Is Inequality Harmful for North-South Intra-Industry Trade Growth?

Investigating sales and advertising rivalry in the UK multipurpose vehicle market (1995–2002)

To what extent do managers account for rivals’ advertising responses? We employ static and dynamic panel techniques to derive estimates that are used to test whether the Dorfman-Steiner optimality condition held in the UK multipurpose vehicle (MPV) market between 1995 and 2002. We show that omitting the response of own advertising to rivals’ advertising leads to substantially lower optimal levels of advertising expenditure compatible with non-retaliation strategies. When recognition of interdependence by the members of the oligopoly is taken into account, the Dorfman-Steiner condition holds. To complete the analysis of the advertising-sales relationship we also examine advertising determina…

Competition and product survival in the UK car market

The paper examines the extent to which inter- and intra-firm competition influenced the survival of cars in the UK market between 1971 and 1998. It is shown that, while competition influenced product survival in all market segments within the UK car market, the nature of that competition differed between them. In the small family and large family car segments, intra-firm competition dominated inter-firm competition. In contrast, in the luxury/sports car segment only inter-firm competition conditions resulted in product survival. Evidence was also found that the luxury/sports car segment has grown more competitive over time and that firms marketing products in the family car segments have be…

The Impact of Exchange Rate Fluctuations on Profit Margins: The UK Car Market, 1971–2002

We investigate the impact on profit margins of exchange rate fluctuations in order to examine optimal pricing policy by source countries in the UK car market. We first estimate a nested logit deman...

Calculating Hedonic Price Indices with Unobserved Product Attributes: An Application to the UK Car Market

We show that hedonic price indices that omit model-specific unobservable product attributes are subject to considerable bias. We utilize a complete panel of new car versions marketed in the UK over 1971–98 which incorporates over 100 observable product characteristics, sales weighting to capture the distribution of purchases across models, and model-specific fixed effects to account for unobservable characteristics. We find that quality-adjusted prices obtained from hedonic regressions that do not account for unobservable characteristics exhibit a severe downward bias. We also show that quality-adjusted prices exhibit distinct sub-market differences having increased in ‘mass production’ seg…

THE SURVIVAL OF DIFFERENTIATED PRODUCTS: AN APPLICATION TO THE UK AUTOMOBILE MARKET, 1971-2002*

We investigate how competition affected the survival of products in the UK automobile market between 1971 and 2002. We find, after using a host of controls to account for product characteristics and changes in market structure, that (i) within and between firm spatial competition significantly reduces the life of a model, (ii) initial product differentiation and variant proliferation obviate competition, and (iii) product innovation significantly extends model survival.