George Geronikolaou

Is There an Adverse Effect of Uncertainty on Venture Capital? The European Evidence

Early-stage and, to a lesser degree, expansion Venture Capital (VC) investment exhibits evident irreversibility characteristics and, according to the irreversibility-delay theory of investment, should thus be sensitive to real and financial uncertainty. The objective of this article is to examine to what extent VC investment is adversely affected by macroeconomic uncertainty on the basis of a European dataset from 1995 to 2005. Our results indicate that price uncertainty and interest rate volatility do not significantly affect European VC finance and that only growth and cost of capital considerations seem to matter.

Countervailing Power with Large and Small Retailers

When concentration in the retail market increases, retailers gain more market power towards the suppliers and they hence can achieve better wholesale prices. In the 1950s, Galbraith introduced the concept of countervailing power claiming that lower wholesale prices will pass on to consumer as lower retail prices. Consequently higher concentration may turn out to be beneficial for consumers. In this model where a monopolistic supplier sells an intermediate good to M large retailers who are Cournot competitors and a competitive fringe consisting of N retailers, we show that higher concentration does not decrease retail prices and results solely to a reallocation of profits between the supplier and large retailers, thus invalidating Galbraith’s conjecture. The same result carries on when the exogenously given level of bargaining power of large retailers increases.

What Drives Greek Exports Performance? A Macrolevel Analysis

Τhis paper attempts to highlight the main determinants of Greek export performance over the period 2004–2014. Our empirical analysis shows that unit labor costs and long-term rates negatively affect exports to Eurozone countries. Additionally, exchange rates and unit labor costs seem to be crucial for exports to non-Eurozone countries. Summarizing our results, economic uncertainty is an important drawback for exports to Eurozone countries offsetting the positive effect of reduced labor costs on export performance. Moreover, the clear upward trend of exports to non-Eurozone countries seems to be related both to the reduction of unit labor costs and the devaluation of euro. The need to stimulate growth through a number of reforms in the labor, and goods and services markets is of great importance, absorbing the collapse of domestic demand and redirecting production and capital to tradable goods.

Lottery pricing and price elasticity dispersion in the UK and Canada

ABSTRACT We estimate effective price elasticities for different quantiles of the demand distribution of the UK National Lottery and the Canadian Lotto 649. We show that price elasticities vary significantly from draw to draw and have a tendency to increase with lottery participation and jackpot size. Our findings indicate that setting lottery rules on the basis of mean effective price elasticities should be faced with caution because expected profits are negatively related to the evident variation of elasticities among lottery draws. We also simulate alternative active rollover distributions and show that limiting the rollover accumulation by withholding portions and ploughing them back in future nonrollover draws is potentially profitable.