natural resources curse or blessing are natural resources a curse or a blessing the empirical evidence suggests that either outcome is possible this paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources these include that a resource bonanza induces appreciation of the real exchange rate deindustrialization and bad growth prospects and that these adverse effects are more severe in volatile countries with bad institutions and lack of rule of law corruption presidential democracies and underdeveloped financial systems another hypothesis is that a resource boom reinforces rent grabbing and civil conflict especially if institutions are bad induces corruption especially in nondemocratic countries and keeps in place bad policies finally resource rich developing economies seem unable to successfully convert their depleting exhaustible resources into other productive assets the survey also offers some welfare based fiscal rules for harnessing resource windfalls in developed and developing economies

asymmetric information signaling and optimal corporate financial decisions as is shown in the financial literature the assumption of perfect and costless information often leads to the conclusion that corporate financial decisions are inconsequential to the value of the firm e g stiglitz 20 and fama 6 this conclusion seems to be in direct contradiction with the observed behavior of corporations that allocate real resources to implement financial policies the gap between theory and observed behavior is bridged by introducing various frictions and market imperfections a growing number of studies examine the optiraality of financial decisions when the assumption of perfect and costless information is replaced by allowing for informational asymmetry the asymmetry is assumed to exist between corporate insiders who possess superior information about the firm s future earnings prospects and outside investors the emphasis in this literature is on the ability of financial instruments to serve as signaling devices through which the true value of the firm can be revealed to the market without moral hazard or disclosure of confidential information although the signaling process is typically considered to be costly it is advocated that firms may be better off if they employ this mechanism rather than reveal reliable but confidential information or not disclose at all

screening market signalling and capital structure theory this paper develops an equilibrium model in which informational asymmetries about the qualities of products offered for sale are resolved through a mechanism which combines the signalling and costly screening approaches the model is developed in the context of a capital market setting in which bondholders produce costly information about a firm s a priori imperfectly known earnings distribution and use this information in specifying a bond valuation schedule to the firm given this schedule the firm s optimal choices of debt equity ratio and debt maturity structure subsequently signal to prospective shareholders the relevant parameters of the firm s earnings distribution our objectives in this paper are threefold first we discuss an alternative equilibrium mechanism for resolving the informational asymmetry problem in a lemons type market in which some agents are a priori better informed than others this mechanism recently proposed by thakor 19 is distinct from and yet integrates the salient features of the screening see stiglitz 17 and viscusi 21 and signalling bhattacharya 41 paradigms second we demonstrate that the equilibrium notion developed is relevant to the determination of an interior optimal capital structure for a firm in a world of imperfect information this application of our model involves firms with intertemporally distributed cashflows which vary cross sectionally and are not necessarily independent and identically distributed i i d through time we use this multiperiod setting to address our third objective which is to explain a firm s debt maturity decision essentially our argument is that when both the size and timing of a firm s future earnings are indistinguishable ex ante from other firms in the economy the firm s capital structure and debt maturity choices could simultaneously function as signals of these a priori unknown parameters of its earnings the market structure we consider is similar to that in thakor 19 there are sellers each of whom offers a variety of products with qualities dependent upon a common set of exogenous attributes unique to the seller and buyers who are unaware of these attributes buyers interested in one of the products offered

corporate insurance and managerial incentives abstract we present an agency model to examine the use of corporate insurance by publicly held firms we assume that insurance companies serve as investigators verifying whether or not accidents were insured when the manager performs multiple tasks to reduce the expected number of accidents the verification results can be used to produce a pair of managerial performance measures we show that the optimal pair of performance measures can be obtained when the corporate insurance policy covers all uncontrollable accidents and some controllable accidents that are costlier for the manager to control journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c61 c73 d82 g22 l14

an exploration of competitive signalling equilibria with third party information production the case of debt insurance in markets in which sellers know more about product quality than buyers but cannot convey their superior information either by directly issuing costly signals of the spence type or by successfully funding the production of information i suggest another way in which the informational asymmetry problem can be resolved a third party can produce the necessary information at a cost and use it to price a service consumed by the sellers buyers can then observe a seller s choice of service consumption level and be well informed in equilibrium in this framework i construct a model in which a borrower s choice of insurance coverage signals its default probability to lenders and explore the properties of the resulting signalling equilibrium in a variety of cases subsequent to akerlof s provocative paper 1 the analysis of equilibria in markets with asymmetrically informed agents has been the subject of considerable enquiry akerlof s novel insight was the observation that such markets can fail in the sense that the demand at any price is zero this market failure can be prevented however if a priori imperfectly informed buyers of a given product can somehow revise their initial conditional estimates of product quality so that prices are consistent with quality in an equilibrium bhattacharya 2 3 ross 9 and spence 12 13 14 have suggested that one way of achieving this is to allow sellers of the product or service to issue costly signals of the quality offered for sale in a rational equilibrium prospective buyers could use these signals to discriminate accurately between products of differing quality campbell and kracaw 4 have recently suggested another possibility that sellers can make side payments to information producers to acquire the necessary information at a cost and convey it to the market this paper explores yet another distinct way of resolving the information asymmetry problem the market structure considered here involves three parties a group of sellers each aware of the quality of its own product a set of buyers who perhaps satisfy the rational expectations assumption that they are aware of the average quality of the products in the market but are unable to distinguish one seller from the other on the basis of product quality and third party information producers who expend resources to produce information about the quality of each product offered for sale these information producers recover the cost of information acquisition by using their knowledge to structure and price some fixed quality service that they provide to

fiscal decentralization and government size numerous studies have attempted to model the possible factors contributing to universal growth in public sectors this paper analyzes one device that appears capable of controlling some of that growth fiscal decentralization the results reported here also support the use of monopoly government assumptions in models of public policy

linking the insights of smith marx young and hirschman on the division of labour implications for economic integration and uneven development this article distinguishes between two types of division of labour discussed by smith the final product specialisation type has been adopted as the basis of mainstream trade models that champion the benefits of free trade the division of production operations type can be extended through the works of marx transition to modern industry based on forms of manufacture young industrial differentiation and hirschman linkages through this some countries started reaping more benefits from increasing returns engendering incipient uneven development that aggravates under unrestricted economic integration between them and the trailing countries in the modern era the leading countries trans national corporations have further shaped the international division of production operations resulting in different forms of enclave development when their activities are unregulated under recently reached multi lateral agreements that limit the use of subsidies and investment measures and strengthen the protection of intellectual property rights uneven development would be sustained some future research directions are considered

decentralized taxation and the size of government evidence from swiss state and local governments according to the leviathan model fiscal federalism is seen as a binding constraint on a revenue maximizing government the competitive pressure of fiscal federalism is supposed to reduce public sector size as compared to unitary states however empirical results concerning the leviathan hypothesis are mixed this study uses a state and local level panel data set of swiss cantons from 1980 to 1998 to empirically analyze the effect of different federalist institutions on the size and structure of government revenue because of the considerable tax autonomy of sub national swiss governments it is possible to investigate different mechanisms by which fiscal federalism may influence government size the results indicate that tax exporting has a revenue expanding effect whereas tax competition favors a smaller size of government fragmentation has essentially no effect on the size of government revenue for swiss cantons the overall effect of revenue decentralization leads to fewer tax revenue but higher user charges thus revenue decentralization favors a smaller size of government revenue and shifts government revenue from taxes to user charges

nation states vs united empire effects of political competition on economic growth is political fragmentation i e nation states more favorable to economic growth than political unification i e a united empire this study develops an endogenous growth model to analyze the growth effects of fragmentation versus unification under unification the economy is vulnerable to excessive leviathan taxation and possibly subject to the costs of unifying heterogeneous populations under fragmentation the competing rulers are constrained in taxation but spend excessively on military defense if capital mobility is above below a threshold then fragmentation unification would favor growth and this threshold is increasing in the degree of defense competition and decreasing in the costs of heterogeneity

systems integration a core capability of the modern corporation many of the world s leading firms are developing a new model of industrial organization based on systems integration rather than performing all productive tasks in house companies are building the capabilities to design and integrate systems while managing networks of component and subsystem suppliers this article illustrates how systems integration evolved from its military engineering based origins in the 1940s and 1950s to a modern day strategic capability across a wide variety of sectors taking a resource based view of the firm the article shows how systems integration capabilities underpin the way high technology companies compete by moving selectively up and downstream in the marketplace through the simultaneous twin processes of vertical integration and disintegration systems integrators of capital goods move downstream into service intensive offerings to expand revenue streams and increase profitability by contrast producers of high volume components and consumer goods use systems integration capabilities to exploit upstream relationships with input suppliers in both cases strategic options and capabilities are shaped by the life cycle of each product the article develops a clearer understanding of systems integration arguing that it now represents a core capability of the modern high technology corporation

the cartelization of local governments intergovernmental competition can enhance efficiency centralization of government expenditures inhibits intergovernmental competition because it makes governments more homogeneous and so cartelizes local governments cartelization reduces tiebout competition and limits benchmark competition in which one government s performance can be compared with neighboring governments measuring fiscal centralization as the ratio of local to state and local government expenditures within the state the evidence shows that more fiscal decentralization is associated with higher levels of state per capita income cartelization of local governments negatively impacts income

the global business revolution the cascade effect and the challenge for firms from developing countries the global business revolution since the 1980s has witnessed an unprecedented degree of industrial consolidation and concentration of business power at a global level firms with powerful globally recognised technologies and or brands constitute the systems integrators at the apex of extended supply chains this paper examines the supply chains in four different sectors aerospace telecommunications automobiles and beverages it finds that these sectors have striking similarities in the way in which the core systems integrators have stimulated industrial concentration across the whole supply chain this cascade effect has profound implications for firms from developing countries in catching up at the firm level

costs of taxation and the size of government existing theory on the form of government suggests that a parliamentary system promotes a larger size of government than does a presidential system this paper extends the existing theory by allowing for distortionary taxation a main result is that if taxation is sufficiently distortionary the parliamentary system may promote a smaller size of government than the presidential system the proposed mechanism appears consistent with several empirical patterns in the data that cannot be explained by other theories

the need for competition between decentralized governance approaches for data exchange in smart electricity grids fiscal federalism vs polycentric governance abstract the institutional framework of the electricity sector is challenged by digitalization with smart metering data on energy consumption and production becomes available information management shall secure the efficient exchange of this data e g from smart metering in smart grids currently national as well as regional governance approaches for information management systems are being developed we discuss how the scale and scope of an information management system has an influence on the level of innovation in the process of the data exchange we define information management as a club good and apply the insights from the theory of fiscal federalism we conclude that neither of the extremes of national central and decentralized governance approaches for information management will be optimal rather we identify the need of polycentric governance approaches that compete with each other to define the optimal degree of decentralization

estimating the signaling benefits of debt insurance the case of municipal bonds this paper examines the demand for municipal bond insurance in the context of a competitive signaling equilibrium model the study compares the pricing of new bond issues that are insured to similar issues that are not insured the results indicate that issuers who purchase bond insurance on average are able to reduce their new issue borrowing cost more than enough to offset the cost of the insurance premium furthermore the net benefit to the issuer increases as the underlying credit quality of the bond declines

the power to tax analytical foundations of a fiscal constitution preface 1 taxation in constitutional perspective 2 natural government a model of leviathan 3 constraints on base and rate structure 4 the taxation of commodities 5 taxation through time income taxes capital taxes and public debt 6 money creation and taxation 7 the disposition of public revenues 8 the domain of politics 9 open economy federalism and taxing authority 10 toward authentic tax reform prospects and prescriptions epilogue notes selected bibliography index

government and economic growth a non linear relationship recently various authors have examined the relationship between growth in government size and total economic growth in each case the authors permitted only a monotonic relationship this paper examines the issue of a non linear relationship between growth in government and overall growth in the economy

privatization and government size a budget constraint view of government shows that privatization need not alter spending when it is implemented without a rule forbidding re use of the funding backing newly privatized programs only when these funds are eliminated from the budget process e g tax rebates or permanent deficit reduction can these funds not back new programs or expand existing programs this is an important caveat since privatization proposals do not contain such rules with such rules privatization can increase allocational efficiency and lead to smaller government size

generic existence of completely revealing equilibria for economies with uncertainty when prices convey information conditions which imply the existence of strict rational expectations equilibria for most static pure exchange economies where prices convey information about the state of the world are analyzed information is aggregated and transmitted by prices because agents have different initial information and maximize the conditional expectation of state dependent utility functions major results state that if with probability one agents characteristics do not vary too much as the state of the world varies then generically there exist equilibrium price functions which reveal all initial information more precisely if the support of the image measure is contained in a compact c1 manifold satisfying some technical conditions which is of sufficiently low dimension relative to the number of commodities then existence of completely revealing equilibria is generic any economy satisfying these assumptions can be approximated by a sequence of economies which also obey these assumptions and have completely revealing equilibrium price functions slight perturbations do not destroy the existence property

firm specific human capital amd optimal capital structure the authors consider the moral hazard in managers undersupplying imperfectly marketable firm specific human capital firms may cope by granting long term wage contracts that protect managers against employment termination although ex ante efficient these contracts may be ex post inefficient when managerial ability is discovered to be low precommitted firms must honor these contracts unless there is ownership transfer that permits their legal invalidation bankruptcy is one such transfer mechanism since managers anticipate the contractual consequence of bankruptcy leverage worsens moral hazard this cost provides a counterbalance to the debt tax shield and leads to an optimal capital structure copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

bank funding modes securitization versus deposits abstract we examine a bank s choice of whether to fund the loans it originates by emitting deposits or to sell the loans to investors with common knowledge of loan quality and laissez faire banking we find that the choice is irrelevant with asymmetric information but without government intervention we find that better quality assets will be sold securitized and poorer quality assets will be funded with deposits public regulation can influence the bank s choice subsidies can cause a bank to favor deposit funding but mutual funds and third party insurers may mitigate the effects of governmental subsidies

intra firm trade abstract the study analyses intra firm trade that is the estimated one third of world trade which is transacted between affiliated parties as firms realize the increasing potential for integrating their operations throughout the world they are contributing to significant shifts in the patterns of interntional trade and industrial development as emphasized here international trade is inextricably linked to the growing and substantial share of transactions between affiliated parties conveyed through multinational enterprises

fiscal decentralization and government size an extension this paper analyzes one method governments employ to circumvent the discipline of a competitive system of fiscal federalism intergovernmental collusion in the form of intergovernmental grants grants it is argued serve to encourage the expansion of the public sector by concentrating taxing powers in the hands of the central government and by weakening the fiscal discipline imposed on governments forced to self finance their expenditures the results reported suggest that intergovernmental grants do encourage growth in the public sector the results offer further support for the use of monopoly government assumptions in public sector modeling

the politics of government financial management evidence from state bonds abstract in the 3 7 trillion u s state and local government bond market greater issuance costs lower issue prices and greater underwriting fees benefit financial institutions while costing taxpayers campaign contributions by politically supportive underwriters can be associated with lower issuance costs alternatively contributions can influence a politician to accept greater costs this paper s evidence suggests that contributions influence politicians in the absence of an underwriter auction underpricing increases with the chosen underwriter s contributions relative to others moreover the difference in the fees charged by contributing underwriters and those charged by non contributing underwriters is 2 9 in the presence of an underwriter auction these results are statistically insignificant

searching for leviathan an empirical study in several papers and a recent book geoffrey brennan and james buchanan 1977 1978 1980 have put forth a striking and controversial view of the public sector drawing by analogy on the conventional theory of monopoly in the private sector they envision a monolithic government that systematically seeks to exploit its citizenry through the maximization of the tax revenues that it extracts from the economy from this perspective they develop a fiscal constitution whose central purpose is to constrain leviathan by limiting in various ways its access to tax and other fiscal instruments while the leviathan hypothesis has been the source of lively debate and a wide range of policy proposals it has not been the subject of much systematic empirical work or testing this is a matter of some importance since the policy implications of the leviathan view are disturbing to put it mildly in particular brennan and buchanan virtually stand on their heads many of the basic theorems in public finance for an efficient and equitable tax system if in fact the leviathan view is an inaccurate depiction of the functioning of the public sector the introduction of their policy proposals is likely to make a sorry mess of the fiscal system the leviathan model does however have some straightforward implications for observable fiscal behavior it is the purpose of this paper to examine one of these testable implications brennan and buchanan stress that fiscal decentralization is itself a powerful constraint on leviathan competition among governments in the context of the interjurisdictional mobility of persons in pursuit of fiscal gains can offer partial or possibly complete substitutes for explicit fiscal constraints on the taxing power 1980 p 184 such competition among governments in a federal system that places heavy reliance on local fiscal decisions will greatly limit the capacity of leviathan to channel resources into the public sector in short as indicated by the epigraph to this paper the leviathan model implies that other things equal the size of the public sector should vary inversely with the extent of fiscal decentralization 2