Strategic R&D policy under vertically differentiated oligopoly

In this paper strategic R&D policy is analysed, where a high-tech firm and a low-tech firm compete in a third country with vertically differentiated ( high-quality and low-quality ) products. If the product market is under price competition, the high-tech (low-tech) firm's government has an incentive to tax (subsidize) its domestic firm's product R&D activities. If the product market is under quantity competition, the results are opposite: an R&D subsidy (tax) incentive for the high-tech (low-tech) firm's government; and the high-tech firm's government always gains in the R&D policy game, in contrast to the standard prisoner's dilemma result of the R&D policy literature. JEL Classification: F13     

DIVERSE ORGANIZATIONS AND THE COMPETITION FOR TALENT

We propose a theory of firm production that requires diverse inputs. We show that in a competitive labor market, firms differ in their skill composition. Organizations with higher total factor productivity (TFP) are larger and hire from a broader range of skills. Technological progress leads to an increase of all wages and results in downsizing. Quantifying productivity using our model shows that a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function generates unbiased estimates of TFP but biased estimates of marginal product and elasticity of substitution across skills. Our model also generates estimates of the TFP distribution based on CEO compensation alone.     

Innovation,competition and firm size distribution on fragmented markets

This paper presents a simple model of firm and consumer behavior. We formulate a sub-market entry game, where boundedly rational firms decide on investing in R&D for inventing new products that will appeal to targeted groups of consumers. The success depends on the amount of resources available for the project as well as on the firm’s familiarity with market characteristics. Successful innovation feeds back into the firm size and (potentially into) market knowledge and increases the future R&D productivity. A new product decreases the market-shares of incumbents. However, this business stealing effect is asymmetric across incumbent population. We identify the section of parameter space where firms have an incentive to diversify horizontally. In this section, the model results in rich industrial dynamics. Firm size heterogeneity emerges endogenously in the model. Equilibrium firm size distributions are heavy tailed and skewed to the right. The heaviness of the tail depends on submarket specificity of firm’s market knowledge. This relationship is non-monotonic, emphasizing two different effects of innovation on industrial dynamics (positive feedback and asymmetric business stealing).     

Regulation,Local Monopolies and Spatial Competition

Many regulated industries involve an oligopoly market structure. We examine optimal incentive regulation for a duopoly model of spatial competition when firms have private cost information. Market structure is endogenous as regulation determines market segments for firms and output distribution across consumers in each firm's market. By varying the assignment of consumers to firms, a relatively more efficient firm can be rewarded with a larger market, thus reducing quantity incentive distortions. We derive the optimal policy, assess the impact of asymmetric information relative to full information, and examine extensions to allow for ex ante asymmetries in firm structure.     

Who Exports Better Quality Products to Smaller or More Distant Markets?

The role of across‐firm differences in product quality and firms' competitiveness in determining the spatial patterns of within‐product export unit values across destinations is examined in this paper. Using product level export data, it is shown that the average export unit value of a product shipped from the USA or Korea increases with distance and decreases with destination market's size. However, within‐product average unit values for products exported from China and India decrease with distance and increase with market size. To interpret these different spatial patterns of unit values across exporting countries, model of quality heterogeneity is developed in which firms differ in their workers' skill level and higher‐skilled workers show greater productivity in performing tasks that improve product quality. The model predicts that in relatively skill‐abundant countries, exporting firms specialize in high‐quality products using relatively cheap skilled labor, whereas, in relatively skill‐scarce countries, firms that produce lower‐quality products are more competitive.     

理解企业多元化经营的新视角:控股股东的影响

多元化经营在现实企业中普遍存在,这也吸引了大量研究探寻企业多元化经营的动机。已有文献主要关注企业本身多元化经营,忽略了控股股东因素,从而存在一定的认知偏差。不同于已有文献,基于手工搜集数据,本文首次考察了控股股东多元化经营与上市公司多元化经营之间的关系及其影响因素。研究发现,首先,控股股东多元化经营与上市公司多元化经营之间存在着一定的替代关系,说明控股股东将上市公司多元化经营作为其整体多元化经营战略的一部分;其次,从影响机制上看,控股股东持有上市公司的权益在其总资产中份额越高、其他大股东持股比例越高、上市公司所处地区市场化程度越高,控股股东多元化经营与上市公司多元化经营之间的替代关系会越弱,说明那些有助于减轻控股股东对上市公司进行干预的因素将会弱化这种关系。本文为理解企业多元化经营行为以及企业与其控股股东的关系提供了新的视角。     

Oligopolistic Competition and New Technology Adoption under Uncertainty

The paper examines the adoption of a new technology in oligopoly, where there is ex ante uncertainty about variable costs of the new technology. Each firm can either adopt the new process by bearing some up-front investment or may continue to use the old one, after which firms play a Cournot market game. If in equilibrium both technologies are employed, more uncertainty about the new technology increases (decreases) the number of innovating firms and decreases (increases) the product price if the up-front investment is large (small). Our model applies readily to vertical integration if integrated firms neither buy nor sell the intermediate good on the market. However, if buying and selling is allowed, the number of integrated firms is independent of input price uncertainty.     

Market size and entry in international trade: Product versus firm fixed costs

This paper develops a theoretical framework to infer the nature of fixed costs from the relationship between entry patterns in international markets and destination market size. If fixed costs are at the firm level, firms take advantage of an intrafirm spillover by expanding firm‐level product range (scope). Few firms enter with many products and dominate international trade. If fixed costs are at the product level, an interfirm spillover reduces the fixed costs to export for all firms producing the product. The resulting entry pattern consists of many firms exporting different varieties of the same product. Using cross‐country data on firm and product entry, I find empirical evidence consistent with product‐level costs. More firms than products enter in larger markets offering their consumers lower prices and a greater variety of goods within the product category.     

Oligopoly and the redistribution of market share under commodity taxation

This paper examines the effect of ad valorem and specific commodity taxation on firm market share in a duopoly where firms have different costs. Two reasons suggested for these cost asymmetries are inter-firm differences in efficiency and differences in product quality. When cost differences are efficiency-based, then specific and ad valorem commodity taxation increases the market share of the lower-cost firm and decreases the market share of the higher-cost firm. If the cost difference results from differing product quality, the specific tax increases the market share of the high quality (higher-cost) firm and decreases the market share of the low quality (lower-cost) firm, whereas, the ad valorem tax has just the opposite effect.     

Multi-product firms in monopolistic competition: The role of scale-scope spillovers

We develop a monopolistic competition model where firms are multi-product, and the elasticity of substitution on the consumption side is variable. The cost function, otherwise very general, is such that expanding firm-level product range (scope) reduces marginal costs of production of existing varieties. This captures scale-scope spillovers, i.e. within-firm spillovers between the scale at which firms operate and their choices of scope. Firm-level product ranges and the mass of firms are endogenously determined. We show how an increase in market size affects the market outcome. A larger market leads to lower prices, larger outputs, and a wider industry-level product range. Firm-level product ranges expand (shrink) under sufficiently strong (weak) scale-scope spillovers. Last, under strong (weak) spillovers, the number of firms increases less (more) than proportionally to the market size.     

Innovation,trade and multi‐product firms

This paper contributes to the literature on the relationship between innovation and exports by developing a model that emphasizes the role of product innovation in explaining heterogeneity in export behaviour both across and within firms. The dynamic model assumes that firms invest to maintain and increase the portfolio of products they sell: innovation is a stochastic process whereby the probability to capture new business opportunities is a function of the number of goods already sold. Crucially, the model assumes two independent mechanisms to drive the extensive and the intensive margins of a firm's export. The resulting lack of (built‐in) correlation between the two margins is well reflected in the data and represents the main contribution of our theoretical framework. The model is consistent with several other empirical regularities that characterize multi‐product firms, such as the heavy tail in the distribution of the number of products exported by each firm, the strict hierarchy in the sales of products across markets, the substantial degree of product churning and the highly skewed distributions of export sales.     

Heterogeneous productivity shocks,elasticity of substitution and aggregate fluctuations

We use a Dixit-Stiglitz setting to show that aggregate productivity fluctuations can be generated through changes in the dispersion of firms’ productivity. When the elasticity of substitution among goods is larger than one, an increase in the dispersion raises aggregate productivity because firms at the top of the distribution produce most of output. When the elasticity is smaller than one, an increase in the dispersion reduces aggregate productivity because firms at the bottom of the distribution use most of inputs. We use individual firm level data from Spanish manufacturing firms to test the relationship between the dispersion of firms’ productivity and aggregate productivity. The estimated coefficients are consistent with the predictions of the model: we find that an increase in the coefficient of variation of firms productivity of 1% increases aggregate productivity by 0.16% in sectors with an elasticity of substitution larger than one while the same increase in the standard deviation reduces aggregate productivity by 0.36% in sectors with an elasticity of substitution smaller than one.     

Product Differentiation,Competitive Toughness,and Intertemporal Substitution

Standard measures of competitive toughness fail to capture the fact that, as consumers optimize intertemporally, firms operating today compete with (as yet non‐existent) businesses, which will be started tomorrow. We develop a two‐tier constant elasticity of substitution (CES) model of dynamic monopolistic competition in which the impact of product differentiation on the market outcome depends crucially on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS). The degree of product differentiation per se fails to serve as a meaningful indicator of competitive toughness: what matters is its cross‐effect with EIS. We also extend the model to the case of non‐CES preferences in order to capture variable mark‐ups.     

Technological Progress, Downsizing and Unemployment

This paper presents a model where the form of innovations is endogenous. It is shown that with labour market imperfections, which raise the wage above the shadow price of labour, firms over-invest in innovations cutting labour costs and under-invest in increasing quality. As a result, the market outcome features lower long run growth, higher unemployment and lower welfare than the social optimum. It is further shown that a firm's incentives to cut labour costs are increased as wages rise and as the firm declines. Finally, a rise in competition increases incentives to downsize for firms with below average quality performance.     

Strategic spin-offs of input divisions

When a downstream producer enters backward into the input market, a “helping the rivals effect” exists: Such entry hurts the firm's downstream business as it increases upstream competition and thus benefits its rival downstream firms. This negative externality prevents the newly-created upstream unit from expanding. A spin-off enables the firm to credibly expand in the input market, thereby forcing its upstream competitors to behave less aggressively. Spin-offs occur in equilibrium if and only if the number of downstream firms exceeds a threshold level. When there is more than one integrated firm, a spin-off by a firm can trigger spin-offs by others that would not occur otherwise.     

产品多样性与企业区位选择

在一个线性城市市场中有两个企业,每个企业生产两种产品,且每个企业在其中一种产品上具有垄断力量,而在另外一种产品上与其他企业竞争.本文讨论这个市场上企业的最优选址问题,研究表明,企业选址与垄断类消费者和竞争类消费者的比例有关.当垄断类消费者的比例足够大时,企业选择集聚;当竞争类消费者的比例足够小时,企业选择尽可能远离对方;当二者数量相差不大时,企业将选择中间状态.与社会最优选址相比,两个企业之间的距离既可能过远也可能过近.     

Conjectural Variations, Market Power, and Optimal Trade Policy in a Vertically Related Industry

The paper introduces the conjectural variations and bargaining approaches into a vertical model wherein a foreign upstream firm supplies one input to two downstream firms that produce differentiated products for the export market. Various downstream firms’ competition modes and upstream's pricing schemes emerge as special cases of this formulation. The authors show that the optimal export policy of a downstream country depends crucially on the downstream firms’ conjectures of rivals’ responses, the upstream firm's pricing schemes, their relative bargaining powers, and the degree of product differentiation. If the upstream's pricing or bargaining power is strong (weak) and if the downstream's degree of competition is high (low), a tax (subsidy) is optimal owing to a strong (weak) vertical profit‐shifting effect and a weak (strong) horizontal effect.     

Trade Liberalization,Firm Selection,and Variety Growth

Recent empirical findings indicate that when trade is liberalized both firm selection takes place and product variety increases. Each of these two stylized facts has its own seminal theory. But how can they arise together? This paper presents a model of heterogeneous, multi‐variety firms that provides an intuitive explanation. When trade is liberalized efficient foreign exporters enter and push out the least efficient domestic firms. Fewer firms remain in total. But exporters endogenously offer more variety than domestic firms. The entry of variety‐rich foreign firms unambiguously dominates the decrease in the number of firms. Thus, total variety increases.     

R&D subsidies in a model of growth with dynamic market structure

This paper presents the effects of an R&D subsidy in a Schumpeterian general equilibrium model with rich industry dynamics. R&D subsidies raise the long-run growth rate, but they also raise the level of industry concentration. In the model firms compete for market share through process R&D endogenously determining the market structure within and across industries. Endogeneity of the market structure allows for analysis of changes in the moments of the firm size distribution in response to policy. R&D subsidies primarily benefit large incumbent firms who increase their innovation rates creating a greater technological barrier to entry. Concentration increases with fewer firms and a higher variance in the market shares. In general equilibrium, the greater distortions in the product market cause the wage rate to fall which leads to increased turnover rates. In addition, the analysis demonstrates that the model captures a large number of empirical regularities described in the industrial organization literature, but absent from most endogenous growth models. These features, such as entering firms are small relative to incumbents, the hazard rate of exit is negatively related to firm size, and large firms spend more on R&D than small firms play important roles in understanding the impact of R&D subsidies on the economy.