occupational choice and the process of development this paper models economic development as a process of institutional transformation by focusing on the interplay between agents occupational decisions and the distribution of wealth because of capital market imperfections poor agents choose working for a wage over self employment and wealthy agents become entrepreneurs who monitor workers only with sufficient inequality however will there be employment contracts otherwise there is either subsistence or self employment thus in static equilibrium the occupational structure depends on distribution since the latter is itself endogenous we demonstrate the robustness of this result by extending the model dynamically and studying examples in which initial wealth distributions have long run effects in one case the economy develops either widespread cottage industry self employment or factory production employment contracts depending on the initial distribution in the other example it develops into prosperity or stagnation

environmental policy and international trade when governments and producers act strategically some environmentalists express concern that trade liberalization may damage the environment by giving governments incentives to relax environmental policies to give domestic producers a competitive advantage support for such concern may be given by models of imperfectly competitive trade where there may be rent shifting incentives for governments to relax environmental policies but there are also incentives for producers to act strategically e g through their investment in rd ii allowing governments to act strategically increases the incentive for producers to act strategically iii welfare is lower when both parties act strategically and iv strategic behavior by producers and governments is greater when governments use emission taxes than when they use emission standards

language friction and partner selection in cross border r d alliance formation how does language friction affect alliance formation language friction is a form of cultural friction arising from structural differences in the respective languages used by potential partners to reason and solve problems together a little language friction may prompt partners to rethink solutions thereby enhancing collaboration but excessive friction may impede collaboration we develop a language friction index lfi to quantify relative differences in linguistic structure for any language pair utilizing a unique data set of semiconductor design activities 1988 2001 our empirical analysis finds an inverted u shaped relationship between partners lfi and the likelihood of cross border research and development rd 2 the effects of language friction are economically significant and strategically consequential 3 certain aspects of language friction occur independent of language proficiency and persist despite the use of lingua franca to reduce language barriers 4 linguistic diversity is an indirect marker of cognitive diversity which is useful in boosting creativity especially in first time collaborations 5 beyond r d alliances language friction may also influence other types of strategic interactions and organizational processes

multiproduct firms and environmental policy coordination the literature that analyzes the coordination of environmental taxes by governments considers that firms produce a single good at a single plant however in practice firms tend to produce several goods at various production plants multiproduct firms these firms may organize themselves in a centralized or decentralized fashion for purposes of decision making this affects their output and pollution levels this paper sets out to analyze the coordination of environmental taxes considering multiproduct firms we find that the organizational structure chosen by the owners of the firms depends on whether or not governments coordinate with one another in setting taxes and on whether the goods produced are substitutes or complements social welfare is greater if a supranational authority sets taxes in all countries in this case joint welfare is never lower if the authority is constrained to set the same tax in all countries

equilibrium pollution taxes in open economies with imperfect competition abstract this paper argues that imperfect competition in global markets creates a strategic interaction between governments that can lead to the inefficient distortion of pollution taxes this distortion can be decomposed into a rent capture effect and a pollution shifting effect the rent capture effect lowers equilibrium taxes as each country attempts to gain a competitive advantage over its trading partner and thereby capture foreign rent through net exports the pollution shifting effect raises equilibrium taxes as each country attempts to transfer production and its associated pollution to the other country this effect vanishes if pollution is perfectly transboundary because shifted pollution causes as much damage to the domestic environment as does domestic pollution the net effect on symmetric equilibrium taxes is negative except in the special case of perfect competition with no transboundary pollution in this case the two effects are mutually offsetting and the nash equilibrium is efficient when pollution is at least partially transboundary there also arises the usual transboundary externality and this reinforces the negative net strategic effect giving rise to equilibrium taxes that are lower than what is globally efficient

environmental policy with endogenous plant locations in a game between the governments of two countries each chooses its own environmental policy the nash equilibria of the game are generally not pareto optimal on the one hand each country may want to attract industry giving it an incentive to choose low environmental taxes or standards on the other hand if disutility from pollution is sufficiently high each country might prefer that a firm locates only in other countries this effect tends to make the environmental policy under non cooperation stricter than it would be with cooperation

a study of cartel stability the joint executive committee 1880 1886 this article employs weekly time series data on the joint executive committee railroad cartel from 1880 to 1886 to test empirically the proposition that observed prices reflected switches from collusive to noncooperative behavior an equilibrium model of dynamic oligopoly with asymmetric firms together with explicit functional form assumptions about costs and demand determines the estimating equations and stochastic structure of the econometric model the hypothesis that no switch took place so that price and quantity movements were solely attributable to exogenous shifts in the demand and cost functions is then tested against this alternative and rejected

endogenous timing in duopoly games stackelberg or cournot equilibria abstract simultaneous versus sequential play is studied in an extended game in a preplay stage players decide whether to select actions in the basic game at the first opportunity or to wait until observing their rivals first period actions in one extended game players first decide when to select actions without committing to actions in the basic game the equilibrium has a simultaneous play subgame unless payoffs in a sequential play subgame pareto dominate those payoffs in another extended game deciding to select at the first turn requires committing to an action both sequential play outcomes are the equilibria only in undominated strategies

life after takeover economic consequences of takeovers are investigated by analyzing profitability of enterprises acquired a s a direct or indirect white knight consequence of tender offer s target companies pre tender profitability averaged 0 97 percentag e points below peer industry norms nine years after takeover acquir ed lines of business had operating income assets percentages 3 10 poi nts below those of non tender lines with similar industry bases mark et shares and merger accounting methods most of the targets postta keover profit decline stemmed from asset value writeups there is no indication that on average the acquirers raised their targets operat ing profitability net of merger related accounting adjustments copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

timing and payoff of patent purchases the role of firm size and composition while large pharmaceutical companies continue to dominate drug development and patent acquisition their timing of drug patent acquisition and subsequent payoffs remain poorly understood we analys

is there complementarity or substitutability between internal and external r d strategies abstract the various strands of extant empirical research are inconclusive about the complementarity or substitutability between different innovation mechanisms such as internal and external r d using a panel sample of 83 incumbent pharmaceutical firms covering the period 1986 2000 our empirical analysis suggests that instead of a clear cut answer to the question of whether internal and external r d are complementary or substitutive innovation activities there appears to be a contingent relationship between internal and external r d strategies in shaping a firm s innovative output the results from our study indicate that the level of in house r d investments which is characterized by decreasing marginal returns is a contingency variable that critically influences the association between internal and external r d strategies in particular internal r d and external r d through either r d alliances or r d acquisitions are complementary innovation activities at higher levels of in house r d investments whereas at lower levels of in house r d efforts internal and external r d turn out to be substitutive strategic options

industrial organization paradigms empirical evidence and the economic case for competition policy the recent reform of competition policy in canada prompts one to ask whether there remains a tenable economi c case for antitrust policy to answer this question this paper begi ns by sketching competing industrial organization i o paradigms th e empirical evidence bearing on these paradigms particularly the m ainline structure conduct performance paradigm which has provided the main theoretical support for competition policy is examined it is concluded that recent theoretical and empirical work in i o have undermined the traditional economic case for competition policy the last section of the paper attempts a partial reconstruction of the ca se for competition policy along somewhat unorthodox lines

the economics of controlling stock pollutants an efficient strategy for greenhouse gases abstract optimal control theory is applied to develop an efficient strategy to control stock pollutants such as greenhouse gases and hazardous waste the optimal strategy suggests that at any time the marginal costs of abatement should be equated with the present value of the marginal damage of timely unabated emission the optimal strategy calls for increasingly light abatement over time as the pollutant stock accumulates the optimal policy applied to greenhouse gases suggests moderate abatement efforts at present with the potential for much greater future efforts

income distribution and macroeconomics this paper analyzes the role of wealth distribution in macroeconomics through investment in human capital it is shown that in the presence of credit markets imperfections and indivisibilities in investment in human capital the initial distribution of wealth affects aggregate output and investment both in the short and in the long run as there are multiple steady states this paper therefore provides an additional explanation for the persistent differences in per capita output across countries furthermore the paper shows that cross country differences in macroeconomic adjustment to aggregate shocks can be attributed among other factors to differences in wealth and income distribution across countries

challenges to promoting social inclusion of the extreme poor evidence from a large scale experiment in colombia we evaluate the large scale pilot of an innovative and major welfare intervention in colombia which combines homes visits by trained social workers to households in extreme poverty with preferential access to social programs we use a randomized control trial and a very rich dataset collected as part of the evaluation to identify program impacts on the knowledge and take up of social programs and the labor supply of targeted households we find no consistent impact of the program on these outcomes possibly because the way the pilot was implemented resulted in very light treatment in terms of home visits importantly administrative data indicates that the program has been rolled out nationally in a very similar fashion suggesting that this major national program is likely to fail in making a significant contribution to reducing extreme poverty we suggest that the program should undergo substantial reforms which in turn should be evaluated

does environmental dumping lead to delocation environmental dumping is often viewed as an instrument used by some countries in the attempt to attract foreign investments stated otherwise the delocation of firms would be a major outcome of a stiff environmental policy in this paper we study the impact of a strict anti pollution policy pursued by a government on domestic firms locational decisions and determine the main variables that interact with such a policy some preliminary welfare implications are also provided

do bad bidders become good targets this paper empirically examines one motive for takeovers to change control of firms that make acquisitions that diminish the value of their equity firms that subsequently become takeover targets make acquisitions that significantly reduce their equity value and firms that do not become takeover targets make acquisitions that raise their equity value within the sample of acquisition by targets the acquisitions that reduce equity value the most are those that are later divested either in bust up takeovers or restructuring programs to thwart the takeover this evidence is consistent with theories advanced by marris manne and jensen concerning the disciplinary role played by takeovers

do firms learn to create value the case of alliances we investigate whether firms learn to manage interfirm alliances as experience accumulates we use contract specific experience measures in a data set of over 2000 joint ventures and licensing agreements and value creation measures derived from the abnormal stock returns surrounding alliance announcements learning effects are identified from the effects of unobserved heterogeneity in alliance capabilities we find evidence of large learning effects in managing joint ventures but no such evidence for licensing contracts the effects of learning on value creation are strongest for research joint ventures and weakest for marketing joint ventures these results are consistent with the view that learning effects are more important in situations characterized by greater contractual ambiguity copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

ideas for rent an overview of markets for technology this article surveys some of the recent literature on technology markets and summarizes its main issues and insights we structure our analysis in three parts the supply and demand of technology the factors that condition the formation and growth of technology markets industry structure and dynamic issues in addition we summarize some of the studies that have tried to document the size and growth of these markets we find that the literature has focused mainly on the supply of technology but several other aspects of these markets remain under studied including the demand for external technology the role of uncertainty in technology markets and the dynamic interaction between industry structure and the market for technology understanding these will illuminate whether markets for technology will continue to grow or remained confined to pockets of the economy copyright 2010 the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

endogenous timing in strategic environmental policymaking in this paper we endogenize the timing of policymaking in a simple two country model of strategic environmental policy we consider a timing game in which two policymakers non cooperatively decide their preferred sequence of moves before setting emission tax rates we show that whether the policymakers implement emission tax policies simultaneously or sequentially crucially depends on the magnitude of environmental damages when the damages are insignificant the tax rates are strategic substitutes and the simultaneous move policymaking emerges in equilibrium in contrast when the damages are significant the tax rates are strategic complements and sequential move policymaking emerges we also extend the model by allowing for differences in the vulnerability to environmental damages between countries when the differences are large the unique equilibrium of the game is the situation where the less vulnerable country acts as a leader in the case where multiple equilibrium emerges the risk dominant equilibrium is also that where the less vulnerable country leads

the competitive effects of not for profit hospital mergers a case study applying conventional horizontal merger enforcement rules to nonprofit hospitals is controversial critics contend that the different objective function of not for profits entities should mitigate competitive concerns about mergers involving nonprofit hospitals we analyze a merger that reduced the number of competitors both nonprofit in the alleged relevant market from three to two we find that the transaction was followed by significant price increases we reject the hypothesis that these price increases reflect higher post merger quality this study should help policymakers assess the validity of current merger enforcement rules especially as they apply to not for profit enterprises

do substantial horizontal mergers generate significant price effects evidence from the banking industry this study examines the price effects of recent us bank mergers that substantially increased local market concentration using the deposit interest rates that banks offer their customers as our price measure we find that over the 1991 94 time period deposit rates offered by participants in substantial horizontal mergers and their local market rivals declined by a greater percentage than did deposit rates offered by banks not operating in markets in which such mergers took place we interpret our results as evidence that these mergers led to increased market power

von stackelberg and cournot duopoly choosing roles under what circumstances will firms agree on the choice of roles of leader and follower in the von stackelberg duopoly model a key determinant is the slope of the firms reaction function in either price or quantity space the duopolists will disagree over the choice of roles if they have downward sloping reaction functions each will prefer to be the leader they will also disagree if they have upward sloping reaction functions and similar profit functions each will prefer that the other be the leader preferences between von stackelberg and cournot outcomes are also considered

on corporate governance a study of proxy contests abstract this paper examines a sample of firms experiencing proxy contests for seats on their board of directors dissident shareholders usually fail to obtain a majority of board seats nevertheless they capture some seats via mechanisms such as cumulative voting in over half of the sample contests regardless of proxy contest outcome positive and statistically significant share price performance is associated with the contest that finding is predicted by the standard economic analysis of proxy contests in which the challenges benefit shareholders by improving corporate performance the finding runs counter to the claim of berle 1962 that the economists view of proxy contests is a wholly imaginary picture a portion of the positive share price changes taking place in the early stages of some proxy contests is not permanent however and as suggested by manne 1962 is at least partially attributable to temporary increases in the market value of the vote attached to corporate shares

the gains from merger or collusion in product differentiated industries a merger in an industry with differentiated products increases the market power of the merging firms to the extent that their products are close substitutes and that other firms produce only more distant substitutes such a merger makes the residual demand curve of each partner steeper by shifting each in the direction of the industry demand curve 2 the extent of this increase in market power depends upon the own elasticity of demand for each merging firm s product as well as the cross elasticity of demand for each with all other firms products as a result evaluating the effect of a merger between two firms with n 2 other competitors would seem to require the estimation of at least n2 parameters all of the price elasticities of demand a formidable task that extremely difficult estimation task is unnecessary however the necessary information is contained in the slopes of the two single firm residual demand curves before the merger and the extent to which the merged firm will face a steeper demand curve for example suppose a merger between two u s brewing firms say pabst and anheuser busch were proposed it is not particularly important to determine whether it is competition from miller or competition from stroh or from heileman or which puts the most effective brake on anheuser busch s pricing only the total effect of these other firms and the particular effect of competition from pabst are of interest this paper proposes econometric procedures for estimating the demand system that merger partners will face based only on pre merger data the key to the procedures is that the effects of all other firms in the industry are summed together formally we start with a model of an n firm product differentiated industry manipulation of the model removes the prices and quantities of all but two firms this reduces the dimensionality of the problem to manageable size rather than an n firm demand system we estimate a two firm residual demand system in this way the technique extends our econometric method for

environmental taxes and first mover advantages this paper studies whether governments prefer to be leaders or followers in environmental policies to analyze this question i assume transboundary pollution and two countries that have to decide whether to set environmental taxes sequentially or simultaneously when taxes are set sequentially an effect denoted as the sequential setting effect arises that raises the equilibrium taxes i show that whether governments prefer to be leaders or followers in taxes depends on the degree to which environmental pollution spills over to trading partners when this overspill is low enough taxes are strategic complements and both the leader and the follower obtain greater welfare than under a simultaneous tax setting however the leader country obtains greater welfare than the follower in this case governments set taxes sequentially when the degree to which environmental pollution spills over to trading partners is high enough taxes are strategic substitutes and governments set taxes simultaneously in this case each government wants to avoid becoming the follower in taxes

differential gains between partners in joint ventures role of resource appropriation and private benefits i examine why there are differences in wealth gains between firms when they announce a joint venture jv building on transaction cost economics and the resource based view i argue that because jvs often involve incomplete contracts differences in wealth gains arise due to resource appropriation and private benefits as a result two factors become important in understanding whether a firm earns higher lower wealth gains than its partner 1 its potential for earning private benefits and 2 its ability to extract private benefits as a test of the impact of the first factor i propose that when a jv is formed the partner that possesses more valuable resources is likely to earn lower wealth gains whereas the partner that possesses less valuable resources is likely to earn higher wealth gains because its potential for earning private benefits over the course of the venture is also higher i then argue that the partner with less valuable resources is likely to extract higher private benefits and gain more when it has greater bargaining power and absorptive capacity conversely the partner with more valuable resources is likely to protect itself better from appropriation when it has jv capabilities i find support for these arguments in a sample of 344 ventures the implications are that private benefits significantly influence value creation in jvs and that a broad array of contingencies and factors affect these benefits which need to be considered when entering into a cooperation

the outsourcing of r d through acquisitions in the pharmaceutical industry abstract we examine the performance of 160 pharmaceutical acquisitions from 1994 to 2001 and find evidence that on average acquirers realize significant positive returns these returns are positively correlated with prior acquirer access to information about the research and development activities at target firms and a superior negotiating position a unique desperation index is employed to determine the current status of a firm s internal productivity we find that firms experiencing declines in internal productivity or which are more desperate are more likely to engage in an outsourcing type acquisition in an effort to replenish their research pipelines

governance forms drivers in bio pharmaceutical inter firm relationships abstract since the first theoretical papers on transaction cost economy several studies have addressed the problem of designing governance forms in inter firm relationship scholars have deeply investigated the problem and several theories have been proposed to face with it the biopharmaceutical industry is one of the most interesting testbeds for understanding dynamics and rationality of governance forms in ifrs indeed in this industry the advent of the biotechnology has not been disruptive as in other industries so that the newcomers the biotech companies and the incumbents the pharmaceutical ones have incurred in several types of ifrs such as licensing agreements non equity alliances equity alliances and mergers and acquisitions thus several papers have tried to investigate what kind of drivers influence the choice of the governance form in this industry but most of them have focused on general characteristics of inter firm agreements such as the investment specificity the number of prior ties the technology distance and so forth differently from other researches in this paper we focus on specific characteristics of ifrs in the biopharma industry and we build a theoretical framework consisting of 13 drivers that are able to influence the governance mode of ifrs in this industry we test our theoretical framework through an explorative empirical analysis even if more confirmative empirical analysis is needed the empirical results evidence the validity of the theoretical framework proposed in this paper and provide some interesting managerial implications

the impact of r d cooperations and mergers in pharmaceuticals on research activities and drugs offered on the market in the last 10 years the pharmaceutical industry has experienced steep unprecedented price increases which are frequently attributed to increasing drug development costs to cope with rocketing development costs companies engage in research and development r d cooperations we study the impact of r d cooperations on firms research activities and drugs offered on the market using a comprehensive dataset we find that r d cooperations formed at the early stage of the drug development process increase the number of r d projects and the number of drugs offered on the market late stage r d cooperations formed among larger firms in technology and product markets increase firms research activities but reduce the number of drugs launched on the product market results suggest that large firms cooperating in the late research stage re optimize their r d pipelines and eliminate similarly aligned research projects

auctions and bidding a primer maybe the contractor was right to think bid jobs are different but it is more likely that he suffered from too simple a view of what is involved in preparing a competitive bid our analysis will show that even an experienced estimator working in familiar terrain can lose money if he doesn t understand the subtleties of competitive bidding the phenomenon experienced by the painting contractor known as the winner s curse is just one of the surprising and puzzling conclusions that have been turned up by modern research into auctions another is the theoretical proposition supported also by some experimental evidence that for example a sealed bid treasury bill auction in which each buyer pays a price equal to the highest rejected bid would yield more revenue to the treasury than the current procedure in which the winning bidder pays the seemingly higher amount equal to his own bid there are also subtle results that demonstrate the equivalence of such apparently different institutions as the standard sealed bid auction in which the auctioneer seller sells the goods to the highest bidder for a price equal to his bid and the dutch auction in which the auctioneer seller begins by asking a high price and gradually lowers the price until

reply on comment to small firms and the merger mania research on performance differences between small and large firms is booming it emerges relatively separated from the mainstream industrial organization literature inspired by levy s comment on an earlier paper we try to bridge the gap between the two areas especially we screen non cooperative game theoretical models for predictions on performance differences most of them forecast higher profits for larger firms but there exist also some models which predict the opposite for very specific circumstances

the gains to bidding firms from merger abstract this study examines the effect of mergers on the wealth of bidding firms shareholders bidding firms gain significantly during the twenty one days leading to the announcement of each of their first four merger bids these results fail to support the capitalization hypothesis that bidders gains are captured at the beginning of merger programs bidders abnormal returns are positively related to the relative size of the merger partners and the gains during the announcement period are larger for mergers which are successful though the gains are larger prior to 1969 merger bids after 1969 also significantly increase the wealth of bidding firms shareholders the results suggest that the inconclusive findings of the earlier studies may be due to methodological deficiencies the findings of this study are consistent with value maximizing behavior by the management of bidding firms

technological innovation and acquisitions i examine whether technological innovation is a motivating factor in firms acquisition decisions and how an acquisition or an acquisition withdrawal affects technological innovation in subsequent years i find that firms engaging in acquisition activities are less innovative and have often experienced declines in technological innovation during the years prior to the bid among the bidders the relatively more innovative ones are less likely to complete a deal during the three years after the bid successful bidders do not underperform matching firms whereas failed bidders significantly underperform their nonbidding peers i further find that formerly less innovative bidders benefit more from acquisitions these findings suggest that technological innovation affects firms acquisition decisions and in turn acquisitions help firms innovation efforts

the price and profit effects of horizontal merger a case study the economic rationale behind antitrust concern for horizontal mergers rests primarily on the familiar structure performance paradigm that links market concentration with supra competitive profits and implicitly with higher prices a vast empirical literature has demonstrated a positive statistical relationship between measures of industry structure such as entry barriers and concentration and average industry profit using cross section data a small number of cross section studies most dealing with banking services have claimed to find a positive relationship between concentrated market structure and price measures aspinwall 1970 bell and murphy i969 heggestak and mingo 1976 hester i979 lamm i98i landon i97i marion et al 1979 and marvel 1978 but we are unaware of any study that traces the effect of an actual change in market structure on prices or profits in this paper we exploit an unusual opportunity to test for price effects and estimate profit consequences of two acquisitions that resulted in substantial increases in the market share of the acquiring firm the evidence we examine arises from a recent federal trade commission antitrust suit against xidex corporation the world s largest producer of duplicating microfilm the xidex case is unusual in three respects i although the size of the market is small sales under ioo million the acquisitions involved greater changes in market shares than are usual in antitrust actions 2 the suit was brought five years after the first acquisition and two years after the second so a post acquisition record of price behavior exists for this example furthermore the price data used in this study are actual transaction prices 3 special characteristics of the products allow a relatively straightforward test for price effects of the acquisitions the next section provides background information concerning the firms and products involved following that we describe the data and methodology used to estimate the price effects of the acquisitions and present results which indicate significant price increases traceable to the acquisitions we then offer estimates of the incremental profits attributable to those price increases a final section provides a summary the analysis and conclusions set forth in this study are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of federal trade commission staff or the commission itself all data and other information used in the study are in the public domain this includes information obtained by the commission which has become part of the public record for helpful comments we thank allan fisher ron lafferty paul pautler and rich sciacca of the bureau of economics federal trade commission

do gasoline mergers affect consumer prices the marathon ashland petroleum and ultramar diamond shamrock transaction abstract in 1999 marathon ashland petroleum map acquired the michigan assets of ultramar diamond shamrock uds which increased map s share of terminal storage in michigan from about 16 percent to about 25 percent and increased the share of gasoline stations bearing a map brand from about 16 percent to about 24 percent in this paper we examine whether this acquisition affected the retail price of gasoline we use a difference in differences model to compare price movements in six michigan cities affected by the acquisition with price movements in two nearby cities unaffected by the acquisition using this model we find no evidence that this acquisition led to higher prices for consumers

environmental policy when market structure and plant locations are endogenous abstract a two region two firm model is developed in which firms choose the number and the regional locations of their plants both firms pollute and market structure is endogenous to environmental policy there are increasing returns at the plant level imperfect competition between the home and the foreign firm and transport costs between the two markets at critical levels of environmental policy variables small policy changes cause large discrete jumps in a region s pollution and welfare as a firm closes or opens a plant or shifts production to from a foreign branch plant the implications for optimal environmental policy differ significantly from those suggested by traditional pigouvian marginal analysis

event studies in management research theoretical and empirical issues we examined the use of event studies in management research and found that there was inadequate attention paid to theoretical and research design issues this lack of attention may lead to false in

green lobbies and transboundary pollution in large open economies abstract we employ a common agency model of policy making to examine how green lobbies affect the determination of trade and environmental policies in two large countries that are linked by trade flows and transboundary pollution we show that the impact of green lobbying on environmental policy outcomes depends crucially on the prevailing trade regime cooperative or non cooperative on whether environmental agencies act in a unilateral or coordinated manner and on the size of the emission leakages and transboundary spillovers under free trade a unilateral increase in pollution taxes reduces domestic emissions at the cost of increased foreign emissions in this case if the emission leakages and the associated transboundary spillovers are large enough green lobbying can create a bias towards lower pollution taxes

strategic alliances and the rate of new product development an empirical study of entrepreneurial biotechnology firms abstract a key to success in industries populated by entrepreneurial high technology firms is the rate at which the firm develops new products rapid product development creates significant advantages for entrepreneurial firms including access to early cash flows external visibility legitimacy and early market share the higher a firm s rate of new product development the more likely the firm is to achieve and maintain these first mover advantages this is particularly true in industries such as pharmaceuticals where the effectiveness of patent protections leads to patent races in which a winner take all scenario exists but even in industries where patent protection is weak the advantages of being first in terms of market preemption reputation effects experience curve effects etc can still be of major importance we argue that one way an entrepreneurial firm can increase its rate of new product development is by entering into strategic alliances with firms that possess complementary assets the basic proposition advanced is that a firm s rate of new product development is a positive function of the number of strategic alliances that it has entered however the relationship between strategic alliances and the rate of new product development may be nonlinear specifically although strategic alliances may initially have positive effects on the rate of new product development this relationship may exhibit diminishing returns moreover past some point it is possible that negative returns may set in thus the relationship between the number of alliances and the rate of new product development may be an inverted u shape two reasons can be given to support such a relationship first not all alliances will make an equal contribution to increasing the rate of new product development the economic law of diminishing returns suggests that the more alliances a firm engages in the more likely it is to enter some alliances whose marginal contribution is relatively minor such a phenomenon on its own is enough to suggest diminishing returns second gaining access to complementary assets through strategic alliances is not without risks malperformance may occur when the firm discovers that the complementary assets provided by the partner are a poor match fail to live up to the promises made by the partner or a partner may opportunistically exploit an alliance expropriating the firm s know how while providing little in return these problems arise because the effectiveness with which the firm can select and manage alliance partners is likely to be negatively related to the number of alliances the firm is managing due to information processing requirements the quality of partner search and the ability to monitor the partners actions will decline as the firm increases the number of alliances in which it is involved this reasoning leads to a prediction that past some point alliances will be increasingly vulnerable to malperformance this raises not only the possibility of diminishing returns to the number of alliances but also negative returns as the number of alliances increases past some critical point this proposed relationship between alliances and new product development was tested on a sample of 132 biotechnology firms the results provide strong evidence to support the inverted u shaped relationship between the number of strategic alliances and the rate of new product development therefore at low levels strategic alliances are positively related to new product development but as the number of alliances increases the benefits begin to decrease and at high levels the costs of an additional alliance actually outweigh the benefits

markup pricing in mergers and acquisitions this paper studies the relation between the premiums in takeover bids involving exchange listed target firms from 1975 91 and the pre announcement stock price runups the evidence shows that the pre bid runup and the postannouncement increase in the target s stock price the markup are generally uncorrelated with little substitution between the runup and the markup the runup is an added cost to the bidder this finding has important implications for assessing the costs of insider trading it also raises interesting questions about the role of information from public capital markets in private takeover negotiations

mergers and the market for organization capital abstract in this paper mergers are an equilibrium outcome in which acquirers marry targets so as to gain access to their organization capital firms with lower learning costs about the new technology are not necessarily those that manage it best once it is mature since there are gains from trade a market for organization capital can arise through mergers this model generates a merger wave after a shock to technology and is consistent with several other stylized facts on mergers documented in the literature

international aspects of pollution control pollution is a by product of production is only gradually dissolved by the environment and crosses national borders the market outcome ignores the adverse effects of pollution and thus yields higher levels of output and pollution than would prevail under a supranational social planner which does care about pollution in practice governments often do not cooperate and this leads to outcomes of pollution and production in between the market outcomes and the outcomes under supra national social planning absence of precommitment leads to lower emission charges less cleaning up activities and more pollution appropriate levels of emission charges under the various outcomes are a result of this analysis attention is also paid to investment in clean technology the debate between optimists who believe that higher production is compatible with sound environmental policy and pessimists can be analysed in this way