financial supervision regimes and bank efficiency international evidence abstract there exists a lively debate as for the appropriate architecture of the financial supervision regime with a long list of theoretical advantages and disadvantages associated with each one of its key dimensions the present study investigates whether and how bank profit efficiency is influenced by the central bank s involvement in financial supervision the unification of financial authorities and the independence of the central bank the results show that efficiency decreases as the number of the financial sectors that are supervised by the central bank increases additionally banks operating in countries with greater unification of supervisory authorities are less profit efficient finally central bank independence has a negative impact on bank profit efficiency

chinese villages and townships as industrial corporations ownership governance and market discipline1 public firms in a reforming socialist economy face two problems the old soft budget constraint syndrome and new principal agent problems china s township village government owned enterprises tves outperform state owned enterprises soes in growth rate and productivity three explanations are proposed in the literature 1 tves represent informal or ambiguous private property rights which are most efficient in partial reform 2 the small size and scale of township village governments as industrial corporations allows officials to monitor tves directly and to limit their wherewithal for cross subsidizing 3 strict market disciplines facing tves render indirect market monitoring to mitigate agency problems effectively analyses of jiangyin data show that a while both superior to local soes village and township enterprises share similar productivity and b the scale of township village corporations slightly increases productivity i conclude that local state corporatism should be revised to inc

competition policy burdens and state owned enterprise reform one of the most important remaining issues in china s transition to a market economy is the reform of state owned enterprises soe s when reforms started in late 1978 soe s dominated china s industrial sectors in every aspect after 18 years of gradual transition the soe share in china s total industrial output has declined from 77 6 percent in 1978 to 28 8 percent in 1996 however in 1996 soe s still employed 57 4 percent of urban workers and possessed 52 2 percent of total investment in industrial fixed assets improving soe performance is crucial for social stability and sustained growth in china however over 40 percent of soe s are losing money in this paper we will argue that the root of the soe problem is the separation of ownership and control and that the oftencriticized soft budget constraints arise from various state imposed policy burdens which make the state accountable for the poor perfornance of soe s the key for a successful soe reform is to remove the policy burdens and to create a level playing field so that market competition can provide sufficient information for the managerial performance of the soe s and make the managers incentives compatible with those of the state io competition and the performance of large corporation in a market economy

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

embeddedness and contractual relationships in china s transitional economy interfirm contracts represent common economic relations in the marketplace they are also deeply embedded in social relations and social institutions in the context of china s transitional economy this study examines how three mechanisms economizing transaction costs network based social relations and institutional links affect interfirm contractual relationships in 1 the choice of search channels for contractual partners 2 the formality and provisions in a contract and 3 the intensity of social interaction in contract implementation empirical evidence is drawn from information collected on 877 contracts from 620 firms in two chinese cities beijing and guangzhou the authors find distinct roles of social relations institutional links and regulatory environments in the initiation of contractual partners and the forms of contracts adopted whereas transaction specific factors play a significant role in the intensity of social interaction in contract implementation these findings suggest the interplay among economic calculativeness social networks and institutional links and the complementarity in the underlying theoretical ideas

price reversals bid ask errors or market overreaction abstract we show that bid ask errors in transaction prices are the predominant source of apparent price reversals in the short run for nasdaq firms once we extract measurement errors in prices caused by the bid ask spread we find little evidence of market overreaction on the contrary we find that security returns are positively and not negatively autocorrelated we also show that bid ask errors lead to substantial spurious volatility in transaction returns about half of measured daily return variances can be induced by the bid ask effect

technical and allocative efficiency in european banking this paper specifies an empirical framework for estimating both technical and allocative efficiency using the translog cost share system thus providing a solution to the issue known in the literature as the greene problem the model is applied to a large panel of european banks and the results are compared with those of a model that does not include an allocative inefficiency term and also with those obtained by using a consistent bayesian technique our results suggest that models which include only technical efficiency significantly overestimate it while parameter estimates from the model that includes both technical and allocative efficiency are very close to the ones obtained from the bayesian approach thus enhancing our confidence in the proposed methodology finally the fact that allocative efficiency of banks in our sample improves more than technical efficiency underlines the importance of including an allocative inefficiency component in parametric efficiency models

chinese institutional innovation and privatization from below one of the most distinctive features of china s transition to a market economy has been the role played by rural township and village enterprises tve s in the face of sustained rapid growth of tve s the share of total industrial output produced by state owned enterprises soe s has fallen below half despite steady state sector growth and the absence of significant privatization yet most tve s are collectives a form of publicly owned enterprise this feature seems to make them unique in no other transitional economy has public ownership played such a dynamic role china presents the unusual picture of an economy that has made a transition to a primarily market economy but in which publicly owned enterprises still produce the bulk of manufacturing output surprisingly also the collective ownership form does not have a precise legal definition in china leading to some uncertainty about ultimate property rights martin weitzman and chenggang xu 1993 point out that public ownership with vaguely defined ownership ought to represent a recipe for economic disaster to them tve success suggests instead advantages to the internal institutional form of tve s which are seen to facilitate cooperation through implicit contracts among community members locked into an ongoing relationship victor nee 1992 advances a similar interpretation arguing that long time community residents create forms of income sharing that may be optimal in the absence of an independent legal system an alternative perhaps complementary view is presented here the success of tve s i argue is due largely to a set of external conditions to which tve s are an effective adaptation tve s are responses to one of the most distinctive characteristics of the chinese transition as a whole the early creation of product markets which exist for a prolonged period without well developed markets for factors of production or assets tve s are a flexible and effective but basically ordinary adaptation to this environment

stochastic data envelopment analysis a review abstract this paper provides a review of stochastic data envelopment analysis dea we discuss extensions of deterministic dea in three directions i deviations from the deterministic frontier are modeled as stochastic variables ii random noise in terms of measurement errors sample noise and specification errors is made an integral part of the model and iii the frontier is stochastic as is the underlying production possibility set pps stochastic dea utilizes non parametric convex or conical hull reference technologies based upon axioms from production theory accompanied by a statistical foundation in terms of axioms from statistics or distributional assumptions the approaches allow for an estimation of stochastic inefficiency compared to a deterministic or a stochastic pps and for statistical inference while maintaining an axiomatic foundation focus is on bridges and differences between approaches within the field of stochastic dea including semi parametric stochastic frontier analysis sfa and chance constrained dea ccdea we argue that statistical inference based upon homogenous bootstrapping in contrast to a management science approach imposes a restrictive structure on inefficiency which may not facilitate the communication of results of the analysis to decision makers semi parametric sfa and ccdea differ w r t the modeling of noise and stochastic inefficiency the two approaches are in spite of the inherent differences shown to be complements in the sense that the stochastic ppss obtained by the two approaches share basic similarities in the case of one output and multiple inputs recent contributions related to i disentangling of random noise and random inefficiency and ii obtaining smooth shape constrained estimators of the frontier are discussed

regional environmental efficiency in china an empirical analysis based on entropy weight method and non parametric models abstract while vigorously developing its economy china is attaching more and more importance to environmental protection and pollution control in different regions of china however there are great differences in economic development and the degree of environmental pollution in this study we use the entropy weight method to calculate the pollution indexes of different regions from 2015 to 2017 then we evaluate the chinese regional environmental efficiency based on a new non parametric frontier model moreover a new set of ranking interval models that treat the undesirable outputs as inputs is proposed to further describe the regional disparities of the environmental efficiency between different regions with robustness finally we conduct an empirical analysis by combining the stepwise regression and principal component analysis to identify the most influential variables that may affect regional environmental efficiency according to the results the southeast region of china performs best in environmental efficiency followed by the northeast region then the southwest region and the worst is the northwest region for managerial implications we find that the investment of high education and the development of the it industry can significantly increase regional environmental efficiency more importantly the results of the principal component analysis provide the government with a set of variables to strategically select the most appropriate strategy

the value of trading consolidation evidence from the exercise of warrants we study the effect of trading consolidation by examining the response of liquidity and stock price to the exercise of deep in the money corporate warrants this enables a relatively clean test of the value of trading consolidation the exercise at the warrant expiration is fully anticipated and has no information content an effect can come from the value of trading consolidation that improves liquidity indeed we find that liquidity and stock prices both increase significantly at warrant expiration further the price increase is positively related to the pre exercise extent of fragmentation to post exercise improvement in stock liquidity and to the proportional increase in the number of shares following the warrant exercise

a multidimensional approach to measuring bank branch efficiency abstract bank branch efficiency measurements range from simple ratio and standard regression analyses to more complex frontier approaches each with specific strengths and weaknesses however in isolation the indexes that these approaches generate fail to capture the multidimensional nature of bank branch efficiency this paper develops a three step procedure that enables combining the strengths of the existing approaches we begin by taking the widest number of efficiency indexes proposed in literature step 1 reduce the redundant information through a collinearity analysis step 2 and categorize bank branches into efficiency classes through a clustering procedure step 3 we test our approach on 23 branches of an italian regional bank the results show that this three step approach is able to provide a multidimensional view of efficiency based on indexes employing a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches with different ways of conceiving intermediation vs production and measuring stock vs flow or physical measures bank outputs and inputs different definitions of efficiency technical and cost efficiency and different measurement approaches ratios standard regression analysis and frontier functions the resulting efficiency ranking is consistent with those that univariate indexes generate and provides a balanced evaluation of branch efficiency when such indexes produce contradictory indications

the dynamics of stock index and stock index futures returns in rational efficiently functioning markets the returns on stock index and stock index futures contracts should be perfectly contemporaneously correlated this study investigates the time series properties of 5 minute intraday returns of stock index and stock index futures contracts and finds that sp however the effect is not completely unidirectional with lagged stock index returns having a mild positive predictive impact on futures returns

markets and income inequality in rural china political advantage in an expanding economy when market reform generates rapid growth in an agrarian subsistence economy changes in inequality may be due to economic growth and structural change rather than to the intrinsic features of markets the case of post mao china is examined using nationally representative survey data gathered in 1996 to address unresolved questions about findings from 1980s surveys well into reform s second decade political officeholding has a large net impact on household income comparable to that of operating a private enterprise contrary to findings based on earlier surveys and expectations about the impact of growth cadre household advantages are stable across levels and forms of economic expansion returns to entrepreneurship however decline sharply with the spread of wage employment future declines in relative returns to political position are therefore unlikely to occur due to the further spread of private household entrepreneurship and theories of change based on this mechanism appear untenable

resolving the deposit dilemma a new dea bank efficiency model abstract one of the weaknesses of current bank efficiency models is a disagreement as to the role of deposits in the bank production process some models view deposits as an input while others view them as an output such disparity of approaches results in inconsistent efficiency estimates in this study we propose an alternative data envelopment analysis dea bank efficiency model that treats deposits as an intermediate product thus emphasizing the dual role of deposits in the bank production process consequently the effect of the amount of deposits on bank efficiency depends on the efficiency at both stages of the bank production process the main advantage of our model is that it does not require a researcher to make a judgment call as to whether having more production approach or less intermediation approach deposits is better for bank efficiency our unified framework has the potential to produce more consistent efficiency estimates

a theory of holdouts in wage bargaining holdouts the continuation of negotiations beyond the contract expiry date are the most common form of disputes in labor contract negotiations the authors model holdouts as a delaying tactic employed by unions to obtain information about other bargaining outcomes in their industry novel implications of their model include a positive association between holdout duration and the number of bargaining pairs negotiating contracts simultaneously bunching of holdout durations within these negotiating groups and fewer strikes among holdouts which end later in groups using a large panel of contract negotiations in canadian manufacturing the authors find considerable support for these predictions copyright 1998 by american economic association

the emergence of a market society changing mechanisms of stratification in china this article examines the effect of institutional change the shift from redistribution to markets in altering the mechanisms of stratification new institutionalists maintain that interests are emb

an econometric model of serial correlation and illiquidity in hedge fund returns the returns to hedge funds and other alternative investments are often highly serially correlated in sharp contrast to the returns of more traditional investment vehicles such as long only equity portfolios and mutual funds in this paper we explore several sources of such serial correlation and show that the most likely explanation is illiquidity exposure i e investments in securities that are not actively traded and for which market prices are not always readily available for portfolios of illiquid securities reported returns will tend to be smoother than true economic returns which will understate volatility and increase risk adjusted performance measures such as the sharpe ratio we propose an econometric model of illiquidity exposure and develop estimators for the smoothing prole as well as a smoothing adjusted sharpe ratio for a sample of 908 hedge funds drawn from the tass database we show that our estimated smoothing coecien ts vary considerably across hedge fund style categories and may be a useful proxy for quantifying illiquidity exposure

the roles and performance of state firms and non state firms in china s economic transition summary it is commonly accepted that state owned enterprises soes are inefficient and that non state firms drive the phenomenal growth in china however why soes are not dying out and how the non state firms thrive in a poor institutional environment remain unanswered we apply the institutional and principal agent perspectives to explain how firms with different ownerships deploy their resources and formulate strategies to achieve their goals using china s industrial census data we find that soes tend to adopt strategies conducive to fulfilling administrative tasks and empire building whereas the non state firms tend to be more profitable in the market policy and strategic implications are discussed

xetra efficiency evaluation and nasdaq modelling by kapsyn abstract in this paper we give an introduction to capital market synergetics a model enabling us to compute transaction costs and investigate the operating efficiency of a stock market s microstructure frankfurt s trading system xetra and nasdaq are currently implemented into the computer program kapsyn by using kapsyn we examine xetra s behaviour in different market scenarios particularly the designated sponsor s performance the empirical evidence of the kapsyn parameter setting chosen is validated connecting the parameter setting to economic data by using neural networks and analytical reasoning underlie the definition of market scenarios the designated sponsor s eminent importance in non liquid markets has been demonstrated very impressively finally nasdaq s transaction cost statistics are investigated in the above scenarios compared to xetra nasdaq exhibits minimal transaction costs for mid size trades while transaction costs for small and block trades are nearly 100 50 higher

sectoral change catching up and slowing down oecd post war economic growth revisited abstract regression analysis of gdp growth since 1950 on pooled oecd cross sections indicates uniform technological catch up in all sectors but lower marginal labour productivity in agriculture the decline in opportunities to reallocate labour explains some of the post 1973 productivity slowdown

day of the week effect on the paris bourse abstract we present evidence on the day of the week effect on a stock market with a particular settlement procedure the paris bourse a strong and persistent negative return is found on tuesdays a similar result was previously found for japan and australia the settlement procedure is shown to have an effect on the distribution of daily returns consistent with forward pricing theory it cannot explain the negative tuesday return after adjusting for this settlement effect the mean return on mondays is the largest in the week a result at odds with the evidence in the u s a

estimating most productive scale size using data envelopment analysis abstract the relation between the most productive scale size mpss for paparticular input and output mixes and returns to scale for multiple inputs multiple outputs situations is explicitly developed this relation is then employed to extend the applications of data envelopment analysis dea introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes ccr to the estimation of most productive scale sizes for convex production possibility sets it is then shown that in addition to productive inefficiencies at the actual scale size the ccr efficiency measure also reflects any inefficiencies due to divergence from the most productive scale size two illustrations of the practical applications of these results to the estimation of most productive scale sizes and returns to scale for hospitals and stem electric generation plants are also provided emphasize the advantage of this method in examining specific segments of the efficient production surface

social inequalities in reforming state socialism between redistribution and markets in china this article extends market transition theory to an analysis of inequality under the conditions of partial reform in china logit regression analysis indicates cadres officials have no greater odds than other households of being among the privileged or avoiding poverty entrepreneurs andformer team cadres however are advantaged despite the rise of a hybrid elite of entrepreneurs who are currently cadres that capitalizes on redistributive power to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace increases in income inequality are modest when market reform stimulates improved economic performance the poor appear to benefit and experience comparable improvements in household income as a result there is only a slight increase in inequality at least in the early stages of market reform the empirical analysis is based on survey data collected in rural china in 1985

ownership organization and income inequality market transition in rural vietnam in transitional economies the scale of economic enterprise and the allocation of property rights shape social structures and influence income distribution in agrarian economies where labor intensive family enterprises dominate political officials income advantages decline rapidly relative to those of private entrepreneurs larger enterprises however provide greater income opportunities for officials especially when a government retains an ownership stake in the initial phases of reform this article replicates the findings from an earlier study of rural china using comparable survey data from vietnam we find that during the first two decades of rural market reform in vietnam and china the scale and ownership of firms differed radically small family enterprises dominated rural development in vietnam whereas china s development was dominated by larger firms initially established by rural governments consequently while cadre income advantages have kept pace with those of private entrepreneurs

the decline of township and village enterprises in china s economic transition summary a paradoxical phenomenon in china s transitional economy is that markets developed under predominant public ownership which nevertheless has declined with the development of markets previous studies reveal that initial political and economic conditions of reform and fiscal decentralization gave rise to local public enterprises leading role in early marketization this paper explains the subsequent fall of such a role building and expanding on recent studies of privatization we argue that market development and competition have constrained the abilities of local public enterprises to address revenue and employment imperatives whereas local governments sales oriented growth strategies have exacerbated governance problems panel data are analyzed to provide provisional test of pertinent hypotheses

federalism as a commitment to reserving market incentives the authors advance a new perspective in the study of federalism their approach views federalism as a governance solution of the state to credibly preserving market incentives market incentives are preserved if the state is credibly prevented from compromising on future economic success and from bailing out future failures the salient features of federalism decentralization of information and authority and interjurisdictional competition help provide credible commitment or these purposes in addition the authors suggest that some federalism are self sustaining

urban infrastructure financing in reform era china urban infrastructure has been substantially upgraded in reform era china this paper explains contextually and empirically how chinese cities finance their infrastructure it demonstrates that china has succeeded in addressing urban infrastructure backlogs by opening up new venues for financing but simultaneously heavily relying on unconventional sources the paper also argues that urban infrastructure financing has much to do with the country s transition to a market oriented economy that fosters the pro growth role of city governments as well as the redistribution of fiscal power between the levels of the urban hierarchy that produces significant variation of financial capacities among the different administrative ranks of cities

financial freedom and bank efficiency evidence from the european union this paper investigates the dynamics between the financial freedom counterparts of the economic freedom index drawn from the heritage foundation database and bank efficiency levels we rely on a large sample of commercial banks operating in the 27 european union member states over the 2000s after estimating bank specific efficiency scores using data envelopment analysis dea we develop a truncated regression model combined with bootstrapped confidence intervals to test our main hypotheses results suggest that the higher the degree of an economy s financial freedom the higher the benefits for banks in terms of cost advantages and overall efficiency our results also show that the effects of financial freedom on bank efficiency tend to be more pronounced in countries with freer political systems in which governments formulate and implement sound policies and higher quality governance

growth efficiency and convergence in china s state and collective industry in china as in the soviet union and eastern europe economic reform initiatives seek to increase productivity by introducing elements of market oriented policies and institutions into an economy formerly dominated by state planning efforts to evaluate the impact of reform of chinese industry have focused on the measurement of productivity change in state enterprises this study expands the prior framework of analysis in several directions our investigation of productivity trends is not limited to state enterprises but includes quantitative comparisons with china s fast growing collective industries which contributed 36 of overall industrial output in 1988 1 unlike previous studies our analysis works with gross rather than net output this permits us to investigate changes in the productivity of intermediate inputs which occupy a large portion of total costs in chinese industry as well as labor and capital to do this we develop a quasi frontier estimation procedure which seems appropriate for comparisons of total factor productivity based on chinese industrial data finally we offer a quantitative perspective on the extent to which reform efforts have moved industrial resource allocation toward patterns expected of a market system the analysis confirms our previous finding based on a restricted framework employing only labor fixed capital and net output that multifactor productivity in state industry has risen substantially during

stock index futures mispricing profit opportunities or risk premia this paper reports empirical evidence on stock index futures pricing based on about four years of synchronous hourly data from the uk reported index values are based on firm quotes identified arbitrage opportunities are therefore actually exploitable and economically significant the analysis controls for cash market settlement procedures the results show that ex ante trading rules would have generated attractive profits after transaction costs and after the risks of dividend uncertainties marking to market and possible delays in execution are considered the far contract and the near contract tend to be mispriced in the same direction the mild tendency of futures to be overpriced in rising markets and underpriced in falling markets appears to be unimportant finally significant positive relationships are observed between the absolute magnitude of mispricing and time to maturity and between mispricing and index option implied volatility

trading frequency and event study test specification abstract we examine the effects of thin trading on the specification of event study tests simulations of upper and lower tail tests are reported with and without variance increases on the event date across levels of trading volume the traditional standardized test is misspecified for thinly traded samples if return variance is unlikely to increase then corrado s rank test provides the best specification and power with variance increases the rank test is misspecified the boehmer et al standardized cross sectional test event study methodology under conditions of event induced variance journal of financial economics 30 pp 253 272 is properly specified but not powerful for upper tailed tests lower tailed alternative hypotheses can best be evaluated using the generalized sign test

measuring true stock index value in the presence of infrequent trading based on the beveridge nelson 1981 decomposition of an arima process i present a measure of true stock index value that is not directly observable due to infrequent trading of stocks the technique is illustrated with daily observations of the russell 2000 index this new measure might well prove useful in studies of lead lag relationships between index derivatives and spot market and futures basis measurements

market microstructure and securities values evidence from the tel aviv stock exchange abstract this paper examines the value effects of improvements in the trading mechanism selected stocks on the tel aviv stock exchange were transferred gradually from a daily call auction to a mechanism where the call auction was followed by iterated continuous trading sessions this event was associated with a positive and permanent price appreciation the cumulative average market adjusted return over a period that started five days prior to the announcement and ended 30 days after the stocks started trading by the new method was approximately 5 5 in addition we find positive liquidity externalities spillovers across related stocks and improvements in the value discovery process due to the improved trading method finally there was a positive association between liquidity gains and price appreciation

kinship networks and entrepreneurs in china s transitional economy1 this research draws insights from two theoretical traditions one is new institutionalism which emphasizes the role of institutions both formal and informal in economic growth the other is social network analysis which highlights the role of interpersonal relations in producing and enforcing informal norms integrating these two approaches yields the thesis that social networks affect economic growth via enforcing informal institutions the article focuses on the economic payoff of kinship networks in the context of china s rural industrialization to argue that kin solidarity and kin trust played an important role in protecting the property rights of private entrepreneurs and reducing transaction costs during the early stages of market reform when formal property rights laws were ineffective and market institutions underdeveloped data from 366 villages show that the strength of kinship networks has large positive effects on the count and workforce size of private rural enterprises and insignificant

evolution of bank efficiency in brazil a dea approach abstract this paper investigates cost technical and allocative efficiencies for brazilian banks in the recent period 2000 2007 we use data envelopment analysis dea to compute efficiency scores brazilian banks were found to have low levels of economic cost efficiency compared to banks in europe and in the us for the period with high macroeconomic volatility 2000 2002 the economic inefficiency in brazilian banks can be attributed mainly to technical inefficiency rather than allocative inefficiency state owned banks are significantly more cost efficient than foreign private domestic and private with foreign participation there is no evidence of differences in economic efficiency due to type of activity and bank size these results may provide some useful guidance for financial regulators and bank managers

property rights and stratification in socialist redistributive economies in socialist economies work organizations differ widely in the compensation they provide employees despite the absence of key product and labor market processes thought to ex plain such inequalities in market economies existing theories of stratification in socialist economies focus on the power and privilege of elites but inequalities among organizations are not created by political particularism or elite power in this paper i sketch elements of an institutional theory of stratification anchored in a conception of property rights the right to derive income from productive assets two aspects of property rights guide the analysis 1 the dispersion of property rights across a hierarchy of governmentjurisdictions and 2 the exercise of these rights by government jurisdictions as they extract revenues primarily through taxation extraction of revenues from a work organization varies with the budgetary resources of a government jurisdiction and the dependence of that jurisdiction on the out puts of the organization variation in revenue extraction in turn creates inequalities among work organizations in their abilities to provide benefits to employees an analysis of survey data on the provision of housing and benefits by work organizations in the large industrial city of tianjin china provides provisional support for these ideas s tudents of communist states have had little reason to dispute lenski s 1966 claim that the distribution of rewards in a society is a func tion of the distribution of power p 63 as ex emplified in szelenyi s wedding of elite theory to institutional economics this idea has been de veloped primarily in terms of the power of class es or occupational groups szelenyi 1978 be gan with the observation that planned economies operate according to redistributive rather than market principles however the process of re

federalism and the soft budget constraint the government s incentives to bail out inefficient projects are determined by the trade off between political benefits and economic costs the latter depending on the decentralization of government two effects of federalism are derived first fiscal competition among local governments under factor mobility increases the opportunity costs of bailout and thus serves as a commitment device the competition effect second monetary centralization together with fiscal decentralization induces a conflict of interests and thus may harden budget constraints and reduce inflation the checks and balance effect the authors analysis is used to interpret china s recent experience of transition to a market economy copyright 1998 by american economic association

regional institutions ownership transformation and migration of industrial leadership in china the case of the chinese synthetic dye industry 1978 2008 scholars have emphasized the gradual ownership transformation of enterprises as a key driver of the chinese economy s unprecedented growth however little work has been done on the issue of whether this transformation process takes place evenly across the various regions in china this article describes the important role of regional institutions in shaping the ownership based competitiveness of local enterprises and the migration of industries across regions in the case of the chinese synthetic dye industry the passing of leadership from state owned enterprises soes to collectively owned enterprises coes and then to private enterprises pes was accompanied by a concurrent leadership migration from one region to another the article contends that this simultaneous occurrence was not accidental four institutional constraints the degree of central supervision the local labor arrangements the local social welfare provision and the degree of ambiguity in property rights retarded the rise of new ownership forms in the previously dominant regions this gave other regions the opening to take over leadership positions by providing a more favorable institutional context for new ownership forms these findings are likely to apply to all of the chinese manufacturing industries that existed prior to 1978 and that subsequently did not experience significant technological changes and were not highly protected by the government

local governments as industrial firms an organizational analysis of china s transitional economy despite widespread skepticism about government ownership in transitional economies china s rapid industrial growth has been led by public enterprises kornai s theory of soft budbet constraints born of the failure of earlier hungarian reforms fosters such skepticism but it assumes as fixed organizational characteristics that in fact vary widely across government jurisdictions local governments with smaller industrial bases have clearer financial incentives and constraints fewer nonfinancial interests in enterprises and a greater capacity to monitor them in china s vast public sector the fastest growth in output and productivity has occurred where government ownership rights are clearest and most easily enforced which enables officials to manage public industry as a diversified market oriented firm

autocorrelation of daily index returns intraday to intraday versus close to close intervals abstract first order autocorrelation coefficients of 1 daily equally weighted open to open returns 2 daily equally weighted intraday to intraday returns terminating at each of 23 successive 15 minute intervals of the trading day beginning at 10 15 a m and 3 daily equally weighted and value weighted close to close returns interval 24 are examined a number of findings concerning the behavior of these autocorrelations are reported first order autocorrelation is shown to follow a crude u shaped pattern when plotted against the time of the trading day but there is no significant difference in the behavior of autocorrelations based on open to open returns and 24 hour returns terminating at 10 15 a m evidence that intraday patterns in autocorrelation cannot be explained fully by trading delays also is presented

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

elite opportunity in transitional economies command economies gave communist era elites administrative control and material privilege but severely restricted money income and private wealth markets and privatization have injected new value into public assets and create unprecedented opportunities for elite insiders these opportunities depend on the extent of regime change and barriers to asset appropriation regime change varies from the survival of the entire party hierarchy to its rapid collapse and defeat in competitive elections barriers to asset appropriation vary with the extent pace and form of privatization and the concentration and liquidity of assets different combinations of such circumstances jointly affect the extent to which prior elites obtain ownership or control of privatized assets use political office to extract larger incomes move into salaried elite occupations or fall out of the elite altogether regime change and barriers to asset appropriation affect change at the national level but outcomes vary across economic sectors because of characteristics of organizations elite positions and assets this elementary theory serves to integrate varied findings from recent research on central europe china and russia and yields predictions for other regions

a non parametric analysis of productivity the case of u s and japanese manufacturing a nonparametric analysis of technology technical change and productivity is presented in the context of cost minimizing behavior a number of nonparametric tests concerning the existence and nature of technical change are applied to u s and japanese manufacturing data nonparametric measures of technical change are presented copyright 1990 by american economic association

tests of stability for variances and means of overnight intraday returns during bull and bear markets abstract this paper examines the behavior of overnight and intraday returns during and across bull and bear markets robust tests new to the finance literature are performed to examine the stability of both variability of returns and mean returns over time comparing bull and bear markets intraday returns are significantly more volatile during bear markets but no statistical difference in overnight returns is found variability of returns is significantly greater intraday than overnight during both bull and bear markets differences in mean returns between bull and bear markets are shown to occur primarily intraday rather than overnight implications for future studies of trading phenomena and return generating processes are presented

does risk aversion affect bank output loss the case of the eurozone abstract we propose a new model to infer the evolution of bank specific output losses due to the uncertainty in bank output prices losses are based on bank risk aversion with micro foundations tethered to the uncertainty regarding prices our model allows us to measure time varying bank specific output losses and risk aversion while taking into account all bank cross sectional heterogeneity we employ a panel data set to estimate the input and output elasticities with both parametric and non parametric techniques we are the first to document that increasing risk aversion among eurozone banks during the financial crisis resulted in sizable output losses although subdued thereafter losses have been resurging in recent years both conventional and unconventional monetary policy responses by the european central bank ecb mitigated uncertainty in bank output prices though unequally so across countries certain measures of unconventional monetary policy may have even enhanced bank risk aversion and thereby output losses but mainly so for large countries