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Price markups and firms' Tobin's Q ratios are widely believed to have been increasing in the past several decades. Various models for the calculation of price markups have been developed, each relying on the historically held definition of the ratio of price to marginal cost; however, all of these have methodological drawbacks, and some of the results they have produced have been poorly reflective of the near past wider macroeconomic experience. This paper defines a new approach for the definition and measurement of markup pricing, and it also avoids some of the issues surrounding the marginal cost approaches by using the measure of economic rent and the capital asset pricing model. The results show limited markup pricing for the UK's FTSE 100 companies (2018–2023), but that certain real estate, technology/media and financial services/equity investment firms have enjoyed higher price markup levels. An analysis of the business models of these firms is used to qualitatively propose explanations for such markups. This work offers formal proof that that the expected price markup is equal to Tobin's Q and finds that the empiric market level of markup is near equivalent to the market Tobin's Q; the differences between the markup and Tobin's Q at the level of the firm are equally assessed. This work challenges the general consensus that price markups are above one and have been increasing; it may also aid policy makers with respect to taxation policy and regulatory measures, as well as the financial management of firms in decisions concerning capital deployment and portfolio management. The method merits expansion to wider data sets, as well as to those from outside of the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basis of rent has progressively shifted from valuing material goods which are subject to classical supply and demand forces to valuing more intangible sources of scarcity that impact the value state of abstract goods or experiences. In order to quantify the value ascribed to this new abstract asset class in this paper, we propose a new type of rent called Art-Rent. In this work, we describe Art-Rent in classical price, cost, and income (PCI) terms and use the subject of determining value of abstract painting as a test case. In order to quantify Art-Rent, we subject the total value calculation of abstract art to three models of PCI assessment. We determined that art is systematically undervalued and propose that Art-Rent can be factored into calculations for any commodity which holds any abstract recurring future value to the consumer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian economy has performed well compared with comparable countries over the last three decades only if we average the excellent performance in the 1990s and the poor performance over the past decade. Real wages over the past decade have stagnated—to an extent without historical parallel. We cannot understand the economy's underperformance without recognising the increasing claims of economic rents on national income. Correction of weaknesses requires coordination of many policy instruments including measures to reduce the prevalence of rents (competition policy and regulation of oligopoly where competition is not feasible or inefficient) and changes in taxation arrangements to shift the burden of business taxation from firms in competitive activities to firms relying heavily on economic rents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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