Taxation of firms with unknown mobility

We analyze optimal business tax policy when some firms are able to escape taxation by moving abroad. In contrast to the existing literature, we assume that the true number of mobile firms is ex ante unknown. While the government may learn from the firms' location responses to past tax rate changes, firms may anticipate this and adjust their choices accordingly. We find that incomplete information on mobility substantially affects the properties and the implications of equilibrium policy choices. First, the government may find it optimal to set a tax rate that triggers partial firm migration but full revelation of the true number of mobile firms. Second, we show that, if the firms' outside option is attractive (i.e., relocation cost and foreign tax rates are low), expected tax rates and expected firm migration are higher if the degree of mobility is unknown. Third, there is a positive value of learning, i.e., commitment on future tax rates cannot increase the government's expected revenue. However, if the government can commit to a rule‐based learning mechanism, i.e., credibly tie its future tax policy to present policy outcomes, it may obtain a Pareto improvement.     

When two tribes go to work: Board political diversity and firm performance

A substantial literature has studied how increased diversity in terms of gender, age, education, and race amongst members of firms' boards affects decisions and performance. This paper studies whether ideological diversity in the boardroom affects firm performance. We find that whilst a board with a broader range of political opinions and beliefs is correlated with better performance ceteris paribus, that the causal impact of such an increase in diversity is negative and substantial. This negative effect is still present when diversity is measured excluding top management, and when diversity is defined in terms of the difference between firms' management and non-executive directors. In conclusion we consider the implication of these findings given the recent growth in both political polarization and ideological segregation.     

TARIFF JUMPING FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT DECISION IN A QUALITY‐DIFFERENTIATED MARKET

Using a product differentiation model, this paper discusses the issue of transnational firms evading tariffs and investing directly in a host country (through foreign direct investment (FDI)). Where product quality is differentiated between foreign and host country firms and assuming a firm's quality requirement is a long‐term strategy and is not affected by a foreign firm's trade decision, we obtain the following findings. First, whether or not a host country firm produces high or low quality products, raising the quality requirement for foreign products will increase the possibility of a foreign firm choosing FDI instead of exporting a product to the host country. Second, raising the quality requirement for domestic products will lower the possibility of foreign firms choosing FDI without regard to the product's quality. Finally, given a competitor in the host country, in FDI, a foreign high‐quality product‐producing firm has an advantage over a low‐quality product‐producing firm. We also find that even when firms' quality decisions are affected by a foreign firm's trade decision, most of the above results will still hold.     

PRODUCTIVITY OR UNEXPECTED DEMAND SHOCKS: WHAT DETERMINES FIRMS' INVESTMENT AND EXIT DECISIONS?

We investigate the roles played by unexpected demand shocks, besides productivity, on firms' capital investment and exit decisions. We propose a practical approach to recover unexpected firm‐level demand shocks using inventory data. The recognition of demand shocks and inventory also improves the productivity estimation. The empirical results indicate that although productivity and demand shocks are both significant factors determining firm behavior, the former is more dominant for investment decision and the latter is more salient for firm exit. These findings confirm that unexpected demand shocks, besides persistent productivity, are important factors when analyzing capital investment and firm exit decisions.     

The Effect of Corruption on Investment Growth: Evidence from Firms in Latin America,Sub‐Saharan Africa,and Transition Countries*

Most of the empirical studies that analyze the impact of corruption on investment have three common features: they employ country‐level data on investment, corruption is measured at the country level, and data for countries from several regions are pooled together. This paper uses firm‐level data on investment and measures corruption at the firm and country level, and allows the effect of corruption to vary by region. Our dependent variable is firms' investment growth and we employ six measures of corruption from four different sources—two firm‐level measures and four country‐level measures. We find that the effect of corruption on investments varies significantly across regions: corruption has a negative and significant effect on investment growth for firms in Transition countries but has no significant impact for firms in Latin America and Sub‐Saharan Africa. Furthermore, for Transition countries, corruption is the most important determinant of investment.     

Optimal fiscal and monetary policies in the face of rare disasters

This paper studies optimal fiscal and monetary policies in an economy exposed to large adverse shocks (rare disasters). We contrast optimal policies under commitment and discretion and identify several striking differences between these institutional environments. A government that can commit to its policy plans relies heavily on debt to smooth the adverse effects of large shocks over time. Lack of commitment seriously limits the government's ability to use debt as a shock absorber. Under discretion, an increase in debt leads to an increase in inflation expectations and therefore higher nominal interest rate distortions. Hence, the discretionary government keeps debt in close vicinity of its steady-state level, and the response of taxes, inflation, and interest rates to shocks is much more pronounced under discretion than under commitment. This is particularly relevant for large shocks and when the initial stock of government debt is already high at the time the shock occurs. We also argue that the adverse welfare effects of disasters are larger under discretion than under commitment, but these welfare differentials can be significantly reduced by making the discretionary government inflation averse.     

Beat 'em or Join 'em? Export Subsidies versus International Research Joint Ventures in Oligopolistic Markets

We compare adversarial with cooperative industrial and trade policies in a dynamic oligopoly game in which a home and foreign firm compete in R&D and output and, because of spillovers, each firm benefits from the other's R&D. When the government can commit to an export subsidy, such a policy raises welfare relative to cooperation, except when R&D is highly effective and spillovers are near-complete. Without commitment, however, subsidisation may yield welfare levels much lower than cooperation and lower even than free trade, though qualifications to the dangers from no commitment are noted.
JEL classification: F 12; F 13     

Internal debt and welfare

This paper analyzes how multinational firms' internal debt financing affects high-tax countries. It uses a dynamic small open economy model and takes into account that internal debt impacts both the multinational firms' investment decisions and the government's tax policy. The government has incentives to redistribute income from firm owners to workers. If the government's redistributive motive is not too strong, internal debt reduces welfare in the short term by decreasing tax revenues. However, debt financing stimulates capital accumulation and exerts a positive long-term welfare impact.     

Agency Contracts,Noncommitment Timing Strategies and Real Options

Given that an owner lacks the ability to commit to his or her timing decisions under a manager's hidden action, we consider the optimal design of the contract and the owner's optimal timing decisions. Using a real options approach, we show that, compared with the full commitment case, a higher (lower)‐quality project is launched later than (at the same time as) the first‐best case, whereas the replacement of the manager is (is not necessarily) made later if the hidden‐action problem is severe enough (is not severe enough). Severance pay may serve to minimize the compensation for the manager's loss of corporate control.     

风险投资介入与创业企业国际化——基于我国高科技上市公司的实证研究

风险投资对创业企业的成长具有举足轻重的作用;那么,风险投资的介入对其国际化会带来怎样的影响呢?文章基于资源基础观、代理理论和信号传递理论,分析了风险投资影响创业企业国际化的内在作用机理以及风险投资机构特质与创业企业国际化之间的关系,并以我国300家高科技上市公司的非平衡面板数据为样本进行了实证检验.结论表明:(1)风险投资介入不仅能够开拓创业企业国际化的广度,而且也能加强创业企业国际化的深度;(2)不同特质的风险投资机构对创业企业国际化的影响存在差异,有外资背景的、行业专长高的或采取联合投资策略的风险投资机构有利于创业企业在海外市场上的拓展和渗透.文章不仅拓展了现有的企业国际化理论,而且对创业企业的国际化实践也具有借鉴意义.     

Strategic R&D and the innovation of products: understanding the role of time preferences and product differentiation

We evaluate the effects of innovation on competition using an optimal control approach that incorporates firms' time preferences. Using a model where firm(s) innovates by investing in research and development to create a more appealing product for heterogeneous consumers, we examine conditions that maximize social welfare. When firm(s) choose discount rate regardless of market structure, a monopoly will develop more innovative products. However, we show that duopolies may increase innovation if competition alters firms' outlook. Finally, we identify firm incentives to behave myopically, which in the context of collusion may impede industry-wide innovation.     

Corruption and competition in procurement

We consider a procurement problem in which the procurement agent is supposed to allocate the realization of a project according to a competitive mechanism that values bids in terms of the proposed price and quality. Potential bidders have private information about their production costs. Since the procurement agent is also in charge of verifying delivered quality, in exchange for a bribe, he can allow an arbitrary firm to be awarded the realization of the project and to produce a quality level lower than that announced. We compute equilibrium corruption and we study the impact on corruption of the competitiveness of the environment, and in particular of: (i) an increase in the number of potential suppliers of the good or service to be procured, and (ii) an increase of competition in the market for procurement agents. We identify the effects that influence equilibrium corruption and show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, corruption may well be increasing in competition.     

Optimal limited authority for principal

This article studies a principal-agent problem where the only commitment for the uninformed principal is to restrict the set of decisions she makes following a report by the informed agent. We show that an ex ante optimal equilibrium for the principal corresponds to a finite partition of the state space, and each retained decision is ex post suboptimal for the principal, biased toward the agent?s preference. Generally an optimal equilibrium does not maximize the number of decisions the principal can credibly retain. Compared to no commitment, limited authority improves the quality of communication from the agent. As a result, it can give the principal a higher expected payoff than delegating the decision to the agent.     

Adverse selection,commitment and exhaustible resource taxation

This paper studies the contractual relationship between a government and a firm in charge of the extraction of an exhaustible resource. Governments design taxation scheme to capture resource rent and they usually propose contracts with limited duration and possess less information on resources than the extractive firms do. This article investigates how information asymmetry on costs and an inability to commit to long-term contracts affect tax revenue and the extraction path. This study gives several unconventional results. First, when information asymmetry exists, the inability to commit does not necessarily lower tax revenues. Second, under asymmetric information without commitment, an efficient firm may produce during the first period more or less than under symmetric information. Hence, the inability to commit has an ambiguous effect on the exhaustion date. Third, the modified Hotelling's rule is such that an increase in the discount factor does not necessarily reduce the first-period extraction.     

Optimal Delegation

We analyse the design of decision rules by a principal who faces an informed but biased agent and who is unable to commit to contingent transfers. The contracting problem reduces to a delegation problem in which the principal commits to a set of decisions from which the agent chooses his preferred one. We characterize the optimal delegation set and perform comparative statics on the principal's willingness to delegate and the agent's discretion. We also provide conditions for interval delegation to be optimal and show that they are satisfied when the agent's preferences are sufficiently aligned. Finally, we apply our results to the regulation of a privately informed monopolist and to the design of legislatives rules.     

Beneficial collusion in corruption control: The case of nonmonetary penalties

We analyze a corruption model where a principal seeks to control an agent's corruption by supplementing a costless noncollusive outside detector such as the media with a collusive internal supervisor. The principal's objective is to minimize the overall costs, made up of enforcement costs and social costs of corruption. If the penalties on the corrupt agent and a failing supervisor are nonmonetary in nature and yet the two parties can engage in monetary side-transfers, the principal may stand to benefit by allowing supervisor–agent collusion. This benefit may even prompt the principal to actively encourage collusion by hiring a dishonest supervisor in strict preference over an honest supervisor.     

Endogenous supply of fiat money

We consider whether reputation concerns can discipline the behavior of a long-lived self-interested agent who has a monopoly over the provision of fiat money. We obtain that when this agent can commit to a choice of money supply, there is a monetary equilibrium where it never overissues. We show, however, that monetary equilibria with no overissue do not exist when there is no commitment. This happens because the incentives this agent has to maintain a reputation for providing valuable currency disappear once its reputation is high enough. More generally, we prove that in the absence of commitment overissue happens infinitely often in any monetary equilibrium. We conclude by showing that imperfect memory can restore the positive result obtained with commitment.     

Location decisions of a polluting firm and the time consistency of environmental policy

This paper considers location decisions of a monopolist, who faces a tax on its emissions in the home country, under ex post that is, time consistent, and ex ante, that is precommitment, environmental policies. We show that the monopolist will relocate more often under ex post optimal emission taxes. A government which cannot commit to an ex ante emission tax and sets its tax ex post after abatement effort has been chosen, is unable to affect the monopolist’s location decision, because it cannot commit to strategically reduce its tax level in the first stage. Domestic welfare is often higher under ex post emission taxes whenever the monopolist relocates under both policy regimes. Otherwise, welfare is higher under government commitment to an ex ante emission tax level. Thus, government commitment to a policy is not always welfare improving.     

Why we need a commitment approach to environmental policy

The principal reason why economists have advocated environmental policies based on incentives is that their conception of business behavior derives from the neoclassical model of the firm. Businesses certainly do respond to profit incentives, but firms' behavior is also greatly influenced by socio-political considerations and their organizational capabilities. In recent years, a significant group of businesses that are highly innovative, competitive and socially responsible has emerged. These are not the firms that policy makers envisioned when they formulated command and control and market incentive environmental policies, i.e., control-oriented policies. Because of this, there is a need for new types of environmental policies. Thus, the first purpose of this paper is to propose a new class of environmental policies. The second purpose is to explain why the neoclassical model is deficient as a basis for environmental policy and to explicate the nature of a more appropriate model.Control-oriented policies were designed for firms that behave like neoclassical firms. For high performance organizations (HPOs), what is needed is the opposite of control-oriented policy. What is needed is an environmental policy that takes advantage of HPOs commitment, responsibility, and trustworthiness. The appropriate policy should take into account that overall environmental performance is a product not just of firm behavior but of the whole environmental system of which firms are a part. What is needed is a commitment approach to environmental policy.A commitment approach (CA) to environmental policy is first of all not a control-oriented policy. A CA is a nonregulatory approach in which firms are self-regulated. The CA is only for firms that are able to 1) make a commitment to high environmental performance and 2) develop the capabilities to meet these commitments. The environmental protection (EP) agency that administers the CA would be charged with selecting the particular “high commitment” (HC) firms that would be subject to the policy. Low and intermediate commitment firms would presumably continue to be regulated under the usual control-oriented environmental policies. The selected HC firms would be eligible for government technical assistance and information. In addition, the EP agency could aid the functioning of the environmental systems (ES) in which HC firms are embedded by, for example, providing education and information to these businesses' stakeholders. Finally, it would be necessary for the EP agency to accomplish periodic assessments of how ESs performance departs from the ideal and how these systems' operations require rectification.     

Corporate Social Responsibility Spillover and Competition Effects on the Food Industry

This paper examines the spillover and competition effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) with duopoly competition. In employing the assumption that firm CSR increases consumer willingness to pay for the firm's products while consumer willingness to pay decreases for non‐CSR firm products, some interesting conclusions are achieved. First, CSR spillover effects increase CSR firm outputs and prices, while CSR spillover has the opposite effect on competitors. Second, CSR spillover decreases total outputs and total social welfare levels. Third, competition effects increase CSR expenditures, and CSR firms' CSR policies are the most robust when non‐CSR firms assume a leading position. It is found that total outputs and consumer utilities are highest when CSR firm acts as leader, while the relationships of social welfare among different cases are ambiguous depending on product substitution and spillover effects.