On the labor-managed firm in a competitive environment

A risk-neutral median voter in a labor-managed firm (LMF) facing an increase in the demand for its product will prefer to maintain employment and secure his job to the prospect of a higher dividend accompanied by the risk of unemployment. It is argued that LMFs with fixed employment and output will lose out in competition with flexible-output profit maximizing firms. Partnerships with a small membership in high-human-capital industries will be most likely to survive in a competitive environment.     

Towards an economic theory of the multiproduct firm

This paper outlines a theory of the multiproduct firm. Important building blocks include excess capacity and its creation, market imperfections, and the peculiarities of organizational knowledge, including its fungible and tacit character. A framework is adopted in which profit seeking firms are seen to diversify in order to avoid the high transactions costs associated with using various markets to trade the services of various specialized assets. Neoclassical explanations of the multiproduct firm are shown to be seriously deficient.     

The theory of the labor-managed firm from the membership's perspective with implications for marshallian industry supply

The partial-equilibrium literature on labor-managed (L-M) firms argues that the property-rights structure inhibits economic efficiency and induces perverse responses to price parameters in the short run. But recent general-equilibrium literature demonstrates equivalence of equilibria between L-M and capitalist market economies with the relevant welfare results therefore applying to the L-M economy. Once the L-M firm's maximand is modified to incorporate members' property rights, the short-run industry supply curves of the two economics, under quasi-market conditions consistent with recent Yugoslav reforms, are seen to be equivalent. Hence, the property-rights structure in the L-M economy is compatible with efficiency and normal short-run price responses.     

Budget constraint of a firm and economic theory

Summary Firms in reality are subject to budget constraints which general equilibrium theorists have paid little attention. Using Morishima (1950, 1992) model, this paper deals with firms that are subject to budgets pertaining to sales and investment decisions, and proves the existence of a general equilibrium. We show that an economy with firms subject to budgets does not necessarily satisfy the efficiency proposition, and clarify how the total profit maximum condition in the Arrow-Debreu (1954) type economy ensures an efficiency in a limited dynamic sense.The author is grateful to Professors J. Iritani, H. Nagatani, and K. Urai who gave useful comments on occasions of Saturday Workshop on Economic Theory and Mathematics. He is also grateful to Professor M. Kaneko for his useful comments on an earlier version of the paper Kuga (1993), to which this article is closely related.     

On the opportunism-independent theory of the firm

Previous developments in the opportunism-independent theoryof the firm are either restricted to special cases or are derivedfrom the capabilities or resource-based perspective. However,a more general opportunism-independent approach can be developed,based on the work of Demsetz and Coase, which is neverthelesscontractual in nature. This depends on ‘direction’,that is, deriving economic value by permitting one set of actorsto direct the activities of another, and of non-human factorsof production. Direction helps to explain not only firm boundariesand organisation, but also the existence of firms, without appealingto opportunism or moral hazard. The paper also considers theextent to which it is meaningful to speak of ‘contractual’theories in the absence of opportunism, and whether this analysiscan be extended beyond the employment contract to encompassownership of assets by the firm.     

David Hume and Irving Fisher on the quantity theory of money in the long run and the short run

The Modern variant of internationalization of Swedish economics began at the end of the nineteenth century will Wicksell as the first clearly international economist. By that time foreign influences came especially from the German-language area. We concentrate, however, on the period after the Second World war. Our statistics is based oninter alia, the Scandinagian Journal of Economics. English has gradually become the most important language in citations and Swedish dissertations. American influences have become large, and the Swedish ideal of research is very similar to the American one. The evolution is, however, not unequivocal.     

Intra- and international risk-sharing in the short run and the long run

We investigate empirically how industrialized countries and US states share consumption risk at horizons between 1 and 30 years. US federal states share about 50% of their permanent idiosyncratic risk through cross-state capital income flows. While insurance against transitory fluctuations in output is virtually complete, OECD countries do not share any of their permanent idiosyncratic risk. Our results suggest that purely transaction cost based theories cannot explain the home bias, since the potential welfare gains from insurance against permanent shocks would by far outweigh that of insuring against transitory variation. We conclude that permanent and transitory shocks constitute two qualitatively different kinds of risk and that various forms of endogenous market incompleteness may render permanent shocks a lot harder to insure, in particular at the international level.     

Long run determinants and short run dynamics of inflation in Tunisia

The essential idea of this study is to analyse the origins of inflation at short and long runs in Tunisia relying on annual data during the period 1962 to 2003. We also suggest a model that has a structure determined by monetary and structural factors, and estimated by Johansen's cointegration technique. The empirical results show that inflation is explained by mixed factors: monetary ones such as money supply, the interest rate and the real effective exchange rate; and structural ones like the nominal average annual wage rate, the import prices and the real output. The analysis aims at pointing out the long run determinants of inflation and studying its short run dynamics.     

International risk‐sharing in the short run and in the long run

Abstract International risk‐sharing has far‐reaching implications both for economic policy and for basic research in economics. When countries do not share consumption risk, individuals experience consumption fluctuations that are undesirable and possibly unnecessary. We investigate bilateral risk‐sharing at short vs. long horizons. We find substantial cross‐country consumption correlations at trend and business‐cycle frequencies. Correlations are particularly high within Europe. Prior research focused on first‐difference correlations, which are typically quite low. We argue that this reflects measurement error. At all horizons, we find that consumption correlations are not significantly different from output correlations, implying a lack of deliberate consumption risk‐sharing.     

A bargaining theory of the firm

Suppose that a firm has several owners and that the future is uncertain in the sense that one out of many different states of nature will realize tomorrow. An owner’s time preference and risk attitude will determine the importance he places on payoffs in the different states. It is a well-known problem in the literature that under incomplete asset markets, a conflict about the firm’s objective function tends to arise among its owners. In this paper, we take a new approach to this problem, which is based on non-cooperative bargaining. The owners of the firm play a bargaining game in order to choose the firm’s production plan and a scheme of transfers which are payable before the uncertainty about the future state of nature is resolved. We analyze the resulting firm decision in the limit of subgame-perfect equilibria in stationary strategies. Given the distribution of bargaining power, we obtain a unique prediction for a production plan and a transfer scheme. When markets are complete, the production plan chosen corresponds to the profit-maximizing production plan as in the Arrow–Debreu model. Contrary to that model, owners typically do use transfers to redistribute profits. When markets are incomplete, the production plan chosen is almost always different from the one in a transfer-free Drèze (pseudo-)equilibrium and again owners use transfers to redistribute profits. Nevertheless, our results do support the Drèze criterion as the appropriate objective function of the firm.     

On economic applications of evolutionary game theory

Evolutionary games have considerable unrealized potential for modeling substantive economic issues. They promise richer predictions than orthodox game models but often require more extensive specifications. This paper exposits the specification of evolutionary game models and classifies the possible asymptotic behavior for one and two dimensional models.     

Financial and economic determinants of firm default

This paper investigates the relevance of financial and economic variables as determinants of firm default. Our analysis covers a large sample of medium-sized limited liability firms. Since default might lead, through bankruptcy or radical restructuring, to firm’s exit, our work also relates to previous contributions on industrial demography. Using non parametric tests we assess to what extent defaulting firms differ from the non-defaulting group. Bootstrap probit regressions confirm that economic variables, in addition to standard financial indicators, play both a long and short term effect. Our findings are robust with respect to the inclusion of Distance to Default and risk ratings among the regressors.     

Input cost, capacity utilization and substitution in the short run

This article studies the behavior of input cost shares in an environment where labor is costly to adjust, materials can be adjusted at no cost and capital is fixed. A model relating cost shares with relative prices and adjustment costs is proposed, allowing joint estimation of the elasticity of substitution and the adjustment cost function, which is an unknown function of the capacity utilization. Based on a panel of more than 700 manufacturing firms, we find evidence of strong input share variations according to the degree of capacity utilization. The estimated shapes of adjustment costs curves of labor are in agreement with our theoretical model, and we obtain sensible elasticities of substitution estimates. Based on such estimates, we find evidence of a negative (positive) bias in downturns (recoveries) in conventional productivity growth measures.     

Consistent firm choice and the theory of supply

Summary. This paper analyzes the problem of deriving predictions, regarding supply behavior of a competitive firm, from prior consistency postulates about input-output choices made by such a firm. It extends the literature by introducing a consistency postulate for firm choice, which is weaker than profit-maximization. This consistency postulate is nevertheless both necessary and sufficient for supply responses predicted by the standard theory of firm choice based on the postulate of profit-maximization. Furthermore, our rationality postulate, in conjunction with another condition, is shown to be equivalent to firm choice behavior that can be rationalized in terms of profit maximization.Received: 11 April 2003, Revised: 26 April 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D21.Indraneel Dasgupta: I thank Bhaskar Dutta and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier versions.     

The economic policy uncertainty and firm investment in Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the Australian firm investment activity. We find a significant positive relationship between the EPU and the firm investment over 2002 to 2017 period. Our main results remain unchanged after several endogeneity tests. Further analysis reveals that this relationship becomes pronounced for firms if their headquarters located in small states, firms with more tangible assets, higher operating cash flows and cash holdings, higher profits and leverage, but firms with fewer dividend payouts. Our paper sheds lights on the unique attribute of the impact of the EPU on the Australian firm investment activity and offers important policy and managerial implications.     

Spillovers,integrated production and the theory of the firm

Recent econometric literature has demonstrated the existence of significant technological spillovers within and around groups of advanced (R&D-intensive) firms. I demonstrate thatcompetence blocks of advanced firms operate as technical universities and research institutes, unintentionally providing free educational and research services, often in areas where such services are not supplied by existing educational institutions or where the nature of competence makes traditional educational institutions incapable of supplying them. I demonstrate that the competence that diffuses from such competence blocks is botheconomic andtechnological, that it only diffuses under particular market circumstances, notably characterized by competition, and that the outcomes are typically experimental.Integrated production is an organizational technique to coordinate complex production in mechanical engineering industry within firms and over specialized consultants and subcontractors in the market. Such organizational competence is typically tacit and difficult to communicate outside its production context. Hence, such a production organization often functions as a competence block that spills knowhow throughout the industry. This organizational form is also very useful in illustrating the nature of the firm, the nature of the organizational competence that forms the backbone of western industrial technology and how that competence generates economic growth through the intermediation of firms. I use Swedish aircraft industry as a case illustration.