The multinational retailer IKEA represents a natural laboratory for studying international pricing and product cycle behavior. With 314 stores in 38 countries, IKEA is a major international presence in retail housewares and furnishings. IKEA is unique among homegoods retailers in its publication of annual catalog of prices guaranteed to hold for 1 year. This paper examines international pricing...

International trade data show that the prices of differentiated goods barely moved in recent recessions, while the declines in volumes were large. In contrast, for nondifferentiated goods, price reductions greatly contributed to the adjustment in trade values. I document similar patterns in U.S. domestic data on producer prices and industrial production. I use a two-country general equilibrium ...

How does an unexpected domestic monetary expansion a¤ect the foreign economy: Does it induce an increase or a decline in foreign production? And is it ’beggar-thy-neighbour’, or does it raise foreign welfare? Empirical evidence from VARs indicates that monetary policy has positive international transmission e¤ects on both foreign output and aggregate demand. A two-country dynamic general equili...

Since the early 1980s, donors and international These reform experiments have revealed eight lending agencies have promoted the reform of main lessons: agricultural marketing as a central component of economy wide structural adjustment programs in Africa. Although the record of implementation has often been slow and uneven, staple food marketing policy has been transformed over this period. The...

A regime-switching vector error correction model is applied to monthly price data to assess the impact of BSE outbreaks on price relationships and patterns of transmission among farm and retail markets for bovine in Spain. To evaluate the degree to which price transmission is affected by BSE food scares, a BSE food scare index is developed and used to determine regime-switching. Results suggest...

In a recent contribution, H. Naito (1999) has shown that production efciency may be violated in the optimum with non-linear income taxation. Using a slightly simpler framework, this paper complements Naito's analysis in showing that production e ciency does not hold in the optimum with (i) non-linear and (ii) linear income taxation provided that second best and rst best do not coincide. These n...

In contrast to single-product pricing models, multi-product pricing models have been much less studied because of the complexity of multi-product demand functions. It is highly nontrivial to construct a multi-product demand function on the entire set of nonnegative prices, not to mention approximating the real market demands to a desirable accuracy. Thus, many decision-makers use incomplete dem...