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We assess the consequences for consumers in 76 countries of multinational acquisitions in beer and spirits. Outcomes depend on how changes in ownership affect markups versus efficiency. We find that owner fixed effects contribute very little to the performance of brands. On average, foreign ownership tends to raise costs and lower appeal. Using the estimated model, we simulate the consequences of counterfactual national merger regulation. The US beer price index would have been 4–7% higher without divestitures. Up to 30% savings could have been obtained in Latin America by emulating the pro-competition policies of the US and EU.

This paper estimates the role of country-variety comparative advantage in the decision to offshore assembly of more than 2000 models of 197 car brands headquartered in 23 countries. While offshoring in the car industry has risen from 2000 to 2016, the top five offshoring brands account for half the car assembly relocated to low-wage countries. We show that the decision to offshore a particular car model depends on two types of cost (dis)advantage of the home country relative to foreign locations. The first type, the assembly costs common to all models, is estimated via a structural triadic gravity equation. The second effect, model-level comparative advantage, is an interaction between proxies for the model’s skill and capital intensity and headquarter country’s abundance in these factors.

This paper analyzes rivalry between transport facilities in a model that includes two sources of horizontal differentiation: geographical space and departure time. We explore how both sources influence facility fees and the price of the service offered by downstream carriers. Travellers' costs include a fare, a transportation cost to the facility and a schedule delay cost, which captures the monetary cost of departing earlier or later than desired. One carrier operates at each facility and schedules a single departure time. The interactions in the facility-carrier model are represented as a sequential three-stage game in fees, times and fares with simultaneous choices at each stage. We find that duopolis-tic competition leads to an identical departure time across carriers when their operational cost does not vary with the time of day, but generally leads to distinct service times when this cost is time dependent. When a facility possesses a location advantage, it can set a higher fee and its downstream carrier can charge a higher fare. Departure time differentiation allows the facilities and their carrier to compete along an additional differentiation dimension that can reduce or strengthen the advantage in location. By incorporating the downstream carriers into the analysis, we also find that a higher per passenger commercial revenue at one facility induces a lower fee charged by both facilities to their carrier and a lower fare charged by both carriers at their departure facility, while a lower marginal operational cost for one carrier implies a higher fee at its departure facility, a lower fee at the other facility served by the rival carrier and a lower fare at both facilities. JEL Classification: D43, L13, L22, L93, R4

International audience; We analyze trip-timing decisions of public transit users who trade off crowding costs and disutility from traveling early or late. Considering fixed and then endogenous demand, we derive the equilibrium distribution of users across trains for three fare regimes: no fare, an optimal uniform fare, and an optimal train-dependent fare that supports the social optimum. We also derive the optimal number of trains and train capacity, and compare them across fare regimes. Finally we calibrate the model to a segment of the Paris RER A mass transit system and estimate the potential welfare gains from train-dependent fares.

International audience; We model trip-timing decisions of rail transit users who trade off crowding costs and disutility from traveling early or late. With no fare or a uniform fare, ridership is too concentrated on timely trains. Marginal-cost-pricing calls for time-dependent fares that smooth train loads and generate more revenue than an optimal uniform fare. The welfare gains from time-dependent fares are unlikely to increase as ridership grows. However, imposing time-dependent fares raises the benefits of expanding capacity by either adding trains or increasing train capacity. We illustrate these results by calibrating the model to the Paris RER A transit system.

We use disaggregated data on car assembly and trade to estimate a model of multinational production. Our framework delineates four theory-based specifications under which all frictions relevant to multinational production can be structurally estimated. In addition to the trade costs and multinational production frictions emphasized in past work, we incorporate a third friction: regardless of production origin, it is more difficult to make sales in markets that are geographically separated from the brand's headquarters. The estimation transparently recovers internally consistent estimates of each type of friction cost. With structural parameters in hand, we investigate the consequences of three trade integration experiments: TPP, TTIP, and Brexit. We show that each type of friction makes a qualitative and quantitative difference in the reallocation of production caused by economic integration.

International audience; There is a large operations research literature on public transit system design. An extensive economic literature has also developed on public transit capacity investments, service frequency, and optimal pricing and subsidy policy. These two branches of literature have made significant advances in understanding public transit systems. However, in contrast to the literature on automobile traffic congestion, most of the studies have employed static models that cannot account for travelers' time-of-use decisions and the dynamics of transit congestion and crowding. The time profile of ridership is driven by the trade-off that users face between traveling at peak times and suffering crowding, and avoiding the peak by traveling earlier or later than they would like. A few studies have explored this trade-off using simple microeconomic models that combine trip-scheduling preferences as introduced by Vickrey (1969) with a crowding cost function that describes how utility from travel decreases with passenger loads. In this paper we use this modeling framework to analyze usage of a rail transit line, and assess the potential benefits from internalizing crowding externalities by setting differential train fares. We also present results on optimal train capacity and the number of trains put into service.

Most traffic congestion models assume that agents make trip-timing decisions independently and receive payoffs at the origin and destination that do not depend on whether other agents are present. We depart from this paradigm by considering a variant of Vickrey's bottleneck model of the morning commute in which individuals live as couples and value time at home more when together than when alone. We show that the costs of congestion can be higher than for a comparable population of individuals living alone. The costs can be even higher if spouses collaborate with each other when choosing their departure times. To calibrate the model we estimate trip-timing preferences for married and unmarried men and women in the Greater Paris region. Jel Classifications: D11, D70, R41.

International audience; In open pit mining, one must dig a pit, that is, excavate the upper layers of ground before reaching the ore. The walls of the pit must satisfy some mechanical constraints, in order not to collapse. The question then arises how to mine the ore optimally, that is, how to …nd the optimal pit. We set up the problem in a continuous (as opposed to discrete) framework, and we show, under weak assumptions, the existence of an optimum pit. For this, we formulate an optimal transportation problem, where the criterion is lower semi-continuous and is allowed to take the value +1. We show that this transportation problem is a strong dual to the optimum pit problem, and also yields optimality (complementarity slackness) conditions. Acknowledgement 1 Both authors thank the Centro de Modeliamento Matem-atico (CMM) at the University of Santiago de Chile for its hospitality, and Professors Felipe Alvarez and Jorge Amaya for substantial discussions.

In a context of complete financial markets where asset prices follow Ito’s processes, we characterize the set of consumption processes which are optimal for a given stochastic differential utility (e.g. [Duffie and Epstein, Econometrica 60 (1992) 353]), when beliefs are unknown. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the efficiency of a consumption process, consists of the existence of a solution to a quadratic backward stochastic differential equation and a martingale condition. We study the efficiency condition in the case of a class of homothetic stochastic differential utilities and derive some results for those particular cases. In a Markovian context, this efficiency condition becomes a partial differential equation.

Quantifications of gains from trade in heterogeneous firm models assume that productivity is Pareto distributed. Replacing this assumption with log-normal heterogeneity retains some useful Pareto features, while providing a substantially better fit to sales distributions-especially in the left tail. The cost of log-normal is that gains from trade depend on the method of calibrating the fixed cost and productivity distribution parameters. When set to match the size distribution of firm sales in a given market, the log-normal assumption delivers gains from trade in a symmetric two-country model that can be twice as large as under the Pareto assumption.

With increasing sophistication, economists have been estimating gravity equations for five decades. Robust evidence shows that borders and distance impede trade by much more than tariffs or transports costs can explain. We therefore advocate investigation of other sources of resistance, despite the greater difficulty involved in measuring and modeling them. From our selective review of recent findings, a unifying explanation emerges. A legacy of historical isolation and confl ict forged a world economy in which neither tastes nor information are homogeneously distributed. Cultural difference and inadequate information manifest themselves most strongly at national borders and over distance.

This chapter focuses on the estimation and interpretation of gravity equations for bilateral trade. This necessarily involves a careful consideration of the theoretical underpinnings since it has become clear that naive approaches to estimation lead to biased and frequently misinterpreted results. There are now several theory-consistent estimation methods and we argue against sole reliance on any one method and instead advocate a toolkit approach. One estimator may be preferred for certain types of data or research questions but more often the methods should be used in concert to establish robustness. In recent years, estimation has become just a first step before a deeper analysis of the implications of the results, notably in terms of welfare. We try to facilitatediffusion of best-practice methods by illustrating their application in a step-by-step cookbook mode of exposition.

Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper, n° 1165/1997; The Multifractal Model of Asset Returns ("MMAR," see Mandelbrot, Fisher, and Calvet, 1997) proposes a class of multifractal processes for the modelling of financial returns. In that paper, multifractal processes are defined by a scaling law for moments of the processes' increments over finite time intervals. In the present paper, we discuss the local behavior of multifractal processes. We employ local Holder exponents, a fundamental concept in real analysis that describes the local scaling properties of a realized path at any point in time. In contrast with the standard models of continuous time finance, multifractal processes contain a multiplicity of local Holder exponents within any finite time interval. We characterize the distribution of Holder exponents by the multifractal spectrum of the process. For a broad class of multifractal processes, this distribution can be obtained by an application of Cramer's Large Deviation Theory. In an alternative interpretation, the multifractal spectrum describes the fractal dimension of the set of points having a given local Holder exponent. Finally, we show how to obtain processes with varied spectra. This allows the applied researcher to relate an empirical estimate of the multifractal spectrum back to a particular construction of the Stochastic process.

Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper, n° 1166/1997; This paper presents the first empirical investigation of the Multifractal Model of Asset Returns ("MMAR"). The MMAR, developed in Mandelbrot, Fisher, and Calvet (1997), is an alternative to ARCH-type representations for modelling temporal heterogeneity in financial returns. Typically, researchers introduce temporal heterogeneity through time-varying conditional second moments in a discrete time framework. Multifractality introduces a new source of heterogeneity through time-varying local regularity in the price path. The concept of local Holder exponent describes local regularity. Multifractal processes bridge the gap between locally Gaussian (Ito) diffusions and jump-diffusions by allowing a multiplicity of Holder exponents. This paper investigates multifractality in Deutschemark/US Dollar currency exchange rates. After finding evidence of multifractal scaling, we show how to estimate the multifractal spectrum via the Legendre transform. The scaling laws found in the data are replicated in simulations. Further simulation experiments test whether alternative representations, such as FIGARCH, are likely to replicate the multifractal signature of the Deutschemark/US Dollar data. On the basis of this evidence, the MMAR hypothesis appears more likely. Overall, the MMAR is quite successful in uncovering a previously unseen empirical regularity. Additionally, the model generates realistic sample paths, and opens the door to new theoretical and applied approaches to asset pricing and risk valuation. We conclude by advocating further empirical study of multifractality in financial data, along with more intensive study of estimation techniques and inference procedures.

NBER Working Paper Series - National Bureau of Economic Research, n° 11441/2004; Recent research documents that aggregate stock prices are driven by shocks with persistence levels ranging from daily intervals to several decades. Building on these insights, we introduce a parsimonious equilibrium model in which regime-shifts of heterogeneous durations affect the volatility of dividend news. We estimate tightly parameterized specifications with up to 256 discrete states on daily U.S. equity returns. The multifrequency equilibrium has significantly higher likelihood than the classic Campbell and Hentschel (1992) specification, while generating volatility feedback effects 6 to 12 times larger. We show in an extension that Bayesian learning about stochastic volatility is faster for bad states than good states, providing a novel source of endogenous skewness that complements the "uncertainty" channel considered in previous literature (e.g., Veronesi, 1999). Furthermore, signal precision induces a tradeoff between skewness and kurtosis, and economies with intermediate investor information best match the data.

The majority of independent nations today were part of empires in 1945. Using bilateral trade data from 1948 to 2006, we examine the effect of independence on post-colonial trade. On average, there is little short run effect of trade with the colonizer (metropole). However, after three decades trade declines more than 60%. We also find that trade between former colonies of the same empire erodes as much as trade with the metropole, whereas trade with third countries exhibits small and unsystematic changes after independence. Hostile separations lead to larger and more immediate reductions. Trade deterioration over extended time periods suggests the depreciation of some form of trading capital such as business networks or institutions.

Free trade in audio-visual services has faced opposition on the grounds that foreign media undermine domestic culture, and ultimately, global diversity. Using a long panel of French birth registries, we assess the media-culture link using name frequencies as a measure of tastes. Controlling for the number of people who currently have a name and unobserved name effects, our regressions show that media influences choices via selective imitation. Parents are much more likely to adopt media names that they associate with youth. Using estimated parameters, we simulate our model of name choice to reveal that, absent foreign media, less than 5% of French babies would have been named differently. Our simulations also suggest a positive effect of foreign media on the welfare of parents., Plusieurs voix se sont élevées contre le libre-échange dans les services audio-visuels et ont souligné que les médias étrangers pouvaient ébranler la culture domestique et au final la diversité culturelle. A partir des certificats de naissance français, nous évaluons le lien média-culture en utilisant la fréquence d’apparition des prénoms comme mesure des préférences culturelles. Nos estimations, qui tiennent compte du nombre de personnes portant actuellement chaque prénom et des effets inobservables des prénoms, montrent que les médias influencent les choix des parents via un processus d’imitation sélective. Les parents sont beaucoup plus enclins à choisir les prénoms utilisés dans les médias et qu’ils associent à la jeunesse. A partir des paramètres estimés, nous simulons un modèle de choix de prénoms et montrons qu’en cas d’absence des médias étrangers, moins de 5% des enfants français auraient été prénommés différemment. Nous simulations suggèrent également un effet positif des médias étrangers sur le bien-être des parents.

This article provides evidence on the long-term impact of market potential on economic development. It derives from the New Economic Geography literature a structural estimation where the level of factors' income of a country is related to its proximity to large markets, referred to as 'market potential'. The empirical part evaluates this market potential for all countries in the world with available trade data over the 1965-2003 period and relates it to income per capita. Overall results show that market potential is a powerful driver of increases in income per capita.

This article provides evidence on the long-term impact of market potential on economic development. It derives from the New Economic Geography literature a structural estimation where the level of factors' income of a country is related to its proximity to large markets, referred to as ‘market potential’. The empirical part evaluates this market potential for all countries in the world with available trade data over the 1965–2003 period and relates it to income per capita. Overall results show that market potential is a powerful driver of increases in income per capita.

The measured effect of national borders on trade seems too large to be explained by the apparently small border-related trade barriers. This puzzle was first presented by McCallum (1995) and has gone on to spawn a large and growing literature on so-called border effects. We argue in this paper that, because distances are always mismeasured in the existing literature, the border effects may have been mismeasured in a way that leads to a systematic overstatement. Our goal here is to develop a correct measure of distance that would be consistent for international as well as intra-national trade flows. We show how use of the existing methods for calculating distance leads to “illusory” border and adjacency effects. We then apply our methods to data on interstate trade in the United States and inter-member trade in the European Union. We find that our new distance measure reduces the estimated border and adjacency effects but does not eliminate them. Thus, while we do not solve the border effect puzzle, we do show a way to shrink it.

Quality sorting and trade: Firm-level evidence for French wine Investigations of the effect of quality differences on heterogeneous performance in exporting have been limited by lack of direct measures of quality. We examine exports of French wine, matching the exporting firms to producer ratings from two wine guides. We show that high quality producers export to more markets, charge higher prices, and sell more in each market. More attractive markets are served by exporters that, on average, make lower rated Champagne. Market attractiveness has a weakly negative effect on prices and a strongly positive effect on quantities, confirming the sign predictions of a simple quality sorting model. Methodologically, we make several contributions to the literature. First, we propose an estimation method for regressions of firm-level exports on ability measures and use Monte Carlo simulations to show that it corrects a severe selection bias present in OLS estimates. Second, we show how the means of quality, price, and quantity for exporters to a given market can be used to recover estimates of core parameters (which we compare with firm-level estimates) and discriminate between productivity and quality-sorting versions of the Melitz model. Our new method regresses country means on an index of each country's attractiveness and the fixed costs of entering it. We compare our method, which utilizes explanatory variables estimated in the firm-level regressions, to the conventional approach that relies on a reduced-form relationship with proxies for attractiveness and fixed costs.

International audience; Advances in communication technology make it possible for workers in India to supply business services to head offices located anywhere. This has the potential to put high-wage workers in direct competition with much lower paid Indian workers. Service trade, however, like goods trade, is subject to strong distance effects, implying that the remote supply of services remains limited. We investigate this proposition by deriving a gravity-like equation for service trade and estimating it for a large sample of countries and different categories of service trade. We find that distance costs are high but are declining over time. Our estimates suggest that delivery costs create a significant advantage for local workers relative to competing workers in distant countries.

International audience; Using data on name distributions in 95 French d'epartements observed from 1946 to 2002, we investigate spatial and social mechanisms behind the transmission of parental preferences. Drawing inspiration from recent work on social interactions, we develop a simple discrete choice model that predicts a linear relationship between choices by agents in one location and the choices made in neighboring areas. We explain the shares of parents that give their children Saint, Arabic, and American-type names. In a second exercise we examine the effect of distance between locations on differences in name-type shares. In our last exercise we consider dissimilarity in actual names rather than name-types. Using Manhattan Distances as our metric, we find a steady and substantial decline in the importance of geographic distance. Meanwhile, differences in class and national origins have increasing explanatory power.

We study effects of using Sharpe ratio as a performance measure for compensating money managers in a dynamic and frictionless market setting. First, we demonstrate that with such a performance measure, the manager's focus on the short horizon performance is detrimental to the investor's long horizon performance. Numerical experiments illustrate that when returns are iid, the performance loss is significant, even when the investor's investment horizon is not much longer than the manager's. When expected returns are mean reverting, the performance loss is exacerbated. Second, we show that Sharpe ratio maximization strategies tend to increase (decrease) the risk in the later part of the optimization period after a bad (good) performance in the earlier part of the optimization period. As illustrated by a simulation exercise, this prediction is in agreement with empirical observations, and it presents a rational expectations alternative to the prevalent tournament theory explanation.

Recent theoretical work on economic geography emphasizes the interplay of transport costs and plant-level increasing returns. In these models, the spatial distribution of demand is a key determinant of economic outcomes. In one strand, it is argued that higher demand gives rise to a more than proportionate increase in production, a result known as the home market effect. Another strand emphasizes the effects of market sizes on factor prices. In this paper we highlight the theoretical connection between these two strands. We use data on 57 European regions to show how wages and employment respond to differentials in what we call real market potential, a discounted sum of demands derived from the theory.

This chapter examines empirical strategies that have been or could be used to evaluate the importance of agglomeration and trade models. This theoretical approach, widely known as "New Economic Geography" (NEG), emphasizes the interaction between transport costs and firm-level scale economies as a source of agglomeration. NEG focuses on forward and backward trade linkages as causes of observed spatial concentration of economic activity. We survey the existing literature, organizing the papers we discuss under the rubric of five interesting and testable hypotheses that emerge from NEG theory. We conclude the chapter with an overall assessment of the empirical support for NEG and suggest some directions for future research.

This paper develops, in a Brownian information setting, an approach for analyzing the preference for information, a question that motivates the stochastic differential utility (SDU) due to Duffie and Epstein [Econometrica 60 (1992) 353-394]. For a class of backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) including the generalized SDU [Lazrak and Quenez Math. Oper. Res. 28 (2003) 154-180], we formulate the information neutrality property as an invariance principle when the filtration is coarser (or finer) and characterize it. We also provide concrete examples of heterogeneity in information that illustrate explicitly the nonneutrality property for some GSDUs. Our results suggest that, within the GSDUs class of intertemporal utilities, risk aversion or ambiguity aversion are inflexibly linked to the preference for information., Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051604000000756 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

International audience; This paper develops a theoretical model of location choice under imperfect competition to formalize the notion that firms prefer to locate “where the markets are.” The profitability of a location depends on a term that weights demand in all locations by accessibility. Using a sample of Japanese firms' choices of regions within European countries, we compare the theoretically derived measure of market potential with the standard form used by geographers. Our results show that market potential matters for location choice but cannot account entirely for the tendency of firms in the same industry to agglomerate.

This paper generalizes, in the setting of Brownian information, the Duffie–Epstein (1992) stochastic differential formulation of intertemporal recursive utility (SDU). We provide a utility functional of state-contingent consumption plans that exhibits a local dependency with respect to the utility intensity process (the integrand of the quadratic variation) and call it the generalized SDU. This mathematical generalization of the SDU permits, in fact, more flexibility in the separation between risk aversion and intertemporal substitution and allows to model asymmetry in risk aversion. We extensively use the backward stochastic differential equation theory to give sufficient conditions for comparative and absolute risk aversion behavior as well as aversion to specific directional risk. Additionally, we discuss whether our functional exhibits monotonicity to its information filtration argument. For purposes of illustration, we provide some applications to the consumption/portfolio strategy selection problem in a complete securities market.

International audience; Knickerbocker (1973) introduced the notion of oligopolistic reaction to explain why firms follow rivals into foreign markets. We develop a model that incorporates central features of Knickerbocker's story—oligopoly, uncertainty, and risk aversion—to establish the conditions required to generate follow-the-leader behavior. We find that rival foreign investment will make risk-neutral firms less inclined to move abroad once its rivals have done so. We show that Knickerbocker's prediction relies on risk aversion and derive an expression for the minimum amount of risk aversion needed to generate oligopolistic reaction.

International audience; Paul Krugman's model of trade predicts that the country with the relatively large number of consumers is the net exporter and hosts a disproportionate share of firms in the increasing returns sector. He terms these results ‘home market effects'. This paper analyses three additional models featuring increasing returns, firm mobility, and trade costs to assess the robustness of home market effects to alternative modelling assumptions. We find strikingly similar results for two of the models that relax assumptions about the nature of demand, competition and trade costs. However, a model that links varieties to nations rather than firms can generate opposite results.

We use the border effects methodology to study the empirical foundation of anxieties relating to construction of a '' Fortress Europe''. We study to what extent imports from the United States and Japan for a representative European country have actually been subject to greater constraints than imports from other European countries, taking intra-national trade as a benchmark. Our findings show a relatively large increase in difficulty of access to the European market for Japanese and American producers during the 1980s. This pattern contrasts quite markedly with the gradual reduction in border effects within the European Union., Nous utilisons la méthodologie des effets frontières pour étudier les fondements empiriques des inquiétudes liées à la construction d'une " Forteresse Europe". Nous étudions dans quelle mesure les importations en provenance des États-Unis et du Japon d'un pays européen représentatif ont été réellement soumises à des contraintes plus importantes que les importations en provenance d'autres pays européens en prenant le commerce intra-national comme niveau de référence. Nos résultats font état d'une augmentation relativement importante de la difficulté d'accès au marché européen pour les producteurs japonais et américains au cours des années 80. Cette évolution contraste assez nettement avec la baisse graduelle des effets frontières à l'intérieur de l'Union Européenne., Head Keith, Mayer Thierry. Effet frontière, intégration économique et « Forteresse Europe ». In: Économie & prévision, n°152-153, 2002-1-2. Commerce international. pp. 71-92.

International audience; Bick (1987,1990) and He and Leland (1993) demonstrated that not every arbitrage-free Markovian diffusion price process is consistent with an equilibrium approach. We propose a unified framework for these results and we derive a new martingale characterization of equilibrium.

International audience; Non-Europe: The Magnitude and Causes of Market Fragmentation in the EU. — In 1985 the European Commission diagnosed its member states as suffering from excessive market fragmentation, later referred to as “Non-Europe.” The authors examine the empirical basis for the Commission's diagnosis using a trade model derived from monopolistic competition. They then investigate the links between the initial size and subsequent evolution of border effects within the EU. The findings support the view that European consumers act as if imports from other members were subject to high nontariff barriers. However, there appears to be almost no relationship between market fragmentation and the barriers that were identified and removed by Europe's Single Market Programme.

Knickerbocker (1973) introduced the notion of oligopolistic reaction to explain why firms follow rivals into foreign markets. We develop a model that incorporates central features of Knickerbocker's story--oligopoly, uncertainty, and risk aversion--to establish the conditions required to generate follow-the-leader behavior. We find that rival foreign investment will make risk-neutral firms less inclined to move abroad once its rivals have done so. We show that Knickerbocker's prediction relies on risk aversion and derive an expression for the minimum amount of risk aversion needed to generate oligopolistic reaction.