The impact of ‘stop-go’ demand management policy on Britain's consumer durables industries, 1952-65

This article examines the impacts of British government ‘stop-go’ policy on domestic sales of consumer durables over the period 1952–65, via hire purchase restrictions and punitive Purchase Tax rates. Our analysis includes a general review of contemporary evidence regarding the impacts of these measures, a more detailed study of the television sector, and time-series econometric analysis for both televisions and a representative high-ticket labour-saving consumer durable: washing machines. We find that the restrictions had devastating impacts on Britain's consumer durables industries, preventing firms from fully exploiting economies of scale, reducing output growth and international competitiveness, and eroding industrial relations. Government officials were aware of these problems, but considered them a price worth paying to facilitate moves towards sterling convertibility and the re-establishment of the City as a leading financial and trading centre

Assessing the Impact of Field-of-Use Restrictions in Patent Licensing Agreements: The Ethical Pharmaceutical Industry in the United States, 1950–1962

[EN]There are a number of strategies employed by companies to limit price competition, including patenting. This article investigates patent licensing restrictions as a strategy to erode price competition, using mainly information gleaned from the 1960–1962 Kefauver Committee hearings. The article deals with the pharmaceutical industry, which is one of the few sectors in which patents are essential to the development and introduction of innovations. The current study adds to a body of literature that has yielded mixed results with respect to the role of patents in this industry. The main contribution of this research is that restrictive licensing clauses, specifically field-of-use restrictions, are found to be relevant in eroding price competition in the institutional market. However, in the retail ethical market, price competition was absent even when no field-of-use restrictions were included in licensing contracts, although product competition was relevant between patented drugs

Wholesale pricing in a small open economy

This paper addresses the empirical analysis of wholesale profit margins using data of the Dutch wholesale sector, 1986. At the heart of the analysis is the typical nature of wholesale production: wholesalers do not produce a tangible product, but offer a service capacity. This has an immediate impact on the identification, interprelation and measurement of determinants of profit variations. A model is set up to explain variations in wholesale profit margins, which is inspired by two widely applied approaches to industry pricing: the behavioural mark-up model and the marginalist price-cost model