- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
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An approach to regulation often used for a public utility to stop it exploiting monopoly power. A public utility is forbidden to earn above a certain rate of return decided by the regulator. In practice, this often encourages the utility to be inefficient, slow to innovate and quick to spend money on such things as big offices and executive jets, to keep down its profit and thus the rate of return. Contrast with price regulation.
Industry:Economy
Impossible to predict the next step. Efficient market theory says that the prices of many financial assets, such as shares, follow a random walk. In other words, there is no way of knowing whether the next change in the price will be up or down, or by how much it will rise or fall. The reason is that in an efficient market, all the information that would allow an investor to predict the next price move is already reflected in the current price. This belief has led some economists to argue that investors cannot consistently outperform the market. But some economists argue that asset prices are predictable (they follow a non-random walk) and that markets are not efficient.
Rate
Industry:Economy
A form of protectionism. A country imposes limits on the number of goods that can be imported from another country. For instance, France may limit the number of cars imported from Japan to, say, 20,000 a year. As a result of limiting supply, the price of the imported good is higher than it would be under free trade, thus making life easier for domestic producers.
Industry:Economy
The foundation stone of monetarism. The theory says that the quantity of money available in an economy determines the value of money. Increases in the money supply are the main cause of inflation. This is why Milton Friedman claimed that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”. The theory is built on the Fisher equation, MV = PT, named after Irving Fisher (1867–1947). M is the stock of money, V is the velocity of circulation, P is the average price level and T is the number of transactions in the economy. The equation says, simply and obviously, that the quantity of money spent equals the quantity of money used. The quantity theory, in its purest form, assumes that V and T are both constant, at least in the short-run. Thus any change in M leads directly to a change in P. In other words, increase the money supply and you simply cause inflation. In the 1930s, Keynes challenged this theory, which was orthodoxy until then. Increases in the money supply seemed to lead to a fall in the velocity of circulation and to increases in real income, contradicting the classical dichotomy (see monetary neutrality). Later, monetarists such as Friedman conceded that V could change in response to variations in M, but did so only in stable, predictable ways that did not challenge the thrust of the theory. Even so, monetarist policies did not perform well when they were applied in many countries during the 1980s, as even Friedman has since conceded.
Industry:Economy
The difference between what a supplier is paid for a good or service and what it cost to supply. Added to consumer surplus, it provides a measure of the total economic benefit of a sale.
Industry:Economy
When a firm’s shares are held privately and not traded in the public markets. Private equity includes shares in both mature private companies and, as venture capital, in newly started businesses. As it is less liquid than publicly traded equity, investors in private equity expect on average to earn a higher equity risk premium from it.
Industry:Economy
A favorite example in game theory, which shows why co-operation is difficult to achieve even when it is mutually beneficial. Two prisoners have been arrested for the same offence and are held in different cells. Each has two options: confess, or say nothing. There are three possible outcomes. One could confess and agree to testify against the other as state witness, receiving a light sentence while his fellow prisoner receives a heavy sentence. They can both say nothing and may be lucky and get light sentences or even be let off, owing to lack of firm evidence. Or they may both confess and probably get lighter individual sentences than one would have received had he said nothing and the other had testified against him. The second outcome would be the best for both prisoners. However, the risk that the other might confess and turn state witness is likely to encourage both to confess, landing both with sentences that they might have avoided had they been able to co-operate in remaining silent. In an oligopoly, firms often behave like these prisoners, not setting prices as high as they could do if they only trusted the other firms not to undercut them. As a result, they are worse off.
Industry:Economy
Keeping some money handy, just in case. One of three motives for holding money identified by Keynes, along with the transactional motive (having the cash to pay for planned purchases) and the speculative motive (you think asset prices are going to fall, so you sell your assets for cash).
Industry:Economy
Things that the Joneses buy. Some things are bought for their intrinsic usefulness, for instance, a hammer or a washing machine. Positional goods are bought because of what they say about the person who buys them. They are a way for a person to establish or signal their status relative to people who do not own them: fast cars, holidays in the most fashionable resorts, clothes from trendy designers. By necessity, the quantity of these goods is somewhat fixed, because to increase supply too much would mean that they were no longer positional. What would owning a Rolls-Royce say about you if everybody owned one? Fears that the rise of positional goods would limit growth, since by definition they had to be in scarce supply, have so far proved misplaced. Entrepreneurs have come up with ever more ingenious ways for people to buy status, thus helping developed economies to keep growing.
Industry:Economy
In 1958, an economist from New Zealand, A. W. H. Phillips (1914–75), proposed that there was a trade-off between inflation and unemployment: the lower the unemployment rate, the higher was the rate of inflation. Governments simply had to choose the right balance between the two evils. He drew this conclusion by studying nominal wage rates and jobless rates in the UK between 1861 and 1957, which seemed to show the relationship of unemployment and inflation as a smooth curve. Economies did seem to work like this in the 1950s and 1960s, but then the relationship broke down. Now economists prefer to talk about the NAIRU, the lowest rate of unemployment at which inflation does not accelerate.
Industry:Economy
