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Scale Economies with Regard to Price Adjustment Costs and the Speed of Price Adjustment in Australian Manufacturing

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  • Michael Olive

    (Department of Economics, Macquarie University)

Abstract

The standard quadratic price adjustment cost function makes no allowance for firm size or for scale economies. Incorporating quadratic price adjustment costs into the profit function, a firm's speed of price adjustment is both shown to be a positive/negative function of its size when firms have scale economies/diseconomies with regard to these costs and to be a negative function of market power. The intuitive explanation is that large firms that can defray this type of cost have less reason to slow price adjustment, while firms with market power are better able to offset price adjustment costs by slowing their speed of price adjustment. These results are used to derive an industry error correction model of pricing where the speed of price adjustment is a weighted average of the firm effects. Estimation of the model is carried out on data obtained from nine two-digit Australian manufacturing industries during the period 1994:3 to 2002:2. The empirical results suggest that the speed of price adjustment is positively related to the size of firms within an industry and negatively related to industry concentration. Given that these variables do not change rapidly over time, they are likely to have a steadying influence on the speed of price adjustment at an aggregate level in the face of changes to monetary and fiscal policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Olive, 2005. "Scale Economies with Regard to Price Adjustment Costs and the Speed of Price Adjustment in Australian Manufacturing," Research Papers 0507, Macquarie University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:mac:wpaper:0507
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

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    2. Chrysovalantis Amountzias, 2019. "Pricing Decisions and Competitive Conduct Across Manufacturing Sectors: Evidence from 19 European Union Manufacturing Industries," Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, Springer, vol. 19(3), pages 413-440, September.
    3. Amountzias, Chrysovalantis & Dagdeviren, Hulya & Patokos, Tassos, 2017. "Pricing decisions and market power in the UK electricity market: A VECM approach," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 108(C), pages 467-473.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Speed of price adjustment; adjustment costs; Australian manufacturing;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Theory
    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • L16 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Industrial Organization and Macroeconomics; Macroeconomic Industrial Structure
    • L60 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing - - - General

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