coal overcapacity in china multiscale analysis and prediction gaining a quantitative understanding of the causes of coal overcapacity and accurately predicting it are important for both government agencies and coal enterprises following the decomposition reconstruction prediction concept a combined ensemble empirical mode decomposition least square support vector machine autoregressive integrated moving average eemd lssvm arima model is proposed for quantitatively analyzing and forecasting coal overcapacity in china the results show that the main causes of coal overcapacity in china include insufficient demand market failure and institutional distortion institutional distortion with an influence degree of 73 75 is the most fundamental and influential factor from 2017 to 2019 the scale of coal overcapacity in china will reach between 1 721and 1 819 billion tons suggesting that coal overcapacity will remain a serious problem the rate of coal overcapacity caused by insufficient demand will fluctuate slightly while coal overcapacity caused by market failure will trend downward but the impact of institutional distortion on coal overcapacity will be exacerbated a statistical analysis demonstrates that the eemd lssvm arima model significantly outperformed other widely developed baselines e g arima lssvm eemd arima and eemd lssvm

risk taking and taxation an alternative perspective abstract the analysis of risk taking and taxation has almost invariably been in a portfolio choice framework this paper presents the alternative perspective of an occupational choice framework where risk taking involves the additional element of discrete choice between safe and risky activities it is shown that the specification of equilibrium must of necessity have a general equilibrium character in this setting the paper develops rules for government intervention in the market equilibrium and analyses the effects of taxation on risk taking

everyone may benefit from subsidising entry to risky occupations this paper shows that in the presence of costly state verification directly or indirectly subsidising entry to risky occupations may benefit everyone the result holds even in the presence of private insurance indeed it may be desirable to prohibit private insurance in favour of subsidies to hazardous activities these findings do not depend on the government having an advantage over the private sector in observing outcomes the explanation is that through its influence on equilibrium price feasible fiscal policy can shift the return distribution so as to create collective insurance more cheaply than is possible through private contracting with its requirement of costly auditing amongst applications is a case for a loss making state bank offering high interest rate loans

quota allocation of coal overcapacity reduction among provinces in china abstract laying down fair and economically viable policies to allocate quotas of coal overcapacity reduction to provinces has drawn great attention from both governments and enterprises in this study the production function method and panel variable coefficient model are used to estimate the boundary production function and coal capacities of 25 coal producing provinces the results predict that china s coal overcapacity will reach more than 0 803 billion tons by 2020 then a quota allocation model of coal overcapacity reduction among the provinces is proposed based on nonlinear programming with the aim of minimizing the total cost of national overcapacity reduction the results show that the total cost of national overcapacity reduction based on the optimal allocation scheme is 56 6695 billion yuan less than that based on the government allocation scheme the gini coefficient of the optimal allocation scheme is smaller than 0 3 indicating that this plan considers effectiveness and fairness furthermore we calculate the optimal proportions for the provinces to reduce coal overcapacity based on different capacity utilizations and different national coal production control targets the results show that the optimal proportions for most provinces are approximately the same under different conditions which means the optimal allocation scheme is robust and efficient

inter firm technology transfer partnership embedded licensing or standard licensing agreements when companies decide to engage in technology transfer through licensing to other firms they have two basic options to use standard licensing contracts or to set up more elaborate partnership embedded licensing agreements we find that broader partnership embedded licensing agreements are preferred with higher levels of technological sophistication of industries with greater perceived effectiveness of secrecy as a means of appropriability and when licensors are smaller than their licensees innovative differentials between companies innovative supremacy of the licensor and market and technological overlap between partners appear to have no effect on the preference for a particular form of licensing

regulatory environments and the location decision evidence from the early foreign market entries of new technology based firms new technology based firms ntbfs embarking on a strategy of rapid internationalisation choose foreign market entries that minimise transaction costs and the related risks of failure means to reduce the young firms vulnerability to the appropriation of intellectual capital are particularly important influences on early foreign market choices we explore the effect of the institutional dimension specifically the national regulatory environment on the location choices and the speed of internationalisation by british and german ntbfs we provide evidence that entrepreneurial young firms choose to enter country markets offering better regulatory protection for their intellectual property this decision is moderated by a home regulatory regime bias in contrast we observe that the speed of internationalisation is influenced less by the foreign regulatory regime and more by industry and firm characteristics we also observe that managerial experience influences the location choices of ntbfs facing regulatory hazards

intellectual property rights and the governance of international r d partnerships this paper studies the degree to which country differences in intellectual property rights protection affect the choice of companies for a particular mode of international inter firm r d partnering it focuses on the preference of companies for either an equity joint venture or a contractual partnership we find that international differences in intellectual property rights protection are a significant factor with less secure protection firms choose r d joint ventures rather than contractual partnerships the level of technological change in industries has an inverse effect on the preference for international r d joint ventures

international technology licensing monopoly rents transaction costs and exclusive rights as firms increasingly use licensing to exploit knowledge based assets in global technology markets appropriate structuring of these agreements has become an important line of research inquiry one area that has received less attention is the nature of rights granted in inter firm licensing relationships although it is an important clause that has implications for profit generation from licensing of proprietary assets conceptualizing licensing rights in terms of number of licenses granted and exclusivity rights given to a licensee in a foreign market this paper examines the determinants of these rights based on monopoly rents and transaction costs associated with different types of licensing contracts hypotheses are empirically tested through two studies one based on large us manufacturing firms and the other on a cross national sample of medium sized firms actively involved in international technology licensing results from both studies show a greater propensity to use non exclusive multiple licensing when the licensed technology has greater potential to produce differentiated products or when there is greater threat of substitutive technologies entering the market on the other hand innovative technologies and a higher degree of asset specific investments required of the licensee for the technology are related to the use of single exclusive licensing agreements

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

foreign direct investment as a way to guide the innovative process towards sustainability abstract in 1972 for the first time the term sustainable development was coined at the stockholm conference and in 1987 the brundtland report established the sustainability innovation binomial since then extensive research into sustainability oriented innovation has been conducted focused during the last decade on smes and recognizing these as the main actor of sustainable development for which foreign direct investment fdi is considered from a research and institutional point of view as a vital source although academic literature presents conflicting conclusions in this context this paper aims to perform a microeconomic analysis of how fdi influences the innovative process of smes and how this can lead to a process oriented towards sustainability to this end a panel of 4667 smes has been analyzed spanning a sample period between 2004 and 2013 through a binary logit model which compares and contrasts smes with fdi and equivalent smes without fdi over time and therefore exposed to a changing economy the most significant results are that fdi is attracted mainly by factors associated with technological supply which when coupled with being of medium size and located in a manufacturing sector of medium high technology generates positive spillovers these depend to a large extent on public funding which allows these companies to be more innovative and makes it more likely they focus their innovative process on sustainability

is western europe losing the technological race abstract using a variety of indicators this paper compares technological levels in japan the usa and w europe there is no justification for assuming general european technological backwardness whilst it lags in electronics and since 1975 has had a relatively slow rate of growth of innovative activities it also has sectors of strength chemicals machinery production engineering and countries whose relative commitments of resources to innovative activities are at least equal and sometimes superior to those of japan and the usa frg sweden switzerland its main policy challenges are to increase the rate of growth of innovative activities in lagging countries and to ensure pervasive applications of information technology similarly there is no convincing evidence that w europe is relatively backward in converting technology into economically efficient innovations some policy problems are significant in all three regions skill shortages whilst others are in the usa and w europe short term planning horizons of top management particular european problems are the effects of social legislation on worker flexibility and mobility of national regulations on intra european competition and of slow rates of growth of output on the growth of innovative activities japan and the usa have their problems with the latter continuously under challenge from the former and increasingly specialised in defence and raw materials related technologies

the size distribution of innovating firms in the uk 1945 1983 a survey of 4 378 significant innovations shows that firms with fewer than 1 000 employees commercialized a much larger share than is indicated by their share of r and d expenditures innovations per employee have been consistently above average in firms with more than 10 000 employees and have become so in firms with fewer than 1 000 intersectoral variation in the size distribution of innovating firms can be explained as a function of r and d based technological opportunities and of technological ease of entry by user firms with principal activities outside the sector copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

the composition of foreign direct investment and protection of intellectual property rights evidence from transition economies while existing literature has examined the impact of intellectual property protection on the volume of foreign direct investment fdi little is known about its effect on the composition of fdi inflows the author addresses this question empirically using a unique firm level data set from eastern europe and the former soviet union she finds that weak protection deters foreign investors in technology intensive sectors that rely heavily on intellectual property rights the results also indicate that a weak intellectual property regime encourages investors to undertake projects focusing on distribution rather than local production the latter effect is present in all sectors not just those relying heavily on intellectual property protection

the poor are twice cursed wealth inequality and inefficient credit market abstract this paper investigates the role of unobservable wealth differences on credit market equilibrium given there is also asymmetric information concerning effort preferences and choices in equilibrium poor but able entrepreneurs may subsidise the rich and incompetent or be excluded as a result investment may exceed or fall short of the optimal level low inequality may deliver conditions for perfect screening and an efficient level of investment the equilibrium with cross subsidisation is consistent with otherwise puzzling empirical observations

optimal linear income taxation in models with occupational choice the purpose of this paper is to investigate the implication of occupational choice for linear income taxation occupational choice is restricted to entrepreneurship versus wage earning different settings are considered concerning the introduction of uncertainty and that of individuals heterogeneity in ability or risk aversion for each setting an optimal tax formula is derived and shown to be made up of various components pertaining to insurance redistribution and efficiency

determinants of patent rights a cross national study abstract this paper presents an index of patent rights for 110 countries for the period 1960 1990 the index is used to examine what factors or characteristics of economies determine how strongly patent rights will be protected the evidence does indicate that more developed economies tend to provide stronger protection but the underlying factors which influence patent protection levels are the country s level of research and development r d activity market environment and international integration which are correlated with its level of development the results qualify however that r d activity influences patent protection levels after a nation s research sector reaches a critical size an implication of this is that to raise patent protection levels in weakly protecting countries it is important to foster a significant research base in those countries and thereby create incentives for protecting patent rights

do country level institutional frameworks and interfirm governance arrangements substitute or complement in international business relationships interfirm relationships among partners from institutionally distant environments are subject to governance difficulties owing to the paucity of shared cognitive and regulatory frameworks we examine the potential of formal contracting and relational governance developed at the partnership level to overcome the formal and informal institutional gap at the country level empirical results from a sample of 184 international partnerships of large us firms support an overall substitutive relationship between informal institutional frameworks and interorganizational relational arrangements whereby the performance benefits of relational governance are reinforced at higher degrees of informal institutional distance contrastingly formal institutional frameworks and contractual governance are found to have a complementary relationship with performance gains from formal contracting undermined at higher degrees of formal distance

modeling productive entrepreneurship in developing countries this paper develops a model of entrepreneurial start ups in an economy with costly firm creation costly entry to the skilled labor market and a mismatch between skilled workers and available jobs as prevailing in many developing countries it examines several mitigating policies such as improving the business environment reducing tax rates and cost of starting business and subsidizing entrepreneurial search and skilled employment to be effective policies need to target the most binding constraints to productive entrepreneurship when the constraints are on the side of firms search subsidies would be more effective in encouraging productive start ups than subsidies to skilled employment although fewer entrepreneurs may choose to operate in the formal sector than under the latter both types of subsidies should be phased out with reforms of the business environment and improved labor markets

provincial allocation of coal de capacity targets in china in terms of cost efficiency and fairness developing a de capacity scheme that is economical fair and efficient has become a key problem affecting the smooth achievement of coal de capacity targets it is also an important policy issue with regard to the overall implementation of china s supply side structural reforms in this study we use the production function method as well as the panel variable coefficient model to calculate the 25 provinces boundary production functions for the coal industry which leads to the estimation of the coal capacity and capacity utilization rate of each province taking into account the labor resettlement cost and disposal cost of fixed assets a total cost function of coal de capacity is established the growth rate function of total factor productivity tfp in the coal industry is constructed by the solow residual value method an allocation model of coal de capacity is then proposed based on multi objective nonlinear optimization with constraint conditions on the total reduction amount and minimum output of coal in each region finally using the relevant data of china s 25 coal producing provinces in 1990 2015 the allocation of coal de capacity is obtained under the goal of minimizing the total cost and maximizing the tfp growth rate the results show that the capacity utilization rate of china s coal industry is much lower than the lower limit of the reasonable utilization ratio while tfp shows negative growth over a long period the comparative analytical results indicate that in terms of total cost the optimal allocation scheme is 44 5335 billion yuan lower than the government allocation scheme the disposal cost of fixed assets and labor resettlement costs decrease by 29 2749 billion yuan and 15 2586 billion yuan respectively in terms of tfp growth the optimal allocation scheme has a 1 54 higher tfp growth rate compared with the government allocation scheme in terms of fairness the gini coefficients of the optimal scheme calculated by various indexes are all smaller than 0 3 placing the scheme within the category of considerable or absolute fairness in addition we calculate the optimal allocation ratio of coal de capacity in the situation where cost preference and quality preference of central government are considered to verify the intrinsic consistency of the model in brief the optimal allocation scheme proposed in this study effectively realizes the integration of economy efficiency and fairness 2018 elsevier b v

trade and insurance with imperfectly observed outcomes abstractthe following sections are included introductionthe modelunobserved outcomescostly observationconcluding remarksreferences this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

does stronger patent protection increase export variety evidence from us product level data proponents of global intellectual property rights iprs reforms have argued that developing countries weak iprs limit their access to foreign innovative products and technologies central to our understanding of the effects of iprs on product access is the influence of national differences in patent protection on corporate behavior and business strategy of multinational firms using detailed product data on us exports from 1990 to 2000 this research note assesses the impact of strengthening iprs in developing countries on product variety of us exports colonial origin and cross industry variation in patent effectiveness serve to identify the impact the results show that the strengthening of iprs increased exports of new products in patent sensitive industries the expansion in product variety accounted for the entire increase in us exports the findings substantiate claims that ratification of trips by developing countries promotes access to new foreign products and technologies additionally the results demonstrate that patent protection is a significant institutional factor in us firms business decisions over the introduction of new products and processes into a developing country marketplace

coal power overcapacity and investment bubble in china during 2015 2020 abstract electricity consumption growth in china has experienced radical adjustment from high speed to medium speed with the advent of new economy normal however the investment enthusiasm on coal power remains unabated and leads to continuous operation efficiency deterioration in recent years in this paper we quantify the rational capacity and potential investment of coal power in china during the 13th fyp period 2016 2020 by employing power planning model and fully considering the power sector s contribution in the 15 non fossil primary energy supply target by 2020 we estimate that the reasonable capacity addition space of coal power ranges between 50 gw and 100 gw depending on the expected range of demand growth we find that if all the coal power projects submitted for environmental impact assessment eia approval were put into operation in 2020 capacity excess would reach 200 gw such huge overcapacity will bring forth disastrous consequences including enormous investment waste poor economic performance of generators and more importantly delay of low carbon energy transition finally policy recommendations are proposed to address this issue

choosing organizational modes of strategic technology partnering international and sectoral differences this paper focuses on international strategic technology partnerships and the choice that companies have in terms of the organizational mode either through complex inter organizational modes involving equity sharing or contractual non equity alliances the empirical results show that the choice of particular mode of cooperation varies with the technological characteristics of sectors of industry joint ventures are disproportionately represented in relatively mature industries contractual alliances dominate strategic technology partnering in so called high tech industries

excess capacity as a barrier to entry in the us titanium industry abstract the purpose of this paper is to construct and empirically test a model designed to determine the impact if any of expected excess capacity on the probability of entry the analysis is conducted within the context of a single oligopoly specifically the us titanium metal industry using time series data an empirical model is developed and estimated in order to determine expected values of the components of excess capacity capacity and production by disentangling the components of excess capacity and estimating them separately it is possible to separate any incumbent actions that may preempt entry from the effects of underlying cycles in demand and production these predicted values are utilized in a logit model generating results which indicate that expected levels of capacity expansion appear to diminish the probability of firm entry into the titanium industry

the second theorem of the second best abstract this paper interprets many results from the literature on incentive compatibility and cost benefit analysis as illustrations of a second theorem of the second best the theorem states that if there exists any restriction on transactions required for first best efficiency then there is no presumption that a social welfare maximum entails equal marginal social utilities of income across individuals one reason is that incentive constraints shift with redistributions of wealth so that redistributions have an instrumental role in relaxing constraints that make the economy second best two examples relate such wealth effects to countervailing incentives and hostage taking

moral hazard and optimal commodity taxation abstract this paper demonstrates that in an economy with moral hazard and more than one commodity competitive equilibrium is not constrained efficient to correct the market failure differential commodity taxation is necessary a general optimal tax formula is derived and special cases of is discussed

switching costs and sectoral adjustments in general equilibrium with uninsured risk abstract consider a two sector economy subject to recurring technological shocks these affect earnings in the two sectors differently creating incentives for workers to switch occupation switching costs are sunk individuals are risk averse and cannot diversify their income risk we characterize the rational expectations equilibrium of the economy and illustrate the extent to which uncertainty and switching costs increase labor immobility the resulting equilibrium is not even second best optimal even a government that cannot transfer income to achieve insurance can improve matters by speeding up the reallocation of labor across sectors because that reduces relative price variability journal of economic literature classification numbers d52 d62 j62

international trade foreign investment and the formation of the entrepreneurial class in this paper i examine the argument that free trade may be harmful to less developed countries because such international competition inhibits the formation of a local entrepreneurial class i view the entrepreneur as the manager of the industrial enterprise as well as the agent who bears the risks associated with industrial production a two sector model of a small open economy is developed in which the size of the entrepreneurial class is endogenous it is shown that the entrepreneurial class is smaller under free trade than would be first best optimal in the presence of efficient risk sharing institutions such as stock markets nonetheless there are potential gains from trade and any protectionist policy that increases the number of entrepreneurs will have deleterious welfare consequences this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

patents as indicators of corporate technological strength abstract quantitative indicators of the technological strengths of individual companies would be an important addition to the financial and economic data used in competitor assessments merger acquisition analyses investment decisions and corporate planning and management this paper examines the links between corporate patent and patent citation data and several other indicators of corporate performance changes in sales and profits research and development budgets scientific productivity and expert opinions of company technological strength the study covers 17 us pharmaceutical companies for which financial r d and expert opinion data were readily available for these pharmaceutical companies it was found that the patent data are an excellent indicator of overall corporate technological strength with 1 an overall correlation of 0 82 between expert opinion of pharmaceutical company technical strength and the number of us patents granted to the companies and 2 correlations in the general range of 0 6 to 0 9 between increases in company profits and sales and both patent citation frequency and concentration of company patents within a few patent classes

trade and insurance with moral hazard abstract previous literature on the use of trade policy for insurance has relied implicitly on moral hazard and adverse selection as the reasons for the failure of private markets for risk bearing this paper begins with the observation that such forces should be incorporated explicitly into the models to ensure a fair comparison between markets and governments for the case of moral hazard it is found that market equilibrium given exclusive insurance is an informationally constrained pareto optimum in one case of non exclusive insurance a systematic role for government insurance is found but the scope of trade policy is ambiguous

trade and insurance with adverse selection this paper considers a small open economy with a safe sector and a risky sector the probability of success in the risky activity differs across individuals and is private information it is shown that policies that sustain informationally constrained pareto optima should not include tariffs a laissez faire competitive equilibrium if it exists is pareto optimal these results contrast with previous literature on the role of tariffs as insurance where private risk markets are assumed away in an ad hoc manner

the measurement of intellectual property rights protection this research improves upon empirical studies that examine the measurement of intellectual property rights ipr protection prior measures examine only one type of law or lack a component that addresses the actual enforcement of these laws the measure presented here uses three types of ipr laws and enforcement components for them

technological flows and choice of joint ventures in technology alliances abstract this paper analyses the influence of technological flows in the choice of joint ventures as a governance form of technology alliances using a theoretical framework based on transaction costs economics and the economics of intellectual property rights we argue that the formation of a joint venture is only necessary in situations for which technological flows make the monitoring of alliance activities and the distribution of cooperation rents difficult our hypotheses have been confirmed using a sample of technology alliances created by companies from the european union between 1992 and 1999

the effect of national culture on the choice of entry mode characteristics of national cultures have frequently been claimed to influence the selection of entry modes this article investigates this claim by developing a theoretical argument for why culture should influence the choice of entry two hypotheses are derived which relate culture to entry mode choice one focusing on the cultural distance between countries the other on attitudes towards uncertainty avoidance using a multinomial logit model and controlling for other effects the hypotheses are tested by analysing data on 228 entries into the united states market by acquisition wholly owned greenfield and joint venture empirical support for the effect of national culture on entry choice is found

measurement of natural and cyclical excess capacity in china s coal industry abstract overcapacity is a persistent problem in china s economy previous de capacity measures based on the quantity of the total excess capacity have failed to prevent the recurrence of increasingly worse overcapacity to solve this problem we attempt to quantitatively analyze china s excess coal capacity by dividing it into the long term natural excess capacity and short term cyclical excess capacity using the state space model and kalman filter algorithm the results show that china s excess coal capacity can indeed be divided into natural excess capacity and cyclical excess capacity and they have different causes fluctuations roles and effects on the price in 1995 2001 cyclical excess capacity was the main factor of overcapacity but in 2002 2015 natural excess capacity played a key role cyclical excess capacity has a negative effect on the price whereas natural excess capacity has little effect on it therefore policy makers should focus on the causes the fluctuations and the roles of natural excess and cyclical excess in addition to those of the total excess capacity they should also consider the relationship between the capacity and price based on the different effects of the natural excess capacity and cyclical excess capacity on the price

on the future of international joint venture research international joint ventures ijvs are an important type of international strategic alliance isa and have been studied by scholars for decades resulting in a plethora of empirical studies publications and reviews yet an inadequate accumulation of knowledge exists as a closer look reveals much more than providing a summary and critical assessment of past contributions this paper develops an expansive research agenda based upon a deep understanding of past research and comprehensive frameworks that distill this research we identify a number of research opportunities that would not only advance ijv research but also closely related literatures and disciplines such as isas theories of the multinational firm international business research and strategic management

a comparison between economic systems with an application to transition abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium theory of endogenous firm and class formation under non contractibility with heterogeneous individuals a collectivist economy a private ownership economy and a mixed economy are compared on the basis of identical economic fundamentals methodological symmetry each economic system generates specific inefficiencies so that none dominates the others in general the main trade off is between the welfare loss associated with risk taking in the private ownership economy and the informational problems in the collectivist economy we then use this framework to study the political economy of transition between economic systems and provide detailed welfare results

measuring r d in small firms how much are we missing the oecd surveys on r d are considerably biased towards underestimating r d in small firms this conclusion is derived from the author s comparison between the official dutch r d survey and the findings of his own survey among 3000 firms although being based on dutch observations only the author s considerations have an impact on other oecd countries since the official dutch r d survey is fully compatible with those in other countries the findings call into question the results from a number of empirical studies bearing on subjects such as market structure and r d firm size and r d or r d and growth

the social efficiency of private decisions to enforce property rights costs must be incurred if an owner is to enforce private property rights effectively we show that in a perfectly competitive economy private decisions to enforce rights may result in either more or less enforcement than is socially efficient cases of multiple stable equilibria occur and an equilibrium may be locally but not globally efficient resources may not be employed in their socially most valuable uses and enforcement may be accompanied by inefficient investment in resource productivity

externalities in economies with imperfect information and incomplete markets this paper presents a simple general framework for analyzing externalities in economies with incomplete markets and imperfect infonnation by identifying the pecuniary effects of these externalities that net out the paper simplifies the problem of determining when tax interventions are pareto improving the approach indicates that such tax interventions almost always exist and that equilibria in situations of imperfect information are rarely constrained pareto optima it can also lead to simple tests based on readily observable indicators of the efficacy of particular tax policies in situations involving adverse selection signaling moral hazard incomplete contingent claims markets and queue rationing equilibria traditional discussions of externalities have emphasized the distinction between technological externalities in which the action of one individual or firm directly affects the utility or profit ofanother and pecuniary externalities in which one individual s or firm s actions affect another only through effects on prices while the presence of technological externalities imply in general that a competitive equilibrium may not be pareto efficient pecuniary externalities hy themselves are not a source of inefficiency the fact that prices change has of course important consequences there are both distributional and allocational effects but the distribution effects net out gains for example hy firms whose prices increase are precisely offset by losses e g to individuals who must pay higher prices and there are no welfare losses from the allocation effects as long as the price changes involved are small if firms are maximizing profits and individuals are maximizing utility both facing prices that correctly refiect opportunity costs then standard envelope theorem arguments imply that changes in profits or utility induced by changes in allocations resulting from any small change in prices are negligible

unfair credit allocations this article investigates the impact of credit allocation on heterogeneous wealth entrepreneurs we show that with decreasing risk aversion and unobservable wealth poorer borrowers exert more effort as a consequence of endogenous adverse selection they are either excluded from the market or necessarily subsidize richer borrowers in a pooling equilibrium resulting in a paradoxical and inequitable redistribution alternatively a less likely separating equilibrium may occur in which poor types bear the entire weight of separation in the form of excess risk taking

enterprise investment local government intervention and coal overcapacity the case of china abstract long term management of china s coal overcapacity depends on the targeted policy guidance on industry production capacity expansion in the overcapacity formation process in this study coal enterprise and local government are treated as game participants and a three stage dynamic game model has been developed to depict the boosting effect of the game behavior of coal enterprise s and local government s capacity investments in different markets of supply and demand the results are shown in the following 1 local government has been the behind the scenes operator of over investment and redundant construction and its excessive interventions in coal industry investment have been the primary cause of overcapacity formation 2 when the market is in short supply coal enterprise s optimal behavior is to continuously increase the rate of investment growth until it reaches the threshold to obtain the maximum excess profits ultimately leading to overinvestment in the industry and 3 the key factors affecting the game abilities of coal enterprise and local government are the market s self regulation and the central government s supervision intensity although the chinese government a highly vertically oriented bureaucratic structure is implementing a mandatory de capacity policy to alleviate the intensity of excessive coal capacity it is not a long term regularization on the supply side reform

which countries protect intellectual property the case of software piracy david g steel using data on software piracy we examine how protection of intellectual property varies across countries consistent with other studies we find that intellectual property receives greater protection in developed economies high income countries have lower piracy rates we also find that protection depends on cultural factors countries with an individualist culture have lower piracy rates than do countries with a collectivist culture piracy rates are also lower in countries that have strong institutions that enforce contracts and protect property from expropriation these results suggest that national policies toward intellectual property reflect not only economic concerns but also national culture and institutions jel 034 l86 i introduction intellectual property rights are a recurring focus of international negotiation developed nations argue that such rights are essential for promoting innovation and economic growth many developing nations on the other hand argue that intellectual property rights inhibit economic development by restricting use of existing knowledge a generation of theoretical research has demonstrated that there is truth in both arguments depending on circumstances individual countries may reasonably favor different levels of protection for intellectual property 1 surprisingly little is known however about how such protection is actually determined only a handful of previous studies have analyzed cross national variation in intellectual property rights 2 these studies relate patent rights as formalized in the laws of individual countries to a range of social and economic variables the main empirical finding is that developed countries provide stronger patent protection in this article we extend this line of research by examining cross national variation in piracy of computer software the business software alliance and the software publishers association 1998 have estimated piracy rates the ratio of illegally copied units to total units for business software in more than 70 countries for 1994 97 these rates vary substantially in some countries essentially all new software was pirated in other countries less than 40 of software was pirated what explains these differences consistent with previous studies we find that developed countries provide greater protection for intellectual property than do developing countries high income countries tend to have lower piracy rates this is true both in a simple comparison of piracy rates with per capita income and to a lesser extent in regressions that control for other factors as we discuss below the causal interpretation of this correlation is not obvious the correlation is consistent with the hypothesis that intellectual property rights promote economic development however it may also reflect reverse causality e g if developing nations offer less protection so that they can use the intellectual property of developed nations or common causation by other factors many commentators have suggested that culture may also explain differences in piracy rates western countries they argue have individualist cultures that naturally embrace individual ownership of intellectual property whereas many non western countries have collective cultures that emphasize sharing over individual ownership as a result these societies have been reluctant to adopt western conceptions of intellectual property rights to test whether differences in culture lead to differences in intellectual property rights we relate piracy rates to an index of individualism and collectivism developed by hofstede 1980 1983 we find strong evidence that culture matters 3 countries with a tradition of individualism pirate much less than do countries with a tradition of collectivism this is true both in simple comparisons of piracy rates with individualism and in regressions that control for other factors

a technology gap approach to why growth rates differ abstract this paper contains a discussion and test of the technology gap approach to development and growth the basic hypotheses of the theory are tested on pooled cross sectional and time series data for 25 industrial countries for the period 1960 1983 the sample includes in addition to 19 oecd countries 6 of the most important industrial economies from the non oecd area the findings of the paper confirm that there exists a close correlation between the level of economic development measured as gdp per capita and the level of technological development measured through r d or patent statistics furthermore for the group of 25 countries as a whole technology gap models of economic growth are found to explain a large part of the actual differences in growth rates both between countries and periods as expected both the scope for imitation growth in innovative activity and efforts to narrow the gap investment appear as powerful explanatory factors of economic growth however when the non oecd countries and later usa and japan are removed from the sample the explanatory power of the technology variables especially growth in innovative activity diminishes

if agricultural land taxation is so efficient why is it so rarely used the land tax enjoys a distinguished pedigree in the theoretical literature on tax efficiency yet it is rarely used as a serious revenue source in rural areas of developing countries this article considers three drawbacks of the land tax relative to taxes on exports or marketed output 1 capitalization effects of the land tax impose a large burden on the current generation 2 land taxation increases the riskiness of net farmer income and 3 administration of the land tax entails costly informational requirements this article demonstrates that only the second and third drawbacks are valid economic arguments against the land tax simulations based on an economic model of farm behavior suggest that farmers may still prefer a land tax to an export tax despite the increased uncertainty of their after tax income administrative costs are therefore the best explanation of the weak link between the theoretical and practical aspects of land taxation

predictive analytics and the targeting of audits the literature on audit strategies has focused on random audits or on audits conditioned only on income declaration in contrast tax authorities employ the tools of predictive analytics to identify taxpayers for audit with a range of variables used for conditioning the paper explores the compliance and revenue consequences of the use of predictive analytics in an agent based model that draws upon a behavioral approach to tax compliance the taxpayers in the model form subjective beliefs about the probability of audit from social interaction and are guided by a social custom that is developed from meeting other taxpayers the belief and social custom feed into the occupational choice between employment and two forms of self employment it is shown that the use of predictive analytics yields a significant increase in revenue over a random audit strategy

allocation of coal de capacity quota among provinces in china a bi level multi objective combinatorial optimization approach abstract coal de capacity or capacity cut is an important part of china s energy transition formulating a quota allocation scheme for coal de capacity is the key to realizing smooth exit of coal overcapacity this study proposes a novel method of allocation of coal de capacity quota among provinces based on bi level multi objective combinatorial optimization in this bi level optimal allocation scheme boas the upper level is the central government and the lower level is the provincial governments the results indicate that because of the different costs of coal de capacity in each province the execution rate of each province for tasks assigned by the central government is quite different compared with the government allocation scheme gas and the single level optimal allocation scheme soas the growth rate of total factor productivity of the boas increases by 2 14 and 0 60 respectively the total de capacity cost of boas has reduced 64 billion yuan and 19 billion yuan respectively and the environmental benefits of boas has increased 73 billion yuan and 71 billion yuan respectively the gini coefficient of boas calculated by various indexes is less than 0 3 placing the scheme within the category of considerable or absolute fairness in addition the proposed allocation model truly reflects the complex dynamics of the game process of china s coal overcapacity governance system and can provide a more effective decision making reference for the chinese government in formulating the allocation scheme of coal de capacity

in country we trust national trust and the governance of international r d alliances drawing on a cognitive perspective of trust we propose that the trust towards an alliance partner s country which we call national trust will affect the governance structure used to organize the alliance between the partners we further argue that this effect of national trust is moderated by improved information on the partner firm using a sample of international alliances among firms based in western european countries we find support for the main effect of national trust on alliance governance decisions as well as partial support for an information based moderation

unintended consequences of china s coal capacity cut policy in early 2016 china introduced additional capacity cut policies to rebalance supply in the coal market to match demand that had been reduced by slow economic growth and strict environmental regulation ensuing disruptions to the coal market caused these policies to be revised and subsequently discarded as decision makers tried to find a balance between efficient supply economic and social stability and environmental sustainability this paper explores the causes of these unintended consequences using an extended version of the kem china model the results reveal that full and partial compliance with the capacity cut policies results in a significant gap between supply and demand this suggests that implementation of the policy was technically infeasible even allowing for a significant increase in coal prices and economic costs besides significant differences in coal prices and output profiles are registered across the country we argue that the heterogeneous nature of the chinese coal market and policy compliance was a major factor leading to the unintended consequences rendering a single national price benchmark inappropriate as a policy gauge we propose that the capacity cut policy should be differentiated across regions and even types of coalmines market approaches would be preferable to the command and control instruments and policy distortions that cause excess capacity should be removed

land taxes output taxes and sharecropping was henry george right economists have generally argued that if a land tax is administratively feasible then to increase efficiency it should be used to the exclusion of output taxes this article shows that underlying this policy prescription is the assumption that institutions for pooling and spreading production risks are perfect when account is taken of the imperfections in those institutions some use of output taxes will be pareto superior to a pure land tax regime and may induce higher output as well henry george was wrong these results generally apply even when the land tax is indexed to regional output and when land is farmed under sharecropping even in these cases a move from a pure land tax to a mix of land and low output taxes will reduce pre existing distortions in both consumption and production arising from the imperfection in risk markets

the impact of technological innovation on international trade patterns the evidence reconsidered abstract this paper presents some new evidence in relation to the role of technical change in particular industrial innovation on the international competitiveness of the various oecd countries its originality consists primarily of a using a technology output indicator to measure technological performance b presenting and comparing various measures of trade and technological performance for each individual oecd country with the exception of iceland c analysing at a relatively high level of product industry disaggregation the relationship between export performance and technological performance at the same time the very limited scope of the paper has to be emphasized a the analysis is purely static all the evidence presented relates to one year 1977 b most of the results obtained are preliminary and should be further substantiated by more detailed empirical and theoretical research c as a consequence little attention has been paid to policy implications which it was felt could only be discussed properly in a later stage the paper consists of four sections a brief review of the state of the art section 1 a discussion on definitions of technology intensity section 2 the development of the best technology output indicator section 3 and the empirical analysis itself section 4 the following most important results emerge from these various sections a there are serious shortcomings in using average technology intensity as bench mark for classifying products or industries in technology intensive or nontechnology intensive categories b there is a substantial difference between technology intensity as measured on the basis of a technology input proxy rd c yet as between countries the most traditional output and input indicators the number of patents granted and the amount spent on rd d foreign patenting in particular foreign patenting in the united states figs 1 and 2 section 3 is a more reliable technology output proxy than domestic patenting e in terms of technological comparative advantage as opposed to technology intensity it is the small oecd countries as opposed to the large ones which seem to base their trade comparative advantage on technological comparative performance table 7 section 4 1 f at the individual industry level it is found that i for most technology intensive industries defined however in a less restrictive way than us r d intensities a close relation exists between technological performance and export performance and ii that as compared to other country specific resource variables technological performance is the most important trade explanatory variable its elasticity increasing with the technology intensity of industries tables 11 and 12 section 4 2 space constraints prevented us from presenting the data in relation to the inter industry and inter country analysis these can however be obtained from the author

large firms in the production of the world s technology an important case of non globalisation us patenting by 686 of the world s largest manufacturing firms shows that their share of the world s production of technology is less than their share of r d activities and varies greatly amongst sectors in most cases the technological activities of these large firms are concentrated in their home country the characteristics of which influence the volume and trends in their technological activities much more strongly then the international component of these activities at the same time these large firms are major elements in the volume and the pattern of sectoral specializations in their home countries technological activities

tariff jumping and joint ventures it is well known that high tariffs tend to induce foreign direct investment fdi by encouraging the investors to jump the tariff wall this paper examines the economic interaction among tariffs fdi and international joint ventures ijv we show that in the presence of a strong local competitor even if opening a fully owned subsidiary is not profitable to a foreign firm the foreign firm may still enter the host country market through ijv however ijv is not profitable for sufficiently high tariff rates hence we argue that liberal trade policies may attract foreign investments through the formation of joint ventures

patent protection and the industrial composition of multinational activity evidence from u s multinational firms using data on u s firms technology licensing to local agents in developing countries this paper examines the impact of patent protection on internal and arms length technology transfer the effects of protection vary across products according to their complexity consistent with theories of internalization we find that patent reforms enable local firms to attract more arms length technology transfer especially of simple products which are relatively easy to imitate affiliated licensing also rises among simple products but falls among complex products the results withstand several robustness checks including controlling for endogeneity by using colonial origin as an instrument and are equally strong whether patent protection is measured by its intensity or by the timing of reforms the results have significance for patent policy in the developing world where access to knowledge is critical through arms length technology contracts proprietary knowledge diffuses beyond firm boundaries enabling local agents to access not only the protected technology but also know how

an institution based view of global ipr history leveraging the use of history to advance international business research this article focuses on the crucial debate over intellectual property rights ipr between the united states and china ironically during the 19th century the united states was not a leading ipr advocate as it is today but was a leading ipr violator developing an institution based view of ipr history we identify three underlying theoretical mechanisms that help to explain ipr in the two countries path dependence long term processes and institutional transitions we argue that both the us refusal to protect foreign ipr in the 19th century and the current chinese lack of enthusiasm to meet us ipr demands embody rational responses to their respective situations however given long term processes with intensifying isomorphic pressures institutional transitions in favor of better ipr protection are quite possible finally going above and beyond these two countries we draw on the ipr history in over ten other countries to develop a more globally generalizable framework which in turn contributes to the key question of how history matters

offshoring innovation to emerging markets organizational control and informal institutional distance the literature on innovation offshoring has focused on the dichotomous choice between two distinct investment strategies captive offshoring and outsourced offshoring we use the concept of organizational control to investigate how differences in the informal institutions that prevail in the home and host countries influence multinational enterprise mne strategy or the organizational control decision with respect to subsidiaries established to offshore innovation while the relationship between formal institutions and mne strategy has been the subject of considerable academic scrutiny less is known about the role of informal institutions we propose that the type of uncertainty precipitated by informal institutions is critical to understanding the strategic behavior of foreign investing mnes we hypothesize that an mne s organizational control over a subsidiary will be contingent upon the type of informal institutional uncertainty encountered by the subsidiary more specifically we disaggregate the informal institutions construct and develop three new more explicit latent constructs behaviorally oriented informal institutions boii technology oriented informal institutions toii and demand oriented informal institutions doii our theory posits that while an increase in boii distance will precipitate a preference for greater organizational control heightened toii and doii distances will induce the opposite outcome a preference for lower levels of organizational control

tariffs as insurance optimal commercial policy when domestic markets are incomplete free trade is not optimal for a small country that faces uncertain terms of trade if some factors are immobile ex post and markets for contingent claims are incomplete the government can improve social welfare by using commercial policy that serves as a partial substitute for missing insurance markets using a combination of analytical and simulation techniques we demonstrate that optimal policy for this purpose will often have an anti trade bias we also show that the usual preference by economists for factor or product taxes and subsidies over tariffs and export subsidies may not be justified in this context this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item