Are the western welfare states still competitive?

Is there a contradiction between international competitiveness and the central principles of the welfare state? The following article examines both the negative and the positive ways in which welfare statism can affect a country’s ability to compete on international markets.     

The Telecommunications Act at three years: an economic evaluation of its implementation by the Federal Communications Commission

The competitive free-for-all that Congress envisioned in the 1996 Telecommunications Act has for the most part not appeared. The Act calls for two forms of regulatorily-assisted entry into local markets: lease of network elements and resale. The FCC has decreed that the charges for those elements and the resale discounts must emulate the costs of an ideally-efficient firm. This standard is in fact not efficient, and the FCC’s attempt to jump-start the entry of competitors in this way has short-circuited the competitive process itself and jeopardized achievement of the goals of the Act.     

Are Corporate Restructuring Events Driven by Common Factors? Implications for Takeover Prediction

Abstract:  The paper shows that variables commonly used in takeover prediction models also help to explain the likelihood of several other restructuring events, including divestitures, bankruptcies and significant employee layoffs. This finding helps to explain the larger misclassification errors in binomial takeover prediction models commonly used in prior research. The results show that modelling takeover prediction models in a binomial setting is likely to lead to misspecification in the parameter estimates and, further, result in erroneous conclusions about the determinants of takeover likelihood. The paper shows that controlling for other restructuring events by using a multinomial framework results in consistently lower misclassification errors in out-of-sample prediction tests, when compared to the benchmark of a typical binomial model.     

The Austrian Phillips Curve reconsidered

Zusammenfassung Den Ausgangspunkt für diese Arbeit bildet die manchmal behauptete Stabilität der österreichischen Phillipskurve. In dieser Arbeit wird nun zu zeigen versucht, daß diese Stabilität auf den Umstand zurückzuführen ist, daß bei den bisherigen Untersuchungen stets implizit angenommen wurde, die gleichgewichtige (natürliche) Arbeitslosenrate habe sich im Zeitablauf nicht verändert.Wird diese Annahme fallengelassen und ein trendmäßiges Sinken der gleichgewichtigen Arbeislosenrate zugelassen, so weist dann eine auf dieser Grundlage geschätzte Phillipskurve einen signifikanten Strukturbruch zwischen sechziger und siebziger Jahren auf; die Phillipskurve hat sich nun nach oben verschoben.Im zweiten Teil dieser Arbeit wird untersucht, ob die beobachteten Inflationszyklen mit der entsprechenden Standardtheorie vonGrossman (1974) nachvollziehbar sind. Dies kann mit Einschränkungen bejaht werden.

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I am grateful to H. Otruba, H. Duda, H. Klausinger, M. Winkler, R. Neck and A. Wörgötter for many valuable comments. I remain responsible for any error.     

Tax Competition and Tax Revenues

It is often feared that tax competition might lead to a “race to the bottom” and that the consequence of a reduction in tax rates on capital income would be shrinking capital income tax revenues and difficulties for national governments to perform their usual tasks. The following paper analyses what happened to tax revenues in a number of OECD countries. It turns out that taxes on capital income contribute to the financing of public expenditure to a more or less unchanged extent; nor are there significant changes in the level and structure of total tax revenues.      

Differences between Presidents' and Sales Managers' Perceptions of the Industry Environment and Firm Strategy in Small Industrial Firms: Relationship to Performance Satisfaction

The industrial sales force is the primary source of information about the competitive environment. Differences of perceptions of that environment between the national sales manager and the firm president in small industrial firms may reflect inadequate environmental information input into strategic decision-making. The sales force is a major element in implementation of strategy and differences between perceptions of firm strategy may reflect inadequate coordination and communication between the chief strategy decision-maker and the manager who is responsible for implementing that strategy in the market place. It would be expected that these differences in perceptions would impact negatively strategy formulation and execution resulting in unsatisfactory firm performance. This study surveyed the environmental and strategy perceptions of presidents and national sales managers in small to medium-sized industrial firms as well as presidents' satisfaction with firm profitability and marketing/sales effectiveness. The average absolute difference in environment perceptions has a negative relationship with satisfaction with profit. The average absolute difference in strategy perceptions has a negative relationship with marketing/sales effectiveness. This latter relationship is especially strong in an environment high in capital spending variation and for larger firms. The authors suggest implications for managers based on these results.