In the United States, recently the use of soybeans as an energy source has drawn attention. It is concerned in Japan that if the use of soybeans for energy keeps increasing, not only the price of conventional soybeans, which is used for soybean oil, but also the price of non-genetically modified...

Monthly time-series data based on agricultural commodities tend to present strong and particular patterns of seasonality. The presence of zero values in some of the seasons is not explained by the absence of reporting but is the result of actual features of agricultural processes. Seasonal unit...

This paper investigates the integration of the Ethiopian grain market to the world market; and within country grain markets integration. To this end, two cereal crop markets: wheat and maize, have been investigated. For maize the integration into the world market is analyzed using the US and...

European business services has witnessed about two decades of virtual productivity stagnation. The paper investigates whether this is caused by weak dynamic market selection. The time pattern of scale-related inefficiencies is used as an indicator for the effectiveness of market selection. We...

Presented is an evolutionary model of consumer non-durable markets, which is an extension of a previously published paper on consumer durables. The model suggests that the repurchase process is governed by preferential growth. Applying statistical methods it can be shown that in a competitive...

Mexican gas stations across the country buy and sell gasoline at regulated common prices. Therefore, authorities that set these prices do not take into account competition conditions of each market. In this paper we establish the effect of a regulated mark-up price as well as competition on the...

This paper explores whether asymmetric pricing can be identified in the eleven euro zone countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain) by utilizing Error Correction Model on the weekly price changes in order to assess current and...

This paper analyses the effects of concentration on profitability in the US banking sector from 1994-2005, using bank-level panel data. A new index of concentration is proposed, which reflects the depth and intensity of concentration. The econometric specification facilitates the simultaneous...

This study analyses the interest margin in the principal European banking sectors (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain) in the period 1993-2000 using a panel of 15,888 observations, identifying the fundamental elements affecting this margin. Our starting point is the methodology...

How do banks react to increased interbank competition?Recent banking theory offers conflicting predictions about the impact of competition on bank orientation í L H WKH choice of relationship based versus transactional banking í DQG EDQN LQGXVWU\ specialization.We empirically investigate the...