Vertical Integration and Market Foreclosure with Convex Downstream Costs

Received December 14, 2000; revised version received July 16, 2001     

Revisiting Savage in a conditional world

Summary. I present an axiomatization of subjective expected utility and Bayesian updating in a conditional decision problem. This result improves our understanding of the Bayesian standard from two perspectives: 1) it uses a set of axioms which are weak and intuitive; 2) it provides a formal proof to results on the relation between dynamic consistency, expected utility and Bayesian updating which have never been explicitly proved in a fully subjective framework. Received: December 1, 2000; revised version: February 26, 2001     

先秦时期的重储思想概述

上一期里,我们讲述了仓储的起源,简单了解了它古老的历史。这一期,我们要说的是先秦时期人们对仓储的一些认识。从夏朝到战国的两千年间,随着生产力水平的提高和社会的进步,各类仓储活动、仓储设施都有了不同程度的发展,人们对仓储的认识和理解也呈现出较为鲜明的时代特征。但无论岁月如何变迁,重储却始终占据着仓储思想的主旋律。接下来我们要着重介绍的就是这时期的重储思想。     

技术进步、工业化程度对能耗强度影响的差异分析——基于省际面板数据的实证研究

碳达峰、碳中和的深层次问题是能源问题。本文分析了技术进步、工业化程度影响能耗强度的作用机制,并基于2010-2020年我国30个省区市(未包括西藏及港澳台)的面板数据进行实证研究,结果表明:技术进步与能耗强度显著负相关,技术进步通过改善要素生产率有效减少能耗;工业化程度对能耗强度存在显著的正向作用关系,工业体系中高耗能行业占比较高,高耗能产品份额的持续增加影响了能耗强度的降低;不同地区技术进步、工业化程度对能耗强度的影响存在差异性,这可能是与地区禀赋有关;且回归结果经GMM分析检验后是稳健的。据此,应加大节能技术研发并制定耗能标准,优化产业和能源结构,而不同地区应制定差异化能源政策并加强协作。     

The effect of marketing regulations on efficiency: LeChatelier versus coordination effects

Government regulations designed to promote social welfare can have unintended consequences on efficiency. According to the LeChatelier Principle, regulations that effectively limit substitution possibilities among inputs will reduce firm and industry-wide efficiency. In imperfectly competitive markets, however, government constraints on a strategic variable can facilitate coordination. An advertising restriction, for example, would improve efficiency if it enables firms to produce the same level of sales with less advertising spending. We use data envelopment analysis to estimate the effect of marketing regulations on efficiency in the U.S. cigarette industry. Unlike previous studies, we do not assume that marketing and production technologies are separable. Our results demonstrate that coordination effects dominate LeChatelier effects. Cigarette producers have benefited from advertising restrictions, a result consistent with the capture theory of regulation.

Do liquidity induced changes in aggregate dividends signal aggregate future earnings growth?

Extant empirical literature does not provide abundant evidence for the information content hypothesis regarding firm-level dividend signaling. Although this is consistent with the argument against an optimal firm-level dividend policy, this does not imply an absence of an optimal aggregate dividend level. Aggregate dividends and earnings may exhibit stronger associations if aggregation filters out firm-specific earnings information and indicates macroeconomic trends. Using macroeconomic data, we show that aggregate payout ratios signal aggregate future earnings growth for horizons up to 4 years, and that excess aggregate liquidity plays an important role in this relationship.

Entrenched management,capital structure changes and firm value

The relationship between managerial share ownership and the firm’s change in leverage around a security issuance is examined. We find that entrenched managers are not more likely to issue equity, however they do affect lower leverage by choosing debt issuances which are smaller and equity issuances that are larger than those chosen by managers that are not entrenched. The magnitude of the decline in leverage that occurs from before the issuance to after the issuance is positively related to managerial share ownership. In addition, this relationship is confined to only the “entrenchment” range of managerial share ownership. The market reacts negatively to an issuance announcement when managerial share ownership is high.

Agency problems in tracking stock and minority carve-out decisions: Explaining the discrepancy in short- and long-term performances

Several studies have evaluated short- and long-term performances of parent firms who resort to restructuring via tracking stock or minority carve-out. Results show that short-term positive performance of restructuring parents turns negative in the long haul. Although researchers have attempted to resolve this inconsistency, a satisfactory explanation is yet to emerge. In this paper, we offer the self-serving behavior of restructuring parents’ managers as a potential explanation for the observed discrepancy in the short- and long-term performances. We argue that managers of parent firms create new units to receive additional compensation packages. We present evidence that the long-term negative performance can be attributed, at least partially, to self-awarded raise. Since managers of tracking stock parents enjoy a greater degree of managerial discretion and controls, we hypothesize that they would pay themselves a bigger compensation package than their carve-out counterparts and their long-term performance would be inferior to that of the latter group. Our results largely support these hypotheses.

Decomposing productivity patterns in a conditional convergence framework

In this study we examine regional data on per worker GDP, disaggregated at sectoral level, by focusing our interest on the role of differences in the sectoral composition of activities, and in productivity gaps that are uniform across sectors, in explaining the catching-up process, which is realized through physical and human capital as well as technological knowledge accumulation. Our objective is to investigate how much of the interregional inequality in aggregate productivity per worker is imputable to each component. A methodology for identifying and analyzing sources of inequality from a decomposed perspective is developed in the growth framework by combining a shift-share based technique and a SUR model specification for the conditional-convergence analysis. The proposed approach is employed to analyze aggregate interregional inequality of per worker productivity levels in Italy over the period 1970–2000. With respect to the existing empirical results, our approach provides a more comprehensive and detailed examination of the contribution of each identified component in explaining the regional productivity gaps in Italy. It is argued that region-specific productivity differentials, uniform across sectors, explain a quite large share of differences in productivity per worker. However, sectoral composition plays a non negligible role, although decreasing since the end of 1980s, and very different productivity patterns emerge within geographical areas.