THE DISTRIBUTION OF RESEARCH PERFORMANCE ACROSS AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES, 1992–2003, AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR 'BUILDING DIVERSITY'

We contribute to the debate on research performance by comparing the distribution of research inputs and outputs across Australian universities during 1992–2003. We have calculated annual Gini coefficients for various performance measures and Lorenz curves for the final year of the study. Various findings are evident. Research-input measures have remained relatively unevenly distributed across universities. Output measures were more evenly distributed and this exhibited a gradual and rather consistent convergence through time, supporting the view that the research output is being generated gradually more equally across Australia's universities. The exclusion of the 'Group of Eight' (Go8) universities results in a more even distribution of performance. However, in 2003 this group took the lion's share of research inputs but produced a smaller share of outputs. Our findings are relevant to current funding policy discussion.     

Real Estate Prices and Corporate Investment: Theory and Evidence of Heterogeneous Effects across Firms

In this paper, we investigate the effect of real estate prices on productive investment. We build a theoretical framework of firms' investment with credit rationing and real estate collateral. We show that real estate prices affect firms' borrowing capacities through two channels. An increase in real estate prices raises the value of the firms' pledgeable assets and mitigates the agency problem characterizing the creditor–entrepreneur relationship. It simultaneously cuts the expected profit due to the increase in the cost of inputs. We test our theoretical predictions using a large French database. We do find heterogeneous effects of real estate prices on productive investment depending on the position of the firms in the sectoral distributions of real estate holdings.     

Employee Ownership and Company Performance

This paper investigates how Britain's largest employee-owned firm, the John Lewis Partnership, performs relative to its major competitors. In the context of John Lewis's unique constitutional structure, employee ownership appears to offer significant advantages in the market place. It is difficult to assess the relative importance of particular policies; as a group, employee ownership, open information flows, high wages, and profit share are clearly associated with high productivity.     

COMPETITION AND DISCLOSURE*

There are many laws that require sellers to disclose private information about the quality of their products. But the theoretical justification for these laws is not obvious: economic theory predicts that a seller will voluntarily disclose such quality information, however unfavorable, as long as it is costless to do so. Here we show that competitive pressures between firms can undermine this full disclosure result, and explain why it may be the case that only high‐quality firms choose to disclose. In this setting, mandatory disclosure laws can promote competition and raise consumer surplus at the expense of firm profits, potentially increasing the efficiency of the market.     

International Investment Restrictions and Closed-End Country Fund Prices

Some closed-end country funds trade at large premiums relative to their net asset values. This paper examines whether international investment restrictions raise country fund price-net asset value ratios by segmenting international capital markets. We test whether a relation exists between announcements of changes in investment restrictions and changes in these ratios using weekly data from May 1981 to January 1989. The results provide evidence that some foreign markets are at least partially segmented from the U.S. capital market.