Stock-market efficiency in thin-trading markets: the case of the Vietnamese stock market

This article reviews developments in the Stock Trading Centre (STC) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the main stock market in the country, since its start in 2000. It presents information about developments in the number of stocks traded, trading activity and stock-price developments. This article focuses on the question whether the market is weak-form efficient. An important element of the investigation concerns the possible bias of the results caused by the thin trading that characterizes the STC. Stock-market returns are corrected for this. The main conclusion is that the STC is not efficient in the weak form.     

Enforcement of Property Rights and Underdevelopment

The authors formalize the role of legal infrastructure in economic development in a general‐equilibrium model with endogenously determined property rights enforcement. The mutual importance of property rights protection and market production is illustrated by the model's multiplicity of equilibria. In one equilibrium, property rights are enforced, and market activity unhampered. In the other, property rights are not enforced, discouraging economic activity, which leaves the economy without the resources and the incentives to enforce property rights. Even identically endowed economies may therefore find themselves in very different equilibria.     

Discrimination against Migrants in Urban Vietnam

In 2009, migrant workers in the two major cities of Vietnam, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, earned 42% less per hour than did non-migrant (“resident”) workers. We seek to explain this gap using data from a carefully-designed urban poverty survey undertaken in 2009 by the General Statistics Office. We use the method proposed by Brown, Moon, and Zoloth, which first explains how workers sort into different sectors, and then examines wage differentials using a Blinder-Oaxaca style decomposition. About half of the wage gap may be explained by endowments. The system of residential permits (ho khau) may contribute to the difficulties faced by migrants. Our results are broadly similar to, although more stable and plausible than, those found for the major cities in China.     

经济共和主义视角下的地权改革—以林权改革为例

林权改革尝试始于20世纪80年代,于2003年加快了改革的步伐,具有了某种激进的色彩。本文认为,这种改革受到效率优先、市场至上、产权私有、强制变迁等信条的影响,有可能使公平和效率出现张力。作者认为在中央政府的改革思想进一步成熟的背景下,林权改革的指导理论需要实现经济共和主义的转向,并提出了四项替代性原则,即处境公平原则、产权有限原则、民主治理原则和法律平衡原则。经济共和主义并不一般地反对私有林权,也不一般地主张公有林权,而是依据具体条件和上述四项原则来形成不同的权利安排。     

Cultural differences,insecure property rights and the mode of entry decision

We develop a theory of a multinational corporation’s optimal mode of entry in a new market. The foreign firm can choose between a licensing agreement, a wholly owned subsidiary or shared control (joint venture). In an environment in which property rights are insecure, opportunism is possible, and the identification of new business opportunities is costly, we show that the relationship between the quality of the institutional environment and the mode of entry decision is non-monotonic. Licensing is preferred if property rights are strictly enforced, while a joint venture is chosen when property rights are poorly enforced. For intermediate situations, the better use of local knowledge made possible by shared control under a joint venture works as a double edged sword. On the one hand, it makes the monitoring activity of the multinational more credible, on the other it offers insurance to both parties, potentially compromising the incentives faced by the local partner. We are grateful to the Centro Studi Luca d’Agliano for providing financial support. For useful comments we would like to thank Klaus Desmet, Cecilia Testa, Henry Wan and Gerald Willmann and seminar participants at Cornell, Ente Luigi Einaudi, Fundacao Getulio Vargas, Kiel, Milano, Universidad de Sao Paolo, the Midwest International Economics Meetings in Indianapolis, SAET VI conference in Rhodes, and the City University of Hong Kong Conference on Intellectual Property Rights.     

数据要素市场培育：法律难题、域外经验与中国方案

数字经济时代,数据继土地、劳动力、资本、技术之后成为第五大生产要素。目前我国数据权属确定的法律制度不够完善,数据要素市场交易的法律制度尚未建立,数据要素市场监管的法律制度不够健全,这都制约了我国数据要素市场发展。为了培育数据要素市场,应以数据生产者与数据处理者为划分标准,建立“数据生产者（扩展权利)—数据处理者（有限产权)”的数据产权制度;以“降低制度成本—减少交易成本”的思路完善数据要素市场交易相关规则;以“事前预防与事后规制相结合”的方式完善数据要素市场监管法律制度。     

Property rights,entrepreneurship and coordination

The notion of plan coordination enjoys a central place in the analysis of institutions and competitive market processes. The conventional wisdom is that institutions and policies vary in the extent to which they promote competition and how quickly and completely they bring individuals’ plans into closer coordination with one another. Kirzner has provided the most fully elaborated statement on the use of coordination as a positive analytical device for explaining market dynamics and as a normative criterion for evaluating economic policies. We identify the core propositions in his analysis that elucidate how economic coordination depends upon that most fundamental of market institutions – the system of private property rights. We also probe into Kirzner's claims about inherent limitations in our ability to compare the coordinative potential of alternative property rights systems. We unpack the consequences of these core propositions using the economic theory of property rights. We also examine Kirzner's assertion that dynamic competition – including Schumpeterian innovation – is necessarily coordinative in its market effects. We find that his argument rests on the implicit assumption that property rights remain constant during the process of market adjustment. We provide a case study of the advent of commercial aviation as a potential counterexample to his claims.     

CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY: PROPERTY CLAIMS IN A DYNAMIC WORLD

Constitutional political economy concerns the legal foundations of the market. One central component of that legal infrastructure relates to property rights over objects and circumstances. The idea of "takings" causes one to focus on the conditions under which regulatory actions call for compensation to those who imagine that their property rights have been taken. A dynamic economy is alleged here to be one in which legal processes must carry the burden of discovering when particular parties have an interest that can be said to constitute a property right requiring compensation. That is, objects and circumstances are not protected because they are "property." Rather, those objects and circumstances that are protected become, by virtue of that protection, "property." The task for the economist is to understand the perverse incentives to flow from a compensation requirement on all instances of institutional change concerning landed property. A further task is to incorporate a dynamic concept of property rights into general equilibrium models of economic systems.     

Property as an economic concept: reconciling legal and economic conceptions of property rights in a Coasean framework

Adopting a simplistic view of Coase (J Law Econ 3:1–44, 1960), most economic analyses of property rights disregard both the key advantage that legal property rights (that is, in rem rights) provide to rightholders in terms of enhanced enforcement, and the difficulties they pose to acquirers in terms of information asymmetry about legal title. Consequently, these analyses tend to overstate the role of “private ordering” and disregard the two key elements of property law: first, the essential conflict between property (that is, in rem) enforcement and transaction costs; and, second, the institutional solutions created to overcome it, mainly contractual registries capable of making truly impersonal (that is, asset-based) trade viable when previous relevant transactions on the same assets are not verifiable by judges. This paper fills this gap by reinterpreting both elements within the Coasean framework and thus redrawing the institutional foundations of both property and corporate contracting.     

法律还是政治变迁?-以1904-1940年的投资者保护和金融发展为例

本文关注近代中国资本市场发展的制度条件,特别是近代中国工业化的背景下法规和公司章程对投资者权利的保护情况。从纸面立法的角度看,对投资者的保护自清代末期以来呈现出由弱变强的变化趋势;但法律对投资者保护的实施效果并未出现相同趋势。同时,法律对投资者权利的保护水平并没有呈现出与资本市场的发展相关联。这一发现证伪了法律环境对金融发展水平有决定作用的论断。在整理档案的基础上,本文发现近代商人在公司法对投资者保护普遍缺失的制度环境下,通过与政治力量结合、依赖家族纽带等形式获得相对安全的产权保护,这使近代企业的股权集中度普遍较高,直接金融市场发展较为落后。     

WTO与中国企业专利发展战略

WTO以贸易为中心,在全球范围内将货物贸易、服务贸易与知识产权紧密地联系在一起,从而实现了专利保护全球化,知识经济时代知识产权成为了企业生存发展的核心问题,企业的生产、经营、管理都必须以知识产权为中心进行战略定位。专利是市场经济下的一种合法垄断,专利就是市场,要积极发挥专利技术的市场效用。加入WTO以后,中国市场成为了全球市场,中国企业必须立足发展中国家的现实,积极进行战略布局,才能在与跨国公司的竞争中生存和发展。专利战略已成为中国企业实施可持续发展的战略选择,成为了中国企业开展市场竞争的战略重点,也是中国企业进行对外贸易的战略举措。     

A study of legal attributes of carbon emission rights in carbon trading

Clean Development Mechanism （CDM） has given birth to an international carbon trading market prosperity, which provides developing countries with valuable opportunity to address climate change issues right along with economic development and environmental improvement to achieve sustainable development. However, most studies of CDM focus on economics, and few on its legal problems. CDM involves too many aspects. And the clear legal attribute of trading object is the basis of progress of the transaction and also the start point of legal protection. Therefore, this paper in accordance with the inherent principle of property rights economics, and environmental economics in CDM, only discusses CDM carbon emission right legal interpretation and its attribution. The paper recommends that in order to ensure and promote the carbon emission right trading, carbon emission right should be attributed into the system of real rights to be regulated by Real Right Law. In this way, carbon emission right can gain exclusive power of possession and use, which can achieve a clear right definition of environmental goods in line with Coase＇s theory to protect Chinese profit in carbon trading market and promote the development of the carbon trading market further.     

Economic Integration in the Caribbean Community: A Problem of Institutional Adjustment

Law and the economy co-evolve. John R. Commons demonstrated this co-evolution in the transformation of the legal definition of property from physical property to intangible property or the exchange-value of anything realized through transactions. Reasonable transactions required informed participation by parties. The "fetish of liquidity" in the secondary mortgage market fostered by federal laws, favoring mortgage-backed securities, converted the transaction into intangible property. The debtor was no longer the customer of the bank but an obligor to nameless investors uninterested in his/her community. The secondary mortgage market deviated from Commons's standard for reasonable transactions because investors and home buyers were ignorant of the rights, duties, liberties, and exposures of the transactions. We examine the economic outcomes produced by these legal changes in Nevada, and the endogenous forces ignited by these practices in terms of foreclosures and failing communities.     

Firm ownership and internal labour practices in a transition economy

One feature common to many post‐socialist transition economies is a relatively compressed wage structure in the state‐owned sector. We conjecture that this compressed wage structure creates weak incentives for work effort and worker skill acquisition and thus presents adverse consequences for the entire transition economy if a substantial portion of the labour force works in the state sector. We explore firm wage incentives and worker training, as well as other labour practices and outcomes, in a transition setting with matched firm and worker data collected in one of the largest provinces of Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City. The Vietnamese state sector exhibits a compressed wage distribution in relation to privately owned firms with foreign ownership. State wage practices stress tenure over worker productivity and their wage policies result in flatter wage–experience profiles and lower returns to education. The state work force is in greater need of formal training, a need that is in part met through direct government financing. In spite of the opportunities for government financed training and at least partly due to inefficient worker incentives, state firms, by certain measures, exhibit lower levels of labour productivity. The private sector comparison group to state firms for all of these findings is foreign owned firms. The internal labour practices of foreign firms are more consistent with a view of profit‐maximizing firms operating with no political constraints. This is not the case for Vietnamese de novo private firms that exhibit much more idiosyncratic behaviour and whose labour practices are often indistinguishable from state firms. The exact reasons for this remain a topic of on‐going research yet we conjecture that various private sector constraints, including limited access to formal capital, play an important role.     

Ethnic divisions,contract choice,and search costs in the Guatemalan land rental market

This paper shows how ethnic diversity in a context of weak property rights enforcement can result in market segmentation. The paper analyzes how contract enforcement problems affect the joint decision of partner and contract choice by landlords in the land rental market in Guatemala. The empirical method allows partner choice to be determined not only by the characteristics and relative scarcity of the specific landowner and tenant, but also by the characteristics of other potential tenants. The results show that landowners without formal title are more likely to restrict their partners to tenants from the same ethnic group. Partner choice is found to be less important for renting with interlinked land–labor contracts.     

构建农民与农村经济长期发展的财产权基础——基于成都市改革经验的理论分析

在现行的农村土地产权制度下,农民并没有真正意义或物权意义上的土地财产权利。从成都市改革的实践经验来看,在这场改革中,农民个体表达出对土地承包经营权和宅基地使用权权能的完整性及"私有化"的强烈追求,以"还权赋能"为指向的成都市的土地制度改革适应了农民的这一要求。农村土地产权制度改革是完善社会主义市场经济体制的一项重要内容,我们需要在中国特色社会主义理论创新的指导下进行新的实践探索,改革的方向是在不改变土地集体所有权的制度框架下使物权化的土地产权向农民回归,重新构建农民与农村经济长期发展的财产权基础。     

Paying Close Attention to the Research on Property Right of Market

The property fight of market is a foundation, on which various kinds of micro tangible property rights and intangible property rights exist and realize, and as an economic category, the property right of market appears after the class, the state and the equity title. The contents that are involved in the research on the theory and the practice of property fight of market are extensive, including a lot of aspects such as its key theory, the relation between market economy and international competitiveness, etc. Therefore, the research on the property right of market has very important theoretic and practical significance.     

产权制度与企业信用缺失

针对目前对企业信用严重缺失原因的一些片面认识,本文论述产权制度与企业信用缺失的关系.提出产权制度缺陷是企业信用严重缺失的内因,而征信体系不健全等其它因素仅仅是其外因.辅以数学分析,本文论证了转型期产权制度的缺陷如何导致企业信用缺失.因此,除了建立征信体系等措施之外,信用重建必须从根本上建立利于信用形成的现代产权制度.     

中国企业产权改革浅析

在西方现代产权制度理论的基础上,剖析中国现代企业在产权制度改革上的不足,进一步探讨在新经济中,如何深化对国有产权制度的改革,塑造符合社会主义市场经济的又有活力的国有资产产权结构,以及充分认识私营企业在产权发展中的弊端,如何帮助私营企业引进先进的现代产权管理方式,打破现有的产权束缚,完善企业治理机制,发挥私营企业的巨大潜力。     

水权概念和体系的探析——基于资源水与产品水的划分视角

水权是水产权制度的简称,是建立水权市场体系的基础。当前我国面临的水资源短缺与水环境污染危机迫切要求建立有效的水权制度和水权市场体系,以保护和有效配置水资源。为此,法学界和经济学界分别从物权和产权的角度对水权进行阐释和建构。但现有研究对水权的把握过于抽象,难以明确经济主体在用水行为中的损益边界。而以水质变化和用水方式的竞争性、排他性为依据,具体区分资源水和产品水两种水资源形态,能够较为合理地界定和把握水权概念,有针对性地建构水权体系,建立水权市场,从而有助于从微观上定义经济主体的行为边界,从宏观上明确政府与市场的作用边界,为实现水资源的合理配置与可持续发展以及相关立法提供理论依据。