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Throughout the 1990s, the supply of new condominiums in Tokyo significantly increased while prices persistently fell. This article investigates whether the market power of condominium developers is a factor in explaining the outcome in this market and whether there is a relationship between production cost trend and the degree of market power that the developers were able to exercise. In order to respond to these questions, we construct and structurally estimate a dynamic durable goods oligopoly model of the condominium market – one incorporating time-variant costs and a secondary market – using a nested GMM procedure. We find that the data provide no evidence that firms in the primary market have substantial market power in this industry. Moreover, the counterfactual experiment provides evidence that inflationary and deflationary expectations on production cost trends have asymmetric effects to the market power of condominium producers. The increase in their markup when cost inflation is anticipated is significantly higher than the decrease in the markup when the same magnitude of cost deflation is anticipated.

Temporary and circular migration programs have been devised by many destination countries and supported by the European Commission as a policy to reduce welfare and social costs of immigration in destination countries. In this chapter, we present an additional reason for proposing temporary migration policies based on the characteristics of the foreign labor-effort supply. The level of effort exerted by migrants, which decreases over their duration in the host country, positively affects production, real wages, and capital owners' profits. We show that the acceptance of job offers by migrants results in the displacement in employment of national workers. However, it increases the workers' exertion, decreases prices, and thus can counter anti-immigrant voter sentiment. Therefore, the favorable sentiment of the capital owners and the local population toward migrants may rise when temporary migration policies are adopted.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate regional inequality and centralization tendencies in Sweden. For this, we use official data from Statistics Sweden on house prices and employment. The data is on the municipality level and covers the period 1985–2014. The research question then becomes, in relation to employment and house prices, which municipalities have gained and which have lost during this period? The time period has been divided into three subperiods that reflect different phases in the process of economic structural change. Two major economic crises are used to signal the end and the start of new structural phases in the Swedish economy. The study uses two dimensions of local economy: employment rates and house prices in municipalities in relation to the national mean. The results indicate increasing divergence between Swedish municipalities over the period. However, the magnitude of the divergence differs within the studied period. Particularly, when it comes to house prices, the third subperiod (2009–2014) shows increasing divergence between Stockholm and Gothenburg in relation to Malmö and the rest of country. Further, when we study the two dimensions simultaneously in accordance with our model, the number of municipalities with above-national-mean employment rates and house prices decreases over time. In the last period, 2009–2014, municipalities with means above the national mean are concentrated in urban agglomerations mainly located close to Sweden’s three largest cities.

Several studies have observed that stocks tend to drop by an amount that is less than the dividend on the ex-dividend day, the so-called ex-dividend day anomaly. However, there still remains a lack of consensus for a single explanation of this anomaly. Different from other studies, this dissertation attempts to answer the primary research question: how can investors make trading profits from the ex-dividend day anomaly and how much can they earn? With this goal, I examine the economic motivations of equity investors through four main hypotheses identified in the anomaly's literature: the tax differential hypothesis, the short-term trading hypothesis, the tick size hypothesis, and the leverage hypothesis.

While the U.S. ex-dividend anomaly is well studied, I examine a long data window (1975–2010) of Thailand data. The unique structure of the Thai stock market allows me to assess all four main hypotheses proposed in the literature simultaneously. Although I extract the sample data from two data sources, I demonstrate that the combined data are consistently sampled. I further construct three trading strategies – “daily return,” “lag one daily return,” and “weekly return” – to alleviate the potential effect of irregular data observation.

I find that the ex-dividend day anomaly exists in Thailand, is governed by the tax differential, and is driven by short-term trading activities. That is, investors trade heavily around the ex-dividend day to reap the benefits of the tax differential. I find mixed results for the predictions of the tick size hypothesis and results that are inconsistent with the predictions of the leverage hypothesis.

I conclude that, on the Stock Exchange of Thailand, juristic and foreign investors can profitably buy stocks cum-dividend and sell them ex-dividend while local investors should engage in short sale transactions. On average, investors who employ the daily return strategy have earned significant abnormal return up to 0.15% (45.66% annualized rate) and up to 0.17% (50.99% annualized rate) for the lag one daily return strategy. Investors can also make a trading profit by conducting the weekly return strategy and earn up to 0.59% (35.67% annualized rate), on average.

Introduction: It is commonly observed that the ratio of food prices during the war times had become significantly more important than usual periods within the countries including Turkey, known as the Ottoman Empire that previously defeated in Balkans just before the Great World War. The scope of the study is to analyze increased or decreased wheat prices together with price fluctuations during the war period.

Aim: This study investigates the food pricing progress during The Great World War and its relationship with wheat prices.

Method: A model for the behavior of time series is applied to compare the important days of the war data against the timeline of wheat prices for British, German, and French. The statistical test named Holt–Winters uses exponential smoothing technique to encode the various values from the past and predicts “typical” values for the present and the future.

Findings: As a result, it can be said that wheat prices had anomaly patterns during the specific dates in war for French, British, and German sides. Great Britain’s wheat prices increased significantly on April 1915 when landings began on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Wheat prices in Great Britain and Germany dropped significantly just before on July 1916 when the first Battle of the Somme began. However, it increased in Great Britain whilst decreased considerably in Germany in March 1918 when the Soviet Government signed a separate peace agreement with the Central Powers. A significant increase for France was observed only at the end of this war.

This paper examines the hypotheses that the length and the depth of the Great Depression were a result of sticky prices or sticky nominal wages using panel data for industrialized and semi-industrialized countries. The results show that price stickiness, particularly, and wage stickiness were key propagating factors during the first years of the Depression. It is found that prices adjusted slowly to wages, particularly in manufacturing. Manufacturing wages are also found to adjust relatively slowly to innovations in prices, but unemployment exerted strong downward pressure on wage growth.

This chapter traces the development of the pricing research program of Kent Monroe, beginning with his doctoral dissertation and continuing to the present time. Drawing on psychophysics and adaptation-level theory the early research efforts concentrated on validating two important concepts relative to behavioral pricing research: reference price and acceptable price range. Then the behavioral pricing research program expanded to explore how the context of a purchase situation, including the structure of the prices available for judgment, influences buyers' price perceptions and willingness to buy. In the early years his research included pricing models and research on patronage behavior. Subsequently, concentrating primarily on behavioral pricing research, he began to integrate findings from the research program into examining how various sellers pricing strategies and tactics influence buyers' judgments and purchase decisions. These efforts led to the first edition of his book Pricing – Making Profitable Decisions published in 1979. The book was subsequently revised and expanded in 1990 and again in 2003.