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on Industrial Organization |
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Issue of 2006‒08‒19
three papers chosen by |
| By: | Hongbin Cai; Ichiro Obara |
| Date: | 2006–08–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cla:levrem:321307000000000285&r=ind |
| By: | Patrick Lünnemann; Ladislav Wintr |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the behaviour of Internet prices. It compares price rigidities on the Internet and in traditional brick-and-mortar stores and provides a cross-country perspective. The data set covers a broad range of items typically sold over the Internet. It includes more than 5 million daily price quotes downloaded from price comparison web sites in France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US. The following results emerge from our analysis. First, and contrary to the recent findings for common CPI data, Internet prices in the EU countries do not change less often than online prices in the US. Second, prices on the Internet are not necessarily more flexible than prices in traditional brick-and-mortar stores. Third, there is substantial heterogeneity in the frequency of price change across shop types and product categories. Fourth, the average price change on the Internet is relatively large, but smaller than the respective values reported for CPI data. Finally, panel logit estimates suggest that the likelihood of observing a price change is a function of both state- and time-dependent factors. |
| Date: | 2006–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bcl:bclwop:cahier_etude_22&r=ind |
| By: | Sergio Clavijo; Carlos I. Rojas; Camila Salamanca; Germán Montoya |
| Abstract: | Colombia has witnessed a renewed interest in merging and acquiring financial institutions during 2003-2005. These have been “complementary mergers” that seek to exploit economies scale and scope. This process contrasts favorably with those mergers & acquisitions that occurred during the mid-1990s, which involved mainly “twin institutions” that lacked potential for gaining multiproduct efficiency. This document analyzes the need to remove some of the regulatory constraints that obstruct further exploitation of such economies of scale-scope and quantifies the “cost efficiencies” shown by the Colombian banking sector (1994-2005). At the aggregate level, we found (absolute) banking efficiency to be around 63%, a similar value to those found in related studies post-crisis. This implies that banks operating in Colombia have been able to recover their efficiency levels during postcrisis 2003-2005, except for mortgage institutions. We highlight regulatory barriers that could be removed to help the banking system move closer to the optimal production frontier. |
| Date: | 2006–07–31 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:001036:002571&r=ind |