Firm characteristics and influence on government rule-making: Theory and evidence

An adversarial game is used to model a firm's intrinsic and exerted influence over a regulator. Data from the World Business Environment Survey provide strong evidence in support of model hypotheses across a wide range of government agents, countries, and regulatory areas. Of particular relevance to public debate, the theory and econometric analysis show that large firms are more likely to be influential and to benefit from subsidies and low tax constraints. However, large firms are also likely to face greater regulatory constraint from environmental and safety rules.     

Infrastructure regulation and reallocations within industry: Theory and evidence from Indian firms

Many firms in developing countries adopt captive power generators to deal with expensive and unreliable supply of electricity. I present a model that combines upstream regulation with downstream heterogeneous firms in a monopolistic competition framework, where firms can pay a fixed cost to adopt this marginal cost-reducing device. The presence of captive power affects the market equilibrium by increasing the level of idiosyncratic productivity a firm needs to survive in the market and by re-allocating sales and profits towards the more productive, adopting firms. Additionally, the rate of adoption is shown to increase with the price of electricity, industries' electricity–intensity and with higher barriers to firm entry. The mechanisms I propose are present for a cross-section of Indian firms.     

Promises,policies and pocketbook voting

Do voters respond to political parties׳ promises or to their past actions? We use a suitable sequence of events in Swedish politics to provide the first answer to this question. In the 1994 election campaign the Social Democrats proposed major cuts in transfers to parents with young children, whereas in the 1998 campaign they promised to increase transfers. The Social Democrats won both elections and delivered on both promises. Using voting among parents with slightly older children as counterfactual, we find that voters with young children responded markedly to economic promises rather than to implemented policies.     

Electricity sector reform in developing countries: an econometric assessment of the effects of privatization,competition and regulation

Electricity sectors in both developed and developing countries have been subject to restructuring to introduce private capital and increase competition. Although the effects of such reforms in a number of the developed economies are now well documented, the experience of developing countries is much less well researched. This paper provides an econometric assessment of the effects of privatization, competition and regulation on the performance of the electricity generation industry using panel data for 36 developing and transitional countries, over the period 1985–2003. The study identifies the impact of these reforms on generating capacity, electricity generated, labor productivity in the generating sector and capacity utilization. The main conclusions are that on their own privatization and regulation (PR) do not lead to obvious gains in economic performance, though there are some positive interaction effects. By contrast, introducing competition does seem to be effective in stimulating performance improvements.      

X-inefficiency and regulatory regime shift in the UK

Concern over economic efficiency has increased in recent years in the UK and has been one of the major driving forces behind the regulatory reforms and privatisation measures which have been initiated since 1979. The amount of detailed work on economic efficiency, and especially on X-efficiency, in the UK is, however, relatively limited. The first part of the paper surveys the previous UK work in this field and explores the implications of the findings in terms of industry wide studies and industry specific studies. The second part of the study looks specifically at the issue of privatisation and the impact that this has had on X-efficiency in the context of the electricity supply industry.     

会计监管理论:综述及其引申

本文在对现有的会计监管概念进行综述的基础上,对会计监管概念进行了引申。认为会计监管是为了保证会计信息质量、维护利益相关者的产权,企业单位负责人和投资者、债权人、政府机构、注册会计师(会计师事务所)、新闻媒体、社会公众等企业内外部利益相关者,对企业的经济活动和会计行为,基于规则而进行的监督管理的一项制度安排。该定义强调会计监管是一项制度安排,会计人员和会计机构的会计监督不应作为单独的会计监管制度安排。     

Time consistency and optimal government policies in perfect foresight equilibrium

This paper develops a framework for determining optimal monetary and fiscal policies in perfect foresight equilibrium. Such equilibria have the property that all underlying demand and supply functions are derived from optimizing behavior, expectations are realized, and all markets clear. The time consistency of optimal policies derived under such circumstances is analyzed for a variety of alternative optimal policy problems. The general conclusion is that time consistency will prevail with respect to the optimization of any single policy instrument which does not appear explicitly in the indirect utility functions; otherwise time inconsistency will result. Monetary instruments are generally examples of the former, and fiscal instruments examples of the latter.     

Currency restrictions,government transaction policies and currency exchange

Summary. We study how currency restrictions and government transaction policies affect the values of fiat currencies in a two country, divisible good, search model. We show that these policies can generate equilibria where both currencies circulate as medium of exchange and where currency exchange occurs between citizens of different countries. Restrictions on the internal use of foreign currency can cause the domestic currency to be relatively more valuable to domestic agents while taxes on domestic currency create an incentive for home agents to hold foreign currency. We demonstrate that some policies increase prices and lower welfare while others do the reverse. Received: September 5, 2001; revised version: March 1, 2002     

Announcements credibility and government securities: evidence from Colombia

This article evaluates the effect of central bank announcements on government securities yields in emerging economy. In particular, based on the Colombian experience, we present empirical evidence to address the effect of credibility scenario in which the central bank announcements are made. The findings denote that credibility performance must be taken into account to verify the impact of monetary policy announcements.     

Municipal aggregation and retail competition in the Ohio energy sector

Ohio allows communities to vote to aggregate the loads of individual consumers (unless they opt out) in order to seek a competitive energy supplier. Over 200 communities have voted to do this for electricity. By 2004 residential switching reached 69% in Cleveland territory (95% from municipal aggregation) but by 2006 had fallen to 8%. Savings are now small, but customer acquisition costs are low and the cost to consumers is negligible. Aggregation and retail competition have been thwarted by Rate Stabilization Plans holding incumbent utility prices below cost since 2006. In the Ohio gas sector, rate regulation has not discouraged aggregation and competition, but market prices falling below municipally negotiated rates can be politically embarrassing. Municipal aggregation thus works when conditions allow it, and enhances competition. How it would fare against individual choice in a market conducive to retail competition remains an open question.      

Young democracies and government debt: evidence from South America

I test the hypothesis that when democracies are young, or still fragile and unconsolidated, government debt tends to increase, presumably because of increased demand for redistribution, or to buy out the electorate, so that democracy becomes acceptable and “the only game in town”. I use a sample of all South American young democracies during the 1970–2007 period and the results, based on dynamic panel time-series analysis, suggest that those young democracies are indeed associated with larger government debt. Furthermore, I test the hypothesis that the outgoing dictatorships of the day bequeathed the young democracies with large government debt. This hypothesis is not confirmed by the analysis. Lastly, there is no evidence that, as those democracies mature over time, government debt tends to decrease. Given how I conduct the exercise, that is, the nature of the sample, the methodology I use and the counterfactuals I run, and also that there are always new episodes of democratisation being experienced by different countries around the world, with some being economically successful and others less so, the results I report are informative of what to expect in terms of government debt during political transitions into democracy when particular institutions are still not in place.     

Fiscal stimulus effectiveness in Japan: evidence from recent policies

This article examines the effects of Japanese fiscal policy after the 2008 global financial crisis using a mixed vector autoregression/event study approach. We focus on the effects of stimulus packages with environmental benefits. The empirical results show that a tax break and subsidy programme designed to promote the adoption of eco-friendly cars helped stimulate automobile production, while a similar programme intended to promote the purchase of energy-efficient appliances had no effect on appliance production.     

Budget referendums and government spending: evidence from Swiss cantons

In many Swiss cantons, new government programs must be approved by a referendum of citizens before money can be spent. Referendums seem like a natural way to address citizen-legislator agency problems, yet statistical evidence on how referendums affect spending decisions is almost nonexistent. We estimate regressions for Swiss cantons using panel data from 1980 to 1998 and find that mandatory referendums reduced government spending by 19% for the median canton after controlling for demographics and other determinants of spending.     

Economic policies and demand for money: evidence from Canada

This study identifies Canadian fiscal and monetary policy regime changes that could influence the services of money. It is argued that if these policy regime changes were not incorporated in the estimation of demand for real balances, the resulting estimate would be biased and unstable. Using Canadian monthly data for the January 1975 to June 2001 period, the paper estimates a standard demand-for-money (M1) function with and without these policy regime changes. It was found the demand for money in Canada is stable over the short- and long-run periods when these policy regime changes are incorporated and the estimated coefficients have correct signs.     

The benefits and costs of ethanol: an evaluation of the government’s analysis

Ethanol production in the United States has been steadily growing and is expected to continue growing. Many politicians see increased ethanol use as a way to promote environmental goals, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and energy security goals. This paper provides a benefit-cost analysis of increasing ethanol use based on an analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency. We find that the cost of increasing ethanol production to almost ten billion gallons a year is likely to exceed the benefits by about three billion dollars annually. We also suggest that earlier attempts aimed at promoting ethanol would have likely failed a benefit-cost test, and that Congress should consider repealing ethanol incentive programs, such as the ethanol tariff and tax credit.      

Fighting inflation in Mexico: Theory and evidence

Mexico adopted the inflation targeting strategy in 2002, and this came together with declining inflation. According to the economic authorities, this also brought about lower pass-through of exchange rate changes into inflation. The objective of this article is to test the main hypotheses of Mexico’s prize-stabilization strategy. As a preliminary step, we show evidence whereby the interest rate has not the impact on demand assumed in the conventional view. We then estimate econometric models, which show first of all that inflation depends essentially on the evolution of labor and input costs. Then we demonstrate that higher employment and higher wages associated with higher output do not necessarily entail higher labor costs because productivity also increases when output rises. In the final section, we set forth our main conclusions, which cast doubts on some crucial aspects of the inflation targeting strategy, and propose a different interpretation about why inflation declined in this country.     

Remittances and incumbency: Theory and evidence

By raising household income, remittances lower the marginal utility of targeted electoral transfers, thus weakening the efficacy of vote buying. Yet, remittances make individuals wealthier and believe the national economy is performing well, which is positively attributed to the incumbent. Building on these insights, I show that the confluence of these divergent channels generate a surprising result that at increasingly higher levels of dissatisfaction with the incumbent, a remittance recipient is more likely to vote for the incumbent than a non‐remittance recipient. These predictions and their underlying mechanisms are substantiated across 18 Latin American countries.     

Globalization and taxation: Theory and evidence

We construct a theoretical model to capture the compensation and efficiency effects of globalization in a set up where the redistributive tax rate is chosen by the median voter. The model predicts that the two alternative modes of globalization- trade liberalization and financial openness- could potentially have different effects on taxation. We then provide some empirical evidence on the relationship between taxation and the alternative modes of globalization using a large cross-country panel data set. On average, globalization is associated with lower taxation but there is some evidence that in countries with high capital-labor ratio, globalization is associated with increased taxation. We make a distinction between de jure and de facto measures of globalization and find a strong negative relationship between taxation and de jure measures of globalization. The results for de facto measures of globalization are mixed.     

Trust and delegation: Theory and evidence

Social trust is associated with good economic performance, but little is known about the transmission mechanisms connecting trust and performance. We explore the effect of trust on delegation decisions. In a theoretical framework, we note that delegation is a low-cost option when management decisions can be implemented without monitoring. This option is, however, risky and more likely to be profitable in higher-trust environments. In a set of cross-country regressions, we show a strong association between trust and delegation, which is increasing in economic sophistication.     

The 2001-3 electricity distribution price control review in the Netherlands: regulatory process and consumer welfare

The outcome of the first electricity distribution price control review in The Netherlands did not deliver the savings initially suggested by the regulator (DTe). During the course of the first 3-year regulatory period, DTe revised the X-Factors four times. The impact on tariffs has been substantial. DTe initially announced in 2000 that savings would be equivalent to 25% of electric distribution revenues ( 2bn). However, final X-Factors in May 2003 resulted in savings of 10% of revenues. The total cost to consumers—when compared to the most probable outcome—has been 140 mln (7% of total revenues).