Labor mobility and antitakeover provisions

How do firms protect their human capital? We test whether firms facing an increased threat of being acquired strengthen their antitakeover provisions (ATPs) in order to bond with their employees. We use the adoption of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) by US state courts, which exogenously decreases knowledge-worker mobility, thus elevating takeover risk and reducing employee incentives to innovate. Firms respond to the IDD adoption by strengthening ATPs that defend against hostile takeovers, especially when they have greater ex-ante employee mobility and human capital and place greater importance on employee relations. We find no evidence that managers strengthen ATPs for entrenchment or takeover bargaining purposes in this setting. Our findings show that ATPs can be used to credibly commit to employees in order to protect long-term value creation.     

Asian Participation and Performance at the Olympic Games

This paper examines Asian exceptionalism at the Olympics. Northeast Asian countries conform to the statistical norm, whereas the rest of Asia lags, but this result obscures underlying distinctions. Asian women do better than men. Non‐Northeast Asia's relative underperformance is due to the men. Asian performance is uneven across events, finding more success in culturally connected and weight‐stratified contests. The models imply that China, Japan, and South Korea will place among the top 10 medaling countries at the 2016 Games, whereas China will continue to close the medal gap with the United States.     

基于PIC的两轴定位控制系统设计与实现

文章主要研究基于单片机的两轴步进电机定位控制系统的设计,实现基于PIC16F877A单片机的最小控制系统并以步进电机为执行机构的位置控制,通过键盘输入有效行程与液晶屏显示,实现两个步进电机沿着X、Y轴运行至所设定的目标位置,并尽量避免步进电机的失步现象。     

The Political Economy of Industrial Policy in China: The Case of Aircraft Manufacturing

This paper focuses on China's efforts to build a world-class aircraft manufacturing industry. In the first half of the 1990s, the potential of the Chinese industry to mount a competitive challenge to Western aircraft builders was largely discounted. Nowadays, the threat is taken more seriously. The growth in the Chinese air transport market has reinforced the bargaining power of national aircraft producers and authorities are giving priority to building science and technology capacity in this area. Progress in creating military/civilian synergies has proven much more modest and the overall industry still lacks effective coordination.     

Optimal R&D Policy and Managerial Delegation Under Vertically Differentiated Duopoly

The paper investigates the optimal research and development (R&D) policy in a vertically differentiated market with managerial delegation. We consider not only discriminatory R&D policy but uniform R&D policy as well. It shows that R&D policy can vary depending on the regulator's objective: social welfare, consumer surplus or producer surplus; however, the outcomes are invariant to the nature of market competition. Undoubtedly, the relative‐performance contract plays a crucial role for elaborating policy effects. The government prefers discriminatory R&D policy to uniform policy under a consumer‐oriented objective. On the contrary, under a producer‐oriented objective, the government would prefer to choose uniform R&D policy rather than discriminatory policy.     

Sectoral Effects of Monetary Policy: The Evidence from Publicly Traded Firms

This article examines the impact of monetary policy on net sales of publicly traded firms in various sectors of the U.S. economy. We find that monetary policy has a heterogeneous effect on firms in different industries, with the strongest effect on firms in Retail and Wholesaling. Balance sheet characteristics, especially size, influence the impact of policy. Larger firms in several industries are able to mitigate the effect of policy. We find mixed results for firms' working capital, short‐term debt ratio, and leverage ratio with respect to the operation of the credit channel of monetary transmission mechanism.     

Bounds for best response functions in binary games

This paper studies the identification of best response functions in binary games without making strong parametric assumptions about the payoffs. The best response function gives the utility maximizing response to a decision of the other players. This is analogous to the response function in the treatment-response literature, taking the decision of the other players as the treatment, except that the best response function has additional structure implied by the associated utility maximization problem. Further, the relationship between the data and the best response function is not the same as the relationship between the data and the response function in the treatment-response literature. We focus especially on the case of a complete information entry game with two firms. We also discuss the case of an entry game with many firms, non-entry games, and incomplete information. Our analysis of the entry game is based on the observation of realized entry decisions, which we then link to the best response functions under various assumptions including those concerning the level of rationality of the firms, including the assumption of Nash equilibrium play, the symmetry of the payoffs between firms, and whether mixed strategies are admitted.     

PRICE ELASTICITIES AND PRICING POWER IN EMERGING MARKETS: THE CASE OF PETROCHEMICAL‐DERIVED PLASTICS IN SOUTH AFRICA1

This paper examines whether there necessarily exists a conflict between allocative and productive efficiency in small open economy markets. That productive efficiency favours market concentration is not in dispute, and the sole question we face is whether allocative efficiency suffers under high market concentration. We proceed theoretically and econometrically. We find that the conflict between productive and allocative efficiency is not necessarily as stringent as the international competition policy literature suggests should be the case. In particular, we note that the strategic interaction between the large domestic producer and its competitors makes feasible a range of alternative price elasticities of demand, and empirically that all price elasticities of demand are less than or equal to unity. Nevertheless, the impact of market structure is such as to render feasible a wide range of possible levels of pricing power.     

Certainty of Punishment versus Severity of Punishment: An Experimental Investigation

Compliance with laws and regulations depends on the expected penalty facing violators. The expected penalty depends on both the probability of punishment and the severity of the punishment if caught. A key question in the economics of crime literature is whether increasing the probability of punishment is a more effective deterrent than increasing the severity of punishment. This article uses laboratory experiments to investigate this issue and finds that increasing the severity of punishment is a more effective deterrent than an equivalent increase in the probability of punishment. This result contrasts with the findings of the empirical crime literature.     

中资银行引进境外战略投资者效应的案例研究

在中资银行战略引资步伐加快、外资话语权逐步提升的情况下,本文通过对美国新桥投资集团控股深圳发展银行案例的分析,对外资话语权的提升与中资银行的经营绩效之间的关系进行了探讨。研究发现,外资话语权的提升与中资银行的盈利能力和经营效率之间不存在明显的正相关关系,而外资充分的话语权有助于中资银行防范与化解信贷风险和增强抵御风险能力以及提高业务发展能力;另一方面,外资话语权的提升却与中资银行的业务创新能力呈现负相关的关系。在此基础上,本文提出了有关战略引资的建议。