Partial privatization in mixed duopoly with price and quality competition

We analyze price and quality competition in a mixed duopoly in which a profit-maximizing private firm competes against a state-owned public firm. We first show that the welfare-maximizing public firm provides a lower quality product than the private firm when they are equally efficient. In order to maximize social welfare, government manipulates the objective of the public firm that is given by a convex combination of profits and social welfare. It is demonstrated that an optimal incentive of the public firm is welfare maximization under the absence of quality competition, but it is neither welfare maximization nor profit maximization under the presence of quality competition. The result supports a completely mixed objective between welfare and profit maximizations or partial privatization of the public firm.      

Is Tinkering with Institutional Quality a Panacea for Firm Performance? Insights from a Semiparametric Approach to Modeling Firm Performance

There is a large and growing literature on the impact of institutional quality on economic performance and the broad consensus is that “good” institutions facilitate better economic performance. The literature that provides micro‐level support for the policy discourse about institutional quality does not, however, account for significant intra‐country variation in reactions of firms to changes in business environments, even within the same industry, and it generally ignores the possibility that the impact of institutional quality on firm performance may not be neutral. In this paper, we analyze the impact of institutions on firm performance using an approach that enables us to overcome these problems with the stylized approach. Using cross‐country firm‐level data, we demonstrate that not only does the marginal impact of institutional quality vary significantly within countries, but also that the impact is economically significant only at the two extremes of the distribution. We view this as prima facie evidence that policies that tinker with institutional quality on the basis of the popular wisdom about the impact of these institutions on the average firm may not have the desired or expected impact, at least at the micro level.     

Strategic competition and optimal parallel import policy

Abstract In a two‐country Hotelling type duopoly model of price competition, we show that parallel import (PI) policy can act as an instrument of strategic trade policy. The home firm’s profit is higher when it cannot price discriminate internationally if and only if the foreign market is sufficiently bigger than the domestic one. The key mechanism in the model is that the home firm’s incentive to keep its domestic price close to the optimal monopoly price affects its behavior during price competition abroad. We also analyze the welfare implications of PI policies and show that our key insights extend to quantity competition.     

The Austrian Tertius Gaudens: A Revisit of Competition Theory in Light of Georg Simmel

Austrian market process theory stands out in assigning particular importance to the role of the customer. This is however not really salient as competition is discussed save for in a few particular instances. This is a pity since the market process discourse thereby deprives itself of a firm progressive footing concerning further elaborations of how market dynamics evolve. By drawing on the reasoning that originates some hundred years ago with the works of Georg Simmel, this paper brings forward an Austrian version of his idea on Tertius Gaudens. In a market context this is the alert buyer who benefits from the disunion that prevails between sellers to the extent that market intimacy, conceived of as supplier specificity, is low. In this manner some of the inner workings of the market process, what promotes competition subject to which institutional constraints, are discussed to the benefit of yet another important Austrian demarcation, that of competition as being geared by the customer.     

Voluntary Environmental Investment and Responsive Regulation

Instances of corporate voluntary environmental investments have been rising in recent years. Motivations for such activities include corporate image building, regulatory preemption, and production cost savings. While some of these investments arise from industry attempts to set environmental standards where none currently exist, many investments seem to be aimed at reducing the costs of complying with existing regulations. Using a simple game-theoretic model, we investigate firm motivations for, and welfare consequences of, these types of voluntary investments by focusing on the role regulatory enforcement might play. We find that such investments unambiguously increase when an enforcement regulator acts as a Stackelberg follower (a regulatory structure we refer to as responsive regulation) in setting its monitoring and enforcement strategy. These additional investments may be socially undesirable, necessitating a restructuring of non-compliance penalties.     

Environmental regulation and technology transfers

This paper analyzes the situation in which a national government introduces environmental regulations. Within the framework of an international duopoly with environmental regulations, an environmental tax imposed by the government in the home country can induce a foreign firm with advanced abatement technology to license it to a domestic firm without this technology. Furthermore, when the domestic firm's production technology is less efficient than that of the foreign firm, the foreign firm may freely reveal its technology to the domestic firm. These improvements through the voluntary transfer of technology imply that environmental regulations have positive impacts on innovation.     

Why Companies Bring the State Back In. The Voluntary Self-Nationalisation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Rise of ‘Governance by Government’

ABSTRACT

While companies usually prefer private to hybrid governance, they sometimes transfer governance to governments. This paper assumes that this emerges from a decline in a firm’s relative market position. It tests this assumption in a two-stage qualitative analysis: First, it conducts a fuzzy-set QCA of these decisions based on BP’s Annual Company Reports. Second, it presents a process tracing of the voluntary self-nationalisation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Corporation. The paper produces three core findings: First, threats to a company’s survival enable a preference reversal in favour of governmentalisation. Second, shareholder dissatisfaction is a crucial motivator for governmentalisation. Third, managers with an entrepreneurial role-model are more sensitive to autonomy costs and more likely to opt for unconventional governance options.     

Regulating a Polluting Oligopoly: Emission Tax or Voluntary Agreement?

This paper compares, in a polluting oligopoly, an emission tax and a form of environmental policy called voluntary agreement (VA). Here there are two ways of reducing pollution: output contraction and end‐of‐pipe abatement. Given the imperfect competition, firms’ reaction to the tax is sub‐optimal. They reduce output excessively in order to raise the price and do not abate enough. The VA is a take‐it‐or‐leave‐it contract on abatement effort, offered to the firms with the threat of a tax. It has a limited effect on output and always allows higher abatement than the tax. We find that this kind of VA may be more efficient than the tax in a concentrated industry, when pollution is not too harmful and when the abatement technology is rather efficient and cheap.     

Environmental Innovations and Firm Profitability: Unmasking the Porter Hypothesis

We examine impacts of different types of environmental innovations on firm profits. Following Porter’s (Sci Am 264(4):168, 1991) hypothesis that environmental regulation can improve firms’ competitiveness, we distinguish between regulation-induced and voluntary environmental innovations. We find that innovations which do not improve firms’ resource efficiency do not provide positive returns to profitability. However, innovations that increase a firm’s resource efficiency in terms of material or energy consumption per unit of output have a positive impact on profitability. This positive result holds for both regulation-induced and voluntary innovations, although the effect is greater for regulation-driven innovation. We conclude that the Porter hypothesis does not hold in general for its “strong” version, but depends on the type of environmental innovation. Our findings rest on firm-level data from the German part of the Community Innovation Survey 2008 (CIS 2008).     

Eco-labels, Trade and Protectionism

Eco-labels are suspected to serve protectionist purposes. We analyze the choice between an environmental standard and a voluntary eco-label scheme in a partial trade model with one domestic firm and one foreign firm. The environmental standard will only apply to the domestic firm, while both firms can adopt the eco-label. Pollution is production related, and domestic consumers demand products that are produced in an “environmentally friendly” way. Our results show that it may be optimal for the domestic government to introduce an eco-label and get both firms to adopt the label, instead of setting an environmental standard. However, to what extent this policy serves protectionist purposes is ambiguous. In particular, if the willingness to pay for green products is sufficient to cover the pollution abatement costs of the foreign firm, foreign firm profit will increase while domestic firm profit will decrease compared to the outcome with a domestic environmental standard. On the other hand, if the willingness to pay for green products is insufficient, the foreign firm would be better off with a domestic environmental standard.     

基于成本信息缺失的VER政策与社会福利分析

文章在贸易主体间成本信息缺失的基础上,重新探讨了VER的政策含义。研究结果发现,在本国对外国厂商成本信息缺失的情境下,若产品市场为Cournot竞争,则VER将对两国产生实质的影响:对出口国而言,不论其厂商为何种类型,此时的VER政策都是非自愿的;本国的福利变化则需视出口厂商的类型而定。而在Bertrand竞争下,VER只在出口厂商为高成本类型时方对出口国有利,且不论外国厂商为何种类型,VER皆无法使两国同时获利。     

机构投资者对新创企业绩效的影响：一个被调节的中介模型

机构投资者能够改善企业治理效果,进而积极影响企业绩效,但该类研究都是基于成熟企业情境,未考虑新创企业情境的特殊性。基于新创企业研究情境,构建一个被调节的中介模型,从战略决策视角探讨机构投资者、创业导向及环境动态性对企业绩效的影响。结果表明,机构投资者显著抑制企业创业导向;创业导向正向影响企业绩效;创业导向在机构投资者与企业绩效之间发挥中介作用。研究还发现,环境动态性不仅负向调节创业导向与企业绩效的关系,还正向调节创业导向在机构投资者与企业绩效关系中的中介作用。研究结论有助于深入理解机构投资者影响企业绩效的作用机理及边界条件。     

WHEN ARE VOLUNTARY EXPORT RESTRAINTS VOLUNTARY? A DIFFERENTIAL GAME APPROACH

We revisit voluntariness of voluntary export restraints (VERs) in a differential game model of duopoly with sticky prices. We show that a VER set at the free trade level has no effect on equilibrium under open‐loop strategies while the same policy results in a smaller profit for the exporting firm, i.e. it is involuntary under a non‐linear feedback strategy. Moreover, we prove an extended proposition of Dockner and Haug (1991 ) on voluntariness of VERs under a linear feedback strategy.     

Structural Estimation of Variety Gains from Trade Integration in Asia

This article studies the variety gains of trade integration in Asia. Adopting a heterogeneous firm model of trade of monopolistic competition allowed us to estimate not only the welfare gains because of country specialisation, but also the variety gains arising from trade integration. The underlying structural parameters were estimated econometrically, based on a large panel of firm‐level data for the Asian economies (ORIANA). Our empirical findings suggest that, when relaxing the assumption of firm homogeneity and accounting for export market entry costs, the gains from trade integration are higher than in conventional models with representative firms.     

Wage inequality and between-firm wage dispersion in the 1990s: A comparison of rural and urban enterprises in China

Using a worker–firm matched sample, this paper compares the changes of wage structures of urban and rural enterprises following public sector restructuring in China's manufacturing sector. While the wage responses of rural firms with respect to firm characteristics are found to have declined steadily, compensation of urban workers has become increasingly linked to their firms' ability to pay. Our analysis reveals that industrial restructuring has weakened the influence of institutional factors, such as market power, soft budget constraints, and insider influence, on the wage determination of rural firms but it has enhanced their impact on urban firms. Journal of Comparative Economics 33 (4) (2005) 664–687.     

The effect of environmentally sustainable practices on firm R&D: International evidence

Using a comprehensive dataset covering 42 countries spanning 2002–2013, this paper empirically examines the effect of environmentally sustainable practices (ESP) on R&D intensity in firms. We use three separate firm-level ESP scores that distinguish between the mandatory and voluntary compliance of environmental regulations mandated within an industry and a country. Our main finding is that an increase in ESP increases R&D intensity. Therefore, ESP encourages a higher number of innovations and there is a negligible trade-off between these two factors of firm performance. Further, the positive effect of ESP is stronger in countries where institutional quality and R&D infrastructure supports are superior. Our results have important policy implications for firms, investors and national governments.     

Firm location,political geography and environmental information disclosure

As the subjective and objective factors that influence corporate behaviours, political region and firm location are of great importance to environmental information disclosure (EID). With spatial and political geography as a research perspective, this article makes a study by using the samples of manufacturing listed companies from 2009 to 2011. As a result, we determine that regulatory distance and political geography had negative effects on EID, while political geography weakens regulatory distance’s function. After considering an enterprise’s administrative rank, we determined that when the rank is higher, regulatory distance has negative effects on EID; when the rank is lower, the effects are the opposite. Regarding political geography, it always weakened the regulatory distance’s function. Moreover, the effects are significant only when the enterprises had low governmental regulation. The study shows the effects that firm location and political geography have made on EID. At the same time, this study also gives theoretical and empirical evidence to the necessity of raising governmental regulatory effectiveness.     

Innovation,competition and productivity

We investigate the drivers of firm‐level productivity in catching‐up economies by jointly estimating its relationship to innovation and competition using data from the EBRD‐WB Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The findings confirm an inverted‐U shaped impact of competition on R&D. Both competition and innovation have a simultaneous positive effect on labour productivity in terms of either sales or value added per employee, as does a high share of university graduates and foreign ownership. Further positive impacts come from firm size, exports or population density. Innovation and foreign ownership appear to be the strongest drivers of multifactor productivity.     

企业文化再认识——内涵、功能及与企业竞争力的关系

历史和现实表明,成功的企业背后都有成功的企业文化,企业文化对企业竞争力和战略的形成具有核心作用.不同的学者对企业文化有不同的理解,一般而言,企业文化是由"器物文化层"、"组织-制度-结构层"、"人文-价值观层"三个层次组成的系统性的概念.企业文化具有激励功能、目标导向功能、凝聚功能、成本节约和协调与约束功能.营建环境适应性的特色企业文化能使企业形成可持续竞争力和发展力,从而在制度和文化竞争的潮流中永续发展.     

中国企业管理创新演化及其与环境的关系

管理能力作为企业软实力,能够为企业带来竞争优势,而管理创新是提高企业软实力的重要途径。基于组织学习理论、产业组织理论及制度理论,构建了市场竞争、管理创新与制度创新3者间关系模型,并结合典型案例对模型进行了验证。研究表明,市场竞争是转型经济中企业管理创新的主要动因,管理创新与制度创新之间存在双向互动作用,模仿在中国企业管理创新中发挥了重要作用。