Voting in assemblies of shareholders and incomplete markets

Summary. An economy with two dates is considered, one state at the first date and a finite number of states at the last date. Shareholders determine production plans by voting - one share, one vote - and at -majority stable stock market equilibria, alternative production plans are supported by at most percent of the shareholders. It is shown that a -majority stable stock market equilibrium exists if where S is the number of states at the last date and J is the number of firms. Moreover, an example shows that -majority stable stock market equilibria need not exist for smaller s.Received: 23 December 2002, Revised: 14 June 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D21, D52, D71, G39. Correspondence to: Hervé CrésThe authors are grateful to an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. Financial support from the Danish Research Councils and hospitality of HEC is gratefully acknowledged by Mich Tvede and support from Fondation HEC is gratefully acknowledged by Hervé Crés.     

Component efficient solutions in line-graph games with applications

Recently, applications of cooperative game theory to economic allocation problems have gained popularity. We investigate a class of cooperative games that generalizes some economic applications with a similar structure. These are the so-called line-graph games being cooperative TU-games in which the players are linearly ordered. Examples of situations that can be modeled like this are sequencing situations and water distribution problems. We define four properties with respect to deleting edges that each selects a unique component efficient solution on the class of line-graph games. We interpret these solutions and properties in terms of dividend distributions, and apply them to economic situations. This research has been done while the third author was visiting Tinbergen Institute at the Free University, Amsterdam. The research is part of the Research Programme “Strategic and Cooperative Decision Making” at the Department of Econometrics. Financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in the framework of the Russian-Dutch programme for scientific cooperation, is gratefully acknowledged. The third author also appreciates partial financial support from the Russian Leading Scientific Schools Fund (grant 80.2003.6) and Russian Humanitarian Scientific Fund (grant 02-02-00189a). We thank three anonymous referees for their valuable comments.     

Joseph A. Schumpeter’s contributions in the area of fiscal sociology: a first approximation

Fiscal sociology deals with the ramifications of the fiscal activities of the state into areas which are not their primary target. These effects may occur in sectors not directly affected such as related markets, but they may also occur outside the economic sphere proper, such as in politics, culture, religion, or society at large. Schumpeter contributed to the research project of fiscal sociology throughout his life. In this first approximation, his contribution is discussed in terms of his appreciation of three important scholars who all made landmark contributions to fiscal sociology: Franz Oppenheimer, Werner Sombart, and Gustav (von) Schmoller.JEL Classification: B15, H39     

Double Dividend with Involuntary Unemployment: Efficiency and Intergenerational Equity

This paper analyzes the double dividend and distributional issues within an overlapping generations model framework with involuntary unemployment. We characterize the necessary conditions needed to obtain a double dividend, when the revenue of the environmental tax is recycled by a variation of the labor tax rate. We show that an employment dividend may occur without any efficiency dividend and that the young generation is not always harmed by the fiscal reform, even without any intergenerational transfers. Therefore, three dividends (environmental, efficiency and intergenerational equity) can occur simultaneously.     

Pricing-to-market tests in instrumental regressions: Case of the transportation equipment industry

Pricing-to-market (PTM) theory suggests that exporting monopolistic firms adjust their destination-specific mark-ups in the face of exchange rate shocks. A large proportion of the existing evidence for PTM comes from Wald tests applied to OLS- and IV-estimated parameters of single-equation models. Such tests can seriously over-reject in the presence of endogeneity and weak instruments so that some of the available results supporting PTM could be spurious. In this paper we revisit the PTM evidence for Japanese and German exporting firms in the transportation equipment industry. Using the model of Marston (1990), we apply exogeneity and LR-LIML-based tests for which the error probability is controlled irrespective of the quality of the available instruments. Our results show right-hand-side endogeneity in almost all of the examined PTM equations. In addition, we find that statistical decisions often differ depending on whether they are based on the traditional Wald test or on our proposed test.The authors would like to thank Philippe Barla, Jean-Thomas Bernard, Christos Constantatos, Larry Schembri, seminar participants at the Bank of Canada, and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Richard Marston for providing data. Finally, a special thanks to Marjorie Santos for excellent research assistance. All remaining errors are our own and should not be attributed to the Bank of Canada.First version received: May 2002/Final version received: December 2002     

Art as an investment: Short and long-term comovements in major painting markets

This paper examines the short and long-term price linkages among major art and equity markets over the period 1976–2001. The art markets examined are Contemporary Masters, French Impressionists, Modern European, 19^th Century European, Old Masters, Surrealists, 20^th Century English and Modern US paintings. A global equity index (with dividends and capitalisation changes) is also included. Multivariate cointegration procedures, Granger non-causality tests, level VAR and generalised variance decomposition analyses based on error-correction and vector autoregressive models are conducted to analyse short and long-run relationships among these markets. The results indicate that there is a stationary long-run relationship and significant short and long run causal linkages between the various painting markets and between the equity market and painting markets. However, in terms of the percentage of variance explained most painting markets are relatively isolated, and other painting markets are generally more important than the equity market in explaining the variance that is not caused by innovations in the market itself. This suggests that opportunities for portfolio diversification in art works alone and in conjunction with equity markets exist, though in common with the literature in this area the study finds that the returns on paintings are much lower and the risks much higher than in conventional financial markets.The authors would like to thank delegates to the 14th Australasian Finance and Banking Conference, University of New South Wales, seminar participants at the Queensland University of Technology and Massey University, Masaki Katsuura, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. The financial assistance of a Queensland University of Technology, Faculty of Business Research Initiative Grant is also gratefully acknowledged.     

External cooperation and entrepreneurial orientation in industrial clusters

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between external cooperation and entrepreneurial orientation (EO). This relationship is explored in cluster environment, wherein entrepreneurial organizations compete and cooperate simultaneously to pursue opportunities. The following hypothesis is tested: External cooperation is positively correlated with entrepreneurial orientation. The hypothesis is tested with a correlation analysis on a sample of 77 small-sized enterprises operating in the Malopolska region in Poland, wherein several clusters are active. Additionally, the regression analysis is conducted to examine the associations between inter-organizational cooperation and EO dimensions. The findings confirm that external cooperation is positively correlated with EO. This observation is confronted with a pro-competitive approach that is a constitutional element of the entrepreneurship concept. Moreover, the findings show that the correlation between external cooperation and a firm’s performance is stronger than between some other EO dimensions and performance. Additionally, the findings show the important role of relationships between organizations and their clients. In the paper, several remarks for development of the theory are discussed, including the need for incorporating inter-organizational cooperation into a set of entrepreneurial traits and reflecting it in entrepreneurial orientation scales. The findings confirm the importance of that direction of theory development that focuses on inter-organizational collaboration in the context of entrepreneurship.     

Nonpoint Source Pollution Taxes and Excessive Tax Burden

If a regulator is unable to measure firms’ individual emissions, an ambient tax can be used to achieve the socially desired level of pollution. With this tax, each firm pays a unit tax on aggregate emissions. In order for the tax to be effective, firms must recognize that their decisions affect aggregate emissions. When firms behave strategically with respect to the tax-setting regulator, under plausible circumstances their tax burden is lower under an ambient tax, relative to the tax which charges firms on the basis of individual emissions. Firms may prefer the case where the regulator is unable to observe individual firm emissions, even if this asymmetric information causes the regulator to tax each firm on the basis of aggregate emissions.     

Domestic financial market frictions,unrestricted international capital flows,and crises in small open economies

Summary. We present an example of a small open economy where small increases in the world interest rate may induce a sharp decline in output and a precipitous depreciation of the exchange rate. Due to a costly state verification problem in domestic credit markets, combined with unrestricted international capital flows, our economy generates two long-run equilibria, one with low GDP and a relatively depreciated real exchange rate (RER), and one with high GDP and a relatively appreciated RER. The first is always a saddle, while the second may be a sink or a source, depending on the level of the world interest rate. A crisis is identified with the economy switching from an equilibrium path approaching the high-output steady state to the saddlepath approaching the low-output steady state. In Mexicos recent history, periods of growth associated with appreciation of the RER have alternated with periods of sharp contraction and depreciation of the RER. Our economy displays such behavior in response to changes in the world interest rate.Received: 9 April 2002, Revised: 20 March 2003JEL Classification Numbers: E5, F4.G. Antinolfi, E. Huybens: We thank Steve Fazzari, Tim Kehoe, Todd Keister, Manuel Santos, Karl Shell and especially Bruce Smith for very helpful discussions. Jaime Calleja Alderete, Eduardo Camero Godínez, and Juan Vargas Hernández provided excellent research assistance. All remaining errors are ours. Huybens was an assistant professor in the Centro de Investigación Económica, ITAM, at the time this article was written, and part of this work was completed while Antinolfi was a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The views expressed herein are those of the authors, and do not reflect those of the World Bank or the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Correspondence to: G. Antinolfi