对调整外资优惠政策的探讨

随着中国加入WTO，对外商投资的政策优惠及所谓“国民待遇”问题越来越多地成为人们议论的中心，也在决策层的视野中日渐凸显。理论界和一些高层官员纷纷指出，中国应尽快按照国民待遇原则统一内外资企业所得税等税种，取消对外商投资企业的税收优惠。在这其中，不是存有误解，就是产生误导，将对我国利用外资产生巨大的不利影响，有必要予以澄清。一、内外资企业待遇比较改革开放后，中国同其他发展中国家一样，为了吸收外商投资而对其实行优惠政策即“超国民待遇”。这些政策的实施，与其他因素一起，对中国吸收外商投资起到了巨大的促…     

Abatement investments and green goodwill

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model that links profits to green goodwill. Assuming that abatement investments generate green goodwill, and using data from the Swedish pulp industry, we are able to test the effects of green goodwill on firm level output price and profits. The results suggests that Swedish pulp plant output prices and profits may be positively related to changes in green goodwill. Furthermore, no evidence is found to support the existence of adjustment costs due to abatement investments.     

Temporary hires and innovative investments

The flexicurity approach claims a positive effect of flexible labour on firm performance, also through an increased ability to innovate. Critics consider it a deregulation of the labour market, decreasing investment in human capital and innovation. We contribute to this broad debate providing an estimate of the relationships linking innovative investment, substitution investment, permanent hires and temporary hires. In particular, we aim at affirming or denying that innovative investments are accompanied by a specific kind of workforce, being it stable or flexible. In doing so, we contribute to bridge the gap among two quite separate strands of literature, as existing literature usually analyses capital and labour separately. Estimating a nonlinear recursive equation system we highlight a significant increase in the likelihood of hiring on a permanent base when the firm innovates; this holds till 2008. Afterward, during the crisis, innovating firms are more likely to hire using temporary contracts instead, a possible signal of a cost saving strategy adopted in a loose labour market by firms still able to innovate. Furthermore, both permanent and temporary hires never depend on increases in labour costs; however, substitution investment increases when labour cost increases, maybe in an attempt to increase labour productivity through a more efficient capital equipment.     

Understanding resource investments

The Millennium Boom of 2003–2011 made the resources industry highly profitable and led to a surge in new projects around the world. This had major implications for the Australian economy: Resource investment accounted for almost half of all business investment at the peak and the buoyancy of the sector helped Australia to avoid the worst of the global financial crisis. Using the event-study approach, this article examines the wealth-creating effects of new resource projects at the individual company level. The results indicate substantial increases in shareholder returns occur around the time of announcements of government approval for projects, the finalization of feasibility studies and changes in the status of projects such as when a company decides to finally commit to invest in a project. Government approval is the most important milestone in the life cycle of a project, where abnormal returns around 4% are realized on announcement day.     

政治竞争与相互直接投资

This paper investigates a basic question about the international political economy—why is international trade not free? To answer this question, we modified Grossman and Helpman (1994) by considering that interest lobbies make political contributions to both the incumbent government and the political challenger in order to influence the incumbent government’s choice of trade policy. By examining the contribution schedules under a framework of bilateral direct investments, we find that the modified Ramsey rule still holds under our setting.     

State capacity and the quality of policies. Revisiting the relationship between openness and government size

Countries with different levels of state capacity have access to different sets of policies. In particular, countries with strong state capabilities are able to draw from a broader menu of policies than countries with lower capabilities. We apply and test this insight to the case of exposure to trade‐related risk. So far, most of the literature has considered that only one type of policy—the one that increases government size—can help to overcome the challenge imposed by openness. However, there are a number of policies that can mitigate trade‐induced risks, many of which do not have the necessary implication of increasing public spending. Yet, many such policies require governmental capabilities not available to any country. For that reason, while the choice of a particular policy within a menu depends on political conditions, the relationship between openness and the size of government might be mediated by the capabilities of states. This paper provides reduced form evidence confirming that the empirical relationship between openness and government size is conditional on state capabilities. Therefore, public policies cannot be assessed independently of the capacity of the State that would have to implement them.     

Transport infrastructure investments and competition for FDI

This paper studies how transport infrastructure investments (TIIs) affect a bidding war for a firm between two asymmetric countries within a region in a context of imperfect competition, where TIIs play the role of a global public good, leading to a reduction in the unit trade cost between the two countries. A number of interesting results are derived from the model. In particular, TIIs can intensify fiscal competition between the two countries. Surprisingly, this conventional wisdom seems to be confirmed by this paper for the first time. Welfare implications of the model are also examined.     

Health and schooling investments in Africa.

This paper first outlines an organizing framework for considering how health and schooling affect labor productivity and growth, and how household and community factors can in turn affect the demand for these human capital investments. Both cross-country growth models and various aspects of microeconomic studies of individual productivity as related to education and health are discussed. The conclusion offers some tentative leads for policy in this area based on existing research, and an agenda for future research.     

Safety investments,behaviours and injury severity

This study investigates whether recreational boating safety investments and behaviours of current interest are determinants of boating injury severity, and if so, their effects. An ordered probit analysis of 1989–1993 boating accidents suggests that human capital investments in safety, in the form of operator boating experience and formal instruction, reduce both operator and passenger injury severity. Higher levels of operator (passenger) alcohol consumption increase operator (passenger) injury severity, but no relationship was found between operator alcohol consumption and passenger injury severity. At the time a trip is taken, wearing a flotation device has the most efficacious effect on both operator and passenger injury severity. In general, the results support regulatory policies aimed at increasing the use of personal flotation devices as well as reducing alcohol consumption.     

Behavioural heterogeneity in wine investments

We introduce a heterogeneous agent model to explain the dynamics of fine wine investments. Our results show evidence of the existence of both fundamentalists – those who trade on mean-reversion towards a fair value – and chartists – those who extrapolate recently observed price trends – in the wine market. Moreover, we document that market participants switch between the two trading strategies, allocating more weight to the strategy that has been the most accurate in forecasting wine index values in the recent past. This switching behaviour can explain the large variations in index values (bubbles and crashes) that are observed in the fine wine market.     

Deciding on large scale investments

This study analyses the importance of investment factors across investment sizes and the frequency of large investment decisions within the firms. We use data from 1442 investment decisions made by 226 Brazilian firms between 1997 and 2010. The results indicate that the influence of investment factors is different for investments of different sizes. The results also indicate that the increase in the frequency of large-scale investment decisions made by the firm influences especially the role of cash flow, diminishing its importance as an investment factor. This result allows one to argue that, probably, firms more experienced in large-scale decisions could be bolder in their decision-making process, relying less on the accumulation of funds through cash flow.     

Optimal regulation of lumpy investments

We study optimal timing of regulated investment in a real options setting, in which the regulated monopolist has private information on investment costs. In solving the ensuing agency problem, the regulator trades off investment timing inefficiency against the dead-weight loss arising from high price caps. We show that optimal regulation is implemented by a price cap that decreases as a function of the monopolist’s chosen investment time.     

Ambiguity attitude, R&D investments and economic growth

The process aimed at discovering new ideas is an economic activity the returns from which are intrinsically uncertain. We extend the neo-Schumpeterian growth framework to investigate the role of strong uncertainty in the innovative process. In particular, we postulate that, when deciding upon R&D efforts, investors hold ‘ambiguous beliefs’ about the exact probability of arrival of the next vertical innovation, and that they face ambiguity via the α −MEU decision rule (Ghirardato et al., J Econ Theory 118:133–173, 2004). Along the balanced growth path, the higher the agent’s ambiguity aversion (α), the lower the R&D efforts and the economic performance. Consistent with cross-country empirical evidence, this causal mechanism suggests that, together with the profitability conditions of the economy, different ‘cultural’ attitudes towards ambiguity may help explain the different R&D efforts observed across countries.     

Property rights and investments: An evolutionary approach

When contracts are not enforceable, or property rights are not clearly defined, individuals may lack an incentive to carry out costly investments even when they are socially efficient. Some recent contributions such as Ellingsen and Robles (2002) prove that this problem may be less dramatic than standard economic models would suggest. They propose evolutionary models in which only efficient equilibria can be (stochastically) stable. In this paper we show that these results are not robust with respect to the introduction of individual heterogeneity. When individuals have different cost functions, stochastically stable states may be inefficient, even when they induce a positive (suboptimal) level of investment.     

R&D investments and corporate cash holdings

This paper presents evidence about how research and development (R&D) expenditures affect corporate cash holdings in European country groups that differ in their innovation capacity. In theory, one can expect intangible investments such as R&D to result in higher cash stocks than fixed investments, particularly because intangible capital is less suitable as collateral for obtaining external funds. The relationship can be expected to be particularly strong in innovative countries. These countries carry out a relatively high proportion of cutting-edge R&D, which tends to be particularly risky and may be associated with substantial gestation lags before becoming productive. These features tend to increase firms' precautionary cash holdings. To investigate this issue in a European context, we examine different groups of countries that are clustered based on differences in their innovative capacity. Our estimation results confirm a positive relation between changes in R&D investment and changes in cash holdings, whereas changes in fixed investment do not appear to be related to changes in cash positions. The impact of changes in R&D on cash tends to be higher for country groups characterized by a high level of innovative capacity than for countries with moderate levels of innovative capacity. However, the differences across country groups are less pronounced than expected.     

Heterogeneous preferences and investments in energy saving measures

We investigate whether risk, time, environmental, and social preferences affect single-family homeowners’ investments in the energy efficiency of their house using established experimental measures and questionnaires. We find that homeowners who report to be more risk taking are more likely to have renovated their house. Pro-environmental and future-oriented renovators, i.e. renovators with lower discount factors, live in homes with higher energy efficiency. Pro-social preferences as measured in a dictator game relates positively to the energy quality of renovated houses. Controlling for the energy efficiency of houses, we further find that energy consumption as measured by heating and electricity costs is lower for future-oriented and pro-environmental individuals.     

Informational spillovers and the coordination of speculative investments

Abstract. The influence of informational spillovers on the entrepreneur's incentive to undertake reversible investment opportunities is considered. It is shown how investment activity can be driven by the influence that the prospect of social learning has on the option value of investment. In this context, episodes of high investment activity result from a speculative motive, and the expected short‐run profitability of new investment opportunities may inadequately reflect the entrepreneurs’ incentive to invest.     

Unbundling institutional determinants of multinational investments

Previous studies often examined how a broad-based institution affects foreign direct investment (FDI) flows across countries. However, analysis of differential impacts of two or more constituent institutions within a broad-based institution appears to be more useful for policy decision-making. There is a paucity of studies on how constituent institutions within a broad measure of institution affect FDI across countries. Our article constitutes the first attempt in bridging this gap. In this article, we examine the relative effects of property rights institution (PI) and contracting institution (CI) on investment flows. Our results show that PI is much more important than CI in determining the cross-border flows of FDI and affiliate sales. Moreover, PI is found to be more important for FDI than for affiliate sales, indicating that final goods are less of a concern for being expropriated by governments and powerful elites than capital goods. Through unbundling a broad-based institution and examining how the constituent institutions affect investments flows, our article provides practical location decisions for investments in FDI, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and affiliate sales.