We study the determinants of inventory accumulation in a structural VAR framework with news shocks. Specifically, we investigate how news shocks affect two key determinants of inventory movements, namely rates of return and marginal costs. We establish that inventories react strongly and...

The energy crisis engulfing Europe is a crisis of both gas and electricity markets, with huge cost impacts on consumers across all European countries. In Britain, half of typical household energy expenditure arises from electricity. This paper examines how the cost of gas-powered generation...

Consumers often face monetary and non-monetary costs when purchasing goods. Experience goods, for example, require consumers to invest time and money to acquire and use a product, and time requirements may not be fully known prior to making a purchase. Unlike monetary costs, non-monetary costs...

Manufacturers' finished goods inventories move less than shipments over the business cycle. We argue that this requires marginal cost to be more procyclical than is conventionally measured. We construct, for six manufacturing industries, alternative measures of marginal cost that attribute...

There are constraints on pricing congestible facilities. First, if heterogeneous users are observationally indistinguishable, then congestion charges must be anonymous. Second, the time variation of congestion charges may be constrained. Do these constraints undermine the feasibility of marginal...

An examination of data on labor input and the quantity of output reveals that most U.S. industries have marginal costs far below their prices. The corilusion rests on the empirical finding that cyclical variations in labor input are small compared to variations in output. In booms, firms produce...

Under conditions of natural monopoly, private contracts or government regulation may attempt to avoid inefficiency by setting up a pricing formula. Once the capital stock is chosen,the right price to charge the buyer is marginal cost. But the point of this paper is that marginal-cost pricing...

This paper uses a rich panel data set of Indian manufacturing firms to analyze the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on various outcomes of domestic firms. We apply recent methodological advances in the estimation of production functions together with detailed product-level information...

Electrification of transportation and buildings to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions requires massive switching from natural gas and refined petroleum products. All three end-use energy sources are mispriced due in part to the unpriced pollution they emit. Natural gas and electricity...

This paper provides estimates of price-marginal cost ratios or markups for 50 sectors in 8 euro area countries and the US over the period 1981-2004. The estimates are obtained applying the methodology developed by Roeger (1995) on the EU KLEMS March 2007 database. Five stylized facts are...

The importance of sticky prices in business cycle fluctuations has been debated for many years. But we argue, based on a large empirical literature from the 1950's and 60's, that it is necessary to distinguish the response of price to an increase in factor prices from its response to an increase...

A number of recent papers have argued that US firms exert increasing market power, as measured by their markups of price over marginal cost. I review three of the main approaches to estimating economy-wide markups and show that all are based on the hypothesis of firm cost-minimization. Yet...

In this paper, a theoretical relationship is obtained to measure the effect that inefficiency has on marginal costs, degree of economies of scale and technical change. It is shown that when the relationship between inefficiency and output level is ignored, the estimation of marginal costs and...

Despite the clear prescription from economic theory that a firm should set price based only on variable costs, firms routinely factor fixed costs into pricing decisions. We show that full-cost pricing (FCP) can achieve the optimal price. FCP marks up variable cost with the contribution margin...

This paper explores the impact of capital adequacy requirements on the investment behavior of insurance companies from a new perspective. We specifically investigate one important feature of Risk-Based Capital (RBC) system, the square root rule in aggregating risk categories. We show that the...

We study the effects of news shocks on inventory accumulation in a structural VAR framework. We establish that inventories react strongly and positively to news about future increases in total factor productivity. Theory suggests that the transmission channel of news shocks to inventories works...

We study the effects of news shocks on inventory accumulation in a structural VAR framework. We establish that inventories react strongly and positively to news about future increases in total factor productivity. Theory suggests that the transmission channel of news shocks to inventories works...

A number of recent papers have argued that US firms exert increasing market power, as measured by their markups of price over marginal cost. I review three of the main approaches to estimating economy-wide markups and show that all are based on the hypothesis of firm cost-minimization. Yet...

Advocates of using market mechanisms for addressing greenhouse gases and other pollutants typically argue that it is a necessary step in pricing polluting goods at their social marginal cost (SMC). Retail electricity prices, however, deviate from social marginal cost for many reasons. Some cause...

Modigliani and Miller's Proposition III asserts that if a firm's projects are all similar, they should all be discounted at the same marginal cost of capital (MCC), which is also the firm's average cost of capital (ACC). However, when a firm expands by accepting a new project, its weight in...

This article proposes the estimation of marginal cost of individual firms using semiparametric and nonparametric methods. These methods have a number of appealing features when applied to cost functions. The empirical analysis uses data from a unique sample of the California electricity industry...

Recent theoretical research shows that exporters are more productive than nonexporters. We show that this result holds almost trivially for the case of constant marginal cost of production, as mainly assumed in the literature, but it may not hold true if the marginal cost is not constant. Our...

The ubiquity of electrical devices in our daily life is not something we think about anymore in the industrialised world. It has become as normal as breathing. Yet unlike air, power has to be obtained and distributed. The constant availability of current is therefore not a given thing, but...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC), driven by unit labor costs has been criticized for failing to match inflation dynamics and for explaining the duration of price contracts. This paper extends recent attempts in the literature to improve the fit of the NKPC, by introducing a fuller...

We trace the developments that led to quadratic voting, from Vickrey's counterspeculation mechanism and his second-price auction through the family of Groves mechanisms and its most notable member, the Clarke mechanism, to the expected externality mechanism, the Groves-Ledyard mechanism, and the...