inequality and polarisation in health systems responsiveness a cross country analysis the world health report 2000 proposed three fundamental goals for health systems encompassing population health health care finance and health systems responsiveness the goals incorporate both an efficiency and equity dimension while inequalities in population health and health care finance have motivated two important strands of research inequalities in responsiveness have received less attention in health economics this paper examines inequality and polarisation in responsiveness bridging this gap in the literature and contributing towards an integrated analysis of health systems performance it uses data from the world health survey to measure and compare inequalities in responsiveness across 25 european countries in order to respect the inherently ordinal nature of the responsiveness data median based measures of inequality and polarisation are employed the results suggest that in the face of wide differences in the health systems analysed there exists large variability in inequality in responsiveness across countries

national animosity and cross border alliances we extend the cross border strategic alliance knowledge base by introducing dyad specific antagonism animosity between nation pairs and hold that the formation and the type of firm level cross border alliances are nontrivially impacted by conflicting relations and animosity between their home nations we examine the formation of alliances between firms among nation dyads with and without a history of conflicts the frequency and magnitude of conflicts increase the perception of likelihood of opportunism and dyad specific risks materially affect the context in which firms make alliance decisions as animosity between two nations increases the number and the probability of forming alliances within the dyad the nations form decreases conditional on the expected number of alliances increased antagonistic actions of nations outside the dyad and dissimilarity in the historical conflicts that each nation has engaged in outside the dyad i increase the number of equity alliances and ii decrease the number of nonequity alliances as a proportion of total alliances we find positive main effects of learning to contract through prior experience only for equity vs nonequity alliances the reputation effects of antagonism based on relationships with nations outside of the dyad negatively moderate the positive learning effects of prior equity alliance experience abstract from author

managerial control of international firms and patterns of direct investment abstract formal analyses of international firms have concentrated on advantages from large operations due to for example economies of scope however the standard framework implicitly assumes the existence of managerial costs for running international operations the paper develops a model that explicitly incoporates both economies of scope and costs of managerial control of large and international operations it highlights the potential importance of international firms organizational structure suggesting a qualitative difference between situations where international firms have different stages of production located in different countries and situations where firms in addition have the same stage located in different countries

management ownership and market valuation an empirical analysis we investigate the relationship between management ownership and market valuation of the firm as measured by tobin s q in a 1980 cross section of 371 fortune 500 firms we find evidence of a significant nonmonotonic relationship tobin s q first increases then declines and finally rises slightly as ownership by the board of directors rises for older firms there is evidence that q is lower when the firm is run by a member of the founding family than when it is run by an officer unrelated to the founder

foreign entry cultural barriers and learning this paper examines the longevity of foreign entries hypotheses are developed on the mode start ups vs acquisitions and ownership structure wholly owned vs joint ventures in relation to cultural distance the hypotheses are tested within a framework of organizational learning using data on 225 entries that 13 dutch firms carried out from 1966 onwards results show that the presence of cultural barriers punctuates an organization s learning cultural distance is a prominent factor in foreign entry whenever this involves another firm requiring the firm to engage in double layered acculturation we also identify locational paths of learning the longevity of acquisitions is positively influenced by prior entries of the firm in the same country similarly the longevity of foreign entries in which the firm has a majority stake improves whenever the expanding firm engaged in prior entries in the same country and in other countries in the same cultural block

taxes tariffs and transfer pricing in multinational corporate decision making three interrelated aspects of u s multinational corporation activity are analyzed here the ability to shift profits from high tax countries to low tax countries the impact of host country taxes and tariffs on the distribution of real capital and the influence of these policies on international trade patterns of the united states and host countries the cross sectional empirical analysis indicates that the observed pattern of reported profits in high and low tax countries is consistent with income shifting behavior and that real investment responds to host country effective tax rates and tariffs the united states appears both to import more from and export more to low tax countries where mnc investment is greater but this bilateral focus must be amplified to consider multilateral effects if trade benefits are to be projected copyright 1991 by mit press

specialized supplier networks as a source of competitive advantage evidence from the auto industry this study examines the relationship between interfirm asset specificity and performance in the auto industry more specifically i examine the extent to which differences in supplier automaker asset specialization may explain performance differences between japanese automakers nissan and toyota and u s automakers chrysler ford general motors the findings indicate a positive relationship between supplier automaker specialization and performance in particular the data suggest a positive relationship between interfirm human asset cospecialization and both quality and new model cycle time moreover site specialization is found to be positively associated with lower inventory costs the findings suggest that in the auto industry a tightly integrated production network characterized by proximity and a high level of human cospecialization will outperform a loosely integrated production network characterized by low levels of interfirm specialization

equity in the finance of health care some international comparisons this paper presents the results of a ten country comparative study of health care financing systems and their progressivity characteristics it distinguishes between the tax financed systems of denmark portugal and the u k the social insurance systems of france the netherlands and spain and the predominantly private systems of switzerland and the u s it concludes that tax financed systems tend to be proportional or mildly progressive that social insurance systems are regressive and that private systems are even more regressive out of pocket payments are in most countries an especially regressive means of raising health care revenues

from hybrids to hierarchies shareholder wealth effects of joint venture partner buyouts this study examines the parent firm performance implications of joint venture jv partner buyouts which involve the conversion of a hybrid governance structure to an internal unit within the firm s hierarchy transaction cost theory as developed and applied in the international literature and market entry research is extended to the post entry investment setting to isolate sources of value creation or dissipation from the governance changes effected by jv partner buyouts the evidence complements recent research on jv longevity and its determinants copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

stock market valuation of joint venture sell offs this article examines the stock market performance implications of joint venture jv partner sell offs using a resource based view and an event study methodology more specifically it proposes hypotheses putting into evidence the stock market valuation of different reasons for jv sell offs refocusing of a business debt reduction and jv failure abnormal returns ars from jv sell offs are estimated for a sample of 151 european selling partners first the results show that stock market reactions observed around the date of announcement are significant and positive this finding is consistent with that of finance research literature on stock market reactions to ordinary asset sales this leads us to discount the idea that stock markets place a specific valuation on jv sell offs second the results indicate that the reasons for jv sell offs are a determinant of ars of selling partners

cross sectional versus panel estimates of union wage effects abstract the main objective of this paper is to compare and reconcile the cross sectional and the panel estimates of union wage effects it uses panel survey of income dynamics psid data for a period of 6 years 1979 1984 unlike what freeman 1984 predicted i e panel union wage estimates would be smaller than pure cross sectional estimates due to the cumulative nature of the errors in reporting union status in the former both the cross sectional and panel estimates of union wage effects are very similar ranging from 11 to 13 unions seem to have flattering effect on the age earnings profiles not surprisingly the rate of return to schooling of non union members is larger than that of the union members

phasing the operation mode of foreign subsidiaries reaping the benefits of multinationality through internal capital markets the lifetime of foreign equity partnerships is often limited research suggests that mncs abandon their local partners when the need for sharing ownership in foreign subsidiaries has diminished this study shows that mncs may abandon their local equity partners to reap the benefits of multinationality as mncs gain a competitive advantage from leveraging resources across borders they will initially benefit from sharing ownership with a local firm to embed their foreign subsidiaries in the local environment and access local resources more effectively later they will benefit from taking over the local partner s equity share to better embed their subsidiaries in the parent organization and transfer locally accessed resources to the mnc s other locations moderated mediation regressions provide evidence of such practice in the context of cross border transfers of capital resources this strategy seems to work as a corollary of our model panel regressions suggest that sharing ownership with local firms in a host country with a capital resource advantage is associated with appropriating more capital resources from the local debt market while abandoning these partner firms later is associated with transferring more capital resources from this host country via internal capital markets to other parts of the mnc

termination outcomes of research alliances abstract we draw upon evolutionary economics and transaction cost economics to examine how alliance experience accumulation at the parent firm level and alliance features at the transaction level jointly and interactively shape the favorability of research alliances termination outcomes fifteen percent of the terminated alliances we examined were successful 34 were failures and 51 experienced an intermediate outcome in the form of contract expiration or unilateral withdrawal by a partner we find that the effect of partner specific experience on the favorability of termination outcomes is greater for non equity alliances than for equity structures affording stronger formal governance mechanisms other forms of experience such as general alliance experience or prior alliances in the same technological area as the focal agreement have no such favorable consequences for alliance termination the findings also indicate that alliance complexity adversely influences firms termination outcomes in alliances we therefore find evidence in partial support of both evolutionary and transaction cost based arguments for the explanation of termination outcomes in research alliances

the multinational firm direct investment is incorporated into a simple general equilibrium model of international trade the analysis focuses on an attempt to endogenize the internalization decision it is argued that a reasonable approach assumes that arm s length contracts must be simple so that complex arrangements require internalization the model relates direct investment to the degree of underlying uncertainty and to fundamental trade determinants such as relative factor endowments the behavior of the model contrasts sharply with that of the markusen helpman model which takes internalization for granted

tracing value added and double counting in gross exports comment in a recent contribution to the aer koopman wang and wei 2014 proposed a decomposition of a country s gross exports into value added components and double counted terms it is motivated by complex manipulation of basic accounting identities in this comment we provide an alternative framework based on hypothetical extraction this parsimonious approach provides a clear definition of domestic value added in exports and has a natural extension into decompositions of bilateral export flows

the effect of value line investment survey rank changes on common stock prices abstract the information content of value line investment survey rank changes is investigated the results suggest rank changes affect common stock prices but the effect varies by the type of rank change changes from rank 2 to rank 1 have the most dramatic impact on prices a cross sectional analysis finds small firms have a greater reaction to a rank change than larger firms which supports theories on the frequency of report arrival and precision of information a speed of adjustment test concludes the prices of individual securities adjust to the information in a rank change over a multiple day period

corporate combinations and common stock returns the case of joint ventures the gain to stockholders from mergers is well documented however there is little evidence as to whether the source of the gain is due to synergy or management displacement merger is just one of an almost limitless variety of ways in which firms combine resources to accomplish some objective a joint venture is another in addition to being of interest as an independent phenomenon because the original managements of the parent firms remain intact under a joint venture investigation of wealth gains from joint ventures provides an opportunity to isolate the management displacement hypothesis from the synergy hypothesis as the source of gains in corporate combinations our results are 1 there are significant wealth gains from joint ventures 2 the smaller partner earns a larger excess rate of return while the dollar gains are more equally divided and 3 the gains scaled by resources committed yield premiums similar to those in mergers we are inclined to interpret our results as supportive of the synergy hypothesis as the source of gain from corporate combinations this paper is an empirical investigation of the common stock returns of u s companies that enter into joint ventures with other u s companies we consider joint ventures in the context of what is by now a burgeoning literature examining the security returns of companies involved in intercorporate mergers and tender offers 1 in this context our objective is to provide evidence as to the source of the well documented gains to stockholders of firms involved in mergers and tender offers in addition joint ventures are an interesting economic phenomenon in their own right they are undertaken by many of the largest u s companies involve billions of dollars in capital expenditures annually and are subject to considerable scrutiny in the popular press in this regard our analysis provides data on what is as yet a relatively unexplored area of economic activity 2 a corporate merger represents the joining together of all the resources of two companies under a single management to accomplish some set of objectives empirical studies have found that mergers generally result in significant increases in the total market values of the merging firms with the stockholders of the

choice of foreign market entry mode impact of ownership location and internalization factors firms interested in servicing foreign markets face a difficult decision with regards to the choice of an entry mode the options available to a firm include exporting licensing joint venture and sole venture several factors that determine the choice of a specific foreign market entry mode have been identified in previous literature these factors can be classified into three categories ownership advantages of a firm location advantages of a market and internalization advantages of integrating transactions this study examines the independent and joint influences of these factors on the choice of an entry mode multinomial logistic regression model is employed to test the hypothesized effects

who pays for health care in asia we estimate the distributional incidence of health care financing in 13 asian territories that account for 55 of the asian population in all territories higher income households contribute more to the financing of health care the better off contribute more as a proportion of ability to pay in most low and lower middle income territories health care financing is slightly regressive in three high income economies with universal social insurance direct taxation is the most progressive source of finance and is most so in poorer economies in universal systems social insurance is proportional to regressive in high income economies the out of pocket oop payments are proportional or regressive while in low income economies the better off spend relatively more oop but in most low middle income countries the better off not only pay more they also get more health care

a measure of horizontal inequity politicians academicians and the general public alike have perceived that the status quo tax and transfer legislation creates inequities among living units tax laws create numerous situations in which living units with seemingly equal abilities to pay are taxed quite different amounts state by state differences in welfare eligibility rules benefit schedules and administrative procedures the general unavailability of cash welfare to childless nonaged healthy couples and single individuals and other features of transfer programs similarly provide vastly different levels of income support to units with equal needs advocates of major tax and welfare reform have marshalled such evidence into a central argument in favor of their proposals while there is wide agreement that the process of redistributing incomes abounds with inequities there have been few attempts to quantify their extent 2 this paper develops a measure of horizontal inequity and illustrates its use section ii discusses the concept of horizontal equity then builds upon familiar lorenz curve gini coefficient analysis to derive the inequity index the third part considers some problems of implementing the measure and illustrates it section iv provides a short conclusion

progressivity horizontal equity and reranking in health care finance a decomposition analysis for the netherlands this paper employs the method of aronson et al 1994 to decompose the redistributive effect of the dutch health care financing system into three components a progressivity component a classical horizontal equity component and a reranking component results are presented for the health care financing system as a whole as well as for its constituent parts a final section sets out to uncover the relative importance in terms of their effects on progressivity horizontal equity and reranking of the key institutional features of one component of the dutch system the awbz social insurance scheme

the redistributive effect of health care finance in twelve oecd countries the oecd countries finance their health care through a mixture of taxes social insurance contributions private insurance premiums and out of pocket payments the various payment sources have very different implications for both vertical and horizontal equity and on redistributive effect which is a function of both this paper presents results on the income redistribution consequences of the health care financing mixes adopted in twelve oecd countries by decomposing the overall income redistributive effect into a progressivity horizontal inequity and reranking component the general finding of this study is that the vertical effect is much more important than horizontal inequity and reranking in determining the overall redistributive effect but that their relative importance varies by source of payment public finance sources tend to have small positive redistributive effects and less differential treatment while private financing sources generally have larger negative redistributive effects which are to a substantial degree caused by differential treatment

global value chain perspective of us china trade and employment employment impact of trade is an issue of long debate recent literature seems to focus on partial equilibrium analysis of the jobs destruction in the us due to import competition from low cost countries particularly from china however as noted in world investment report 2011 wir 2012 indirect employment generated by trade can be substantial in addition to jobs directly generated by trade to which end a general equilibrium model is more relevant just as in a relay game it makes little sense to award or punish only the last runner in this paper a global value chain approach is adopted to examine the effects of the us china trade on employment by using a recently constructed world input output data it is made possible to account for jobs created along the value chain process it is found that china s exports to the us and to the world had created more job opportunities for its trade partners than any other countries in the world further china s exports to the us and to the world tended to generate more employment opportunities for the us services sector while us exports created more manufacturing jobs for the chinese workers finally in both countries exports the typical value chain products such as electrical and optical equipment were the most effective creators of jobs for both countries in line with recent work of global value chains our work sheds light on the employment effects of interconnected trade and provides an alternative interpretation for the impact of the us china trade on employment

effects of price and deductibles on medical care demand estimated from survey data this paper estimates the price sensitivity of medical care demand from cross sectional survey data by relating medical consumption to approximated copayment rates resulting from deductibles instead of the deductibles itself a transformation is used that better takes into account that expected expenditures at policy level play an important role in the reaction of consumers with regard to their deductible this transformation approximates the average expected copayment rate that is the portion of expenditures that one may expect at the beginning of the year to pay out of pocket given the deductible and given the expected expenditures at policy level the principal finding is an estimated price elasticity of medical care demand of 0 079 the highest price sensitivity was found for physiotherapy visits 0 12 and general practitioner visits 0 085 and the lowest for specialist visits 0 074 and prescription drugs 0 056 hospital care demand appeared not to be affected by deductibles

income redistribution and local tax progressivity a reconsideration this paper investigates and clarifies the relation between global tax progressivity as measured by musgrave and thin s effective progression and pointwise local progression as measured by the elasticity of after tax income with respect to pre tax income residual progression liu s 1985 vigorous defence of the global measure of effective progression is shown to rest upon an erroneous proposition of jakobsson 1976 a counter example is presented demonstrating that the link between residual progression and lorenz domination is much weaker than the work of liu and jakobsson suggests redistribution des revenus et mesure ponctuelle de la progressivite de l imp6t un re examen ce memoire examine et clarifie les rapports entre la progressivite globale de l impot telle que mesuree par l indice de progression effective de musgrave et thin et la progressivite ponctuelle de l imp6t telle que mesuree par l elasticite du revenu apres impot par rapport au revenu avant impot la progression residuelle on montre que la vigoureuse defense de liu 1985 de la mesure globale de progression effective est batie sur une proposition erronnee de jakobsson 1976 un exemple montre bien que le lien entre la progression residuelle et la domination au sens de lorenz est bien plus faible que ne le suggerent les travaux de liu et jakobsson

control modes in international service operations the propensity to franchise what determines a service firm s organizational choice between equity based control and franchising this question which has elicited some theoretical answers and a few empirical tests in a domestic setting has never been addressed in an international context before this study explains the mode of control chosen in terms of a theoretical framework which borrows from agency theory and transaction cost analysis the propensity to franchise internationally was found to be directly related to i monitoring costs associated with geographical and cultural distance between the principal franchisor and its foreign agents franchisees ii the principal s international experience and iii the degree of host countries contextual uncertainty but inversely related to the service firm level of brand name asset specificity

global strategy and multinationals entry mode choice this paper makes a case directed towards establishing the importance of global strategic considerations in choosing multinationals entry mode specifically it is our contention that beyond the environmental and transaction specific factors well established in the literature to affect the entry mode decision we should also consider the strategic relationship a multinational envisages between its operations across borders in reaching this decision after incorporating various global strategic variables into an eclectic framework of the factors influencing the entry mode choice this paper tests both the validity of the overall framework and the importance of each entry mode determinant in differ entiating among entry modes this is done based on ninety six multinational managers responses to a survey questionnaire concerning their entry mode decision experiences the results suggest that an express incorporation of global strategic variables into an analysis of the entry mode decision is warranted

the stability of joint ventures reciprocity and competitive rivalry the focus of the following empirical analysis is the influence of reciprocity and long term relationships on the stability of joint ventures these cooperative incentives are offset by industry structural conditions which may promote competitive rivalry among the partners to separate these effects on joint venture survival the hypothesized relationships are proxied by variables drawn from industry and questionnaire data and estimated under a hazard model specification a theoretical implication of the findings is to suggest a shift of attention from the transaction to the economic relationship as the unit of analysis copyright 1989 by blackwell publishing ltd

the eclectic paradigm of international production a restatement and some possible extensions this article reviews some of the criticisms directed towards the eclectic paradigm of international production over the past decade and restates its main tenets the second part of the article considers a number of possible extensions of the paradigm and concludes by asserting that it remains a robust general framework for explaining and analysing not only the economic rationale of economic production but many organisational and impact issues in relation to mne activity as well

unfair inequalities in health and health care inequalities in health and health care are caused by different factors measuring unfair inequalities implies that a distinction is introduced between causal variables leading to ethically legitimate inequalities and causal variables leading to ethically illegitimate inequalities an example of the former could be life style choices an example of the latter is social background we show how to derive measures of unfair inequalities in health and in health care delivery from a structural model of health care and health production direct unfairness linked to the variations in medical expenditures and health in the hypothetical distribution in which all legitimate sources of variation are kept constant fairness gap linked to the differences between the actual distribution and the hypothetical distribution in which all illegitimate sources of variation have been removed these two approaches are related to the theory of fair allocation in general they lead to different results we propose to analyse the resulting distributions with the traditional apparatus of lorenz curves and inequality measures we compare our proposal to the more common approach using concentration curves and analyse the relationship with the methods of direct and indirect standardization we discuss how inequalities in health care can be integrated in an overall evaluation of social inequality

make buy or ally a transaction cost theory meta analysis since the publication of williamson s markets and hierarchies many empirical articles have investigated the tenets of transaction cost theory using meta analytic techniques we quantitatively syn

a comparison of two new measures of tax progressivity recently n c kakwani i977 and daniel suits i977 independently and simultaneously developed new measures of the degree of tax progression both measures are related to the gini ratio of income inequality and are distinct from conventional elasticity measures of progressivity in that each yields a summary statistic while standard elasticity measures of progressivity vary as the tax base changes in this paper we briefly describe the measures identify their important characteristics and establish the analytical relation between them empirical calculations of the progressivity of the u s income tax system for the period i 962 76 reveal that the two measures display different magnitudes of change in progressivity more importantly in three out of fourteen years the measures moved in opposite directions

the elasticity of the u s individual income tax its calculation determinants and behavior houthakker hendrik s and lester d taylor consumer demand in the united states analyses and projection cambridge harvard university press 1970 juster f thomas and lester d taylor toward a theory of saving behavior american economic review 65 may 1975 203 209 juster f thomas and paul wachtel a note on inflation and the saving rate brookings papers on economic activity 3 1972 765 778 lehman stephen c federal personal income taxes liabilities and payments surv ey of current business 58 may 1978 28 33 maddala g s econometrics new york mcgraw hill 1977 modigliani franco and charles steindl is a tax rebate an effective tool for stabilization policy brookings papers on economic activity 1 1977 175 203 park thae s federal personal income taxes liabilities and payments survey of current business 60 mar 1980 30 32 taubman paul personal saving a time series analysis of three measures of the same conceptual series this review 50 feb 1968 125 129 u s bureau of economic analysis unpublished computer printout of revised nipa data 1981 u s council of economic advisors economic report of the president washington d c u s government printing office 1977 1981 u s internal revenue service statistics of income individual income tax returns washington d c u s government printing office 1947 1979 wright colin saving and the rate of interest in arnold c harberger and martin j bailey eds the taxation of income from capital washington d c the brookings institution 1969 275 300

the changing role of government in financing health care an international perspective this paper explores the changing role of government involvement in health care financing policy outside the united states it provides a review of the economics literature in this area to elucidate the implications of recent policy changes on efficiency costs and quality our review reveals that there has been some convergence in policies adopted across countries to improve financing incentives and encourage efficient use of health services in the case of risk pooling all countries with competing pools experience similar difficulties with selection and are adopting more sophisticated forms of risk adjustment in the case of hospital competition the key drivers of success appear to be what is competed on and measurable rather than whether the system is public or private in the case of both the success of performance related pay for providers and issues resulting from wait times evidence differs within and across jurisdictions however the evidence does suggest that some governments have effectively reduced wait times when they have chosen explicitly to focus on achieving this goal many countries are exploring new ways of generating revenues for health care to enable them to cope with significant cost growth but there is little evidence to suggest that collection mechanisms alone are effective in managing the cost or quality of care jel h51 i11 i18

redistribution effect and unequal income tax treatment decomposing the post tax gini coefficient across groups of pre tax equals reveals the separate contributions to the redistributive effect of an income tax of 1 the effective schedule the vertical effect 2 the unequal treatment of equals arising from departures from this effective schedule the horizontal effect and 3 the reranking of unequals as a result of such departures the reranking effect the methodology is applied to u k microdata throughout the period 1978 91 reranking understates the negative contribution to redistributive effect of unequal tax treatment by about one third and is far outweighed by the vertical effect copyright 1994 by royal economic society

multinationals multi plant economies and the gains from trade a general equilibrium model of a multinational enterprise based on economies of multi plant operation is developed these economies are modelled as arising from the existence of a joint input whose productivity in each production facility is independent of the number of facilities maintained by a firm the multinational thus offers the world increased technical efficiency by eliminating the duplication of the joint input that would occur with independent national firms since this technical efficiency may come at the expense of increased market power the full determinants of home country host country and world welfare are considered

the dynamics of learning alliances competition cooperation and relative scope we show how the tension between cooperation and competition affects the dynamics of learning alliances private benefits and common benefits differ in the incentives that they create for investment in learning the competitive aspects of alliances are most severe when a firm s ratio of private to common benefits is high we introduce a measure relative scope of a firm in an alliance to show that the opportunity set of each firm outside an alliance crucially impacts its behavior within the alliance finally we suggest why firms might deviate from the theoretically optimal behavior patterns 1998 john wiley sons ltd

equity in the finance and delivery of health care some tentative cross country comparisons textabstractequity is widely acknowledged to be an important goal in the field of health care indeed mclachlan and maynard 1982 have gone so far as to suggest that the vast majority of the population would elect for equity to be the prime consideration p 556 a view endorsed by mooney 1986 p 145 several researchers have investigated how successful their own country s delivery and or financing system is in achieving its stated equity goals in general the strategy of these studies is to compare the current situation with some ideal or target situation le grand 1978 for example in what has become a classic study in the field compares the distributions across socio economic groups of illness and public expenditure on health care in britain in 1972 and concludes that the national health service nhs has failed to achieve equity in the delivery of health care

the dynamics of the liability of foreignness a global study of survival in financial services we study the impact of foreignness on survival in interbank currency trading worldwide over the period 1974 93 in particular we develop hypotheses on the behavior of the liability of foreignness over time and on the consequences of evolving sources of firm level competitive advantage on this liability we test these hypotheses on the population of 2667 market making trading rooms located in 47 countries worldwide that either existed in 1974 or entered the industry between 1974 and 1993 the results show that there is a liability of foreignness and that it changes over time further strategic and organizational factors such as the adoption of technology by these firms and their mode of internal control significantly influenced survival as did location related factors such as the intensity of local and foreign competition 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

international corporate diversification market valuation and size adjusted evidence errunza and senbet es 7 analyze the effects of international operations on the market value of the firm both at theoretical and empirical levels the theoretical model which is largely heuristic exploits the costly supply adjustment of multinational firms mncs in providing international portfolio diversification services to investors who face differential cost barriers to direct holdings of assets across national boundaries mncs compete as financial intermediaries to undo the barriers so that in equilibrium profits are driven out mncs and pure domestic firms sell at an equivalent risk adjusted return however costly financial intermediation and the associated relative efficiency leads to a positive valuation effect for mncs relative to purely domestic firms further the equilibrium analysis implies that demand side investor barriers to international capital flows alone are inconsequential to the valuation of mncs in their pure financial role but that the interaction with the supply side costs are necessary to produce a valuation effect at the corporate level es subject the theory to an empirical analysis in a value based approach by employing a variant of tobin s 17 qratio the analysis controlling for industrial market power suggests that the relationship between the excess valuation and the degree of international involvement doi has magnified over periods characterized by severe u s government controls vis a vis the more recent periods in this paper we formalize the theoretical argument by viewing indirect portfolio diversification by mncs as a means of completing the international capital market we employ a paradigm in the unanimity literature and formally characterize the equilibrium in which there is a rationale for mnc financial intermediation we then perform an expanded empirical study by employing generalized least squares and maximum likelihood procedures since the positive relationship between excess valuation and doi as suggested in es 7 might be attributed to the so called small firm or size and the p e effects the test methodology controls for such effects also the traditional literature has relied upon foreign sales percentage as a proxy for doi in view of the well recognized limitations of this proxy we employ four different measures of international

organizational learning and diversification employing concepts of lateral and longitudinal learning we examined the dissolution of 462 expansions of dutch firms both acquisitions and new ventures we interpreted the endurance of an expansi

the effects of international operations on the market value of the firm theory and evidence this paper investigates the existence of monopoly rents associated with international operations in a market value theoretic framework the benefits of international operations evolve from such factors as 1 imperfections in the product and factor markets 2 differential international taxation and 3 imperfections in the financial markets in this paper these factors are subject to an equilibrium analysis in the context of recent advances in financial theory in particular imperfections in the financial sector arising from corporate international diversification are examined in a framework which allows a supply adjustments by multinational firms and b the interaction of barriers to international capital flows faced by both firms and investors taking the u s capital market and investors as a base we then specify the conditions under which the foregoing imperfections get priced out in an equilibrium these pricing effects cannot be detected empirically through the methodologies employed by the existing studies which examine the effects of corporate international diversification indeed it was an attempt to rescue the limitations of these studies which initially motivated our paper the existing empirical inquiries into this area rely on traditional risk adjusted performance measures e g 7 or international analogs of return generating processes e g 1 8 instead at the empirical level we employ a value based method which is in the same vein of the thomadakis 17 approach developed to identify the monopoly benefits of industrial market structure we conduct the tests over subperiods characterized by differential government controls in an attempt a to separate the pure financial motives for multinationality from other motives and b to detect if the benefits of international operations carry through recent periods

effective interim collaboration how firms minimize transaction costs and maximise transaction value this study of automotive transaction relationships in the u s a and japan offers abta which indicate that transaction costs do not necessarily increase with an increase in reiation specijk investments we empirically examine the conditions under which transactors can simultaneously achieve the twin benejits of high asset specificity and low transaction costs this is possible because the dtfferent safeguards which can be employed to control opportunism have different set up costs and result in different transaction costs over dl erent time horizons we examine in detail the ractices of javanese firms which result in effective inteq n collaboration 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

internalization an event study test abstract the internalization theory of multinational firms proposes that direct international investment occurs when a firm has information related intangible assets with public good properties we find that firms with characteristics suggesting the presence of information based assets experience a significantly positive stock price reaction upon announcing a foreign acquisition on the other hand firms apparently lacking such assets experience at best zero abnormal returns upon announcing overseas acquisitions

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

interfirm diversity organizational learning and longevity in global strategic alliances organizational theorists have correctly argued that the emergence and maintenance of robust cooperation between global strategic alliance partners is related to the diversity in the partners characteristics yet previous research has failed to systematically delineate the important dimensions of interfirm diversity and integrate the dimensions into a unified framework of analysis this paper develops a multilevel typology of interfirm diversity and focuses on organizational learning and adaptation as critical processes that dynamically moderate diversity s impact on alliance longevity and effectiveness

bargaining power of multinationals and host governments one of the outcomes of negotiation between multinationals and host governments in developing countries the extent of foreign ownership of subsidiaries is influenced by the bargaining power of the two parties foreign ownership measured in various ways appears to be affected by the level of technology of the multinational the degree to which a multinational attempts to differentiate its products the extent to which a subsidiary s output is exported to other parts of the multinational the diversity of products offered by the multinational and the extent of competition by other multinationals the relationship between some of these variables and ownership is not a simple one one variable that others have mentioned as probably affecting bargaining power size of the investment in question appears not to play a significant role in government policies toward ownership but many large projects tend to be located in countries that have lenient ownership policies

statistical inference of progressivity dominance an application to health care financing distributions this paper employs a distribution free statistical test suitable for comparisons based on dependent samples to analyse changes in health care financing distributions on finnish data in distinction to the more general summary index approach used in most studies of progressivity measurement the difference between the lorenz curve of income inequality and the concentration curves of various taxes and payments is used to evaluate progressivity dominance and changes in progressivity sample weights are applied to account for the effect of sampling design and non response the analysis demonstrates that the dominance approach can be successfully applied to various types of distributional problems besides comparisons concerning differences in income distributions as an empirical application the paper presents estimation results for the progressivity of various health care financing sources using data from the 1987 and 1996 finnish health care surveys

current issues in microeconomics recent developments in microeconomics john d hey choice under uncertainty problems solved and unsolved mark j machina uncertainty information and insurance ray rees game theory oligopoly and bargaining bruce lyons and yanis varoufakis contract theory and incentive compatability melvyn coles and james m malcolmson experimental economics graham loomes general equilibrium and disequilibrium and the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics paul madden microeconometric modelling and microeconomic policy analysis ian walker what s the good of equality john broome institutional economics robert a solo

corporate takeover bids methods of payment and bidding firms stock returns this study explores the role of the method of payment in explaining common stock returns of bidding firms at the announcement of takeover bids the results reveal significant differences in the abnormal returns between common stock exchanges and cash offers the results are independent of the type of takeover bid i e merger or tender offer and of bid outcomes these findings supported by analysis of nonconvertible bonds are attributed mainly to signalling effects and imply that the inconclusive evidence of earlier studies on takeovers may be due to their failure to control for the method of payment recent studies on corporate takeovers provide inconclusive results on the valuation effects of acquisitions on the common stock of bidding firms 1 substantial differences are reported between the studies that analyze acquisitions initiated as tender offers and those that confine their samples to merger proposals the existence of mixed empirical findings for the bidding firms makes it difficult to interpret existing evidence and to draw conclusions about the managers acquisition motivations nevertheless the reason for the substantial difference between empirical findings on mergers and tender offers still remains an unresolved issue it is observed however that mergers are usually common stock exchange offers whereas tender offers are usually cash offers given that different methods of financing a project have different signalling implications myers and majluf 39 the differential stock returns of bidders in mergers and tender offers may be due to the method of acquisition financing

when competition eclipses cooperation an event history analysis of joint venture failure why do so many joint ventures fail despite the fact that their success is the exception rather than the rule the literature on why joint venture performance has been so poor remains fragmentary we address this issue adopting a transaction cost economics perspective and modeling joint ventures as governance structures that blend the advantages and drawbacks of both markets and hierarchies using a data base on electronics industry ventures and event history analysis we identify several predictors of joint venture failure and test for their influences a key finding is that the presence of competition between joint venture partners outside of the agreement significantly impairs chances for the operation s chance of survival we also find clear evidence that the failure rate of joint ventures is nonmonotonic rising to a peak in the middle term and then declining finally we compare and contrast predictors of terminations due to failure to those due to acquisition of the joint venture by one of its partners our overall conclusions highlight implications for strategic choice theory building and the management of joint ventures

arms race or detente how interfirm alliance announcements change the stock market valuation of rivals most prior event studies find that the announcement of a new alliance is accompanied by a positive stock market response for the partners this result has usually been interpreted as evidence for the prevailing view that alliances are effective vehicles for partners to acquire or access new skills and thus become stronger competitors however partners should also earn positive abnormal returns if alliances are used to shape competitive interactions attenuating competitive intensity industry wide in this study we disentangle these different mechanisms by examining how alliance announcements affect the stock market s evaluation of allying firms rivals if an alliance is expected to make partner firms more competitive this should lead to negative abnormal returns for partners rivals if an alliance is expected to facilitate a reduction in competitive intensity this should lead to positive abnormal returns for rivals results from an event study analysis of research and development alliances in the telecommunications and electronics industries during 1996 2004 provide evidence consistent with competition attenuation in some alliances our research thus challenges the increasingly narrow focus on learning and resource accumulation through alliances and calls for broader consideration of the roles and effects of collaboration both for individual firms and for industry structure

transactions cost economics and the multinational enterprise an assessment abstract this paper applies transactions cost principles to the multinational enterprise in order to ascertain its distinctive properties as a mode of economic organization the analysis helps identify just when and where contractual alternatives to the multinational firm are likely to be viable this turns out to depend upon the nature of the technology the regime of appropriability within which the firm operates and the characteristics of the markets in question transactions cost analysis is also extended to the multinational enterprise host country relationship implications for management and public policy are derived

evaluating effective income tax progression abstract an algorithm to compute effective income tax progression is devised for use when taxes are a function of both money income and other socioeconomic attributes and the data is in grouped summary form suppressing non income information effective progression can be evaluated at percentiles in the distribution of either money or equivalent income the normative significance of the new measures is explained in both cases the methodology is illustrated by application to u s individual income tax annual data for 1950 1987 yielding contour plots which show how effective progression has varied across the income distribution and with the passage of time

the transaction costs theory of joint ventures an empirical study of japanese subsidiaries in the united states this paper offers the first large sample empirical study of the factors which influence the choice of japanese firms between full or partial ownership of their u s manufacturing subsidiaries it studies for the first time the ownership policies of investors of a single home country in a single host country thus keeping variations within home and host countries constant one methodological improvement over previous studies is the use as independent variables of the relevant characteristics of the investing firms these had been proxied in previous studies by data on u s industries entered the results suggest that the degree of ownership taken by japanese manufacturing investors in their american subsidiaries is driven by the same general transaction costs variables that determine the choices made by their u s counterparts japanese parents joint venture when they need to combine with other firms intermediate inputs which are subject to high market transaction costs an intriguing result however is the lack of significance of two variables which in the u s case strongly push towards full control of foreign subsidiaries in this study neither the japanese parent s r d nor its advertising intensities had any significant impact on their ownership policies

the effect of cultural distance on entry mode choice international diversification and mne performance a meta analysis although a growing literature indicates that cultural distance that is differences between national cultures is an important determinant of organizational actions and performance both empirical and theoretical concerns abound in this study the relationships of cultural distance with entry mode choice international diversification and mne performance are examined by meta analyzing data from 66 independent samples with cumulative sample sizes ranging from 2 255 to 24 152 regression results failed to provide statistical evidence of significant relationships between cultural distance and entry mode choice international diversification and mne performance the examination of moderator effects however yielded important results we found a strong negative association between cultural distance and entry mode choice for us based mnes the cultural distance international diversification relationship was negative for high technology industries while it was positive for other industries cultural distance also had a strong positive effect on mne performance for developed country investments a similar strong positive relationship was found between cultural distance and international diversification in studies with more recent samples results of this study indicate that substantial additional research is needed before the role of cultural distance is fully understood

an econometric analysis of health care expenditure a cross section study of the oecd countries this paper is an empirical examination of the determinants of aggregate health care expenditure the paper presents a systematic analysis of relationships across 19 oecd countries showing the effects of aggregate income institutional and socio demographic factors on health care expenditure the results indicate that institutional factors of the health systems in addition to per capita gross domestic product gdp contribute significantly to the explanation of the health care expenditure variation between countries for example the way physicians in outpatient care are paid and the mixture of public private funding and inpatient outpatient care

firm ownership preferences and host government restrictions an integrated approach two approaches may explain how multinational enterprises mnes select ownership structures for subsidiaries the first argues that mnes prefer structures that minimize that transaction costs of doing business abroad the second argues that ownership structures are determined by negotiations with host governments whose outcomes depend on the bargaining power of the firm this paper presents a framework integrating these two approaches and uses statistical methods to separate their effects empirically

personal income tax progressivity and output volatility evidence from oecd countries this paper investigates empirically the effect of personal income tax progressivity on output volatility using macro data from a sample of oecd countries over the period 1982 2009 our measure of progressivity is based on the difference between the marginal and the average personal income tax rate for the average production worker we find supportive empirical evidence for the hypothesis that higher personal income tax progressivity leads to lower output volatility this effect comes in addition to the stabilizing impact of government size and it is equally important in economic terms all other factors constant countries with more progressive personal income tax systems seem to benefit from stronger automatic stabilizers

lorenz domination and global tax progressivity the paper clarifies the concept of global progressivity as opposed to pointwise progressivity and proposes a summary measure for global progressivity on the basis of lorenz domination as a ranking criterion for income distributions by extending the work of musgrave and thin 1948 and jakobsson 1976 other ad hoc summary measures for global progressivity are evaluated from both a positive and a normative viewpoint domination selon le critere de lorenz et progressivite globale de la fiscalite ce memoire clarifie le concept de progressivite globale par opposition au concept de progressivite ponctuelle et propose une mesure sommaire de progressivite globale fondee sur la domination selon le critere de lorenz ce critere pour la comparaison de distributions de revenus est developpe en prolongeant certains travaux de musgrave et thin 1948 et de jakobsson 1976 l auteur examine aussi de fa on critique d autres mesures sommaires de progressivite globale dans une optique normative et positive

what differences in the cultural backgrounds of partners are detrimental for international joint ventures an international joint venture implies that a firm has to cooperate with a partner with a different cultural background in this study hypotheses about which differences in national culture are most disruptive for international joint ventures were developed and tested using hofstede s five dimensions the study focused on how these dimensions affect the survival of international joint ventures as well as their incidence relative to wholly owned subsidiaries the hypotheses were tested on longitudinal data about 828 foreign entries of twenty five dutch multinational in seventy two countries between 1966 and 1994 the database which spans almost three decades was also used to provide new evidence on a key assumption of hofstede s work that cultural values are stable over time

corporate performance and managerial remuneration an empirical analysis abstract economic theories of efficient compensation predict a positive relationship between executive pay and corporate performance and yet efforts to document this relationship have been largely unsuccessful in this paper we argue that previous cross sectional studies have omitted important variables which seriously bias their results using data that focus on individual executives over time we find that executive compensation is strongly positively related to corporate performance as measured by shareholder return and growth in firm sales the results are robust to the stock market performance measure utilized

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

sales taxes and internet commerce we estimate the sensitivity of internet retail purchasing to sales taxes using ebay data our first approach exploits the fact that a seller s location and therefore the applicable tax rate is revealed only after a buyer has expressed interest in an item we document how adverse tax surprises reduce the likelihood of purchase and shift subsequent purchases toward out of state sellers we then use more aggregated data to estimate that every one percentage point increase in a state s sales tax increases online purchases by state residents by almost 2 percent while decreasing their online purchases from state retailers by 3 4 percent jel h71 l81 l86

the structure of ownership and the theory of the firm the separation of ownership from control produces a condition where the interests of owner and of ultimate manager may and often do diverge and where many of the checks which formerly operated to limit the use of power disappear in creating these new relationships the quasi public corporation may fairly be said to work a revolution it has divided ownership into nominal ownership and the power formerly joined to it thereby the corporation has changed the nature of profit seeking enterprise 1

short of euphoria abstract the tax reform act of 1986 is the most sweeping reform since the early 1940s when the pressures of war finance forced the transformation of the income tax into a mass tax and made it the core of the federal tax system since then many adjustments have been made but the basic structure of the tax has remained unchanged behind this nominal stability however a slow erosion of the tax base appears to have been at work the widening of loopholes and emergence of high income shelters gained momentum in recent years and undermined the public s faith in the income tax the compounding of the investment tax credit and accelerated depreciation diluted and distorted the base of the corporation tax the current reform reverses these trends a major accomplishment that all reformers will welcome but the reform is far from complete its base broadening goes only part of the way and though substantial gains have been made they have not come without a price the pattern of rate reduction involving a dra

equity in the finance of health care some further international comparisons this paper presents further international comparisons of progressivity of health care financing systems the paper builds on the work of wagstaff et al wagstaff a van doorslaer e et al 1992 equity in the finance of health care some international comparisons journal of health economics 11 pp 361 387 but extends it in a number of directions we modify the methodology used there and achieve a higher degree of cross country comparability in variable definitions we update and extend the cross section of countries and we present evidence on trends in financing mixes and progressivity

key characteristics in the choice of international technology transfer mode the choice between licensing and direct investment as a vehicle for international technology transfer is hypothesized to be related to characteristics of the individual technology parent corporation and the host country involved in the transfer a set of hypotheses regarding these relationships are developed and tested in a logit statistical model for a sample of 1 226 technology transfers we find that hypotheses regarding the effects of technology and parents characteristics are strongly supported by this analysis hypotheses regarding the effect of host country characteristics on transfer patterns receive mixed support

europe and central asia s great post communist social health insurance experiment aggregate impacts on health sector outcomes abstract the post communist transition to social health insurance in many of the central and eastern european and central asian countries provides a unique opportunity to try to answer some of the unresolved issues in the debate over the relative merits of social health insurance and tax financed health systems this paper employs regression based generalizations of the difference in differences method on panel data from 28 countries for the period 1990 2004 we find that controlling for any concurrent provider payment reforms adoption of social health insurance increased national health spending and hospital activity rates but did not lead to better health outcomes

some calculations of lifetime tax incidence this paper reports a set of lifetime tax incidence calculations using a life cycle simulation model for canada due to davies 1979a 1982 a repeatedly stated qualification to annual calculations in the empirical tax incidence literature is that it would be more satisfactory to make calculations on a lifetime basis even though it is acknowledged that lifetime tax incidence could well differ from annual it is widely believed that data and other difficulties make such calculations next to impossible indeed the widespread acceptance of the data problems of lifetime calculations seems also to have inhibited speculation about how lifetime tax incidence might differ from annual as a result redistributive tax policy judgments continue to be based on annual incidence calculations in spite of the reservations many have about their usefulness our paper is intended to reorient discussion towards lifetime tax incidence by providing some initial null hypotheses about the shape of lifetime tax profiles our main finding is that under the standard competitive assumptions common in the incidence literature lifetime and annual incidence calculations both produce mild progression in tax rates across household deciles ignoring the bottom decile in the annual calculation while the income tax is less progressive in lifetime than in annual calculations other taxes are for the most part less regressive also lifetime incidence calculations are much more robust to alternative shifting assumptions than annual calculations in the lifetime context key distributions such as earnings transfer payments and consumption are less heavily concentrated in particular percentiles of the population than is true in annual data as a result changing the allocative series for any particular tax does not have the large effect on incidence results found in annual calculations each component of the tax system is allocated to households grouped by lifetime income using particular distributive series following a procedure similar to that employed in annual incidence calculations for example richard musgrave et al 1974 joseph pechman and benjamin okner 1974 edgar browning and william johnson 1979 w irwin gillespie 1980 in the process we are able to compare lifetime and annual incidence calculations using the same data set in both lifetime and annual calculations we allocate five groups of taxes among households using distributive series which come partly from the 1971 statistics canada survey of consumer finances scf and partly from our life cycle simulation model the scf data are used to construct synthetic longitudinal lifetime profiles of earnings and transfer payments for a sample of 500 households the latter are assigned inheritances by simulating patterns of mortality and bequest these data are then used in the life cycle model to generate lifetime consumption profiles and bequests the earnings transfer and inheritance data plus the model output provide the distributive series on which alternative incidence calculations are based while the incidence calculations presented in this paper use canadian data results would likely be similar for the united states

progressivity horizontal inequality and reranking caused by health system financing a decomposition analysis for switzerland abstract this paper presents an application of the duclos et al duclos j y jalbert v araar a 2003 classical horizontal inequity and reranking an integrated approach research on economic inequality 10 65 100 decomposition to an analysis of the 1998 swiss health system financing we see that in addition to measuring horizontal inequality in the classical sense this decomposition is more efficient and flexible than earlier ones it is also pointed out that methods involving a nonparametric estimation lead to asymptotically biased vertical and horizontal effects a procedure to estimate this bias is given finally it is shown that despite a major reform health system financing is still very regressive and social health insurance is more regressive than direct financing

modes of foreign entry a transaction cost analysis and propositions a frontier issue in international marketing is the appropriate choice of entry mode in foreign markets the objective of this paper is to offer a transaction cost framework for investigating the entry mode decision this framework provides 1 a theoretical basis for systematically interrelating the literature into propositions 2 propositions about interactions which resolve the apparently contradictory arguments advanced to date specifically the paper illustrates the feasibility of clustering 17 entry modes into the degree of control the mode provides the entrant proposes that the most appropriate i e most efficient entry mode is a function of the tradeoff between control and the cost of resource commitment advances testable propositions delimiting the circumstances under which each mode maximizes long term efficiency

the effects of corporate restructuring on aggregate industry specialization it has been widely argued that the purpose of corporate restructuring during the 1980s was to produce a population of more industry specialized competitive firms in response to intensifying global competition a number of studies show that corporate restructuring resulted in increased corporate focus during the 1980s however no study has yet examined whether corporate restructuring resulted in increased specialization at the industry level during the 1980s this study examines this issue first we examine whether or not aggregate industry specialization increased during the 1980s that is we ask did the average firm in any given u s industry become more or less specialized to that industry during the 1980s second we examine whether corporate restructuring was a significant determinant of change in aggregate industry specialization during the 1980s using a sample of 686 four digit sic industries and 64 two digit industry groups this study finds that aggregate industry specialization declined very slightly at both the four digit and two digit level between 1981 and 1989 this study also finds that sell offs of establishments through corporate control transactions or interfirm asset sales had no significant effect on aggregate industry specialization