Invited Talk: Efficiency Effects of Mergers: Harmonising Merged Production

Prof. Mikulas Luptacik (Vienna University of Economics and Business) holds a talk on “Efficiency Effects of Mergers: Harmonising Merged Production” on Sat. 19 November 2022 at 2:15pm in room B02a.2.05 (Lakeside Park). Guests welcome!

The model of potential gains from mergers provides a useful decomposition into technical efficiency, returns to scale, and the harmony effect. While technical efficiency and returns to scale have been well elaborated, interpretation of the harmony effect remains open. We provide analytic insight into the aforementioned decomposition. We express the harmony effect as a function of the relative difference between the structures of the firms involved and the relative difference in their sizes. These factors can play an important role and, in some cases, can even outweigh a potentially negative merger outcome due to decreasing returns to scale. Furthermore, we show that the sign of the harmony effect is dependent not on the specific form of the production function but rather on its shape. In the case of a concave production function, the harmony effect contributes in a positive sense to the gains from mergers. Incorporating information on given input prices, the harmony effect is described as the product of technical, price, and allocative efficiency. The potential effects of the technical-physical based harmony effect are illustrated for the Slovak hospital sector. This application provides a detailed look at the reallocation process.

Invited Talk: The Optimal Momentum of Population Growth and Decline

Prof. Gustav Feichtinger (Vienna University of Technology) holds a talk on “The Optimal Momentum of Population Growth and Decline” on Sat. 19 November 2022 at 1:00pm in room B02a.2.05 (Lakeside Park). Guests welcome!

Some fifty years ago, Nathan Keyfitz (1971) asked for the amount a growing human population would further increase if its fertility rate would be reduced immediately to replacement level and remains there forever. The reason for this demographic momentum is an inertia of age structures containing relatively many potential parents due to past high fertility. Nobody expects such a miraculous reduction of reproductive behavior, but a gradual decline of fertility in fast-growing populations seems inevitable. Since any delay in fertility decline to a stationary level leads to an increase of the momentum, we consider an intertemporal trade-off between costly birth control and the demographic momentum at the end of a planning period. Using the McKendrick partial differential equation for the age-structured population dynamics, an appropriate extension of Pontryagin’s maximum principle is applied. The results of such a distributed parameter control framework can also be applied to determine efficient pro-natalistic measures for shrinking populations.

5th QED Workshop

The 5th Quantitative Economics Workshop takes place on Tue., November 15, 2022 at 2:30pm in room B02.2.13. Follow-up on the presentation by Christian Zwatz “Large Sample Robust Inference in the Generalized Linear Regression Model“.

Guests welcome!

CEBA Talk: HAC Robust Estimation and Inference for Long-Run Equilibrium Relationships

Martin Wagner has been invited to hold a talk at the renowned CEBA – Center for Econometrics and Business Analytics Research Seminar of St. Petersburg State University on 11 November 2022. The title of the presentation is “HAC Robust Estimation and Inference for Long-Run Equilibrium Relationships“.