25 research outputs found

    Firms’ Price Markups and Returns to Scale in Imperfect Markets - Bulgaria and Hungary

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    Under perfect competition and constant returns to scale, firms producing homogeneous products set their prices at their marginal costs which also equal their average costs. However, the departure from these standard assumptions has important implications with respects to the derived theoretical results and the validity of the related empirical analysis. In particular, monopolistic firms will charge a markup over their marginal costs. We show that firms' markups tend to be directly associated with the employed production technology, more specifically with their returns to scale. Accordingly, we analyze the implications for the markup ratios from the incidence of non-constant returns to scale. We present quantitative results illustrating the effect of the returns to scale index on the firms' price markups, as well as the relationship between the two indicators, on the basis of firm-level data for Bulgarian and Hungarian manufacturing firms.markup pricing, market imperfections, return to scale, Bulgaria, Hungary

    The minimal dominant set is a non-empty core-extension

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    A set of outcomes for a transferable utility game in characteristic function form is dominant if it is, with respect to an outsider-independent dominance relation, accessible (or admissible) and closed. This outsider-independent dominance relation is restrictive in the sense that a deviating coalition cannot determine the payoffs of those coalitions that are not involved in the deviation. The minimal (for inclusion) dominant set is non-empty and for a game with a non-empty coalition structure core, the minimal dominant set returns this core. We provide an algorithm to find the minimal dominant set.dynamic solution, absorbing set, core, non-emptiness

    Still standing: how European firms weathered the crisis - The third EFIGE policy report

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    This research output confirms the strength of the approach underpinning the EFIGE project, which is based on the recognition that firms are heterogeneous in the extent and the pattern of their internationalisation, as they are in many other respects. The project provides more, and more precise, evidence of what makes firms successful and therefore also what makes countries successful in the context of globalisation. Internationalisation, however, also makes firms vulnerable to shocks affecting international trade and may transform them into agents of propagation of global downturns. At the time of the Great Recession of 2009, there was intense speculation about the reasons why trade collapsed much more than output. It was sometimes claimed that global supply chains were not only propagators, but also multipliers of international fluctuations. This report by László Halpern and his colleagues makes use of the fact that the EFIGE survey was â?? by accident â?? conducted in 2009 and â?? by design â?? included questions about the firmsâ?? response to the global crisis. It provides a fascinating account of what happened to them in an especially turbulent environment. The stylised facts presented in this report are important to bear in mind at a time when Europe is heading for another severe downturn.

    The Language of Oracular Inquiry in Roman Egypt

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    "Versions of this article were presented as papers to the Classics Department at Dalhousie University and to the CACW in 2004."The language of oracular inquiries in Roman Egypt changed from Demotic to Greek because of the insistence of the Roman authorities, not, as historians have previously supposed, because of a preference for Greek on the part of priests or inquirers.https://www.jstor.org/stable/2030461
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