私有化更有效率吗

本文对始自里根和撒切尔夫人主政时期的私有化浪潮提出了批评和质疑。本文认为,以解决政府失灵问题的私有化浪潮,可能导致更为严重的市场失灵问题。虽然在总体上私有企业比国有企业有更强的盈利能力,但这并不意味着私有企业比国有企业更有效率。即使能够证明私有企业比国有企业更有效率,也不能说私有化是可取的。     

A Development‐friendly Prioritisation of Doha Round Proposals

Agriculture looms large on the WTO's agenda. It was the first substantive item listed in the work programme of the Ministerial Declaration launching the Doha Round, and it was arguably at the centre of the failure at Cancun. Developing countries made it clear both before and during the Cancun meeting that progress on agriculture was their primary objective. Negotiations in other areas have received less attention and progressed more slowly. This paper considers that prioritisation, and suggests that the interests of developing countries in the current round of trade negotiations are much broader than is suggested by the narrow range of agricultural issues that have dominated negotiations. A true development round would require a significant reprioritisation of many areas of the WTO's current agenda.     

Incentives,information, and organizational design

NÖG Lecture delivered to the annual meeting of the Austrian Economic Society, Vienna, September 29, 1988. Financial support from the Olin Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Hoover Institution is gratefully acknowledged. This paper is partly based on joint work undertaken with Raaj K. Sah, to whom I am most indebted. I have also benefitted greatly from conversations with Joseph Farrell. Research assistance of Serge Marquié and Rohit Rahi is gratefully acknowledged.     

An Agenda for Reforming Economic Theory

In this article, Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz argues that the standard macro-economic paradigm has failed not only to predict the crisis but also to provide insights into the design of a regulatory framework that would make a recurrence less likely. He points out that many of the underlying assumptions of the standard paradigm always seemed implausible and many of its predictions, such as those concerning the micro-economic behavior of the constituents (firms and households), are inconsistent with the empirical evidence. He then identifies a number of key modeling challenges, what he views as key ingredients that have to be incorporated in any model that is going to describe economic fluctuations or be the basis of a well-designed regulatory or monetary framework.     

Preemption,leapfrogging and competition in patent races

This paper investigates when patent races will be characterized by vigorous competition and when they will degenerate into a monopoly. Undersome conditions, a firm with an arbitrarily small headstart can preempt its rivals. Such ‘?-preemption’ is shown to depend on whether a firm that is behind in the patent race, as measured by the expected time remaining until discovery, cant ‘leapfrog’ the competition and become the new leader. An example of an R&D game with random discovery illustrates how ?-preemption can occur when leapfrogging is impossible. A multi-stage R&D process allows leapfrogging and thus permits competition. A similar conclusion emerges in a model of a deterministic patent race with imperfect monitoring of rival firms' R&D investment activities.     

Peer Monitoring and Credit Markets

A major problem for institutional lenders is ensuring that borrowersexercise prudence in the use of the funds so that the likelihoodof repayment is enhanced. One partial solution is peer monitoring:having neighbors who are in a good position to monitor the borrowerbe required to pay a penalty if the borrower goes bankrupt.Peer monitoring is largely responsible for the successful financialperformance of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh and of similargroup lending programs elsewhere. But peer monitoring has acost. It transfers risk from the bank, which is in a betterposition to bear risk, to the cosigner. In a simple model ofpeer monitoring in a competitive credit market, this articledemonstrates that the transfer of risk leads to an improvementin borrowers' welfare.