Implications of Market Structure for Inequality and Development

市场结构对不平等和发展的影响

• 批准号: 1912405
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Warwick
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2017 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-1912405
• 关键词: Implications; Market; Structure; Inequality; Development

Market structure and imperfect competition have long been subjects of the industrial organization literature. This area of economics, however, has traditionally focused on developed countries and predominantly on output rather than input markets. Recent studies suggest that market structure plays an important role in developing countries and that its interaction with salient features of their economies, importantly other market imperfections, may yield non-standard outcomes. In turn, many of these interactions can be understood as amplified versions of phenomena that are also at play in advanced economies and therefore likely have broader relevance than purely in a development context.During my PhD studies, I intent to build on this growing literature to further explore the implications of imperfect competition for inequality and development through several empirical research projects, including the following:- Two-sided market power and input prices: Changes in competition of intermediate-sector firms in a supply chain may have ambiguous effects on the welfare of upstream input suppliers. Suppliers benefit from greater competition between intermediaries for their inputs, but suffer from their competition on the output markets as this may reduce firm-specific surplus. I intend to empirically estimate the extent to which one effect dominates the other and uncover the underlying determinants in the context of labour markets in India and the United Kingdom. The expected link between competition and wage inequality is one example of a topic that may well be broadly relevant to various countries along the development spectrum.- Market power and spillovers in the motor-vehicle sector in Uganda: The motor-vehicle sector in Uganda is dominated by only a few brands, particularly Toyota. Informal interviews that I conducted in December 2016 suggest that the availability of used parts is a key factor for vehicle choice in the country. Following this intuition, I hypothesize that this brand prominence derives from intertemporal value spillovers from used cars/parts in the secondary market that reduce search costs in case of repair and lead to aggregate economies of scale. I intend to test this hypothesis using administrative data on vehicle registrations and imports from the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA).The empirical estimation will, to the extent possible, draw on existing data. These include datasets prepared by Indian government agencies (some of which need to be purchased), secure data from the Office for National Statistics in the UK and administrative datasets from the URA in Uganda that require extraction and cleaning starting from their raw form. I have already reviewed some of the relevant Indian datasets that are available at the University of Warwick and have submitted documentation to the URA requesting access to the necessary Ugandan data. Overseas fieldwork will likely be important for the retrieval and/or proper interpretation of the Indian and Ugandan data or their supplementing with information from original surveys or third sources. In addition, I understand that physical presence oftentimes expedites the retrieval process substantially.This proposed research will address the relationship between competition and inequality/development via structural estimation techniques. These involve (i) formulating a theoretical model specifically for the study at hand and (ii) estimating the underlying parameters using a combination of econometric, calibration and simulation techniques. The explicit theoretical model will allow me to predict the impact of policy changes by simulating the optimal behavioural responses of firms and individuals. Given the frequency of policy interventions targeting competition or specific labour market outcomes in developing and developed countries, this makes structural estimations particularly fitting for my work.

市场结构和不完全竞争一直是产业组织文献的主题。然而，这一经济学领域传统上侧重于发达国家，主要侧重于产出而不是投入市场。最近的研究表明，市场结构在发展中国家发挥着重要作用，市场结构与发展中国家经济的显著特点，重要的是与其他市场缺陷的相互作用，可能产生非标准的结果。反过来，这些相互作用中的许多可以被理解为发达经济体中也在发挥作用的现象的放大版本，因此可能具有比纯粹在发展背景下更广泛的相关性。在我的博士研究期间，我打算在这些不断增长的文献的基础上，通过几个实证研究项目进一步探索不完全竞争对不平等和发展的影响，包括以下内容：双边市场力量和投入价格：供应链中中间部门企业竞争的变化可能对上游投入供应商的福利产生模糊的影响。供应商受益于中间商之间对其投入的更大竞争，但却因其在产出市场上的竞争而受损，因为这可能会减少特定于公司的剩余。我打算实证估计在何种程度上一个效果占主导地位的其他和揭示的背景下，在印度和英国的劳动力市场的基本决定因素。竞争和工资不平等之间的预期联系是一个很可能与发展范围沿着的各个国家广泛相关的主题的一个例子。乌干达机动车部门的市场支配力和溢出效应：乌干达的机动车部门仅由少数几个品牌主导，特别是丰田。我在2016年12月进行的非正式采访表明，二手零件的可用性是该国车辆选择的关键因素。根据这种直觉，我假设这种品牌的突出性来自二手汽车/零部件在二级市场的跨期价值溢出，降低了维修的搜索成本，并导致规模经济。我打算使用乌干达税务局（URA）的车辆登记和进口的行政数据来检验这一假设，经验估计将尽可能利用现有数据。其中包括印度政府机构准备的数据集（其中一些需要购买），英国国家统计局的安全数据以及乌干达URA的行政数据集，这些数据集需要从原始形式开始提取和清理。我已经审查了沃里克大学提供的一些相关的印度数据集，并向乌干达城市管理局提交了文件，要求获得必要的乌干达数据。海外实地工作对于检索和/或正确解释印度和乌干达的数据或用原始调查或第三方来源的信息补充这些数据可能很重要。此外，我了解到物理存在通常会大大加快检索过程。这项拟议的研究将通过结构估计技术来解决竞争与不平等/发展之间的关系。这包括（i）为手头的研究制定一个专门的理论模型，（ii）使用计量经济学、校准和模拟技术相结合的方法估计基本参数。明确的理论模型将使我能够通过模拟企业和个人的最佳行为反应来预测政策变化的影响。鉴于发展中国家和发达国家针对竞争或特定劳动力市场结果的政策干预的频率，这使得结构性估计特别适合我的工作。