Optimal supervision with moral hazard

This paper adopts the principal–supervisor–agent hierarchy model pioneered by Tirole [Tirole, J., 1986. Hierarchies and bureaucracies: on the role of collusion in organizations. Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 2, 181–214] to analyze the optimal architecture of supervision. We consider a principal who encounters a double moral hazard problem. In particular, we examine the endogenously determined supervisory effort and the possibility of untruthful revelation of supervisor's message. The degree of accuracy for this endogenously chosen information architecture hinges upon the supervisory technology, the supervisor's reservation utility and the agent's production technology. Besides, though the principal's welfare would be lowered when the possibility of untruthful revelation is taken into account, we find that his desired supervisory effort level may be enhanced instead.     

Renegotiation-proof contract in repeated agency

Renegotiation-proof contracts are studied in infinitely repeated principal–agent problem. Contracts satisfying a weaker notion of renegotiation-proofness always exist. The renegotiation-proof value function has a simple characterization: It is the principal's optimal value function when an appropriate lower bound is placed on the agent's expected utility. Sufficient conditions are provided for renegotiation-proof value function in finite horizon to converge to renegotiation-proof value function in infinite horizon as time goes to infinity.     

Environmental Regulation and the Eco-Industry

This paper re-examines environmental regulation, under the assumption that pollution abatement technologies and services are provided by an imperfectly competitive environment industry. It is shown that each regulatory instrument (emission taxes and quotas; design standards; and voluntary agreements) has a specific impact on the price-elasticity of the polluters’ demand for abatement services, hence on the market power of the eco-industry and the resulting cost of abatement. This implies that the optimal pollution tax will be higher than the marginal social cost of pollution, while a voluntary approach to pollution abatement may fail unless the eco-industry itself is willing to participate.We thank Dominique Bureau, Olivier Godard, Émeric Henry, Nicolas Marchetti, Alain-Désiré Nimubona, Anne Perrot, Gilles Rotillon, Katheline Schubert, the editors Michael Crew and Anthony Heyes, and two anonymous referees for helpful discussions and suggestions. We also acknowledge valuable comments from seminar audiences at HEC Montréal, the University of Paris I, the University of Toulouse, and the DG-Entreprise of the European Commission in Brussels.     

基于委托代理理论的信用违约互换最优契约模型分析

本文阐述了信用风险互换及其委托代理关系．分析了信息不对称下引起信用违约互换道德风险问题,运用委托代理理论建立了相应的信用违约互换契约分析模型．对道德风险下的最优信用违约契约性质进行研究．并提出了解决道德风险、优化信用违约互换的激励机制．确保信用违约互换在我国的健康发展。     

Self-Reporting and Private Enforcement in Environmental Regulation

Self-reporting of compliance status has become a common feature in the enforcement of environmental regulation. In this paper, I generalize existing models of enforcement with self-reporting to include the possibility of private enforcement of regulation through citizen suits. This allows me to identify an additional argument for the efficiency of self-reporting: it can increase the likelihood of a successful suit and thus facilitate private enforcement of regulation. Specifically, if self-reporting sufficiently increases the expected penalty for losing a citizen suit, if the costs of private enforcement are low, and if inspection costs are high enough relative to enforcement costs, self-reporting lowers expected regulatory and social costs by allowing the regulator to rely on private enforcement and decrease his enforcement efforts.

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Discussing the political survival of Romanian ministers since 1989—Do economic conditions matter?

Political longevity in young democracies has attracted the attention of scholars and practitioners alike due to several particular characteristics of such democracies, such as a low level of trust, a low level of credibility, corruption, economic difficulties, a less well‐established rule of law and an increased bureaucracy. In such a context, we studied the tenure duration of Romanian ministers since 1989, as well as their accumulated political longevity in ministerial offices. Using proportional hazards regression, we observed some peculiarities in the young Romanian democracy in comparison with more established regimes. We observed that left‐wing majorities tend to increase the probability of seat changes and thus diminish tenure longevity. We also observed that good economic conditions may lead to the substitution of certain types of ministries, while higher inflation rates tend to shorten tenure longevity for Romanian ministers. Moreover, our estimations support the finding that Romanian ministers tend to have shorter tenures as the number of past ministerial functions increases and that the burden of simultaneously managing various ministries significantly contributes to the shorter political longevity of a given minister. Finally, recent ministers have had longer tenures than those in the first years after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.     

Regulation of Stock Externalities with Correlated Abatement Costs

We study a dynamic regulation model where firms’ actions contribute to a stock externality. The regulator and firms have asymmetric information about serially correlated abatement costs. With price-based policies such as taxes, or if firms trade quotas efficiently, the regulator learns about the evolution of both the stock and costs. This ability to learn about costs is important in determining the ranking of taxes and quotas, and in determining the value of a feedback rather than an open-loop policy. For a range of parameter values commonly used in global warming studies, taxes dominate quotas, regardless of whether the regulator uses an open-loop or a feedback policy, and regardless of the extent of cost correlation.Early versions of this paper were presented at the Fifth California Workshop on Environmental and Resource Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, May 5–6, 2000, and at the annual meeting of the Canadian Agricultural Economics Society, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, June 1–3, 2000. We thank these conference participants, and two anonymous referees of this journal for their comments, without implicating them in any remaining errors. The opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the views of the Asian Development Bank.     

Optimal Management of Environmental Externalities with Time Lags and Uncertainty

Many environmental externalities occur with time lags that can range from a few days to several centuries in length, and many of these externalities are also subject to uncertainty. In this paper, we examine the key features of an optimal policy to manage environmental externalities that are both lagged and stochastic. We develop a two-period, two-polluter model and obtain closed-form solutions for optimal emissions levels under different combinations of damage functions and stochastic processes. These solutions show that it is not obvious whether greater control should be exerted on polluters that generate externalities with longer lags or on polluters that generate externalities with shorter lags. We find that the optimal ranking of polluters with respect to the length of the time lag associated with their externality will depend on (a) the discount rate, (b) conditional expectations of future states of the polluted resource, (c) persistence of the pollutant, and (d) initial conditions.     

双边道德风险条件下科技人员的激励薪酬契约

文章利用现代契约经济学的基本理论,对双边道德风险条件下科技人员的线性激励薪酬契约设计的内在规律进行了分析.分析表明,在理论和实践两方面,线性激励薪酬契约都有广泛存在的合理性.同时,文章根据研究结论并结合中国实际,给出了相应的规范性建议.     

Joint Production,Externalities, and the Regulation of Production Networks

Real production systems are often vertically integrated in thesense that one production process uses the unwanted joint product of another production process as input.This interrelationship links in a non-obvious way the different negative externalities stemming from theproduction processes. An empirical example is the sulphuric acid industry. Our model of a vertically integratedproduction system shows how internalising one currently existing externality may create another externalitywhich has thus far not been existent. We also discuss how environmental policy could deal with this problemwhen regulating integrated production systems.     

机场环境管制探讨

机场环境管制的重点是噪声和排放物污染。除直接管制外,收费是国外机场环境管制中应用得最多且最有效率的经济管制方式。我国除继续强化已有的直接管制方式外,还可以从收取以保护环境为目的的噪声费和排放物费、限制机场土地的使用、采取国际机场协会提出的短期和长期机场环境保护措施三个方面进一步加强机场环境管制。     

Optimal Regulation of Auditing

We study regulation of the auditing profession in a model whereaudit quality is unobservable and enforcing regulation is costly.The optimal audit standard falls short of the first-best auditquality, and it is increasing in the riskiness of firms andin the amount of funding they seek. The model can encompasscollusion between clients and auditors, arising from the jointprovision of auditing and consulting services: deflecting collusionrequires less ambitious standards. Finally, banning the provisionof consulting services by auditors eliminates collusion butmay not be optimal in the presence of economies of scope. (JELClassification: G28, K22, M42).     

基于环境规制的中国出口企业绩效分析研究——以电子信息出口企业为例

环境规制对企业绩效的影响,是通过对生产成本、企业进入和技术创新等影响的传导机制而产生的,既有直接效应,也有间接效应.既有积极影响,也有消极影响.本文利用产业组织理论的结构-行为-绩效分析框架,分析环境规制对出口企业绩效影响的传导机制.研究表明,当政府对产业实施环境规制时,不仅生产成本发生变化,而且企业所在的市场结构以及市场行为也会发生变化.通过综合考察环境规制对各种因素的影响,才能够对环境规制对企业绩效的最终影响结果作出正确的解释,为管理部门和公众提供更为全面的企业环境绩效信息.     

GRANTING AN EXIT OPTION TO CONDUCT AN AUDIT

We study a principal–agent relationship with auditing in which information from an audit is ‘soft’– by conducting an audit, the principal observes the agent's private information, but cannot obtain verifiable evidence on the information. Moreover, the principal's auditing effort is unverifiable in our model. Therefore, besides the agent's misreporting incentive, there is the principal's incentive to accuse the truthful agent even without auditing. If the principal's auditing effort is verifiable, granting no exit option to the agent is optimal although the principal can still accuse a truthful agent after the audit. We show that when the principal's auditing effort is unverifiable, granting an exit option to the agent and auditing are complementary. Without granting an exit option to the agent, no auditing is optimal, and the principal grants an exit option to conduct a sincere audit, which in turn mitigates the agent's misreporting incentive. Our analysis also reveals that, when the cost of auditing is sufficiently large, the principal conducts more sincere audits with a smaller amount of penalty.     

Regulation and Coordination of International Environmental Externalities with Incomplete Information and Costly Public Funds

In this article, we study cross-border externalities in a game played by two principal-agent pairs with adverse selection. Each firm/agent is located in one country and generates pollution by producing complementary or substitute goods, sold on a common market. A fraction of pollution is transferred from one country to another. Each regulator/principal is imperfectly informed about the marginal cost of his domestic firm and accordingly uses secret incentive contracts with costly public funds. We show the necessity of cooperation between competing regulators to effectively internalize all the damages caused to the environment, while reaching the first best. If the level of uncertainty is sufficiently low, we obtain an infinity of noncooperative Bayesian differentiable equilibria, which may necessitate competing regulators to coordinate on an equilibrium. Such coordination constitutes an incentive for competing regulators to cooperate. Our major result states that under some circumstances asymmetric information relaxes the transborder externality problem. Indeed, we show that, when there is a major transfer of pollution and firms' marginal costs are sufficiently high, competing regulators are better off under uncertainty. Therefore, asymmetry of information can have the very consequence of generating regulation that is too strict from the domestic viewpoint but that improves social efficiency when the benefits to both countries are taken into account.     

The appeals process in principal–agent relationships

The appeals process is employed in many organizations including administrative agencies, regulatory authorities, sports organizations, and private companies. This paper examines the dual role of the appeals process in enhancing fairness and inducing performance in principal–agent relationships in the presence of imperfect performance evaluation. Some surprising results emerge. For example, the merit of the appeals process depends on the agent’s aversion to unfairness, and appeals may be optimally denied even if the appeals process is more accurate than the initial evaluation and is costless. An increase in the accuracy of the initial evaluation may reduce the principal’s welfare. Furthermore, the principal’s welfare can increase as the cost of the appeals process increases.     

私募股权投资基金的规制探析

私募股权投资基金在我国不断发展壮大,对于我国资本市场的健康发展起到了积极作用。但是,由于种种客观原因,我国私募股权投资基金的立法工作迟迟没有实质性进展。私募股权投资基金不可避免地存在各种问题。法律的空白给民间私募股权投资基金提供了生存空间,也使其面临相当大的法律风险。本文通过对我国现行私募股权投资基金法律制度进行分析研究,提出我国对私募股权投资基金的法律规制应当从设立、退出和监管三个方面入手,建立和完善我国私募股权投资基金法律制度。     

清洁生产技术创新、治污技术创新与环境规制

本文通过数理模型,证明了环境规制对技术创新的影响存在偏向性,在环境规制强度较弱阶段偏向于促进治污技术创新,而在较强阶段偏向于促进清洁生产技术创新。并利用中国2002-2015年省际面板数据,以清洁生产技术创新水平和治污技术创新水平的比值构建技术创新偏向指数。通过广义可行最小二乘法,估计面板固定效应模型,分析环境规制与技术创新偏向指数的关系,论证了本文的理论命题。另外,企业规模偏向于促进治污技术创新,而第二产业比重的上升、国有企业比例的增加和企业研究与开发支出则显著偏向于促进清洁生产技术创新。     

How (Not) to Foster Innovations in Public Infrastructure Projects*

The government wants an infrastructure‐based public service to be provided. First, the infrastructure has to be built; subsequently, it has to be operated. Should the government bundle the building and operating tasks in a public–private partnership? Or should it choose traditional procurement (i.e., delegate the tasks to different firms)? Each task entails unobservable investments to come up with innovations. It turns out that, depending on the nature of the innovations, bundling can either stimulate or discourage investments. Moreover, we find that if renegotiation cannot be prevented, public–private partnerships might lead the government to deliberately opt for technologically inferior projects.     

管制、竞争与民营银行的发展

金融深化的基础是管制与竞争的均衡。计划体制下,国家对金融业一直采取国有控股或国家垄断,因而产生民营银行压抑现象。市场化改革显化了金融制度与经济制度的摩擦,因而民营银行发展在金融深化中具有现实性,也是金融基础设施建设的重要组成。从竞争的角度看,放松民营银行进入壁垒,有助于金融业适度竞争,同时也是国有银行改革的重要组成部分。当然,金融本身的脆弱性说明银行民营化过程也是管制重建的过程。