Bridging bargaining theory with the regulation of a natural monopoly

Review of Economic Design - In this paper, we integrate the bargaining theory with the problem of regulating a natural monopoly under symmetric information or asymmetric information with complete...     

Stock market reactions to US Consumer Product Safety Commission enforcement actions

This study examines stock market reaction to violations of product safety regulations and firm product responsibilities in the post-enforcement period. Our event study results show that market reaction was negative to failures by firms to report product defects in a timely way. Our results also show that the stock market reaction varies depending on the type of violations, and whether there are single or multiple violations. Firms spend more on research and development and advertising in the post-enforcement period, in addition to investing in their compliance programmes which have a significant positive impact on product responsibility stewardship. Our empirical results show that the stock market reacts negatively to recall volume and refund remediation strategy. The stock market reaction is negative to social media communication about product recalls initiated by manufacturers. However, this negative effect appears to be counteracted by the positive corporate social responsibility (CSR) reputation effect of the manufacturers. Our findings imply that US manufacturing firms dealing with product recalls must be sensitive to how consumers and investors interpret the communication.     

Licensing cost-reducing innovations under supply function competition

In this paper, we study the licensing of cost-reducing innovations in a duopoly under supply function competition. We show that the innovator prefers fixed-fee licensing to no licensing if its cost advantage is not extremely large. Moreover, if its cost advantage is not extremely small, the innovator prefers fixed-fee licensing and mixed licensing to revenue-royalty licensing. This second result arises only because of our assumption that the cost functions are quadratic. We show that if the cost functions are linear and royalty payments are per unit of output, the innovator strictly prefers royalty licensing to fixed-fee licensing. We also show that in our model, consumer surplus is remarkably higher under any type of licensing than under no licensing. However, revenue-royalty licensing is slightly superior for consumers to the other two types of licensing and only so if the cost advantage of the innovator is sufficiently large.     

The political economy triangle of government spending,interest-group influence,and income inequality: Evidence and implications from the US states

This paper introduces the political economy triangle (PET) concept of government spending, special interest groups (SIGs) influence, and income inequality, empirically confirming its existence and unveiling its nature while directly addressing key shortcomings of most prior research on the determinants of such inequality. Using static and dynamic panel techniques and data from the US states, it reports several new results: (i) the findings of previous studies regarding the roles of government spending and interest groups, including labor unions, in income distribution are confirmed, however, their estimated inequality effects grossly underestimate those obtained when endogeneity issues are accounted for explicitly; (ii) a dynamic tripartite relationship between the variables of the PET exists; (iii) government spending and SIGs' influence, including union strength, beyond their direct effects on inequality, have a separate positive impact through their interactions; (iv) the effectiveness of government spending in reducing inequality diminishes as the level of SIGs' influence and union strength increase in the short and long run, (v) the aggregate inequality-increasing effect of SIGs is strengthened and the inequality-reducing effects of unions weakened as the spending rises, in the short run and long run. Finally, the broad implications of these findings are discussed.