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Economics --- Research --- National Bureau of Economic Research --- National Bureau of Economic Research. --- National Bureau of Economic Research (U.S.)

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Economics --- Recherche en économie. --- Science économique. --- ECONOMIC RESEARCH. --- UNITED STATES. --- Economic theory --- Political economy --- Social sciences --- Economic man --- Research --- Research. --- National Bureau of Economic Research --- National Bureau of Economic Research. --- National Bureau of Economic Research (U.S.) --- NBER --- N.B.E.R. --- Zenkoku Sōgō Keizai Kenkyūjo (Cambridge, Mass.) --- Quantitative methods (economics) --- Planning (firm) --- United States --- Business, Economy and Management --- Finance --- General and Others --- Economie politique --- Periodicals --- Recherche --- Périodiques --- EBSCOBSP-E EJECONO EPUB-ALPHA-N EPUB-PER-FT NBER-E --- United States of America

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In essence, this paper will try to decompose the concentration-profits relationship into separate concentration-price arid concentration-cost relationships. By doing this, I hope to shed light on some of the allocative and distributive issues that, I suspect, give the subject its intrinsic interest, but which have not so far been confronted empirically: Does high concentration save or waste resources? Does it lead to higher prices? Who gains and loses from a social policy hostile to high concentration? Since the unique aspect of the paper is its focus on a concentration-cost relationship, most of the analytical effort is spent here. I review the theory underlying such a relationship, and develop and implement a model designed to estimate its importance. Subsequently, I try to estimate how much of the usual profit-concentration relationship is due to cost effects and how much to price effects. The main conclusion is that, while price effects are not absent, the cost effects so dominate them as to cast doubt on the efficacy of any general legal rule hostile to industrial concentration.

Industrial concentration. --- Big business.

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This paper investigates some alternative definitions of labor for productivity and demand analysis. The paper is organized as follows: Section II considers the organization of work activities in a simple fixed coefficient technology in the presence of comparative advantage among various classes of workers. Assuming that the number of independent productive activities exceeds the number of comparative advantage classes, an application of the envelope theorem shows the derivation from first principles of a neoclassical production function with input dimension (the number of workers of each type) smaller than the engineering technology(the number of activities). This is the basic result illustrating that occupational classifications depend on both the technology and the distribution of skills (factor supplies) in the working population, a fact that may be relevant to international and other cross-sectional differences in productivity and the demand for labor. The situation is reversed in section III, which treats the case where the number of worker classifications exceeds the number of production activities. In this case the micro-technology cannot be reduced below the basic set of work activities one starts with, and within these categories labor can be aggregated according to efficiency units. However, the nature of factor endowments in economies of this sort is rather different than in the neoclassical model, and leads to an output transformation function that has all the neoclassical properties. This result is reminiscent of an example of Houthakker (also, see Sato) who also obtained smooth neoclassical behavioral functions from underlying distributional phenomena. Section IV examines the characteristics-factor approach to labor aggregation and relates it to the results in section III, noting an inherent difficulty arising from selectivity of various ability groups of workers among work activities due to comparative advantage. In effect, the existence of rent destroys the possibility of simple linear aggregation. Finally, section, indicates some problems with applying the theory of marriage directly to labor demand. These issues become most interesting when there are incomplete markets that limit the gains from fully exploiting comparative advantage, due to transactions costs. The results are limited, but some examples show that any predictions concerning positive or negative assortive matching of workers depends not only on the correlation of talents among members of the work force, but also on the nature of technology and the distribution of demands for various outputs.

Skilled labor. --- Labor productivity.

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In this paper we intend to survey and suggest the theoretical framework of the important aspects of causality detection with the purpose of conveying to the reader the essential features and the different forms in which inferences may be drawn from given data. Section II presents the basic theorem characterizing the causality events and suggests two feedback detection methods which, like the one suggested by Pierce and Haugh (1977), are based on correlation analysis. In Section III we survey other well-known causality detection methods and try to relate and to compare them with the methods suggested in Section II. Section IV briefly reviews the theoretical controversy of the relationship between money and income and presents some empirical evidence based on the methods discussed in this paper. Conclusions are in Section V.

Money supply --- Mathematical models.