Knowledge that Transforms

This paper empirically examines the 'long purse' hypothesis, formalized by Patrick Bolton and David Scharfstein (1990), that incumbents may drive out entrants through aggressive pricing. The author analyzes the pricing of 733 disk drives between 1980 and 1988. Drives that are adjacent to those manufactured by thinly capitalized undiversified rivals are priced lower than other drives during the later years in the sample, when little equity financing was available to these firms. The results are robust to controls for alternative hypotheses and to other specifications of the hedonic regression. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Using event history data, this paper analyzes the distribution of reemployment spell durations conditional on the completed length of the preceding (contiguous) spell of unemployment. The model is used to infer how unemployment insurance, through unemployment duration, may affect the likelihood of reentering unemployment. Special attention is paid to the endogeneity between unemployment and reemployment duration and the sample information contained in the fact that some individuals obtain reemployment by recall as opposed to acceptance of a new job. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

This study investigates the effect of competition on the productive efficiency of the U.S. telephone industry, taking into account the fact that the industry was subject to rate-of-return regulation. It is shown that competition induces the incumbents to use capital inputs closer to the unconstrained optima, thereby reducing the allocative inefficiency caused by the Averch-Johnson effect. This effect is in addition to the usual technical efficiency improvement induced by competition. Empirical results, based on annual data for the U.S. telephone industry for the 1951-90 period, suggested that competition improved the allocative efficiency of the incumbent firms which had been under a rate-of-return regulation until 1989. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Vito Antonio Muscatelli, Andrew A. Stevenson, Catia Montagna, Modeling Aggregate Manufactured Exports for Some Asian Newly Industrialized Economies, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), pp. 147-155

This paper documents the interstate variation in capital gains taxation and examines the relation between the marginal tax rate on capital gains and aggregated state-level realizations between 1979 and 1990. Using state-level aggregated data, rather than data on individual taxpayers, alleviates the problem that the marginal tax rate is endogenous to the amount of capital gains realized. The estimated elasticity of realizations with respect to the tax rate is -0.65, smaller than that found by most researchers using panel data. This finding is robust to a variety of alternative specifications. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

This paper examines the relationship between inflation and wage indexation in the postwar United States using data on the prevalence of cost-of-living adjustments in major collective bargaining agreements. The author finds that increases in inflation precede increases in wage indexation but reductions in inflation do not precede reductions in wage indexation. There is virtually no evidence that wage indexation affects inflation. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Terence C. Mills, Gianluigi Pelloni, Athina Zervoyianni, Unemployment Fluctuations in the United States: Further Tests of the Sectoral-Shifts Hypothesis, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No. 2 (May, 1995), pp. 294-304

The effects of various regulations on hospital costs are estimated using a two decade long panel data set which spans the initiation, and in some instances the repeal, of various forms of hospital regulation. The long panel fosters two improvements over previous research. First, as state hospital cost levels may affect states' incentive to regulate, fixed effect estimators alleviate omitted variable bias derived from the states' regulatory discretion. Second, the long panel permits the estimation of many different regulatory program effects, but also facilitates the analysis of potential regulatory program interaction. The empirical results suggest that previous studies have exaggerated regulatory cost savings: although some interaction effects are indicated, hospital costs appear unresponsive to most regulatory programs. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

The relationship between state-imposed advertising restrictions and state-level market concentration in the malt beverage industry is examined. The authors find that the presence of proscriptions on price advertising significantly increases market concentration at the state level, both absolutely and relative to a measure of national concentration. The evidence also indicates that banning local nonprice advertising in addition to price advertising yields no marginal significant change in either measure of state-level concentration. Analysis of individual brewers' market shares suggests that large national brewers gain at the expense of smaller brewers when price advertising is restricted. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

The authors use the comparative behavior of real output growth and inflation behavior of members and nonmembers of the exchange rate mechanism (ERM) to analyze the importance of ERM membership on macroeconomic performance. An econometric procedure for identifying temporary and permanent shocks to output is proposed and executed. The results confirm that the ERM has acted as a vehicle for macropolicy coordination between members. The authors also investigate several issues relating to the hypothesis of global economic 'tri-polarity' between the United States, Germany, and Japan. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.