Journal Article The Animal Farm: A Mathematical Model for the Discussion of Social Standards for Control of the Environment Get access Harold A. Thomas, Jr. Harold A. Thomas, Jr. Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 77, Issue 1, February 1963, Pages 143–148, https://doi.org/10.2307/1879377 Published: 01 February 1963

In many advertising-intensive industries one observes market share persistence, i.e., firms maintaining lead market shares over long periods of time. I hypothesize that firms that have the largest stock of well-established brands, a stock that I term brand capital, are most likely to introduce new products in response to new market information about consumer preferences. Firms with less brand capital delay their introductions until the uncertainty concerning the market size is reduced. I present empirical support in a study of new product introductions in the U.S. beverage industry.

THE monocentric urban area is without doubt the best known theoretical construct in the literature of urban economics. Many variations exist, but all share certain basic features: a city is located about a node on an otherwise featureless plain. This node, the Central Business District (CBD), is the only concentrated place-or the only place-of employment and shopping. Workers live in housing located outside the CBD and travel to and from their workplaces a fixed number of times each day over a uniformly available, radial transportation system. Transportation costs increase with distance of the residence from the CBD and may include either or both money and time. Households purchase their housing and other commodities to maximize a utility function, not including transportation as an input, subject to a budget constraint net of transportation expenses. As is well known, a number of propositions can be derived from these principal assumptions and some subsidiaries; for example, the existence of downward sloping land rent and housing price surfaces and the spatial segregation of households by income class and preferences (Muth, 1969). What is possibly as well known as this basic model is the difficulty of making the assumptions more realistic. As Beckmann (1974, p. 99) has noted, even minor variations tend to run into a thicket of mathematical difficulties. The effects of multiple workplaces, restrictive zoning, local amenities, and racial discrimination are only a few of the features of real urban areas that can be incorporated into the basic model only with great difficulty or not at all. Since analytical solutions to more realistic models have been difficult or impossible, there has been some recent effort to use computer simulation to examine their properties. Mills, for example, has examined the characteristics of a complex model both with congestion costs and with an efficiently priced transportation system, finding the city's land area in the latter case to be greater than in the former. This result, he suggested, would surprise some persons (1972, ch. 8). Hartwick (1974) has used the same model to study the conditions for spatial segregation or integration of various productive activities, asking, in effect, in what circumstances will persons commute to distinct work areas American-style rather than live above local shops European-style. Zeller (1971) has devised a computer simulation model to portray the bid-rent curves of firms making intrametropolitan location decisions. A particularly interesting possibility has become available recently from the work of various persons, notably Scarf (1973), on the computation of equilibrium prices for competitive economies. The algorithms developed are capable of calculating equilibrium prices, demands and supplies for an economy given only initial resource endowments and demand and supply functions. No more than quite modest restrictions need be imposed on the functions, and the characterization of the economy by number of commodities, types of consumers, and interrelationships in production can be quite rich. Since the characteristics of the various urban models are simply those of competitive economic systems in equilibrium, there would seem to be an obvious opportunity to explore the properties of quite complex models with a very general technique. As might be expected, however, efforts to apply the algorithms to models of spatial economies encounter their own problems, both technical and conceptual. To my knowledge, the first successful application to spatial Received for publication October 3, 1975. Revision accepted for publication September 14, 1976. * An earlier version of this article was presented at the European Conference on Housing Markets, Mons, Belgium, June 1976. I am indebted to Curtis Harris for careful reading and perceptive comments on earlier drafts. Herbert Scarf, Barbara Bergmann, Charles Clotfelter, Charles Lieberman, Michaei Murray, and others have also made helpful comments. Computer funds were provided in a faculty research grant from the University of Maryland Computer Science Center. Copies of the algorithm described in this paper are available upon request.

Bradshaw, Richardson, and Sloan (BRS) find a negative relation between their comprehensive measure of corporate financing activities and future stock returns and future profitability. Noticing that accounting accruals are increases in net operating assets on a company's balance sheet, we question whether it is possible to distinguish between the ‘external financing anomaly’ documented by BRS and the ‘accrual anomaly’ first documented by Sloan [1996. Do stock prices fully reflect information in accruals and cash flows about future earnings? The Accounting Review 71, 289–315]. We show that once controlling for total accruals, the relation between external financing activities and future stock returns is attenuated and not statistically significant. These findings are consistent with Richardson and Sloan [2003. External financing, capital investment and future stock returns. Working Paper, University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan].

Abarbanell and Lehavy provide evidence that analysts’ forecast errors are not normally distributed exhibiting a high occurrence of extreme negative forecast errors (left-tail asymmetry) and a high occurrence of small positive forecast errors (middle asymmetry). This is important for researchers who rely on techniques that are sensitive to the distributional assumptions of analysts’ forecast errors. Many of the conclusions drawn by Abarbanell and Lehavy, however, are based on visual impressions (as opposed to formal empirical tests) or based on methods that are very sensitive to the empirical methods used (e.g., whether the serial correlation of forecast errors is caused by the left-tail asymmetry).

Taxation, Tax complexity, Tax-reporting positions

This article presents empirical estimates of racial discrimination in the New Haven, Connecticut, housing market. The results are based on over 200 rental units for which there is comprehensive information on the characteristics of the dwellings. Using multiple-regression techniques, we estimate that blacks and whites do pay different amounts for equivalent units. For black female-headed households the markup relative to white males is 16 percent; for black male-headed households, 7.5 percent. Also the work indicates that rents for whites in boundary (integrated) areas are about 7 percent lower than for black households in these areas.