Corporate Governance and the Public Interest

Corporate governance has long been a concern for industrial economists but not typically a centrepiece of policy. One reason is that policy design has been based on a market‐orientated approach to the theory and impact of the firm. In contrast, this paper is rooted in a strategic decision‐making perspective that makes corporate governance a central policy issue. Moreover, whereas responses to corporate scandals have focused on shareholders wronged by managers, we see the significance of corporate governance very differently. Merely to punish managers who fail shareholders is to ignore systemic failures, namely that, by design, managers are not democratically accountable to all interests in corporations’ activities. The impact of modern corporations turns crucially on who governs. In practice preferences over strategy vary across actors but not all interests are currently being represented in decision making, resulting in a failure to govern in the public interest. As solutions, we consider the design of company law and also more immediate ways forward, focusing on regulation and democratically controlled public agencies. Our prime concern is the fundamental significance of active, effective citizens. Throughout, the arguments are illustrated using examples from various countries and industries.     

The microfoundation of macroeconomic populism: The effects of economic inequality on public inflation aversion

Previous work on the politics of monetary policy has focused on the role of distributive motives stemming from individual characteristics such as income or factoral/sectoral interests in citizens' formation of monetary policy preferences. However, the existing literature has paid little attention to how a country's overall distributive context, namely, its level of economic inequality, affects citizens' preferences vis-à-vis price stability and employment. This article argues that as inequality pushes more citizens below a society's average income, there is more demand for redistribution through higher employment and increased fiscal spending, each of which can be better supported by expansionary monetary policy. This means that inequality makes citizens more tolerant of inflation. This study uses the International Social Survey Program, the Integrated Values Surveys, and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, which together include 293,100 respondents from 53 countries between the years 1976 and 2016 to demonstrate that overall, inequality significantly moderates citizens' inflation aversion.     

Whither Keynesian probability? Impolite techniques for decision-making

The critical literature on Keynes has provided extensive analysis of why individual agents may find convenient to adopt a “conventional judgement”, and what he meant by “polite techniques” used to save their faces as “rational, economic men.” This paper concentrates instead on impolite techniques of thought suited to deal with Keynesian uncertainty. The paper suggests that the thread going from Keynes's Treatise on Probability to the General Theory and its defence provides a positive analysis of decision-making under uncertainty, and that placing emphasis on this positive analysis simply means adhering to Keynes's long-standing commitment to a (surely peculiar) probabilistic set-up.     

Obedience to the symbol of authority: Experimental evidence on the symbolic source of legitimate authority

The performance of government activities, including law enforcement and regulation, depends on whether citizens perceive them as legitimate. Although substantial studies have explored the institutional sources of legitimacy, how non-institutional factors affect perceived legitimacy remains unclear. Human societies have a long history of employing symbolic icons to enhance the legitimacy of a given authority. This study reports a laboratory experiment of public goods that investigates whether (and to what extent) symbolic factors enhance perceived legitimacy. In the contexts of various incentive schemes and transparency levels, an “authority” in each group decides whether to target a “citizen” for punishment after observing the contributions of “citizens,” and untargeted citizens then choose to support or hinder the authority. A symbolic scepter is issued to the authority in the treated group, whereas this symbol is absent in the control group. The experimental results suggest that the political symbol significantly enhances the authority's legitimacy regardless of the payment scheme and information transparency. A further analysis shows that the political symbol is not associated with the authority's choices regarding enforcement. Rather, the symbol's effect on perceived legitimacy is primarily driven by the citizens' side—that is, the increasing intrinsic tendency to support authority.     

Elections as takeover bids: Some agonistics concerning good government

Agency theory has been widely applied to the governance of business corporations and to good advantage. The formal framework of agency theory pertains as well to polities, wherein citizens are the principals and politicians the agents. Where takeover efforts occur irregularly for corporations, they occur at regular intervals through elections for polities. Timothy Besley’s Principled Agents uses the agency theory to argue that electoral competition will generally select competent and public-spirited politicians. This claim follows from his formal framework, but that framework ignores some questionable and unsettled matters that challenge Besley’s relatively roseate view of the qualitative character of electoral selection.      

日本园林“走出去”的经验及启示

“一带一路”倡议的开展与“走出去”战略紧密相关，而“走出去”战略本身又与不同层面、不同领域的“出发”相关，其中既有经济上的投资与合作，又有文化上的交流与互通。而园林本身作为“文化综合体”天然地具有综合性的优势，因此，中国园林“走出去”已经引起新时期中国园林人的重视。实际上，日本园林的海外修建与传播史远较我国久远，且已取得了显著的成就，赢得了世界性的口碑。这些实绩与其将园林输出有机寓于国家文化战略之中的认识，与其具体实践过程中所不断形成的历史性经验等有关。通过文献与实地踏勘相结合，将这些方面的“他山之石”内容加以研究、提炼，指出日本园林“走出去”的成功除特定历史因素之外，从战略到战术层面均有值得我国借鉴之处。     

Police Violence and the Underreporting of Crime

This paper examines the relationship between police violence and the reporting of crime. Utilizing original data from a large‐scale household survey conducted in Costa Rica from October 2013 to April 2014 (n = 4,200), we find that the observation of police violence significantly reduces citizens’ willingness to report crime. The implications of this finding are explored using a game‐theoretic model of crime, crime reporting, and police misconduct. The model reveals that although the prospect of police violence against criminals may generate a degree of deterrence for criminal behavior, permissiveness toward police violence also raises expectations about the likelihood of police abuse against law‐abiding citizens. Consistent with our empirics, this reduces citizens’ propensity to report crime, thereby fostering a climate of impunity for criminal activity.     

Modeling Technological and Institutional Change in Karl Marx’s Theory of Capitalism

Health policy in the United States struggles with apparently conflicting purposes: (1) access to health care and (2) cost-containment. The failures of policy to resolve this apparent conflict have produced inequities in the health system and the perverse outcomes of high costs and poor access. The failures of policy are associated with the third-party payment system that has become a "rationing transaction" in John R. Commons' hierarchy of transactions. The dominion of private interests over the payment system elevates the financial interests of insurers over the interests of patients. Commons' approach to "reasonable value" as a means of resolving conflicts of interest through a process that engages all participants in the going concern suggests a strengthened role for the public sector in the payment system to achieve the public purposes of the health system.     

Beyond Behavioral Finance

Throughout its history, finance theory has made certain simplifying assumptions regarding human behavior and concerned itself with whether the implications of these assumptions were true and not with whether the assumptions themselves were. Recently, however, more interest has been shown in experimental investigation of these assumptions, and the resultant behavioral finance has been presented as a significant departure from the current research paradigm. Recent research in cognitive science, however, is finding that the mind can and does work differently than traditional finance assumes, and the differences between the behavioral assumptions of traditional finance and the supposedly more realistic ones of today's behavioral finance are frequently superficial. Knowledge and knowing are likely to be profoundly different from the forms in which we have incorporated them in our extant models, both traditional and behavioral, and they differ in ways similar to those which, for example, have differentiated corporations from corporate images in marketing. To truly understand what is going on we must go beyond behavioral finance to address these differences.     

Convenient Stalemates: Why International Patent Law Negotiations Continue Despite Deadlock

For almost 30 years, industrialised, emerging and developing countries negotiate on a substantive patent law harmonisation under the umbrella of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Although a common approach or at least some vague outlines of common ground seem beyond reach, all participants regularly agree on a continuation of the discussion process. Despite an incessant wheeling and dealing among delegates and WIPO officials, the only effect is that discussions still keep going on. In our paper, we draw on a synthesis of both neo-mercantilist and liberal institutionalist insights in order to explain the vibrant stalemate of substantive patent law harmonisation talks. We argue that WIPO's involvement in the negotiation process offers an incentive structure for states to continue negotiations even when a successful conclusion appears rather improbable or downright undesirable. WIPO officials do not necessarily oppose the alternative deployment of their resources and services, because national negotiators' tactics at least partially coincide with their own interests. The paper concludes with a summary of the major results and a discussion on their potential empirical and theoretical relevance for further studies.     

我国城市房屋拆迁利益博弈及其法律调整

城市房屋拆迁是一个关系到公民个人财产权利的重大问题,同时也是政府行使行政管理职权的重要体现。但现实中拆迁时各方的利益博弈却存在严重的不均衡,被拆迁人利益经常受到侵害。解决这一矛盾的根本途径在于重构我国房屋拆迁制度的立法理念;厘清政府在房屋拆迁中的职能定位,退出拆迁人和被拆迁人之间的民事关系;同时需要完善相关法律体系控制政府权利的滥用以及加强社会各界的共同参与和监督。     

论公司的社会责任

公司的社会责任是社会经济文化发展到一定阶段协调利益失衡的产物。随着中国社会经济发展的加速,公司对社会的影响也愈加增大。加强公司社会责任的认知及建设,对中国社会的健康、和谐发展有着重要作用。     

James M. Buchanan’s contractarianism and modern liberalism

This paper contrasts Buchanan’s contractarian–constitutional liberalism with Hayek’s evolutionary liberalism and Rothbards free-market liberalism as representative branches of the classical liberal tradition. While Hayek and Rothbard focus on individual liberty as private autonomy, Buchanan posits that individual sovereignty should be recognized as the fundamental normative premise of liberalism. He insists that a consistent application of this premise requires liberals to respect individuals as sovereigns not only in their capacity as private law subjects but also at the constitutional level of choice where, as sovereign citizens, they choose, jointly with their fellow citizens, the rules under which they wish to live. It is argued that by supplementing the notion of individual liberty as private autonomy with the concept of individual sovereignty in constitutional matters Buchanan lays the theoretical foundation for complementing the well-developed liberal theory of the market with a consistent liberal theory of democracy.     

The results of ‘mass privatization’in Romania: A first empirical study1

This paper provides an assessment of the contribution to privatization in Romania of the 1995-96 Mass Privatization Programme (MPP), which offered shares in nearly 5,000 companies to citizens in exchange for coupons. Analysing a comprehensive database of MPP companies, we find that an average of only 18.7 per cent of these companies' shares were actually transferred to Romanian citizens, and only 7.8 per cent of the companies were majority privatized (on a size-weighted basis). We estimate that the MPP accounted for only about 5.5 per cent of the value of state-owned enterprise assets inherited from the socialist period. The design of the programme created highly dispersed ownership structures, which is likely to generate particularly difficult problems in the many small companies in the programme. We place our findings in the context of the history of Romanian privatization policies since 1990, and provide some comparisons with mass privatization programmes in other countries. We also analyse the implications of the MPP for the corporate governance and the restructuring of enterprises.     

控股股东、实际控制权与小股东权益保护

股权集中型公司是现代公司的主流组织形态之一,其代理成本主要产生于控股股东与小股东之间存在的利益冲突.通过发行多种类股票、交叉持股和金字塔式控股等方式,控股股东能够获取比与其股权份额相对应的名义控制权更大的实际控制权,因而更容易发生以侵害小股东权益作代价追求控制权私下收益的道德风险行为,致使代理成本高昂.声誉机制和法律手段能够迫使控股股东收敛侵占行为,且法律手段较声誉机制更为有效.在中国,声誉机制对控股股东基本不起作用,保护小股东权益的最为有效的措施是完善相关立法并加大执法力度.     

环境保护中的公众参与和政府、企业的失位——关于塑料袋有偿使用问题的研究

介绍环境保护中责任分担的基本概念,并结合中国限塑令实施以来的具体情况进行阐述。结果表明,目前中国限塑政策的实施状况是:政府倡导和制定规则,公众买单。在这一环保实践中,出现了政府在利益分担上的失位和企业的失位,更多的责任必须由公众来承担,这实际上是环保实践中极不正常也极不公平的一种责任分配制度。结合欧美主流国家的相关实践和中国现行的法律,限塑令这一涉及公众普遍利益的政策应当被修改和完善。     

Is Transparency To No Avail?*

Transparent decision‐making processes are widely regarded as a prerequisite for the working of a representative democracy. It facilitates accountability, and citizens might suspect that decisions, if taken behind closed doors, do not promote their interests. Why else would there be the secrecy? We provide a model of committee decision‐making that explains the public's demand for transparency, and committee members' aversion to it. In line with case study evidence, we show how pressures to become transparent induce committee members to organize pre‐meetings away from the public eye. Transparency does not improve accountability, but it might improve the decision.     

中国产品质量监管的声誉模型分析

当前中国商品市场上假冒伪劣现象严重,损害消费者权益的事件层出不穷.在两阶段声誉模型中,消费者运用贝叶斯法则推断企业诚信状况并决定下期的购买行为,此时声誉力量可以约束企业的投机主义倾向,将造假企业驱逐出市场.而对重点行业加强监管、加大处罚力度、鼓励消费者投诉,可以促进市场净化,加快诚信社会的建设步伐.     

Predicting FDI inflows: Exploring a nonlinear relationship between peace years,oil wealth,and the rule of law

Despite previous studies investigating the impacts of various factors such as peace years, natural resources, and the rule of law on foreign direct investment (FDI), empirical findings remain inconclusive. Therefore, this study investigates the interplay between these factors in shaping host country conditions that facilitate FDI inflows. Using generalized additive models, we examine the simultaneous effects of peace years, oil wealth, and the rule of law on FDI inflows in a sample of non-OECD countries from 1970 to 2009. Our results reveal that established peace is a critical factor in attracting FDI inflows for both oil-exporting and non-oil-exporting countries. However, the effects of the rule of law vary depending on oil wealth. Oil-exporting countries receive more FDI inflows when they have a weak rather than a strong rule of law, while non-oil-exporting countries tend to receive more foreign investments when they have a moderately strong rule of law. We argue that countries with oil wealth combined with a moderately weak rule of law provide an environment that is conducive to multinational corporations (MNCs) in extractive industries seeking monopoly rents. Conversely, countries without oil wealth should create stable yet efficient environments that protect property rights and promote labor market flexibility to appeal to non-resource-seeking MNCs.     

Keeping Workers at a Distance: The Connection Between Borders and Finance in Andrew Niccol’s In Time

This article presents In Time (Andrew Niccol, 2011) as a film that illuminates the role of borders at a local level and their relationship with the transnational interests of financial corporations. In Time imagines a near future in which time has replaced money as the currency. In this world, people have been genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, so, when they reach that age, they have to earn time or they die within a year. The film, shot in Los Angeles, portrays a world divided into “zones” and focuses on two of them: Dayton, a working-class area, and New Greenwich, a financial district. Drawing on this setting, In Time explores the roles of borders in the processes by which the later extracts value from the former. In order to investigate such processes, I consider the different kinds of borders that appear in the film, including not only fences and walls, but also other borders related to wealth, time, etiquette, behaviour, race, and surveillance. Close examination of borders, spatial dynamics, and characters’ behaviour elucidate the rationale behind the socioeconomic structures that the film depicts, who benefits from them, and what their interests are. Focusing on such aspects, this article argues that the different borders that appear in the film control the movement of people and money, thereby contributing to several conditions that benefit financial firms: the generalisation of debt, the casualisation of labour, workers’ resignation, the protection of the financial sector, and the criminalisation of the poor.