Article
Toward a theory of monopolistic competition
We propose a general model of monopolistic competition, which encompasses existing models while being flexible enough to take into account new demand and competition features. Even though preferences need not be additive and/or homothetic, the market outcome is still driven by the sole variable elasticity of substitution. We impose elementary conditions on this function to guarantee empirically relevant properties of a free-entry equilibrium. Comparative statics with respect to market size and productivity shocks are characterized through necessary and sufficient conditions. Furthermore, we show that the attention to the CES based on its normative implications was misguided: we propose a new class of preferences, which express consumers' uncertainty about their love for variety, that yield variable markups and may sustain the optimum. Last, we show how our approach can cope with heterogeneous firms once it is recognized that the elasticity of substitution is firm-specific.
The article deals with the theory of monopolistic competition under demand uncertainty. The authors consider the economy with labor immobility consisting of the high-tech sector with monopolistic competition and the standard sector with perfect competition. Preferences between sectors are specified by the Cobb – Douglas production function. It is assumed that companies make output decisions under preferences uncertainty and consumers’ distribution by sectors will be known by the time of realization. It means that firms are informed about consumer demand with accuracy up to a multiplicative uncertainty which is generated by random parameters in the Cobb – Douglas utility function. The paper shows that demand uncertainty leads to consistent growth of prices and wages in high-tech sector in relation to salaries in the second sector. The impact of uncertainty on welfare is ambiguous. In particular, under the known expected value of uncertainty customers derive benefit from exaggerated companies’ expectations about clients’ desire to consume high-tech goods.
We propose a general equilibrium model to study the spatial inequality of consumers and firms within a city. Our mechanics rely on Dixit and Stiglitz monopolistic competition framework. The firms and consumers are continuously distributed across a two-dimensional space, there are iceberg-type costs both for goods shipping and workers commuting (hence firms have variable marginal costs based on their location). Our main interest is in the equilibrium spatial distribution of wealth. We construct a model that is both tractable and general enough to stand the test of real city empirics. We provide some theoretical statements, but mostly the results of numerical simulations with the real Moscow data.
In this paper, we consider a model of monopolistic competition with volume of product quality in the task of economic growth. For this purpose, a model of consumers has been used, in the utility function of which, in addition to the love of diversity, love of product quality is included. For this model, the Ramsey equation is obtained, which includes the change in the time of product quality. For the industrial sector, the case is considered within firm investments in innovations aimed at improving the quality of the final product. For this scenario, arbitration equations were obtained and various modes of economic growth were analyzed taking into account changes in product quality
We propose a model of monopolistic competition with additive preferences and variable marginal costs. Using the concept of "relative love for variety," we provide a full characterization of the free-entry equilibrium. When the relative love for variety increases with individual consumption, the market generates pro-competitive effects. When it decreases, the market mimics anti-competitive behavior. The constant elasticity of substitution is the only case in which all competitive effects are washed out. We also show that our results hold true when the economy involves several sectors, firms are heterogeneous, and preferences are given by the quadratic utility and the translog.
The paper examines the structure, governance, and balance sheets of state-controlled banks in Russia, which accounted for over 55 percent of the total assets in the country's banking system in early 2012. The author offers a credible estimate of the size of the country's state banking sector by including banks that are indirectly owned by public organizations. Contrary to some predictions based on the theoretical literature on economic transition, he explains the relatively high profitability and efficiency of Russian state-controlled banks by pointing to their competitive position in such functions as acquisition and disposal of assets on behalf of the government. Also suggested in the paper is a different way of looking at market concentration in Russia (by consolidating the market shares of core state-controlled banks), which produces a picture of a more concentrated market than officially reported. Lastly, one of the author's interesting conclusions is that China provides a better benchmark than the formerly centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe by which to assess the viability of state ownership of banks in Russia and to evaluate the country's banking sector.
The paper examines the principles for the supervision of financial conglomerates proposed by BCBS in the consultative document published in December 2011. Moreover, the article proposes a number of suggestions worked out by the authors within the HSE research team.
The paper studies a problem of optimal insurer’s choice of a risk-sharing policy in a dynamic risk model, so-called Cramer-Lundberg process, over infinite time interval. Additional constraints are imposed on residual risks of insureds: on mean value or with probability one. An optimal control problem of minimizing a functional of the form of variation coefficient is solved. We show that: in the first case the optimum is achieved at stop loss insurance policies, in the second case the optimal insurance is a combination of stop loss and deductible policies. It is proved that the obtained results can be easily applied to problems with other optimization criteria: maximization of long-run utility and minimization of probability of a deviation from mean trajectory.