讲座主题：Government Procurement, Market Power and Consumer Welfare: Empirical Evidence from the Infant Formula Market

　　主讲人：安永红

　　讲座地点：B228

　　讲座时间：2018年 6月26日下午14点30 分

　　主办单位：www.365808.com财政与税收系

　　讲座摘要：The US infant formula market is highly concentrated and over one-half of the total sales are through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). The three major manufacturers compete not only for non-WIC consumers but also to serve WIC participants exclusively by bidding a rebate on the wholesale prices. Using data of sales and manufacturers' rebates, we investigate how the WIC program (1) affects manufacturers' pricing strategies and leads to the substantial gap between the wholesale prices and the after-rebate prices, and (2) distorts the prices paid by the non-WIC consumers. Our estimates show that manufacturers' marginal costs are much higher than the prices paid by WIC program. Nevertheless, winning a WIC contract is profitable because serving WIC participants has a substantial spillover effect (increasing 30.6% of the demand from nonparticipants), and the manufacturer's loss from WIC participants are subsidized by the increased prices for nonparticipants. We further conduct counterfactual analyses to investigate the impacts of the WIC program on non-WIC consumers.

　　个人简介：

　　安永红，德州农工大学经济学系副教授。在约翰ž霍普金斯大学获得经济学博士学位，研究领域包括微观计量经济学和产业经济学，曾在Journal of Econometrics、Journal of Business & Economic Statistics、Journal of Applied Econometrics、Journal of Public Economic Theory 、Applied Economics等国际高水平期刊发表十多篇学术论文。