Explore the vast range of titles available.

This paper analyzes a general equilibrium economy featuring input-output connections, imperfect competition, and external economies of scale owing to entry and exit. The interaction of input-output networks with industry-level market structure affects the amplification of shocks and the pattern of diffusion in the model, generating cascades of firm entry and exit across the economy. In this model, sales provide a poor measure of the systemic importance of industries. Unlike the relevant notions of centrality in competitive constant-returns-to-scale models, systemic importance depends on the industry's role as both a supplier and a consumer of inputs, as well as the market structure of industries. A basic calibration of the model suggests that aggregate output is three times more volatile in response to labor productivity shocks when compared to a perfectly competitive model.

Mast seeding is a widespread and widely studied phenomenon. However, the physiological mechanisms that mediate masting events and link them to weather and plant resources are still debated. Here, we explore how masting is affected by plant resource budgets, fruit maturation success, and hormonal coordination of cues including weather and resources. There is little empirical support for the commonly stated hypothesis that plants store carbohydrates over several years to expend in a high-seed year. Plants can switch carbohydrates away from growth in high-seed years, and seed crops are more probably limited by nitrogen or phosphorus. Resources are clearly involved in the proximate mechanisms driving masting, but resource budget (RB) models cannot create masting in the absence of selection because some underlying selective benefit is required to set the level of a ‘full’ seed crop at greater than the annual resource increment. Economies of scale (EOSs) provide the ultimate factor selecting for masting, but EOSs probably always interact with resources, which modify the relationship between weather cues and reproduction. Thus, RB and EOS models are not alternative explanations for masting – both are required. Experiments manipulating processes that affect mast seeding will help clarify the physiological mechanisms that underlie mast seeding.

Purpose – Direct digital manufacturing (DDM) is conceived of as either disrupting the entire manufacturing economy or merely enabling novel production. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an alternative where DDM coexists with and complements traditional mass production. When multiple parts run across one manufacturing line, DDM can isolate variability associated with low volume part production and may be preferred to mass production despite being expensive. If DDM complements rather than cannibalizes mass production, this alters the understanding of who adopts DDM, the products built with DDM, and DDM’s long-term supply chain implications. Design/methodology/approach – This invited paper explores a DDM rollout scenario and qualitatively assesses potential supply chain reconfigurations. Findings – The analysis recognizes that existing manufacturers with heterogeneous bills-of-material may develop DDM capabilities to isolate disruptive, low-volume production from scalable mass production. Developing DDM competence and raw material scale advantages, these manufacturers become the locus of change in a manufacturing landscape increasingly characterized by multi-product DDM supercenters. Originality/value – Extant research largely focusses on two potential reasons for DDM adoption: cost-per-unit and time-to-delivery comparisons. The authors explore a third driver: DDM’s capacity to isolate manufacturing variability attributable to low volume parts. Relative to the extant literature, this suggests a different DDM rollout, different adopters, and a different supply chain configuration. The authors identify mass manufacturing variability reduction as the mechanism through which DDM may be adopted. This adoption trajectory would eventually enable a supply chain transition in which spare parts inventory migrates from finished goods at proprietary facilities to raw materials at generalized DDM supercenters.

Over the past few decades, South Korea has prioritized higher education to boost knowledge-based economic development. This study investigates Korean private universities’ scale and scope economies using several input/output variables and employs them using a stochastic frontier analysis of the input distance function. As our dataset does not comprise price-based information, the duality approach between the cost and input distance functions enables us to use our data directly to test ray- and product-specific scale and scope economies. Our dataset comprises university-level data for 57 private universities from 2011 to 2016. The findings reveal ray-scale and global-scope economies for the sampled universities. Based on these empirical results, we provide several suggestions for future research.

This paper develops a model of international trade and investment in which firms can choose to serve their domestic market, to export, or to engage in foreign direct investment (FDI) in order to serve foreign markets. Every industry is populated by heterogeneous firms, which differ in productivity levels. As a result, firms sort according to productivity into different organizational forms. The least productive firms leave the industry, because, if they stay, their operating profits will be negative no matter how they organize. Other low-productivity firms choose to serve only the domestic market. The remaining firms serve the domestic market as well as foreign markets. Their mode of operation in foreign markets differs, however. The most productive firms in this group choose to invest in foreign markets while the less productive firms choose to export. Using data on exports and FDI sales of US firms in 38 countries and 52 industries, this study estimated the effects of trade frictions, economies of scale, and within-industry dispersion of firm size, on exports versus FDI sales. The results show a robust cross-sectoral relationship between the degree of dispersion in firms size and the tendency of firms to substitute FDI sales for exports. The size of this effect is of the same order of magnitude as trade frictions.

Continued consolidation of the US banking industry and a general increase in the size of banks have prompted some policymakers to consider policies that discourage banks from getting larger, including explicit caps on bank size. However, limits on the size of banks could entail economic costs if they prevent banks from achieving economies of scale. This paper presents new estimates of returns to scale for US banks based on nonparametric, local-linear estimation of bank cost, revenue, and profit functions. We report estimates for both 2006 and 2015 to compare returns to scale some 7 years after the financial crisis and 5 years after enactment of the Dodd–Frank Act with returns to scale before the crisis. We find that a high percentage of banks faced increasing returns to scale in cost in both years, including most of the 10 largest bank holding companies. Also, while returns to scale in revenue and profit vary more across banks, we find evidence that the largest four banks operate under increasing returns to scale.

This paper presents new, fully nonparametric estimates of ray‐scale and expansion‐path scale economies for U.S. banks based on a model of bank costs. Unlike prior studies that use models with restrictive parametric assumptions or limited samples, our methodology uses local polynomial estimators and data on all U.S. banks over the period 1984–2006. Our estimates indicate that as recently as 2006, most U.S. banks faced increasing returns to scale, suggesting that scale economies are a plausible (but not necessarily only) reason for the growth in average bank size and that the tendency toward increasing scale is likely to continue unless checked by government intervention.

We examine the effects of city-level auditor industry specialization and scale economies on audit pricing in the United States. Using a sample of Big N clients for the 2000–2007 period, and a scale measure based on percentile rankings of the number of audit clients at the city-industry level, we document significant specialization premiums and scale discounts in both the pre- and post-Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) periods. However, the effects of industry specialization and scale economies on audit pricing are highly interactive. The negative effect of city-industry scale on audit fees obtains only for clients of specialist auditors. By contrast, clients of non-specialist auditors obtain scale discounts only when they enjoy strong bargaining power, suggesting that auditors are \"forced\" to pass on scale economies to clients with greater bargaining power.

Very few studies exist in rationalizing comprehensively the relationship between market integration and green economic growth in China. This paper tries to answer the question whether and how market integration influences regional green economic growth in China. Based on the panel data of 285 city-level regions from year 2004 to 2018 in China, this paper develops explanatory mechanism and discusses the influence theoretically and empirically. To advance the analysis, we construct market integration indicator through relative price variance method based on commodity retail price index and employ the Malmquist–Luenberger (ML) productivity index and DEA-SBM (data envelopment analysis–slacks-based measure) model to evaluate green total factor productivity (GTFP) as indicator for green economic growth. Our empirical findings are: (1) Apparent regional imbalance exists in both the development of market integration and green growth and gaps are expanding from year 2004 to 2018. (2) Market integration promotes regional green growth significantly. (3) Mechanism analysis illustrates that market integration fosters green growth through economies of scale effect, composition effect and spillover effect, respectively. (4) Heterogeneous analysis suggests that the influence from market integration on green growth varies depending on region’s difference in traffic situation and in overall development level.

With continued expansions of scale, the Chinese cities are facing unprecedented economic, environmental, and energy sustainability challenges. The aim of this paper is to examine the heterogeneous impact of environmental regulation (ER) on urban green scale economy (GSEC), by combining the global Malmquist index approach, spatial econometric model, panel quantile regression model (QRPD), and the city-level panel data from 2004 to 2018. The estimation results show that (1) from 2004 to 2018, the growth rate of GSEC fluctuates sharply, and the values of GSEC are less than 1 in many years. This indicates that GSEC is far from efficient and needs to be improved in the future; (2) the results of the spatial econometric model show that GSEC has a U -shaped relationship with the level of ER. Furthermore, the estimation results of QRPD verify the above conclusions and show that there is distinct heterogeneity of ER on GSEC at different quantiles and regional cities; (3) the results further indicate that other vital control variables have a significant and heterogeneous effect on GSEC. Therefore, the focus of future work should be adapted to local conditions. Specifically, in the cities with lower-level GSEC, the policymakers should give top priority to break through the U -shaped inflection point as soon as possible and help enterprises to achieve pollution reduction by technical and financial subsidies. While in the cities with higher-level GSEC, the government should further strengthen its ER and encourage competition among enterprises by internal technological innovation. In addition, the government should try to avoid the negative effect of the “resource curse” trap, excessive financial leverage, and “race-to-the-bottom” phenomenon.