Alternative Approaches to Compensation and Producer Rights

When policies are changed, it is not uncommon for losers to be compensated. Economic theory and quantitative analysis are useful in determining the efficiency gains/losses associated with a policy change, but are little help in deciding what the approach to compensation should be. The amount of compensation varies, depending on, in part, the political clout of the parties being negatively affected by a policy change—compensation is what politicians and the sector demanding compensation can agree on. We formulate four approaches to producer compensation within the context of the Ontario Tobacco Transition Program, where producers would have suffered losses in the absence of compensation. The approaches range from providing zero compensation to providing compensation based on the entire value of the tobacco quota. The Canadian government chose the latter and compensated producers for the termination of the tobacco quota program based on an approach that far exceeded other possible compensation approaches.     

State‐Society Synergy and Export Sophistication

This paper contributes to the recent research on “export sophistication,” or the composition of a country's export portfolio. The central question of the current study is what determines a country's level of export sophistication. I argue that a synergetic relationship between state and society positively contributes to the level of export sophistication. The logic behind the argument is that the socially optimal level of investment in new products can only be realized if both the firm and the government find it individually profitable to carry out the investment. In cases whereby either or both lacks private incentive to invest, higher synergy between public and private sectors makes such joint investments more likely to occur. This logic is formally illustrated using a simultaneous game with incomplete information. The central hypothesis is tested using time series cross‐sectional data. The key empirical novelty of this paper is the construction of a “synergy index” based on Peter Evans' conceptualization of the term. Overall, the data give good support to the hypothesis. This relationship is particularly robust for the subsample of countries with intermediate levels of synergy. Furthermore, there is evidence suggesting that state‐society synergy is subject to diminishing returns as its values get higher.     

Estimating the impact of rural investments in Nepal

As a largely rural society, most people in Nepal still depend upon agriculture as their major livelihood strategy. Therefore, it is important to improve the allocation efficiency of limited public expenditures to promote agricultural growth and poverty reduction. However, evaluating the returns of public investment is limited by methodological challenges. We use hedonic and panel data methods to examine the returns to different types of rural public investments including roads, irrigation and extension advice. The use of diverse identification strategies reduces the risk of using a narrower set of results driven primarily by a particular methodology. We find that rural roads and irrigation are one of the most productive public expenditures according to the benefit-cost ratio calculations, though the magnitudes of these ratios depend on methodology.     

Your Governance or Mine?

In response to criticism directed at the resource sector's corporate governance, this paper examines the corporate governance and underlying firm characteristics of resource development stage entities (DSEs) relative to a size‐matched sample of non‐resource firms. We find that resource DSEs have different governance characteristics in the measures of board independence, chair/CEO duality and CEO cash bonuses. Furthermore, there are differences in the information environment measures of analyst following, debt levels, stock market return and stock turnover. Considering we document substantial differences in underlying firm characteristics, corporate governance differences are likely appropriate to the mining industry and should not be uniformly labelled as ‘bad’. Our results suggest that media rankings based on corporate governance scores may not accurately portray the resource sector. Overall, our results are of interest to Australian investors and regulators and contribute to a broader understanding of contextually contingent corporate governance.