Managing Quality under Heterogeneous Consumer Demand and Product Quality, October 2005

Based on accepted advances in the marketing, economics, consumer behavior, and satisfaction literatures, we develop a micro-foundations model of a firm that needs to manage the quality of a product that is inherently heterogeneous in the presence of varying customer tastes or expectations for quality. Our model blends elements of the returns to quality, customer lifetime value, and service profit chain approaches to marketing. The model is then used to explain several empirical results pertaining to the marketing literature by explicitly articulating the trade-offs between customer satisfaction and costs (including opportunity costs) of quality. In this environment firms will find it optimal to allow some customers to go unsatisfied. We show that the relationship between the expected number of repeated purchases by an individual customer is endogenous to the choice of quality by the firm, indicating that the number of purchases cannot be chosen freely to estimate a customer’s lifetime value.

Do women in female-dominated occupations exit the labour market more? Evidence from Italy, Spain, Denmark and the UK

Literature on sex occupational segregation has typically focused on the micro and macro determinants of it, on mobility patterns over the life course, on implications of segregation and mobility for gender inequalities. Rarely the link between sex-type occupations and women’s risk of labour market interruptions over family formation has been explored. In this piece of work we shall analyse whether women who are working in the female-dominated, male-dominated or integrated occupations have more or less chances to remain attached to the labour market, controlling for qualifications, class, sector and contract positions. By drawing from ECHP, and comparing Italy, Spain, Denmark and the UK, we shall in particular see whether such connection varies across countries with different institutional and cultural configurations.We find that, ceteris paribus, only in the UK the sex-composition of an occupation matters: women in female occupations are more likely to move to inactivity than women in mixed or male occupations. In the other countries considered the main cleavages lie elsewhere. In Italy what matters most is the sector of employment (public vs. private). In Spain the sector is relevant too, but also social class and the type of contract held (permanent vs. temporary). In Denmark women’s transitions to inactivity are largely independent of human capital and job characteristics.

The impact of labour market status on second and higher-order births. A comparative study of Denmark, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom

This paper investigates the effects of women‘s labour force participation on fertility, as well as the effects of the combined labour force participation of both members of a couple. It specifically focuses on such dimensions as unemployment, earnings, temporary contracts and part-time jobs, and it shows that their effects differ in accordance with national institutions and labour market regulations. Event-history methods and a longitudinal sample of the European Community Household Panel are used in the analyses, concerning the years 1993-2000. The results show that labour market insecurity of one or both members of a couple has a particularly strong impact in reducing birth rates in the Southern European countries studied. The more conventional model of men’s employment combined with housewifery has a positive impact on second or higher order births in United Kingdom, Spain and Italy, while in Denmark the effect is the opposite. These differences are consistent with different national models of combining parental responsibilities and participation by gender across the life course.

Leaving the labour market: event-history analysis of the female workers' transition to housework in Denmark, Germany, Great Britain and Spain

This paper is aimed at exploring the determinants of female activity from a dynamic perspective. An event-history analysis of the transition form employment to housework has been made resorting to data from the European Household Panel Survey. Four countries representing different welfare regimes and, more specifically, different family policies, have been selected for the analysis: Britain, Denmark, Germany and Spain. The results confirm the importance of individual-level factors, which is consistent with an economic approach to female labour supply. Nonetheless, there are significant cross-national differences in how these factors act over the risk of abandoning the labour market. First, the number of trnasitions is much lower among Danish working women than among British, German or Spanish ones, revealing the relative importance of universal provision of childcare services, vis-à-vis other elements of the family policy, as time or money.

The dynamics of the Swiss electricity market : three essays

Executive Summary Electricity is crucial for modern societies, thus it is important to understand the behaviour of electricity markets in order to be prepared to face the consequences of policy changes. The Swiss electricity market is now in a transition stage from a public monopoly to a liberalised market and it is undergoing an "emergent" liberalisation - i.e. liberalisation taking place without proper regulation. The withdrawal of nuclear capacity is also being debated. These two possible changes directly affect the mechanisms for capacity expansion. Thus, in this thesis we concentrate on understanding the dynamics of capacity expansion in the Swiss electricity market. A conceptual model to help understand the dynamics of capacity expansion in the Swiss electricity market is developed an explained in the first essay. We identify a potential risk of imports dependence. In the second essay a System Dynamics model, based on the conceptual model, is developed to evaluate the consequences of three scenarios: a nuclear phase-out, the implementation of a policy for avoiding imports dependence, and the combination of both. We conclude that the Swiss market is not well prepared to face unexpected changes of supply and demand, and we identify a risk of imports dependence, mainly in the case of a nuclear phase-out. The third essay focus on the opportunity cost of hydro-storage power generation, one of the main generation sources in Switzerland. We use and extended version of our model to test different policies for assigning an opportunity cost to hydro-storage power generation. We conclude that the preferred policies are different for different market participants and depend on market structure.

Savoir s'assurer : économie politique internationale des normes de services et mondialisation du marché de la (ré)assurance

The significance of the insurance industry in the functioning of the world economy is often underestimated, with premiums reaching 7.5 % of world gross domestic product (GDP), three times as much as worldwide military expenses. Insurance services mutualise risks in such a way as they provide a form of private governance that complements or makes up for guarantees otherwise supplied by the State. This case study of international standards developed for the insurance market provides evidence that deviates from conventional accounts considering service standards as heavily dependent of national environments and industry specificities. The chapter examines the relationship between tertiarisation, internationalisation and standardisation of contemporary economies by highlighting the complementarity between institutionalist approaches of the French regulation school and international political economy scholarship shedding light on the polarisation in the possible use of standards, notwithstanding thesectoraland institutional specificities of the activities concerned.

Katepillarista kauppakassiin : product placement suomalaisessa tv-ohjelmatuotannossa

Product placement has become more and more common in Finnish television programmes lately. Product placement, as with the whole of the television industry, is strictly regulated and monitored by law. Surreptitious advertising, sponsorship, cooperative partnerships and product placement are often confused with each other. Partially these activities are interpenetrative. Present legislation doesn't recognise product placement, therefore it doesn't have any specific position in law, thus causing problems. Product placement in domestic tv-programmes is still relatively modest. More extensive activity is perceivable at the movies where the restrictions are considerably more liberal. In the United States, product placement is a part of a production's budget. Pressure to increase financing has grouwn in both Finland and Europe. There has been considerable preparation in advance of a new television directive in the European Union which would allow more liberal advertising and product placement as a part of financing tv-programmes. The proposal for a new directive is currently only on its first round so product placement probably won't become better defined in law in the near future. Finnish television producers were interviewed as part of the research for this thesis, in order to clarify product placement position and usage in domestic televion programmes. Surreptitious advertising, sponsorship, different kinds of cooperative partnerships and the need for guidance were also discussed in the course of the themed interviews. Even though product placement does not currently play a significant part in the financing of a production, there are certainly pressures in that direktion. In the field of television, the legal boundaries of product placement are presently being explored in order to assess its position as a part of budgeting and covering expenses.

Red Bull

The aim of this project is to analyze the Red Bull company in order to find out its major potentialities and weaknesses using the concepts and tools learnt in the subject "Dirección Comercial I". To this end we have focused our attention in the Red Bull classic drink, so as to see how the enterprise has positioned its product in the market and the implications it has had.

Quality and Competition: An Empirical Analysis across Industries, March 2006

This paper empirically explores the link between quality and concentration in a cross-section of manufactured goods. Using concentration data and product quality indicators, an ordered probit estimation explores the impact of concentration on quality that is defined as an index of quality characteristics. The results demonstrate that market concentration and quality are positively correlated across different industries. When industry concentration increases, the likelihood of the product being higher quality increases and the likelihood of observing a lower quality decreases.

Collective Marketing Arrangements for Geographically Differentiated Agricultural Products: Welfare Impacts and Policy Implications, May 2006

This paper examines the incentive of atomistic agricultural producers within a specific geographical region to differentiate and collectively market products. We develop a model that allows us to analyze the market and welfare effects of the main types of real-world producer organizations, using it to derive economic insights regarding the circumstances under which these organizations will evolve, and describing implications of the results obtained in the context of an ongoing debate between the European Union and United States. As the anticipated fixed costs of development and marketing increase and the anticipated size of the market falls, it becomes essential to increase the ability of the producer organization to control supply in order to ensure the coverage of fixed costs. Whenever a collective organization allows a market (with a new product) to exist that otherwise would not have existed there is an increase in societal welfare. Counterintuitively, stronger property right protection for producer organizations may be welfare enhancing even after a differentiated product has been developed. The reason for this somewhat paradoxical result is that legislation aimed at curtailing the market power of producer organizations may induce large technological distortions.

Adverse Selection, Credit, and Efficiency: the Case of the Missing Market

We analyze a standard environment of adverse selection in credit markets. In our envi- ronment, entrepreneurs who are privately informed about the quality of their projects need to borrow from banks. As is generally the case in economies with adverse selection, the competitive equilibrium of our economy is shown to be ine¢ cient. Under adverse selection, the choices made by one type of agents limit what can be o¤ered to other types in an incentive-compatible manner. This gives rise to an externality, which cannot be internalized in a competitive equilibrium. We show that, in this type of environment, the ine¢ ciency associated to adverse selection is the consequence of one implicit assumption: entrepreneurs can only borrow from banks. If an additional market is added (say, a .security market.), in which entrepreneurs can obtain funds beyond those o¤ered by banks, we show that the e¢ cient allocation is an equilibrium of the economy. In such an equilibrium, all entrepreneurs borrow at a pooling rate in the security market. When they apply to bank loans, though, only entrepreneurs with good projects pledge these additional funds as collateral. This equilibrium thus simultaneously entails cross- subsidization and separation between di¤erent types of entrepreneurs.

Free Flows, Limited Diversification: Explaining the Fall and Rise of Stock Market Correlations, 1890-2001

Using a new dataset on capital account openness, we investigate why equity return correlations changed over the last century. Based on a new, long-run dataset on capital account regulations in a group of 16 countries over the period 1890-2001, we show that correlations increase as financial markets are liberalized. These findings are robust to controlling for both the Forbes-Rigobon bias and global averages in equity return correlations. We test the robustness of our conclusions, and show that greater synchronization of fundamentals is not the main cause of increasing correlations. These results imply that the home bias puzzle may be smaller than traditionally claimed.

Adverse selection, credit, and efficiency: the case of the missing market

We analyze a standard environment of adverse selection in credit markets. In our environment, entrepreneurs who are privately informed about the quality of their projects need to borrow in order to invest. Conventional wisdom says that, in this class of economies, the competitive equilibrium is typically inefficient. We show that this conventional wisdom rests on one implicit assumption: entrepreneurs can only access monitored lending. If a new set of markets is added to provide entrepreneurs with additional funds, efficiency can be attained in equilibrium. An important characteristic of these additional markets is that lending in them must be unmonitored, in the sense that it does not condition total borrowing or investment by entrepreneurs. This makes it possible to attain efficiency by pooling all entrepreneurs in the new markets while separating them in the markets for monitored loans.

The Labor Market Effects of Technology Shocks

We analyze the labor market effects of neutral and investment-specific technology shocks along the intensive margin (hours worked) and the extensive margin (unemployment). We characterize the dynamic response of unemployment in terms of the job separation and the job finding rate. Labor market adjustments occur along the extensive margin in response to neutral shocks, along the intensive margin in response to investment specific shocks. The job separation rate accounts for a major portion of the impact response of unemployment. Neutral shocks prompt a contemporaneous increase in unemployment because of a sharp rise in the separation rate. This is prolonged by a persistent fall in the job finding rate. Investment specific shocks rise employment and hours worked. Neutral shocks explain a substantial portion of the volatility of unemployment and output; investment specific shocks mainly explain hours worked volatility. This suggests that neutral progress is consistent with Schumpeterian creative destruction, while investment-specific progress operates as in a neoclassical growth model.