privatization in eastern germany management selection and economic transition this paper suggests that management s role in enterprise restructuring and market failures in the managerial labor market help explain important features of the german privatization program a model of adverse selection based on information advantages for private owners demonstrates how privatization can improve the quality and number of western managers in eastern enterprises these benefits can increase with the size of the transition evidence of management replacement and significant differences between state owned and privatized firms from a survey of eastern german firms supports model assumptions and predictions these results suggest the importance of management replacement to successful privatization copyright 1997 by american economic association

journal pricing and mergers a portfolio approach despite their influence on the careers of economists the production and pricing of scholarly journals have received scant attention from the profession by contrast the issue of journal quality and scholarly research productivity have been studied in far greater detail a search in the econlit database using the term journal generates several dozen papers on this topic although there may be a number of reasons for this imbalance it is likely that the tenure process combined with the low if not zero effective cost of journals on campuses have influenced our research agenda in other words while professors worry about their job security publish well or perish others their librarians are charged with maintaining free access to all relevant journals of course this pattern is observed not just in economics but across academic disciplines in recent years however easy access to journals has been threatened beset by persistent journal price inflation especially in the socalled stm fields or science technology and medicine and stagnant budgets many university libraries have been forced to reallocate dollars from monographs to journals to postpone the purchase of new journal titles and in some cases to cancel titles as a consequence libraries often relied on interlibrary loans to satisfy faculty demands this situation and its possible causes has been studied at great length in the library science literature with few exceptions a consensus has evolved there which focuses on the growing importance of commercial publishers in the market for scholarly journals over the past decade or more commercial firms have aggressively raised prices at a rate disproportionate to any increase in costs or quality this appears to be especially true for the largest commercial firms although the analysis underlying these conclusions is generally not of the multivariate sort it is suggestive enough to warrant further investigation school of economics georgia institute of technology 781 marietta street nw atlanta ga 30318 e mail mark mccabe econ gatech edu i would like to thank many of my former colleagues at the department of justice including craig conrath renata hesse aaron hoag russ pittman david reitman dan rubinfeld and greg werden as well as jonathan baker cory capps george deltas luke froeb jeffrey mackie mason roger noll dan o brien richard quandt lars hendrik roller steve salop and margaret slade seminar participants at the federal trade commission georgia tech north carolina state university suny stony brook and wissenschaft zentrum berlin and participants at the meetings of the american economic association the european association of research in industrial economics the southern economics association and western economics association the association of research libraries and its members the national library of medicine the georgia tech library and the georgia tech foundation have provided invaluable assistance expert data support was provided by a large group of individuals including deena bernstein claude briggs pat finn doug heslep and steve stiglitz finally i would like to thank the dozens of librarians and publishers who have provided me with important insights 1 the exceptions are janusz a ordover and robert d willig 1978 lisa lieberman et al 1992 george a chressanthis and june d chressanthis 1994 mccabe 2000 and theodore c bergstrom 2001 ordover and willig model the pricing of a single title to institutional and individual subscribers bergstrom s paper discusses the differences between commercial and nonprofit economics journals the other three papers are discussed below 2 increasingly journals are available in both print and digital versions and for some new titles only a digital format is available see carol tenopir and donald king 2000 ch 15 starting in 1998 commercial publishers began placing their content online although major research libraries have generally responded by adding digital access this shift is still in its early stages especially in cases where library collections are more specialized e g the typical biomedical library for this reason as well as the fact that more than two thirds of the sample period occurred in a print only environment the emphasis of this paper is on the behavior of publishers and libraries in a print environment the economic implications of digital access are considered briefly at the conclusion of the paper and are a subject of ongoing research 3 see martha kyrillidou 1999 4 see tenopir and king 2000 ch 13 for a review of this literature an alternative explanation for journal price inflation has been offered by lieberman et al 1992 they argue that entry by new titles over time has lowered circulation for existing journals forcing the latter to raise prices to cover fixed costs

a theory of self selection in a market with matching frictions an application to delay in refereeing times in economics journals abstract a matching market with imperfect information is studied with imperfect information it is shown that friction in a meeting process can facilitate self selection and thus may improve the matching outcome as an application the effect of delay in refereeing time on publication outcome is analyzed in a publication process in economics journals though the delay causes efficiency loss by postponing the dissemination of new research it will better sort the papers to each journal by their qualities by preventing mediocre papers from being submitted to a prestigious journal and published by luck if an assortative outcome good papers in prestigious journals and mediocre papers in less prestigious journals is efficient the delay may actually improve the publication outcome other matching market examples are also discussed

open access and academic journal quality ing from complicated signaling behavior by informed authors lerner and tirole show that adding upstream private information does not alter their basic analysis their proposition 4 454 aea papers and proceedings may 2005

privatization in latin america what does the evidence say privatization is under attack criticisms run from corrupt deals to abuse of market power and social welfare losses we evaluate the empirical record on privatization relying on recent comprehensive studies from latin america the paper presents four main results first the increased profitability of privatized firms is not explained by sample selection biases second in the quest to identify the sources of increased profitability after privatization we find little evidence that validates concerns of generalized market power abuses exploitation of workers and lack of fiscal benefits third the manner in which privatization is carried out matters transparency and homogeneity in procedures speed and limited restructuring prior to privatization lead to better outcomes and less room for corruption and discretion finally privatization s success is enhanced by two complementary policies deregulation or reregulation of industries previously shielded from competitive forces and an effective corporate governance framework that facilitates privatized firms access to capital at lower cost overall the empirical record shows that privatization leads to increased profitability and productivity firm restructuring fiscal benefits output growth and even quality improvements most cases of privatization failure can be linked to poor contract design opaque processes with heavy state involvement lack of reregulation and a poor corporate governance framework

the market of academic journals evidence from data on french libraries this paper analyzes the demand and cost structure of the french market of academic journals after merging several databases we estimate an aggregated nested logit demand system combined simultaneously with a pricing equation taking into account the evolution of impact factors of journals we identify the structural parameters of this market and find that price elasticities of demand are relatively high indicating that this industry experiences competitive constraints we conjecture that the two sidedness feature of academic journals could be a rationale for our results jel l11 l13 l82 c35

can you teach old dogs new tricks on complementarity of human capital and incentives abstract contract theory suggests that firm performance can be improved by appointing new managers and or by introducing better incentives furthermore these two changes should be complementary their effects reinforce each other using data on privatized firms in the czech republic this paper presents results that suggest complementarity between the appointment of new managers and introduction of incentives in a transition economy the results also show that ignoring the complementarity may lead to the wrong conclusion that the effect of incentives is weak managerial incentives seem to work only after the new post privatization managers are appointed

fear of rejection tiered certification and transparency product quality certifiers may not reveal the identity of unsuccessful applicants sellers for three reasons first they respond to the desire of individual sellers to avoid the stigma from rejection second nontransparency helps a certifier to increase his market power by raising the stigma from lower tier certification third transparency does not help screen among heterogeneous sellers strategic complementarities arise as sellers move down the certification pecking order and lead to the stigmatization of the lower tiers mandating transparency benefits the sellers but has an ambiguous impact on buyers who actually become less informed about product quality

identifying the effect of open access on citations using a panel of science journals an open access journal allows free online access to its articles obtaining revenue from fees charged to submitting authors or from institutional support using panel data on science journals we are able to circumvent problems plaguing previous studies of the impact of open access on citations in contrast to the huge effects found in these previous studies we find a more modest effect moving from paid to open access increases cites by 8 on average in our sample the benefit is concentrated among top ranked journals in fact open access causes a statistically significant reduction in cites to the bottom ranked journals in our sample leading us to conjecture that open access may intensify competition among articles for readers attention generating losers as well as winners jel l17 o33

romania s accession to the eu short term welfare effects on food consumers this paper focuses on estimation of the welfare effects on different romanian households of assumed food price changes as a result of eu accession using the slutsky compensating variation approach results suggest that these changes affect welfare differently for various categories of households although on average the welfare loss is 2 6 a higher impact is estimated for low income groups however the relatively high share of home produced consumption of food diminishes these impacts in particular for rural households and somewhat smaller monetary amounts would be required if compensation is paid

privatization under political interference evidence from eastern germany abstract can privatization authority be successfully delegated to a privatization agency to address this question we examine the liquidation policy of the german privatization agency the theoretical part develops a dynamic model of optimal liquidation under incomplete political insulation of the privatization agency we explore how external political interference affects its liquidation policy and derive testable implications for the distribution of liquidation decisions and privatization prices the empirical part uses micro data on 1804 privatization contracts and 1097 liquidation decisions to verify the model predictions the data confirm the view that political liquidation constraints are an important determinant of privatization outcomes

submission fees and response times in academic publishing both submission fees and response times enable editors to maintain an acceptable refereeing burden by discouraging the submission of articles with low probability of acceptance when authors differ in their ability or willingness to pay submission fees and deal with delays journal quality is maximized under a combination of moderate fees and moderate delays

collection sales good or bad for journals this paper discusses the impact of collection sales i e the bundling of several journals for sale by publishers to libraries on journals the advent of electronic journal distribution implies that bundling is an efficient sales strategy and can act to extend the reach of a journal current arrangements are discussed and shown to lead to tensions between commercial publishers and non profit journals the paper argues that non profit journals should not necessarily abandon collection sales programmes rather non profit journals may benefit from withdrawing from commercial publishers which distribute their own for profit journals and joining together to be distributed by less commercial publishers who set relatively low prices for their collections

free labor for costly journals there is a remarkable difference between the prices that commercial publishers charge to libraries for economics journals and the prices charged by professional societies and university presses this price difference does not reflect a difference in quality the six most cited economics journals listed in the social science citation index are all nonprofit journals and their library subscription prices average about 180 per year only five of the 20 most cited journals are owned by commercial publishers and the average price of these five journals is about 1660 per year tables 1 and 2 compare library costs and measures of cost effectiveness for the ten most cited nonprofit journals and the ten most cited journals owned by commercial presses the average price per page of the commercial journals is about six times as high and the average price per citation is about 16 times as high as for the nonprofit journals in tables 1 and 2 the first column shows the year 2001 library subscription price and the second column shows the price per page calculated by dividing year 2001 price by the number of pages published in the year 2000 the third column reports the price per citation this is the library subscription price divided by the number of times that articles in this journal were cited in 1998 as recorded by the social science citation index the fourth column price per recent citation is the library subscription price divided by the number of times that the 1996 and 1997 volumes of the journal were cited in 1998 the citation rank is found by ranking journals according to the number of times that this journal was cited in 1998 the differences in prices and cost effectiveness between nonprofit and commercial journals are similar for less prestigious journals i have assembled a data

the financial and operating performance of privatized firms during the 1990s this study compares the pre and postprivatization financial and operating performance of 85 companies from 28 industrialized countries that were privatized through public share offerings for the period from 1990 through 1996 we document significant increases in profitability output operating efficiency and dividend payments and significant decreases in leverage ratios for our full sample of firms after privatization and for most subsamples examined capital expenditures increase significantly in absolute terms but not relative to sales employment declines but insignificantly combined with results from two previous directly comparable studies these findings strongly suggest that privatization yields significant performance improvements during the past two decades the privatization of state owned enterprises has moved from being a radical almost desperate policy initiative of the thatcher government in britain to being an accepted economic policy for governments of all ideological stripes according to gibbon 1998 860 billion has been raised by governments worldwide through privatizations with the bulk of this total coming since 1987 and at least one commentator roche 1996 predicts that no less than 6 trillion will be raised through privatizations over the next two decades in 1997 alone sales of public enterprises totaled a record 161 billion worldwide with more than 110 billion of the total coming during the second half of the year and 1998 s total of almost 140 billion indicates that the pace shows no sign of slackening as we approach a new millennium

the performance of privatized firms in the czech republic abstract with the growing importance of privatizations as a part of government policy most empirical studies of these privatizations conclude that firm performance immediately improves following privatization privatization has been the most important part of the transition from the centrally planned economies of central and eastern europe and has a larger impact on those economies than privatizations in other countries however few studies have looked at the performance of firms following mass privatization this study uses 453 separate firms 101 firms privatized in both waves for a total of 554 observations in the first and second waves of czech voucher privatization using methodology from previous studies we find that while the overall effects from privatization are positive the effects vary by privatization wave size and industry firms privatized in the first wave performed worse decline in performance following privatization than firms privatized in the second wave we also fail to find ownership concentration or debt as an important factor in restructuring the firm i believe that the results are consistent with two hypotheses first economic and political structure surrounding the privatization waves plays an important part in the success of privatization stable environments both political and economic help privatized firms restructure and improve operating performance as well as attract foreign investors and capital even in less developed countries but in transitional economies undergoing mass privatization in rapidly changing and developing economic and political environments hinder firms from restructuring and improving performance following privatization results are also consistent with the hypothesis that firms with a longer preparation period prior to privatization an implicit seasoning improve performance following privatization

submission demand in core economics journals a panel study i introduction academic economics journals have proliferated to around 1 500 providing economists a large number of outlets for publishing manuscripts econlit n d ideas n d although researchers have examined how the demand for submission for academic economics journals responded to nonprice variables such as an editorial policy change on page limit card and dellavigna 2012 surprisingly the price elasticity of demand for submission remains unknown and becomes the focus of this study the objective of this study was to examine empirically what factors influence authors decisions on which economics journal to submit to focusing on three sets of demand factors manuscript submission fee observed journal quality such as impact factor and ranking and journal usage such as abstract views and library subscriptions similar to most of the literature on economics journals we focused on the economics journals indexed in journal citation reports jcr compiled by the institute for scientific information because jcr journals tend to be viewed as the core or leading academic journals two challenges arose in estimating the demand for journal submission first submission fee may be endogenous if supply and demand are simultaneously determined or if economics journals set the fee based on demand variations that the econometrician does not observe and hence cannot explicitly specify in the demand model to reduce the potential endogeneity bias we surveyed journal editors to obtain and use as an instrument the fee paid to a journal referee for reviewing the reviewer fee might serve as a good instrument in this case because the reviewer fee which is a supply side variable generally is paid by the submission fee there is little evidence to support that paying referees is correlated with unobserved journal quality such as journal reputation indeed a recent study by chetty saez and sandor 2014 found that reviewer fees have little or no effects on quality of the reviewer reports based on an experiment with referees at the journal of public economics casting doubt on the relationship between reviewer fee and referee report the second challenge is that journal quality such as journal reputation or editor reputation is not observed by the econometrician our strategy to address this issue was to use panel data to control for unobserved individual journal effect by supplementing the jcr citation data with other publicly available data and our two rounds of surveys of journal editors we constructed a unique panel dataset that contains various journal characteristics such as submission fee fee paid to a journal referee for reviewing and the number of new submissions for the years of 2008 and 2013 thompson scientific institute for scientific information 2008 and 2013 many researchers have analyzed theoretically the role of submission fee and or response times in academic publishing e g azar 2006 cotton 2013 heintzelman and nocetti 2009 leslie 2005 for a recent example cotton 2013 showed that journal quality could be maximized through a combination of both moderate fees and moderate delays when authors have heterogeneous preferences such a result is obviously based on the assumption that authors respond negatively to a submission fee from an empirical perspective submission fees raise the cost of submitting an article and therefore discourage the submission of papers especially those of marginal quality i e a self selection process regarding the quality of authors own manuscripts however several factors can alleviate the negative impact of submission fees on submissions first azar 2005 pointed out that the rewards for publications in good economics journals are very high compared with the relatively low submission fees second submission fees are sometimes paid by department funds and faculty s grants research contracts

priorities and sequencing in privatization evidence from czech firm panel data abstract while privatization of state owned enterprises has been one of the most important aspects of the economic transition from a centrally planned to a market system no transition economy has privatized all its firms simultaneously this raises the question of whether governments privatize firms strategically in this paper we examine the determinants of the sequencing of privatization to obtain testable predictions about the factors that may affect sequencing we investigate the following competing government objectives i maximizing efficiency through resource allocation ii maximizing public goodwill from the free transfers of shares to the public iii minimizing political costs iv maximizing efficiency through information gains and v maximizing privatization revenues next we use firm level data from the czech republic to test the competing predictions about the sequencing of privatization consistent with the hypotheses of a government priority on revenues and public goodwill we find strong evidence that more profitable firms were privatized first the sequencing of privatization is also consistent with maximizing efficiency through information gains our results indicate that many empirical studies of the effects of privatization on firm performance suffer from a selection bias

privatization and efficiency differentiating ownership effects from political organizational and dynamic effects this paper argues that the private public ownership factor should be differentiated from other factors that also influence the effect of privatization on efficiency this is empirically confirmed in a longitudinal study of 24 spanish firms for which several political and organizational factors are found to influence the estimated effects of privatization on efficiency the analysis of the timing of the effects reveals a strong significance for post privatization years 5 6 negative and 7 8 positive this suggests that the negative effect of these factors is transitional being eventually offset by the positive effects of the change to private ownership 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classification l33

rigorous speculation the collapse and revival of the north korean economy abstract in this paper we use cross entropy estimation techniques to construct the underlying data base for a computable general equilibrium model cge of the north korean economy starting from incomplete data ridden with gross measurement errors the cross entropy estimation approach is powerful and flexible allowing us to make full use of what information we have in whatever form cge modeling forces internal consistency the end product is a model that incorporates fragmentary information in a rigorous way and allows us to examine the implications of a number of alternative scenarios including rehabilitation of flood affected lands liberalization of the international trade regime and military demobilization north korea has been experiencing a famine its economy is characterized by systemic distortions and comparative disadvantage in the production of grains as a consequence the potential payoffs to economy wide reforms even defined narrowly in terms of domestic food availability dwarf more targeted attempts to raise agricultural productivity to many this finding that a famine might be better addressed by the export of manufactures than the recovery of flood damaged lands is a striking and counterintuitive result moreover we find that if reforms were to be undertaken the country could generate a significant additional peace dividend by partially demobilizing its enormous military