Evolution of corporate governance in Russia: government policy vs. real incentives of economic agents

This article is devoted to analysing the evolution of corporate governance mechanisms in Russia. Special attention is paid to the causes of dramatic discrepancies between the expected outputs of institutional reforms implemented by the Russian government with World Bank and IMF support and the actual behaviour of Russian companies. Why was the model of interaction between enterprises and investors, owners and managers, which had been successful in other countries, rejected by Russian business in the 1990s? And how can we evaluate certain positive changes that have occurred recently in corporate policies of major Russian companies? These questions are answered on the bases of analysis of economic agents' motivation at different stages of development of corporate structures in Russia. The article argues that the need for comprehensive organisational and technological restructuring of enterprises led to the need for a concentrated ownership structure. The formation of such a structure in the late 1990s (which occurred, in fact, contrary to the government's activities) created preconditions for extending the time horizon of dominant owners and managers and for positive qualitative changes in the relations between major Russian companies and their shareholders and investors.     

Behavioral Biases and Investment

We investigate the way investors react to prior gains/losses. We directly examine investor reactions to different definitions of gains and losses (i.e., overall wealth, paper gains and losses, and realized capital gains and losses) and investigate how gains and losses in one category of wealth (e.g., real estate) affect holdings in other categories (e.g., financial assets). We show that investors change their holdings of risky assets as a function of both financial and real estate gains. Prior gains increase risk-taking, while prior losses reduce it. To interpret our results, we consider and compare three alternative hypotheses of investor behavior: prospect theory, house money effect and standard utility theory with decreasing risk aversion. Our evidence fails to support loss aversion, pointing in the direction of the house money effect or standard utility theory. Investors consider wealth in its entirety, and risk-taking in financial markets is affected by gains/losses in overall wealth, financial wealth, and real estate wealth. We appreciate the helpful comments of: O. Bondarenko, F. De Jong, B. Dumas, H. Hau, P. Hillion, R. Jaganathan, M. Lettau, P.Maenhout, M. Huang, S. Mullanaithen, T. Odean, J. Peress, R. Shiller, P. Sodini, M. Suominen, A. Subrahmanyan, B. Swaminathan, R. Thaler, L. Tepla, P. Veronesi, M. Weber and the participants of the Summer Financial Markets Symposium at Gerzensee and the NBER Behavioral Finance Meeting, Fall 2002. We are grateful to Sven-Ivan Sundqvist for numerous helpful discussions and for providing us with the data. Financial support from Inquiry Europe is acknowledged. Andrei Simonov also acknowledges financial support from the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation. Any remaining errors are our own.     

Unstable banking

We propose a theory of financial intermediaries operating in markets influenced by investor sentiment. In our model, banks make, securitize, distribute, and trade loans, or they hold cash. They also borrow money, using their security holdings as collateral. Banks maximize profits, and there are no conflicts of interest between bank shareholders and creditors. The theory predicts that bank credit and real investment will be volatile when market prices of loans are volatile, but it also points to the instability of banks, especially leveraged banks, participating in markets. Profit-maximizing behavior by banks creates systemic risk.     

Fitting Observed Demographic Rates with the Multiexponential Model Schedule: An Assessment of Two Estimation Programs

The process of finding the best fitting model can often be very time consuming and tedious. Most computer programs are very specialized, and many require initial parameter estimates to fit a particular curve. Those that are most useful are ones that are versatile in applications, and ones that allow inputs of "rough" parameter estimates for finding the optimal ones. This paper focuses on current approaches for fitting observed age-specific demographic data with the multiexponential model schedule and uses two curve-fitting computer programs: MODEL and TableCurve2D. These two programs are assessed according to how well, and how simply, they can be used to fit age-specific fertility, mortality, and migration rates.     

Two-Sided Platforms: Product Variety and Pricing Structures

This paper provides a new modeling framework to analyze two-sided platforms connecting producers and consumers. In contrast to the existing literature, indirect network effects are determined endogenously, through consumers' taste for variety and producer competition. Three new aspects of platform pricing structures are derived.   First, the optimal platform pricing structure shifts towards extracting more rents from producers relative to consumers when consumers have stronger demand for variety, since producers become less substitutable. With platform competition, consumer preferences for variety, producer market power, and producer economies of scale in multihoming also make platforms' price-cutting strategies on the consumer side less effective. This second effect on equilibrium pricing structures goes in the opposite direction relative to the first one.   Third, variable fees charged to producers can serve to trade off producer innovation incentives against the need to reduce a platform holdup problem.     

A Survey of Corporate Governance

This article surveys research on corporate governance, with special attention to the importance of legal protection of investors and of ownership concentration in corporate governance systems around the world.     

Do Some Forms of Financial Flows Help Protect Against "Sudden Stops"?

There is a debate on whether some forms of financial flows offerbetter protection against crises than others. Using a largepanel data set that includes advanced, emerging, and developingeconomies during 1970–2003, this article analyzes thebehavior of several types of flows: foreign direct investment(FDI), portfolio equity investment, portfolio debt investment,other flows to the official sector, other flows to banks, andother flows to the nonbank private sector. Differences acrosstypes of flows are limited with respect to volatility, persistence,cross-country comovement, and correlation with growth at homeor in the world economy. However, consistent with conventionalwisdom, FDI is the least volatile form of financial flow, whenthe average size of net or gross flows is taken into account.The differences are striking during "sudden stops" in financialflows (defined as drops in total net financial inflows of morethan percentage points of GDP compared with the previous year).In such episodes, FDI is remarkably stable, and portfolio equityseems to play a limited role. Portfolio debt experiences a reversal,though it recovers relatively quickly, and other flows (includingbank loans and trade credit) experience severe drops and oftenremain depressed for a few years.