Factor price

About: Factor price is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2764 publications have been published within this topic receiving 86176 citations.

The effect of FDI on job separation

Abstract: A novel linked employer-employee data set documents that expanding multinational enterprises retain more domestic jobs than competitors without foreign expansions. In contrast to prior research, a propensity score estimator allows enterprise performance to vary with foreign direct investment (FDI) and shows that the foreign expansion itself is the dominant explanatory factor for reduced worker separation rates. Bounding, concomitant variable tests, and robustness checks rule out competing hypotheses. The finding is consistent with the idea that, given global factor price differences, a prevention of enterprises from outward FDI would lead to more domestic worker separations. FDI raises domestic-worker retention more pronouncedly among highly educated workers and for expansions into distant locations.

Producer price and price transmission in a deregulated Ethiopian coffee market

Abstract: Coffee producers in Ethiopia have historically received a very small share of the export price of green coffee. Reasons that are often mentioned are heavy government intervention and high marketing and processing costs. Prior to 1992, government regulation of the domestic coffee market in the form of fixed producer prices and the monopoly power of the Ethiopian Coffee Marketing Corporation put a substantial wedge between the producer price and the world price of coffee by imposing an implicit tax on producers. The domestic coffee marketing system in Ethiopia was liberalised after 1992, which was envisaged to have a positive effect on producer prices and price transmission signals from world markets to producers. This paper, with the help of Cointegration and Error-Correction Model (ECM), attempts to analyse its impact. As findings indicate, the reforms induced stronger long-run relationships among grower, wholesaler and exporter prices. The estimation of the ECM shows that the short-run transmission of price signals from world to domestic markets has improved, but has remained weak in both auction-to-world and producer-to-auction markets. This might be explained by the weak institutional arrangement coordinating the domestic coffee system and contract enforcement. In general, the domestic price adjusts more rapidly to world price changes today than it did prior to the reforms. However, there is an indication that negative price changes transmit much faster than positive ones.

Is that deal worth my time? The interactive effect of relative and referent thinking on willingness to seek a bargain

Abstract: Prior research on relative thinking has suggested that the willingness to seek a bargain depends not only on the absolute value of the bargain but also on the price of the product. For example, a discount of $10 seems more appealing on a product whose regular price is $20 than a product whose regular price is $60. By invoking the interactive role of consumers' reference prices, the authors delineate the specific conditions under which the same $10 discount can seem less appealing when the price is $20 than when it is $60. They present a formal model that simultaneously incorporates the effects of relative and referent thinking and yields novel predictions, which are supported in four laboratory experiments. Their results reveal that deviation from the reference price determines when relative thinking holds and when it gets reversed. Specifically, the relative-thinking effect holds when the actual price is the same as expected, it reverses when the actual price deviates from the expected price, bu...

Holiday Price Rigidity and Cost of Price Adjustment

Abstract: The Thanksgiving-Christmas holiday period is a major sales period for US retailers. Due to higher store traffic, tasks such as restocking shelves, handling customers’ questions and inquiries, running cash registers, cleaning, and bagging, become more urgent during holidays. As a result, the holiday-period opportunity cost of price adjustment may increase dramatically for retail stores, which should lead to greater price rigidity during holidays. We test this prediction using weekly retail scanner price data from a major Midwestern supermarket chain. We find that indeed, prices are more rigid during holiday periods than non-holiday periods. For example, the econometric model we estimate suggests that the probability of a price change is lower during holiday periods, even after accounting for cost changes. Moreover, we find that the probability of a price change increases with the size of the cost change, during both, the holiday as well as non-holiday periods. We argue that these findings are best explained by higher price adjustment costs (menu cost) the retailers face during the holiday periods. Our data provides a natural experiment for studying variation in price rigidity because most aspects of market environment such as market structure, industry concentration, the nature of long-term relationships, contractual arrangements, etc., do not vary between holiday and nonholiday periods. We, therefore, are able to rule out these commonly used alternative explanations for the price rigidity, and conclude that the menu cost theory offers the best explanation for the holiday period price rigidity.