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81. Adverse Selection Among Early Adopters and Unraveling Innovation

Author:
Rory McGee
Publication Date:
01-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP), Western University
Abstract:
I provide an equilibrium analysis of “selection markets”: where consumers not only vary in how much they are willing to pay, but also in how much they cost to the seller. The model provides a joint explanation for three empirical phenomena: low uptake of existing products, slow demand for new products, and market inactivity despite unmet demand. I characterize when early adopters are more adversely selected in new markets. This lowers demand, increases costs, and leads markets to unravel prematurely. With endogenous market entry for new products (e.g., reverse mortgages, annuities), extended patents serve as de facto time-varying subsidies.
Topic:
Economics, Markets, and Innovation
Political Geography:
Global Focus

82. Are new EU data market regulations coherent and efficient?

Author:
Bertin Martins
Publication Date:
12-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Bruegel
Abstract:
Technical restrictions on access to and re-use of data may result in failures in data markets and data-driven services markets. This paper examines three new EU data regulations (the European Health Data Space, the Data Act and the Digital Markets Act) that vary substantially in mandatory access measures intended to overcome these market failures. It applies three economic criteria, economies of scope in re-use and in aggregation of data, and data supply-side failures, to assess the efficiency of these regulations in overcoming market failures and coherence across regulations. Variations might be justified by particular sectoral market conditions. The European Health Data Space proposal comes close to an ideal data access regime for primary re-use and secondary pooling of health data. The Data Act opens access to data from tangible products only. It strengthens the market power of data holders by giving them quasi-ownership rights over data. It introduces new obstacles to re-use that are likely to minimise its impact. The Digital Markets Act opens access to market data pools collected by very large gatekeeper platforms. Some access provisions are vaguely defined. Others facilitate access to data pools but may risk unwinding the benefits of data-driven network effects. Th ere is scope for significant improvement in these data regulations.
Topic:
Markets, European Union, Regulation, and Digital Markets Act (DMA)
Political Geography:
Europe

83. European Union debt financing: leeway and barriers from a legal perspective

Author:
Sebastian Grund and Armin Steinbach
Publication Date:
09-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Bruegel
Abstract:
We explore legal leeway for two approaches to debt-financing European Union spending: creation of extra-budgetary, one-off and temporary EU funds to finance European public goods (similarly to NextGenerationEU), and debt-financing the EU’s regular budget, hence creating an on-budget, permanent borrowing capacity at EU level. We find that NGEU could in principle be replicated. This would require an amendment to the Own Resources Decision (ORD) – a unanimous Council decision that designates the main sources of EU financing and requires ratification by each member state – to authorise borrowing and specify how the borrowing proceeds are to be used. However, this approach would be constrained by the legal requirement that financing EU spending through ‘other revenues’ (as opposed to ‘own resources’ designated as such in the ORD) remain exceptional. As a result, no permanent EU tasks could be financed through NGEU-like funds and NGEU-like financing could not exceed financing through ‘own resources’. We also find that, while EU primary law does not stop the EU from debt-financing its budget, the scope for EU borrowing would remain severely limited compared to a sovereign state. The permissible amount of borrowing must be specified in the ORD and the EU must be able to meet its debt service in any year, which must be secured by a sufficient amount of (non-borrowed) own resources. Finally, considerable flexibility exists for the spending of borrowed funds, regardless of whether this occurs through new NGEU-like extrabudgetary funds or on budget. Borrowed funds could be allocated to climate funding, cohesion policy, infrastructure or research. In the event that borrowing proceeds are established as an ‘own resource’ in an appropriately amended ORD, borrowed funds could even be used for general financing of the EU budget.
Topic:
Debt, Markets, European Union, Finance, and Public Goods
Political Geography:
Europe

84. The Ukrainian war economy

Author:
Dmytro Boyarchuk and Marek Dabrowski
Publication Date:
07-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Bruegel
Abstract:
Ukraine has been subject to full-scale Russian aggression since 24 February 2022, with major implications for Ukraine’s economic performance and economic management. Martial law has temporarily restricted civil and political rights and allowed the government to introduce command management in the economic sphere. These war-related prerogatives have been used only partly (for example, in the energy and transportation sectors, restricting convertibility of the hryvnia and banking transactions with foreign currency), while the dominant role of the private sector and market forces has been maintained in other respects. As a result of war damages and territorial losses, Ukraine’s real GDP contracted by about 30 percent in 2022. Ukraine also experienced severe balance-of-payments and budget tensions in the first months of the war. Intensification of foreign financial aid from the second half of 2022 helped to achieve relative macroeconomic stability in the first half of 2023. The prospects of the Ukrainian economy depend on the length of the war, associated damages and the size of external financial aid. Before February 2022, Ukraine’s record of economic and governance reform was mixed; the war stopped most reforms. On the other hand, obtaining European Union candidate status in June 2022 provided a new incentive to implement comprehensive governance reforms related, in particular, to the judicial system, media, national minorities, public transparency and fighting corruption.
Topic:
Markets, Economy, Banking, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Europe and Ukraine

85. The Anatomy of Cyber Risk

Author:
Rustam Jamilov, Hélène Rey, and Ahmed Tahoun
Publication Date:
05-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
This paper employs computational linguistics to introduce a novel text-based measure of firm-level cyber risk exposure based on quarterly earnings conference calls of listed firms. Our quarterly measures are available for more than 13,000 firms from 85 countries over 2002-2021. We document that cyber risk exposure predicts cyber attacks, affects stock returns and profits, and is priced in the equity option market. The cost of option protection against price, variance, and tail risks is greater for more cyber-exposed firms. Cyber risks spill over across firms and persist at the sectoral level. The geography of cyber risk exposure is well approximated by a gravity model extended with cross-border portfolio flows. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the global cost of cyber risk is over $200 billion per year.
Topic:
Economics, Markets, Cybersecurity, Business, and Risk
Political Geography:
Global Focus

86. Betting on Black Gold: Oil Speculation and U.S. Inflation (2020-2022)

Author:
Carlotta Breman and Servaas Storm
Publication Date:
06-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
Sharp increases in systemically important crude oil prices have been a major cause of the recent surge in the inflation rate in the U.S. This paper investigates the extent to which the increase in oil prices can be attributed to excessive speculation in the oil futures market. Our analysis suggests that excessive speculation in the crude oil market has been responsible for 24%-48% of the increase in the WTI crude oil price during October 2020-June 2022. These estimates translate into an oil price increase of around $18-$36 per barrel and an increase in the U.S. PCE inflation rate by circa 0.75 to 1.5 percentage points during the same period. We complement the analysis with an empirical investigation of the crude oil market which shows that (speculative) long non-commercial open-interest positions in oil futures have increased considerably relative to short non-commercial positions. We further find that higher futures prices for crude oil ‘Granger-cause’ oil spot prices, the futures prices of corn and soybeans and the fertilizer price. These econometric results show that oil speculators have to be held accountable for not just raising oil prices, but also driving up food commodity prices. We finally discuss measures to clamp down on excessive speculation in oil in order to eliminate its systemically adverse consequences for the U.S. economy.
Topic:
Economics, Markets, Oil, Inflation, and Speculation
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

87. The Horizontal Merger Efficiency Fallacy

Author:
Mark Glick, Gabriel A. Lozada, Pavitra Govindan, and Darren Bush
Publication Date:
08-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission Merger Guidelines (the “Merger Guidelines”), including the much improved latest revision in 2023 (the “New Merger Guidelines”), have continued to perpetrate what we call in this paper the horizontal merger efficiency fallacy. The fallacy arises because in the Guidelines the term “efficiencies” has become unmoored from its foundations in economic theory and has been reduced to the business school construct of cost savings. We show that cost savings can only be considered universally socially beneficial by acceptance of what is termed “the Consumer Welfare Standard” (antitrust) or “the surplus theory of welfare” (economics), a theory that has been discredited and abandoned by welfare economists. In economic theory, efficiency means Pareto Efficiency. We explore the various attempts to tether the cost savings definition of efficiency to Pareto Efficiency and explain why these attempts have failed. We conclude that there is no sound way to theoretically reconcile cost savings with the economic meaning of efficiencies. We then move beyond the efficiency fallacy and show how modern welfare economics can be used to integrate Congressional antitrust goals into the New Merger Guidelines. This requires abandoning the unsupported “standard deduction” for efficiencies and replacing it with an evidence-based assessment of how a specific merger under review potentially impacts Congressional antitrust goals. This change renders the present efficiency rebuttal section of the New Merger Guidelines superfluous, and we provide specific reasons why this section as currently drafted is flawed and should be jettisoned.
Topic:
Economics, Government, Markets, Business, and Efficiency
Political Geography:
Global Focus

88. Energy, Inflation and Market Power: Excess Pass-Through in France

Author:
Axelle Arquie and Malte Thie
Publication Date:
10-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales (CEPII)
Abstract:
We explore how, in the French manufacturing sector, producer prices vary with market power during a severe episode of energy price hikes (between January 2020 and December 2022). Our work provides micro-level empirical evidence in favor of a role for firms' market power in explaining inflation. Using a rich dataset on French manufacturing firms' balance sheets, we first estimate markups at the firm-level, and aggregate them at the sectoral level. We then study the response of the producer price index (PPI) to a change in spot energy prices, depending on average market power within sectors. We show that in sectors with higher markups, prices increase relatively more: in the least competitive sector, firms pass through over 115% of the energy shock, implying an excess pass-through of more than 15 percentage points. In addition, we analyze in greater detail the mechanisms that might be behind our results: we discard the possibility that the pricing behavior might be driven by a "liquidity buffer rationale", implying that the excess pass-through we identify is detrimental to consumers.
Topic:
Markets, Inflation, Manufacturing, Energy, and Markups
Political Geography:
Europe and France

89. Reasons Behind Words: OPEC Narratives and the Oil Market

Author:
Celso Brunetti, Marc Joëts, and Valérie Mignon
Publication Date:
09-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales (CEPII)
Abstract:
We analyze the content of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) communications and whether it provides valuable information to the crude oil market. To this end, we derive an empirical strategy which allows us to measure OPEC’s public signal and test its credibility. Using Structural Topic Models, we identify in OPEC narratives several topics related to fundamental factors such as demand, supply, and speculative activity in the crude oil market, highlighting that OPEC announcements are highly linked to oil market volatility and traders’ positions. Most importantly, we find that OPEC communication is credible, reduces oil price volatility, and prompts market participants to rebalance their positions.
Topic:
Markets, Oil, OPEC, Trade, and Volatility
Political Geography:
Global Focus

90. Securing Foreign Markets: Exports, Relational Specificity and New Investment Locations

Author:
Giorgia Giovannetti, Gianluca Santoni, and Giulio Vannelli
Publication Date:
02-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales (CEPII)
Abstract:
In this article we examine how the need to secure profit streams from exports has affected the location choice of new foreign investments by French manufacturing firms. Motivated by the observation that most firms entering a new foreign country do not establish a production unit there or decrease their exports, we develop a simple theoretical framework to guide our analysis and provide empirical evidence to support this “market securing” mechanism. Our results confirm that companies tend to locate new investments in countries that account for a larger share of their past exports; allowing for better monitoring of the foreign market, the investment prevents the disruption of the relationship, whose impact on profits would be more detrimental in the case of more important foreign partners. A 10 percent increase in bilateral exports increases the probability of investing by 3.4 percent. Consistent with our mechanism, given the same volume of exports, firms prefer countries that purchase goods with higher relational specificity as finding new buyers for these goods would imply higher costs if the relationship was broken.Exporting at least one good with relational specificity above the 75th percentile increases the probability of investing by 2.2 times compared to exporting more generic goods (below the 50th percentile).
Topic:
Markets, Foreign Direct Investment, Investment, Exports, and Manufacturing
Political Geography:
Europe and France