Equity, Efficiency and Increasing Returns

Equity, Efficiency and Increasing Returns

Increasing Returns and Economic Efficiency

This paper argues that, from the viewpoint of Pareto optimality, the industries with increasing returns are under-expanded relative to those without increasing returns and those with higher degrees of increasing returns are under-expanded relative to those with lower degrees. Ignoring administrative and indirect (such as rent-seeking) costs, subsidies on goods produced under conditions of (high...

Increasing market efficiency: Evolution of cross-correlations of stock returns

We analyse the temporal changes in the cross correlations of returns on the New York Stock Exchange. We show that lead-lag relationships between daily returns of stocks vanished in less than twenty years. We have found that even for high frequency data the asymmetry of time dependent cross-correlation functions has a decreasing tendency, the position of their peaks are shifted towards the origi...

Inducing efficiency in oligopolistic markets with increasing returns to scale

We consider a Cournot Oligopoly market of firms possessing increasing returns to scale technologies (which may not be identical). It is shown that an external regulating agency can increase total social welfare without running a deficit by offering to subsidize one firm an amount which depends on the output level of that firm and the market price. The firms bid for this contract, the regulator ...

Distribution Risk and Equity Returns∗

In this paper we entertain the hypothesis that observed variations in income shares are the result of changes in the balance of power between workers and capital owners in labor relations. We show that this view implies that income share variations represent a risk factor of first-order importance for the owners of capital and, consequently, are a crucial determinant of the return to equity. Wh...