Independent distribution: an approach for multinationals in the overseas market. Impact of market size in segmenting distribution for the eléctrical appliances market. appliances market.

Multinational companies nowadays are acting globally as they attack markets worldwide. In order to deploy their strategy those companies need to build support and front office structures. In a dynamic environment in wyich markets face voatility the requiered structures can harm the performance of the subsidiaries. An local entrepreneurship. The next step to act at country level is transferring the activity to an independent distributor that will follow the strategic guidelines set by the multinational and coordinated from a wider area regional headquarters

Thirty Minutes or Less: The Inelasticity of Commuting

This Comment urges the legislature to manipulate travel time in order to reduce GHGE (greenhouse gas emissions). Specifically, the legislature must incentivize mass transit by creating easier, quicker transit systems while simultaneously disincentivizing personal automobiles by increasing automobile travel time. By manipulating the travel time for various modes of travel, the legislature can effectively reduce GHGE while increasing individuals’ quality of life by creating an infrastructure that costs less and provides transportation systems not dependent on the automobile. This Comment explains why the Sustainable Communities Act will fail to significantly reduce vehicle emissions, and this Comment proposes legislative action to reach the goals established in the Global Warming Solutions Act. Part I of this Comment discusses the relationship between the automobile and urban decentralization in America. Part II discusses legislation in California targeting automobile emissions, including regional smart-growth measures and state legislative actions targeted at reducing GHGE. Part III explains the impacts on travel mode choice from urban design, temporal components, and individual components such as attitude, preferences, costs, and the duration of the trip. To demonstrate the power of time, Part III also explains the inelasticity of travel time, the relationship between primary and substitute goods, and how different transportation modes have different values of quality. Part IV proposes changes to make public transit a “close substitute” for the personal automobile and describes savings these policies can bring. Part V demonstrates the viability of these policies by discussing several cities with similar policies. The Conclusion calls the California legislature to act by making funding changes. In order to make significant reductions in GHGE from the transportation industry, as set out in the Global Warming Solutions Act and in the Sustainable Communities Act, the legislature must make meaningful funding changes that significantly reduce automobile infrastructure while making other modes of travel more viable options

Credit shocks and equilibrium dynamics in consumer durable goods markets

This article studies equilibrium dynamics in consumer durable goods markets after aggregate credit shocks. We introduce two novel features into a general-equilibrium model of durable consumption with heterogeneous households facing idiosyncratic income risk and borrowing constraints: (1) indivisible durable goods are vertically differentiated in their quality and (2) trade on secondary markets at market-clearing prices, with households endogenously choosing when to trade or scrap their durables. The model highlights a new transmission mechanism for macroeconomic shocks and successfully matches several empirical patterns that we document using data on U.S. car markets around the Great Recession. After a tightening of the borrowing limit, debt-constrained households postpone the decision to scrap and upgrade their low-quality cars, which depresses mid-quality car prices. In turn, this effect reduces wealthy households’ incentives to replace their mid-quality cars with high-quality ones, thereby decreasing new-car sales. We further use our framework to evaluate targeted fiscal stimulus policies such as the Car Allowance Rebate System in 2009 (“Cash for Clunkers”)

Thirty Minutes or Less: The Inelasticity of Commuting

This Comment urges the legislature to manipulate travel time in order to reduce GHGE (greenhouse gas emissions). Specifically, the legislature must incentivize mass transit by creating easier, quicker transit systems while simultaneously disincentivizing personal automobiles by increasing automobile travel time. By manipulating the travel time for various modes of travel, the legislature can effectively reduce GHGE while increasing individuals’ quality of life by creating an infrastructure that costs less and provides transportation systems not dependent on the automobile. This Comment explains why the Sustainable Communities Act will fail to significantly reduce vehicle emissions, and this Comment proposes legislative action to reach the goals established in the Global Warming Solutions Act. Part I of this Comment discusses the relationship between the automobile and urban decentralization in America. Part II discusses legislation in California targeting automobile emissions, including regional smart-growth measures and state legislative actions targeted at reducing GHGE. Part III explains the impacts on travel mode choice from urban design, temporal components, and individual components such as attitude, preferences, costs, and the duration of the trip. To demonstrate the power of time, Part III also explains the inelasticity of travel time, the relationship between primary and substitute goods, and how different transportation modes have different values of quality. Part IV proposes changes to make public transit a “close substitute” for the personal automobile and describes savings these policies can bring. Part V demonstrates the viability of these policies by discussing several cities with similar policies. The Conclusion calls the California legislature to act by making funding changes. In order to make significant reductions in GHGE from the transportation industry, as set out in the Global Warming Solutions Act and in the Sustainable Communities Act, the legislature must make meaningful funding changes that significantly reduce automobile infrastructure while making other modes of travel more viable options

Fixed Costs and Long-Lived Investments

Neoclassical investment models predict that firms should make frequent, small adjustments to their capital stocks. Microeconomic evidence, however, shows just the opposite -- firms make infrequent, large adjustments to their capital stocks. In response, researchers have developed models with fixed costs of adjustment to explain the data. While these models generate the observed firm-level investment behavior, it is not clear that the aggregate behavior of these models differs importantly from the aggregate behavior of neoclassical models. This is important since most of our existing understanding of investment is based on models without fixed costs. Moreover, models with fixed costs have non-degenerate, time-varying distributions of capital holdings across firms, making the models extremely difficult to analyze. This paper shows that, for sufficiently long-lived capital, (1) the cross-sectional distribution of capital holdings has virtually no bearing on the equilibrium and (2) the aggregate behavior of the fixed-cost model is virtually identical to that of the neoclassical model. The findings are due to a near infinite elasticity of investment timing for long-lived capital goods -- a feature that fixed-cost models and neoclassical models share. The analysis shows that the so-called "irrelevance results" obtained in recent numerical studies of fixed-cost models are not parametric special cases but instead reflect fundamental properties of long-lived investments.

Three Essays on Investment.

This dissertation studies the supply and demand of capital goods, and the effects of investment tax incentives. Chapter II examines the effects of investment tax incentives. The evidence indicates that subsidies increase capital goods purchases more than domestic production so investment subsidies also stimulate foreign capital goods producers. At capital producing firms, measures of economic increase substantially following an investment tax subsidy. The data is used to estimate the key parameters of a multi-sector, open-economy DSGE model with capita and labor adjustment costs. In the estimated model, investment tax incentives are strong enough to cause noticeable changes in aggregate economic activity. The import supply elasticity is considerable, allowing investment to rise even in the short-run in response to investment subsidies. Chapter III develops an equilibrium model of investment with retiming costs at the micro-level. In the benchmark case in which investment retiming costs are zero, this model and standard fixed-costs models generate virtually identical aggregate predictions. If the timing adjustment costs are positive, then capital goods prices may exhibit predictable changes over time. Simulated impulse responses in the quantitative model are then used to analyze the effects of retiming costs on the effectiveness of investment of tax subsidies, the economy’s reaction to transitory investment supply shocks, and an out-of-steady state distribution of capital vintages. In the presence of retiming costs, temporary subsidies are less effective and cause a fall in investment after they expire. Additionally, investment supply shocks have an attenuated effect of investment relative to the benchmark case. Chapter IV studies the supply of capital goods. The data indicate that for equipment, the elasticity of investment supply is considerable, while for structures the elasticity of investment supply is close to unity. After calibrating the elasticity of investment supply, investment supply shocks are recovered for each capital type. Using a mix of reduced-form and structural time-series techniques, the structural parameters of the permanent and transitory components for each series are estimated from the data. The analysis suggests that permanent shocks are more prominent than transitory shocks and that the permanent and transitory components are strongly negatively correlated.PhDEconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116656/1/ammocanu_1.pd

Equilibrium in a Durable Goods Market with Lumpy Adjustment 1

referee for helpful comments. We gratefully acknowledge support from the NSF. Leahy thanks the Sloan Durable goods are an important component of the business cycle. Equilibrium models of durable goods markets are made difficult by the lumpy nature of individual purchases. We show that a straight forward approximation of the distribution of durable goods holdings gives rise to a tractable equilibrium model. We analyze the case of competition as well as that of a monopoly producer