker behavior, or by changing job amenities.

Download or read book Essays on Applied Microeconomics written by Masahiro Watabe and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays on applied microeconomics. The first two essays apply implementation theory to market design. The third essay develops a method for industrial organization from contract theory. In the first essay, I examine two types of mechanisms, demand revelation mechanisms and preference revelation mechanisms, in general matching problems with contracts, as in Hatfield and Milgrom (2005). I show that the core correspondence is not Nash-implementable by any demand/preference revelation mechanism. A strong version of Maskin monotonicity plays a crucial role for this impossibility result. Second, I show that Nash equilibrium outcomes of the preference revelation game induced by any Pareto efficient matching procedure coincide with the set of individually rational allocations. This is a generalization of Alcalde (1996)'s result for one-to-one matching problems without contracts. In addition, I show that there exists a stable Nash equilibrium outcome with respect to the true preferences. In the second essay of this dissertation, joint with Taro Kumano, we restrict attention to the deferred acceptance algorithm in school choice. We show that under substitutable and quota-filling choice functions, the deferred acceptance algorithm is dominant strategy implementable by the associated direct mechanism. We argue the pseudo-acyclicity of the revealed priority structure to characterize the set of preference revelation game outcomes in dominant strategies and Nash equilibria. The final essay of this dissertation builds a theoretical model of firm competition via nonlinear pricing. To capture certain documented features of actual markets, the model permits firms to be asymmetric and allows for asymmetric information. I show that for a delegated common agency game in this framework, an equilibrium exists and any equilibrium outcome (specifying allocation rules and who sells to which markets) is implementable by two-part tariffs. In addition, I show that there exists a Nash equilibrium outcome in which the allocation rules exhibit pooling in an intermediate region of the type space, and quality distortions disappear at the top and the bottom of the set of consumer types served by each principal.

Download or read book Essays in industrial economics written by Marcus Asplund and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on New Institutional Economics written by Rudolf Richter and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-29 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays comprises some of Rudolf Richter’s important contributions to research on New Institutional Economics (NIE). It deals with the central idea, principles, and methodology of New Institutional Economics and explores its relation to sociology and law. Other chapters examine applications of NIE to various microeconomic and macroeconomic issues in the face of uncertainty, from entrepreneurship to the euro crisis.

Download or read book Applied Industrial Organization written by Karl Aiginger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applied Industrial Organization offers a perspective on the richness of empirical industrial organization studies. Some papers derive empirical implications from theoretical models, but other papers start from empirical evidence and construct a theory. Three major topics are explored: the role of innovation, the evolution of market structure and firms, and the determinations of performance. As the central force of market economies, innovation is the essence of competition and results in changes to market structures. Other forces driving the evolution of markets and firms are also analyzed. Finally, the determinants of profitability are investigated. In particular, characteristics such as price flexibility, successful lenders and monopoly regulation are examined. Contributors include F.M. Scherer, Paul Geroski, John Hey, David Audretsch, Manfred Neumann, among others.

Download or read book Economic Organization Industrial Dynamics and Development written by Giovanni Dosi and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects some of Giovanni Dosi's most important publications in the new millennium, following his earlier 2000 collection, Innovation, Organization and Economic Dynamics. It begins by offering quite a few advances in the analysis of individual learning in evolving environments, and of organizational structures and learning, thereby contributing to an emerging knowledge-centred theory of the firm and to a related theory of production. A second group of papers addresses the workings of markets, the importance of their institutional architectures, their diverse effectiveness as selection devices, and the evolutionary patterns of demand formation. A third set of chapters continues the exploration of the characteristics, drivers and performance outcomes of industrial evolution. The fourth part of the book is a reassessment of the role of history and path dependence in evolutionary processes. Finally, Part five addresses both the empirics and the modeling of the processes of growth and development nested into coupled evolution of technologies, corporate organizations and institutions.

Download or read book Microeconomics Macroeconomics and Economic Policy written by P. Arestis and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-07-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Microeconomics, Macroeconomics and Economic Policy are at the core of research and study in economics. The essays in this volume have been specifically commissioned and brought together to celebrate the work of Malcolm Sawyer, who has made substantial contributions in these areas.

Download or read book Industrial Organization Economics and the Law written by Franklin M. Fisher and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1991-11-01 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of work by economist, consultant, and expert witness Franklin M. Fisher constitutes an integrated body of the economic analysis of the law, with particular emphasis on antitrust issues. Fisher's involvement with applying economic analysis to real disputes and to problems of microeconomic policy has resulted in valuable lessons. These lessons are incorporated in themes running through many of these essays about the uses and abuses, achievements and shortcomings, of economic analysis.The book opens with a broad overview of key issues in antitrust law. Fisher stresses the importance of understanding the analytic tools used to examine monopoly and competition. He shows that the notion that simple indicators such as market share, or especially, profit rates can be used to provide an easy test for market power is badly mistaken. And he goes on to discuss oligopoly and its modern game theoretic treatment, which he sees as missing the questions that matter in real situations. Throughout, specific cases and policy issues are used to illustrate these important points.The second part of the book looks at the regulation of television, particularly cable, an area in which Fisher has been active since cable television's early days. The book concludes with a section on economic analysis and the law with essays on such matters as the uses of statistical methods and punishment as a deterrent to crime.Franklin M. Fisher is Professor of Economics at MIT. He was the lead expert economist for the defense, assisted by John J. McGowan and Joen E. Greenwood of Charles River Associates, in the major antitrust case U.S. v. IBM. John Monz is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at MIT.