泰德：中国监管体系让我想起了美国的监管制度

很多外国公司认为,中国政府对待他们的态度和对待外国投资者态度一样,变得越来越不友好。美国报纸报道,美国公司最近越发关注中国法律的不平等性。     

Joint Ventures in the U.S. Steel Industry:

A bstract . In 1958 Daniel Fusfeld examined the role of joint ventures in the U.S. steel industry and concluded that joint ventures served as a substitute for mergers forbidden by the Justice Department. Since the Fusfeld study, things have changed drastically for integrated domestic producers. Competition from imports and domestic mini- mills have forced steel firms into bankruptcies and missive plant closings. The contemporary industry's participation in joint ventures is examined in an attempt to understand steel's restructuring. Today's integrated producers jointly may hold tighter control over raw materials, participate in growing numbers of horizontal Joint ventures , and engage in numerous cooperative enterprises with foreign competitors, particularly the Japanese. Contemporary U.S. producers are becoming increasingly absorbed in the global economy.     

U.S. Strategic Trade Policy and the Competitiveness of the U.S. Construction Industry in Developing Country Markets

SUMMARY

U.S. government trade policy increasingly reflects “strategic trade” beliefs that, because competition in markets is imperfect, governments can act strategically to affect trade flows and enhance national welfare. The U.S. National Export Strategy targets the infrastructure sector in twelve developing countries as a strategic opportunity for U.S. construction firms. This paper examines whether U.S. government export promotion initiatives effectively implement strategic trade policy by providing appropriate support to these firms in that target market. It concludes that, within limits, they do.     

Efficiency and Technological Change in the U.S. Brewing Industry

This study demonstrates that the measurement of technological change and economic efficiency are tightly linked. Efficiency measures may depend on carefully controlling for technological change, while tests of technological change may be sensitive to empirical model specifications. Moreover, the study underlines Solow's (1994) and Romer's (1994) admonition that econometricians should pay attention to industry and institutional evidence in building models of technological change. The empirical results presented here suggest that there has been substantial technological change in the U.S. brewing industry from 1950 to 1992. This occurred in the form of a dramatic shift in technology beginning with the introduction of super breweries in about 1972. There has also been a substantial increase in scale economies, which undoubtedly caused many inefficiently small firms to exit the industry during the 1960s and 1970s. Further results suggest that a more complete specification of technological change and the stochastic nature of the frontier production function leads to higher and more tenable estimates of efficiency.     

Profitability and Efficiency in the U.S. Life Insurance Industry

This study explores the relationship between cost inefficiency and profitability in the U.S. life insurance industry. Earnings have particular importance to life insurance companies because earnings and capital determine the viability of the insurer. Since the life insurance industry is mature and highly competitive, cost efficiency may be the main driver of profitability. We derive cost efficiency using the stochastic frontier (SF) method allowing the mean inefficiency to vary with organizational form and the outputs. In addition, the estimation of the cost efficiency measure takes into account the underlying accounting concepts that generate the data and, consequently, the product mix (long-duration policies vs. short-duration policies) to avoid distorted estimates. Our results suggest that cost inefficiency in the life insurance industry is substantial relative to earnings, and that inefficiency is negatively associated with profitability measures such as the return on equity. The analysis of inefficiency and organizational form suggest that stock (shareholder-owned) companies are as efficient and profitable as mutual (policyholder-owned) companies.     

美国区划演变经验及对我国控制性详细规划的启示

梳理了美国区划演变的经验,介绍了新区划工具在城市形态和街道功能、住房保障和社区营造、区划调整灵活性三方面的发展,以此应对区划灵活性和覆盖面不足的问题。文章最后针对区划工具存在的局限性提出了讨论,并探讨了美国区划演变对我国控制性详细规划管理的启示。     

Strategic Ownership Positions in U.S. Industry and Banking

A bstract . Strategic ownership position in corporation do not necessarily imply "control" but rather participation in corporate decision making. Strategic positions in the nation's 500 largest industrial corporations and 153 largest financial institutions are described and classified. Types of owners include banks and employee stock plans, financial bolding firms, insurance companies, families and individuals, pension funds , and foreign owners. Results indicate that families continue to hold significant strategic positions in industry (28.5%) and banking (20.4%). These results have certain implications for the theory of "managerialism."     

Competition and Conflict in the U.S. Atlantic Coast Menhaden Industry

Abstract . Fluctuations in the harvest of menhaden off the U.S. Atlantic coast, a common property resource, have caused competition and conflict among the small number of companies, two large and several small, which operate in the fishery. With no strong central management, the resource is not being exploited to the optimum and increased fishing pressure and effort bring, cyclically, a peak catch followed by contraction in catch and industry. The industry, state agencies and federal offices disagree on corrective measures. Restriction of the fall harvest off the North Carolina coast to replenish the stock would call for an extraordinary sacrifice by the North Carolina industry—costing it between $4.4 and $6.8 million to provide increases between $6.6 million and $8.4 million in gross revenues for the rest of the industry from Maine to Florida. This raises problems of equitable sharing of the burden. A bioeconomic computer model quantifies short and long run impacts that must be faced.     

Information Frictions in Uncertain Regulatory Environments: Evidence from U.S. Commercial Banks

Information frictions between firms and regulators are typically seen as a means by which firms evade enforcement. In contrast, we argue that information frictions between firms and regulators can reduce the efficiency of firms’ compliance efforts when the interpretation of regulatory standards is uncertain. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in distance between firms and their regulators to demonstrate this for a panel of community banks in the US. We find that banks located at greater distance from regulatory field offices face significantly higher administrative costs, at a rate of 20% of administrative costs per hour of travel time. These differences do not come with reduced compliance, are not driven by endogenous regulator choice, and are stable over time. Further, the costs borne by distant firms are negatively related to the scale of the jurisdiction in which they operate, suggesting that information spillovers between firms limit uncertainty about regulatory expectations.     

美国版权产业保护政策的历史演变与启示

美国的版权保护,对内逐步提高版权保护水平;对外先是游离于当时国际主流版权保护体系之外,后是主动融入国际主流版权保护体系,并在全球推行美国的版权保护霸权。美国的版权保护做法对中国具有借鉴意义。     

Empirical Evaluation of Regulatory Regimes in Local Telecommunications Markets

This paper relies on an engineering optimization model of the local telecommunication exchange network to calibrate the functions entering various regulatory mechanisms, from both traditional and modern (incentive) regulation, and evaluate their relative performance. The engineering process model is used to generate data, which are econometrically synthesized in a translog economic cost function. Using this estimated cost function and some empirical and institutional information on market and regulatory conditions, we then calibrate demand, social-surplus, and disutility-of-(cost-reducing)-effort functions. These functions, together with probability distributions reflecting the regulator's beliefs about technology characteristics, allow us to quantitatively assess the social value of regulatory transfers and of good cost auditing procedures, the redistributive consequences of the various forms of regulation, and the sensitivity of their relative performance to the cost of public funds.     

美国振兴先进制造业的政策措施及启示

从20世纪70年代开始,美国制造业的大批量生产模式开始走下坡路。日本经济的兴起,以丰田汽车为代表的日本汽车工业新的生产和管理模式的成功,向世界表明大批量生产的威力已到了尽头。为振兴先进制造业,美国分别从技术、财政、信息网络、教育、企业运作模式、企业联盟等方面制定了一系列政策与计划,对其进行支持。美国所采取的这些政策措施,对于我国在“十一五”规划中如何更有效促进先进制造业的发展,具有重要的启示。     

美国炼油行业污染物排放标准对我国的启示

美国的污染物排放标准技术含量较高。标准内容详尽、复杂,不仅有技术数据,而且还规定如何执行这些技术的条款。研究美国工业行业污染物排放标准,有助于我国类似行业标准的制修订,可以有效提高我国排放标准的科学性和可执行性。     

Capacity Investment under Demand Uncertainty: The Role of Imports in the U.S. Cement Industry

Demand uncertainty is thought to influence irreversible capacity decisions. Suppose that local demand can be sourced from domestic (rigid) production or from (flexible) imports. This paper shows that the optimal domestic capacity is either increasing or decreasing with demand uncertainty, depending on the relative level of the costs of domestic production and imports. We test this relationship with data from the U.S. cement industry, in which the difference in marginal cost between domestic production and imports varies across local U.S. markets because cement is costly to transport over land. Industry data for 1999 to 2010 are consistent with the predictions of the model. The introduction of two technologies to the production set—one rigid and one flexible—is crucial to understanding the relationship between capacity choice and uncertainty in this industry because there is no relationship between these two variables in aggregated U.S. data. Our analysis reveals that the relationship is negative in coastal districts, and significantly more positive in landlocked districts.