1,721,874 research outputs found
"The Real Thing:" Nominal Price Rigidity of the Nickel Coke, 1886-1959
Full text linkWe report that the price of a 6.5oz Coke was 5¢ from 1886 until 1959. Thus, we are documenting a nominal price rigidity that lasted more than 70 years! The case of Coca-Cola is particularly interesting because during the 70-year period there were substantial changes in the soft drink industry as well as two World Wars, the Great Depression, and numerous regulatory interventions and lawsuits, which led to substantial changes in the Coca-Cola market conditions. The nickel price of Coke, nevertheless, remained unchanged. We find that this unusual rigidity is best explained by (1) a contract between the Company and its parent bottlers that encouraged retail price maintenance, (2) a single-coin vending machine technology, which limited the Company's price adjustment options due to limited availability and unreliability of the existing flexible price adjustment technologies, and (3) a single-coin monetary transaction technology, which limited the Company's price adjustment options due to the customer "inconvenience cost." We show that these price adjustment costs are of a different nature than the standard menu cost, and their estimates exceed the existing estimates by an order of magnitude. A possible broader relevance of the nickel Coke phenomenon is discussed in the context of Nickel and Dime Stores, which were popular in the US in the late 1800s and the early 1900s.Sticky Prices, Cost of Adjustment, Menu Cost, Retail Price Maintenance, Single-Coin Vending Machine, Customer Inconvenience Cost, Coca-Cola, Coke, Nickel Coke, Pepsi, Nickel and Dime Stores
Investment-Saving Comovement under Endogenous Fiscal Policy
Full text linkI expand Feldstein’s (1983) model by including flexible exchange rate and by introducing endogenous fiscal policy. Using this model, I demonstrate how a positive investment-saving correlation can arise in a world with endogenous fiscal policy. I show that this correlation does not depend on capital mobility and therefore is compatible with any degree of capital mobility. This implies that the observed investment- saving comovement is not necessarily due to imperfect capital mobility. The model has a testable implication: it predicts a lack of Granger causality from private saving to private investment. Empirical examination of this prediction indicates that U.S. time series data is compatible with the hypothesis of endogenous fiscal policy during a flexible exchange rate period, but not during a fixed exchange rate period.Feldstein-Horioka Puzzle, Investment, Saving, Capital Mobility, Endogenous Fiscal Policy
Heterogeneity in Convergence Rates and Income Determination across U.S. States: Evidence from County-Level Data
Full text linkWe utilize county-level data to explore growth determination in the U.S. and possible heterogeneity in growth determination across individual states. The data includes over 3,000 cross-sectional observations and 39 demographic control variables. We use a consistent two stage least squares estimation procedure. (We report OLS estimates as well.) The estimated convergence rate across the U.S. is about 7 percent per year – higher than the 2 percent normally found with OLS in cross-country, U.S. state, and European region samples. Estimated convergence rates for 32 individual states are above 2 percent with an average of 8.1 percent. For 29 states the convergence rate is above 2 percent with 95 percent confidence. For seven states the convergence rate can be rejected as identical to at least one other state’s convergence rate with 95 percent confidence. In examining the determinants of balanced growth path heights, we find that government at all levels of decentralization is negatively correlated with economic growth. Educational attainment of a population has a non-linear relationship with economic growth according to our estimates: growth is positively related to high-school degree attainment, seemingly unrelated to obtaining some college education, and then positively related to four-year degree or more attainment. Also, finance, insurance and real estate industry and entertainment industry are positively correlated with growth, while education industry is negatively correlated with growth. Heterogeneity in the effects of balanced growth path determinants across individual states is much harder to detect (or dismiss) than in convergence rates.Economic Growth, Income Convergence, Solow Growth Model, Balanced Growth Path, Heterogeneity in Convergence, Education and Growth, Size of Government and Growth, Consistent Estimation, County-Level Data
Weighted Congestion Games With Separable Preferences
Full text linkPlayers in a congestion game may differ from one another in their intrinsic preferences (e.g., the benefit they get from using a specific resource), their contribution to congestion, or both. In many cases of interest, intrinsic preferences and the negative effect of congestion are (additively or multiplicatively) separable. This paper considers the implications of separability for the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibrium and the prospects of spontaneous convergence to equilibrium. It is shown that these properties may or may not be guaranteed, depending on the exact nature of player heterogeneity.congestion games, separable preferences, pure equilibrium, finite improvement property, potential.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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