Debt financing,soft budget constraints,and government ownershipEvidence from China1

Debt financing is expected to improve the quality of corporate governance, but we find, using a large sample of public listed companies (PLCs) from China, that an increase in bank loans increases the size of managerial perks and free cash flows and decreases corporate efficiency. We find that bank lending facilitates managerial exploitation of corporate wealth in government‐controlled firms, but constrains managerial agency costs in firms controlled by private owners. We argue that the failure of corporate governance may derive from the shared government ownership of lenders and borrowers, which nurtures soft budget constraints.     

Employment and wage behaviour of industrial enterprises in transition economies: The cases of Poland and Czechoslovakia1

In this paper we use two very large panel datasets from Poland, 1988-90 and Czechoslovakia, 1990-1992 to explore the dynamics of employment and wage determination at the enterprise level in the early years of transition. The study is intended to assist in building a coherent picture of microeconomic adjustment in transition, a field which was not sufficiently explored in the early years of reform. We find that Polish firms were already to some extent responsive to market conditions pre-reform, notably to demand in determining employment. Czechoslovak firms, however, were largely unresponsive to such pressures in 1989-90. The elasticities rose significantly in both countries in the early years of reform, especially in Czechoslovakia which quickly attained initial Polish patterns of adjustment. Firms became much more responsive to sales and cost pressures in adjusting employment and to their own productivity in setting pay. Ownership effects in these early years were, however, much more modest, with state-owned firms adjusting employment more than their private counterparts, perhaps because over-manning was more serious in that sector.     

Pooled marketing: The challenge and the opportunity

The present situation is marketing is characterized by rising costs and increasing prices. In an article in Business Week, a commentator has stated that “...... marketing and distribution are where industry must make up a lot of the costs of doing business today” (13). Pooled marketing is a viable alternative to the marketing practices which have, along with inflation and other factors, contributed to the present situation. In addition to the cost savings that can emerge from pooling programs, the cooperative sharing of resources makes it possible to capitalize on opportunities that a firm would not have been able to seize on its own.     

An Analysis of the Quality of Internet Life Insurance Advice

This article analyzes the quality of the life insurance recommendations generated by Internet Web sites. The quality of a Web site's recommendations is measured by comparing how closely the recommendations match two benchmarks chosen by the authors. The authors submitted four relatively simple scenarios to 48 Web sites offering advice on how much insurance is appropriate in given circumstances. The article presents several statistical measures of the wide variation in advice offered by these Web sites, and it suggests several explanations for this variation. Statistically, the Web site recommendations differed from the authors’ chosen benchmarks, but did not differ by the type of organization maintaining the Web site.     

Profit-Sharing in OECD Countries: a Review and Some Evidence

This article starts by describing the extent of profit-sharing schemes in OECD countries. It suggests that firms have increasingly introduced profit-sharing schemes not only because of the tax breaks they involve, but also because of accumulating information on the link between profit-sharing and productivity. It concludes with a summary of new research among UK manufacturing companies, which shows a productivity improvement of about 6% in cases where profit-sharing bonuses were of order 5–10% of market wages.     

The impact of the Self‐Sufficiency Project on the employment behaviour of former welfare recipients

Abstract The Self‐Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a Canadian randomized trial in which the program group had 12 months to find full‐time employment in order to qualify for a subsidy that roughly doubled their pre‐tax earnings for the next three years. We find evidence of significant impacts of SSP on non‐employment and employment durations. For the treated group, simulation results show an impact on the employment rate at 52 months after random assignment in the range of 7 to 11 percentage points; this is approximately a 25% increase in the employment rate compared with having no treatment in place.