optimal procurement mechanisms for an informed buyer this paper studies a buyer e g a government agency offering a procurement contract to a number of privately informed suppliers the buyer has private information about her demand for the product to be procured the optimal mechanisms for all types of the buyer are examined it is optimal for the buyer to reveal her demand information through the contract offer and use a first price sealed bid auction procedure to award the contract announcing her reserve price in advance any second price auction is shown to yield less expected surplus for the buyer than the optimal first price auction does when the buyer s marginal willingness to pay decreases with quantity

the political economy of corporate control and labor rents in a democracy a political majority can influence both the corporate governance structure and the return to human and financial capital we argue that when financial wealth is sufficiently concentrated there is political support for high labor rents and a strong governance role for banks or large investors the model is consistent with the great reversal phenomenon in the first half of the twentieth century we offer evidence that in several financially developed countries a financially weakened middle class became concerned about labor income risk associated with free markets and supported a more corporatist financial system

the choice between market failures and corruption because government intervention transfers resources from one party to another it creates room for corruption as corruption often undermines the purpose of the intervention governments will try to prevent it they may create rents for bureaucrats induce a misallocation of resources and increase the size of the bureaucracy since preventing all corruption is excessively costly second best intervention may involve a certain fraction of bureaucrats accepting bribes when corruption is harder to prevent there may be both more bureaucrats and higher public sector wages also the optimal degree of government intervention may be nonmonotonic in the level of income

the politics of financial development evidence from trade liberalization incumbents in various industries have different incentives to promote or oppose financial development changes in the relative strength of promoter and opponent industries thus result in changes in the political equilibrium level of financial development we conduct an event study using a sample of 41 countries that liberalized trade during 1970 to 2000 and show that the strengthening of promoter relative to opponent industries resulting from liberalization is a good predictor of subsequent financial development the benefits of developing the financial system are insufficient for financial development and rents in particular hands appear to be necessary to achieve it copyright c 2008 by the american finance association

the design of ambiguous mechanisms this paper considers a mechanism design framework that is standard except for the agents preferences which exhibit ambiguity aversion in the sense of gilboa and schmeidler 1989 we show that in this framework the optimal strategic form mechanism is an ambiguous mechanism an ambiguous mechanism specifies a message space and a set of outcome functions after showing that a version of the revelation principle holds in our environment we give an exact characterization of the smallest optimal ambiguous mechanism for the single agent case if the type set is composed of n finite elements then the smallest optimal ambiguous mechanism contains n 1 outcome functions we show how the extra revenue that the designer obtains by employing an ambiguous mechanism as opposed to a standard non ambiguous mechanism depends on the parameters of the model in particular we prove that the share of the surplus that the designer can extract from the agent increases as the type set becomes larger and the probability of each single type decreases in the limiting case where the agent s type is drawn from a nonatomic distribution on an interval the optimal ambiguous mechanism extracts all the rent from the agent

why is bank debt senior a theory of asymmetry and claim priority based on influence costs this theory can explain why bank debt is universally senior consistent with the presence of conflict lawyers and absolute priority violations in financial distress better organized banks would more strongly contest priority in financial distress if they were junior because deterrence can reduce creditors total expenses in a priority contest the ex post stronger lobbyist litigant should be senior ex ante for equivalent reasons the theory can advise when public debt should be senior to trade credit and or implicit contracts and can even suggest one rationale for the absolute priority rule apr this article further shows that chapter hi creditor reimbursement procedures can lower overall costs article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

ownership concentration and firm performance in emerging markets a meta analysis the literature concerned with relations between ownership concentration and corporate performance in emerging markets presents conflicting theoretical predications and inconclusive empirical results we use meta analytical techniques to integrate the diverse empirical findings and investigate factors contribute to the inconsistencies in the empirical evidence using 419 correlations collected from 42 primary studies of listed corporations in 18 emerging markets heterogeneity tests show that only a small proportion of the variation in reported ownership concentration performance relations can be attributed to sampling error our meta regressions reveal how population differences researchers modeling choices and inadequate treatment of endogeneity explain a large portion of the true heterogeneity after adjusting for these effects we find ownership concentration has negative relation with firm performance across countries our results emphasize the importance of model specification and methods of addressing endogeneity and support further comparative study of the ownership concentration corporate performance relation between countries with seemingly similar corporate governance environments

the political economy of financial systems evidence from suffrage reforms in the last two centuries initially voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets the franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the uncertainty and financial returns from stock markets our panel data evidence covering 1830 1999 shows that tighter restrictions on the voting franchise induce a greater stock market development whereas a broader voting franchise is more conducive towards the banking sector consistent with perotti and von thadden 2006 our results are robust to controlling for other political determinants and endogeneity

does economic structure determine financial structure abstract in this paper we examine the relationship between the structure of the real economy and a country s financial system we consider whether the development of the real economic structure can predict the direction of evolution of a country s financial structure using data for 108 countries we find a significant relationship between real economic structure and financial structure next we exploit shocks to the economies in india finland and sweden and south korea and show that changes in the economic structure of a country influence the evolution of its financial system this suggests that financial institutions and capital markets change in response to the structure of industries

productivity and distribution effects of codetermination in an efficient bargaining model codetermination can be regarded as an extreme regulatory intervention of the legislator in the labor market which might affect the efficiency of production and the bargaining power of labor based on a model that covers both efficient bargaining and employment bargaining a simple equation is derived that is suited to empirical testing the empirical test is based on german data and includes years before and after the extension of german codetermination law in 1976 the estimates determine the productivity of labor and relative bargaining power of capital and labor it turns out that codetermination does not affect productivity but leads to a significant increase in workers bargaining power and the distribution of rents

strategic transparency and informed trading will capital market integration force convergence of corporate governance dominant investors can influence the publicly available information about firms by affecting the cost of information collection under strategic competition transparency results in higher variability of profits and output thus lenders prefer less transparency since this protects firms when in a weak competitive position while equity holders prefer more market interaction creates strategic complementarity in gathering information on competing firms thus entry by transparent competitors will improve price informativeness moreover as the return to information gathering increases with liquidity increasing global trading may undermine the ability of bank control to keep firms opaque

political intervention in debt contracts this paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model of an agricultural economy in which poor farmers borrow from rich farmers because output is stochastic we allow for idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks there may be default ex post we compare equilibria with and without political intervention intervention takes the form of a moratorium and is decided by voting when bad economic shocks are highly likely state contingent debt moratoria always improve ex post efficiency and may also improve ex ante efficiency moreover the threat of moratoria enhances efficiency when adverse macro shocks are unlikely state contingent moratoria always improve ex ante welfare by completing incomplete debt contracts

finance firm size and growth the authors examine whether financial development boosts the growth of small firms more than large firms and hence provides information on the mechanisms through which financial development fosters aggregate economic growth they define an industry s technological firm size as the firm size implied by industrial specific production technologies including capital intensities and scale economies using cross industry cross country data the results indicate that financial development exerts a disproportionately large effect on the growth of industries that are technologically more dependent on small firms this suggests that financial development accelerates economic growth by removing growth constraints on small firms and also implies that financial development has sectoral as well as aggregate growth ramifications

employment protection and takeovers labor restructuring is a key driver of takeovers and the associated synergy gains worldwide in a difference in differences research design we show that major increases in employment protection reduce takeover activity by 14 27 and the combined firm gains synergies by over half consistent with the labor channel behind these effects deals with greater potential for workforce restructuring show a greater reduction in volume number and synergies the reforms do impede layoffs and the associated wage costs match the magnitude of synergy losses offer prices are not fully adjusted with both bidders and targets exhibiting lower returns following the reforms

stock market development and cross country differences in relative prices abstract we document a positive correlation between stock market capitalization and price levels wages within the group of countries with poorly developed stock markets and a negative correlation between these two variables within the group of countries with more developed stock markets this paper argues that there is a causal relationship behind these correlations stock markets initially stimulate growth pushing the demand for nontradables and increasing prices and wages stock markets also promote a shift toward more capital intensive technologies in the tradable sector increasing the migration of workers to services and eventually putting downward pressure on wages and prices

public education and pensions in democracy a political economy theory a dynamic political economy theory of scal policy is presented to explain the simultaneous existence of public education and pensions in modern democracies the driving force of the model is the intergenerational conict over the allocation of the public budget successive generations of voters choose scal policies through repeated elections the political power of elderly voters creates the motive for adults to support public investment in the human capital of future generations since it expands future pension possibilities we characterize the markov perfect equilibrium of the voting game in a small open economy the equilibrium reproduces salient features of intergenerational

banking on politics this paper presents new data from 150 countries showing that former cabinet members central bank governors and financial regulators are many orders of magnitude more likely than other citizens to become board members of banks countries where the politician banker phenomenon is more prevalent have higher corruption and more powerful yet less accountable governments but not better functioning financial systems regulation becomes more pro banker where this happens more often furthermore a higher fraction of the rents that are created accrue to bankers former politicians are not more likely to be directors when their side is in power and banks are more profitable without being more leveraged rather than supporting a public interest view the evidence is consistent with a capture type private interest story where in exchange for a non executive position at a bank in the future politicians provide for beneficial regulation

aid policies and growth the authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid economic policies and growth of per capita gdp in panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four year periods 1970 93 they find that the policies that have a great effect on growth are those related to fiscal surplus inflation and trade openness they construct an index for those three policies and have that index interact with foreign aid they have instruments for both aid and aid interacting with policies they find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies in the presence of poor policies aid has no positive effect on growth this result is robust in a variety of specifications which include or exclude middle income countries include or exclude outliers and treat policies as exogenous or endogenous they examine the determinants of policy and find no evidence that aid has systematically affected policies either for good or for ill they estimate an aid allocation equation and show that any tendency for aid to reward good policies has been overwhelmed by donors pursuit of their own strategic interests in a counterfactual they reallocate aid reduce the role of donor interests and increasing the importance of policy such a reallocation would have a large positive effect on developing countries growth rates

environmental impacts of china s wto accession abstract china s accession to the wto in 2001 completed the country s entry into the global economy we investigate environmental implications of wto accession there are several hypotheses in this area the scale hypothesis says that production is scaled up and in turn pollution increases the technique hypothesis says that production methods become cleaner and pollution decreases the composition hypothesis says that composition of industries changes and pollution reflects the new composition we analyse the relative strength of the hypotheses by means of an environmental cge model and in the case of air pollution find support for a composition effect in favour of clean industries thanks to the composition effect emissions to air of greenhouse gases fall emissions of particles and so2 also fall but emissions of nox and voc rise since particle and so2 emissions fall we estimate that public health improves

tax rates and tax evasion evidence from missing imports in china tax evasion by its very nature is difficult to observe we quantify the effects of tax rates on tax evasion by examining the relationship in china between the tariff schedule and the evasion gap which we define as the difference between hong kong s reported exports to china at the product level and china s reported imports from hong kong our results imply that a one percentage point increase in the tax rate is associated with a 3 percent increase in evasion furthermore the evasion gap is negatively correlated with tax rates on closely related products suggesting that evasion takes place partly through misclassification of imports from higher taxed categories to lower taxed ones in addition to underreporting the value of imports

do lenders favor politically connected firms rent provision in an emerging financial market corruption by the politically connected is often blamed for economic ills particularly in less developed economies using a loan level data set of more than 90 000 rms that represents the universe of corporate lending in pakistan between 1996 and 2002 we investigate rents to politically connected rms in banking classifying a rm as political if its director participates in an election we examine the extent nature and economic costs of political rent provision we nd that political rms borrow 45 percent more and have 50 percent higher default rates such preferential treatment occurs exclusively in government banks private banks provide no

a general equilibrium analysis of personal bankruptcy law we analyze an economy where principals lenders asset owners franchisors and agents borrowers tenants franchisees match and contract subject to moral hazard bankruptcy law defines the limited liability constraint in these contracts we provide a walrasian characterization of stable allocations and use it to analyze the distributional impact of changing bankruptcy law we show i weakening liability law leads to a redistribution of debt from poor to rich agents ii it makes rich agents better o and poor agents and principals worse o iii exemption limits pareto dominate other bankruptcy laws if project size is fixed and iv means testing as used in the new us bankruptcy law which is ex post pro poor in intent makes the poor worse o ex ante

sovereign debt auctions uniform or discriminatory abstract many financial assets especially government bonds are issued by an auction an important feature of the design is the auction pricing mechanism uniform versus discriminatory theoretical papers do not provide a definite answer regarding the dominance of one type of auction over the other we investigate the revealed preferences of the issuers by surveying the sovereign issuers that conduct auctions we find that the majority of the issuers countries in our sample use a discriminatory auction mechanism for issuing government debt we use a multinomial logit procedure and discriminatory analysis to investigate the mechanism choice it was interesting to find that market oriented economies and those that practice common law tend to use a uniform method while economies who are less market oriented and practice civil law tend to use discriminatory price auctions

a theory of misgovernance this paper tries to explain why government bureaucracies are often associated with red tape corruption and lack of incentives the paper identifies two specific ingredients that together can provide an explanation the fact that governments often act precisely in situations where markets fail and the presence of agency problems within the government we show that these problems are exacerbated at low levels of development and in bureaucracies dealing with poor people we also argue that we need to posit the existence of a welfare oriented constituency within the government in order to explain red tape and corruption

trade and financial reform in china impacts on the world economy despite the setbacks from the recent asian currency crisis the ascendancy of asia as an economic centre of world economic activity is likely to continue into the 21st century a key issue that will shape the role of asia and indeed the shape of the world economy in the 21st century is the economic development of china to date china has successfully weathered the currency storm in asia and continues on a program of economic reform if anything the problems of japan and korea provide powerful lessons for other countries undergoing rapid economic growth and structural change these lessons include the importance of a well developed financial sector with lending and investment decisions based on market signals rather than government directives whether china can further integrate smoothly into global markets and sustain the fast growth of the last few decades will be a crucial development in the world economy in this paper we explore the impacts of continued chinese economic reform with a focus on the role of international financial flows both in the adjustment within china as well as in the transmission of chinese reforms to the rest of the world this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

can foreign stock investors influence policymaking foreign portfolio stock investors fpsis often attach political criteria to their investment choices sometimes in the hope of pressuring policymakers in boycotted markets to adjust their policies

local capture evidence from a central government transfer program in uganda according to official statistics 20 percent of uganda s total public expenditure was spent on education in the mid 1990s most of it on primary education one of the large public programs was a capitation grant to cover schools nonwage expenditures using panel data from a unique survey of primary schools we assess the extent to which the grant actually reached the intended end user schools the survey data reveal that during 1991 1995 the schools on average received only 13 percent of the grants most schools received nothing the bulk of the school grant was captured by local officials and politicians the data also reveal considerable variation in grants received across schools suggesting that rather than being passive recipients of flows from the government schools use their bargaining power to secure greater shares of funding we find that schools in better off communities managed to claim a higher share of their entitlements as a result actual education spending in contrast to budget allocations is regressive similar surveys in other african countries confirm that uganda is not a special case

semiparametric estimation of the optimal reserve price in first price auctions the optimal reserve price in the independent private value paradigm is generally expressed as a functional of the latent distribution of private signals which is by nature unobserved this feature has limited the implementation of the optimal reserve price in practice in this article we consider first price auctions within the general affiliated private values paradigm we show that the seller s expected profit can be written as a functional of the observed bid distribution we propose a semiparametric extremum estimator for estimating consistently the optimal reserve price from observed bids as an illustration we consider the outer continental shelf ocs wildcat auctions

auctions markets and spectrum ownership comment on moreton and spiller abstract in their empirical study of the personal communications service auctions patrick s moreton and pablo t spiller have shown that the bidder behavior is consistent with most economists conceptions of competitive markets moreton and spiller also presented evidence that firms competing in these auctions were able to aggregate licenses thus offering some vindication for those economic theorists who championed simultaneous multiple round auctions on these issues their study brings new data to bear on important questions about auction design and public policy moreton and spiller however do not examine the costs of the secondary market in reallocating license blocks and its relationship to the exposure problem develop a specific model of government regulation or consider the effects of block size on bidding behavior these omissions limit the inferences and conclusions they claim for their study

do exporters gain from vers previous literature has concentrated on the rent transfer accruing to exporting countries when a voluntary export restraint ver is binding this paper studies the efficiency and distributional effects arising when vers force factors out of industries in which they are most productive a theoretical model of the industry under the ver is developed to establish qualitative conditions under which a ver will result in spillovers of exports to unrestricted markets industry contraction and loss in national welfare key parameters of demand and supply are estimated for leather footwear exports from taiwan subject to the u s orderly marketing agreement and their implications explored in a calibrated simulation exercise the results make a strong indictment of vers for most plausible parameter values vers distort exports reduce industry size and cause overall economic losses especially if the affected industry is large

on the political origin of corporate governance species although economies business practices and living standards have converged since wwii corporate structures continue to differ among the advanced economies of the world looking at the diversity of corporate structures of large sized firms around the world and over time would fascinate charles darwin this work develops a critical review of the literature on political determinants of corporate governance through the darwinian theory including some lamarckian aspects as darwin in his work on the origin of species explicates the diversity of species of tortoises finches and iguanas of the galapagos islands so darwinism may contribute in understanding the origin and the persistence of corporate diversity in particular this article takes into account politics driven variations their inheritances and the subsequent selection of advantageous corporate attributes

the role of law in economic growth a literature review abstract compared with other explanatory variables such as capital accumulation technological innovations geographical endowments economic openness and cultural factors institutions especially legal institutions have been regarded as a crucial condition for economic growth in recent years the importance of legal rules is systematically revealed by a series of cross country econometric studies conducted by la porta et al who claim that legal origins are central to understanding the divergence in living standards across the regions and countries of the world and compared with civil law countries especially those countries with french civil law tradition common law countries have enjoyed superior economic outcomes the controversies set off by la porta et al s proposition indicate that there are a number of questions that are difficult to explain by la porta et al s theory and hence call for more work on comparative analysis of different legal families before a consensus can be reached

neither a borrower nor a lender be an economic analysis of interest restrictions and usury laws interest rate restrictions are pervasive and important regulations this article suggests that these restrictions served in part as a primitive means of social insurance lowering the rate of interest effectively transfers income to states of the world where individuals have a high marginal utility of income and are borrowers from states of the world where individuals have a low marginal utility of income and are lenders the model predicts that interest rate restrictions will be tighter when income inequality is high and impermanent and when growth rates are low furthermore loan supply must be somewhat inelastic data from u s states support a connection between inequality income shocks and tighter usury laws usury laws were also stricter in older more stable communities the history of usury laws suggests that this social insurance mechanism is one reason usury laws exist and persist but this history also suggests that usury laws have played many roles across time and that no one theory can po

labor protection and leverage this paper exploits inter temporal variations in employment protection across countries and finds that rigidities in labor markets are an important determinant of firms capital structure decisions over the 1985 2007 period we find that reforms increasing employment protection are associated with a 187 basis point reduction in leverage we interpret this finding to suggest that employment protection increases operating leverage crowding out financial leverage this result is robust across measures of employment protection and leverage and does not appear to be due to pre treatment differences between treated and control firms omitted variables unobserved changes in regional economic conditions and reverse causality heterogeneous treatment effects are consistent with our economic intuition we find that the negative effect is more pronounced in firms that are subject to frequent hiring and firing

investigating capitalism aversion capitalism aversion there are two non mutually exclusive theories of individual variations in pro capitalism opinions the first theory views pro capitalism opinions as self serving individuals are opposed to market forces when they threaten their economic rents the second theory views differences in such opinions as reflecting genuine disagreement on the efficiency of various economic systems using individual data we investigate the validity of both theories focusing on attitudes toward private ownership private profit and competition we find evidence that the first theory explains some of the variations in attitudes however consistent with the second theory we also find evidence of individual learning about the comparative virtues of economic systems the learning is slow home biased and path dependent long run cultural and historical determinants of pro market attitudes such as religion and legal origins explain more than 40 of the cross country variations in capitalism aversion last we provide tentative evidence that at the country level pro market opinions affect the nature of economic institutions our results suggest that the feasibility of economic reform does not depend solely on its impact on the distribution of rents ideological a prioris are likely to be important as well

business groups and the natural state abstract recent revisionist accounts of corporate governance in both business history and finance are challenging the tradition narrative associated with berle and means 1932 and chandler 1977 in which the american model of diffuse ownership and coherent diversification is both an inevitable outcome of economic development and perhaps a normative standard for the world to follow this essay is an attempt to rethink that narrative in light of the continued significance of the pyramidal business group as a governance structure around the world i argue that business groups arise in response both to inadequacies in arm s length markets and to the needs of what north et al 2009 call the natural state in this view the quality of markets and the demands of the state are tightly interconnected phenomena such a perspective explains the emergence of business groups in developing countries as well as their persistence even in wealthy and sophisticated polities apart from the u s and the u k in the end moreover i endorse the view that the much discussed and oft misunderstood exceptionalism of the u s in corporate governance arises not only from the sophistication of american markets but also importantly from government policies toward corporate taxation and securities regulation policies that arose from the unique public choice problem posed by the differential effect on the u s of the collapse of globalization during the middle years of the twentieth century

the political economy of the us mortgage default crisis we examine the effects of constituents special interests and ideology on congressional voting on two of the most significant pieces of legislation in us economic history representatives whose constituents experience a sharp increase in mortgage defaults are more likely to support the foreclosure prevention act especially in competitive districts interestingly representatives are more sensitive to defaults of their own party constituents special interests in the form ofhigher campaign contributions from the financial industry increase the likelihood of supporting the emergency economic stabilization act however ideologically conservative representatives are less responsive to both constituent and special interests jel d72 g21 g28

bidding behaviour in ocs drainage auctions theory and evidence empirical economists frequently criticize game theoretic models of markets on the grounds that they fail to generate empirically testable hypotheses the complaint is that prices and quantities or entry decisions are explained using factors that are not observable to the econometrician such as private valuations and beliefs of agents the corollary to this argument is that the only way to proceed empirically is through experiments however this approach suffers from the problem that the experience of the subjects may be too limited and the compensation too small for them to perform the requisite optimizing calculations the objective of this paper is to discuss the above criticism of gametheoretic models in the context of our work on markets of offshore oil and gas leases in this case study one group of buyers is better informed about the unknown value of the leaae being sold that another group and the two groups can be identified game theoretic models of markets with informational asymmetries generate restrictions on the relative behaviour and performance of the two groups of buyers and some of these restrictions are empirically testable we examine them using bid and profit data more generally the work serves to illustrate a basic point about testing models of

random reservation prices and bidding behavior in ocs drainage auctions r e c e n t surveys of the economic literature on auctions1 indicate that there has been a great deal of theoretical work on the properties of equilibrium behavior in auctions and on the design of auctions to maximize the seller s revenues in the presence of optimizing bidders however there has been very little empirical work using field data that attempts to test various behavioral theories or indeed to see whether they are of any practical interest there has been some good experimental work2 but the relatively small stakes involved in these experimental games and the relative inexperience of the subjects given the potential complexity of equilibrium strategies leave a useful role for the careful study of a detailed field data set this article analyzes such a data set the first price sealed bid auctions of drainage and development leases on federal land in

does trade liberalization harm the environment a new test recent events such as the nafta and the completion of the uruguay round have raised concern over the impact of trade liberalization on the environment in particular it is believed that less stringent environmental standards in developing countries will give them a comparative advantage in pollutionintensive goods using single equation models existing empirical studies have found either no relationship between environment and trade flows or a positive relationship between trade liberalization and the environment this paper develops a simultaneous equations model to estimate this relationship directly incorporating the effects of openness on growth of income and of income growth on environmental damage a two good trade model with endogenous factor supply is estimated using pooled provincial data on chinese water pollution from 1987 1995 estimation of this model reveals that trade liberalization directly aggravates environmental damage via its influence on the terms of trade but indirectly mitigates it via its effect on income growth simulations suggest that trade reform during the period may have had a net beneficial impact on emissions growth

culture openness and finance abstract differences in culture proxied by differences in religion and language cannot be ignored when examining why investor protection differs across countries we show that a country s principal religion predicts the cross sectional variation in creditor rights better than a country s natural openness to international trade its language its income per capita or the origin of its legal system catholic countries protect the rights of creditors less well than protestant countries a country s natural openness to international trade mitigates the influence of religion on creditor rights culture proxies are also helpful in understanding how investor rights are enforced across countries

sulfur dioxide control in china policy evolution during the 10th and 11th five year plans and lessons for the future china s central government established national goals to reduce sulfur dioxide so2 emissions by 10 in both the 10th and 11th five year plan periods 2001 2005 and 2006 2010 respectively but the early policies were unsuccessful at reducing emissions emissions increased 28 during the 10th five year plan after adapting a number of policies and introducing new instruments during the 11th five year plan so2 emissions declined by 14 we examine the evolution of these policies their interplay with technical and institutional factors and capture lessons from the 11th five year plan to guide future pollution control programs we find that several factors contributed to achievement of the 11th five year plan so2 reduction goal 1 instrument choice 2 political accountability 3 emission verification 4 political support 5 streamlined targets and 6 political and financial incentives the approach integrated multiple policy instruments market based command and control and administrative instruments specific to the chinese context the evolution of so2 reduction policies and programs has implications for further so2 reductions from power plants and other sources as well as control of other atmospheric pollutants such as nitrogen oxides nox and carbon dioxide co2 in china

household inequality entrepreneurial dynamism and corporate financing economic theories provide conflicting hypotheses on how wealth inequality affects entrepreneurial dynamism to empirically investigate its impact we construct local measures of household wealth inequality based on financial rents home equity and 1880 farmland we identify its effects on entrepreneurship by instrumenting it with land distribution under the 1862 homestead act or us states removal of death taxes wealth inequality decreases firm entry and exit and the proportion of high tech businesses across metropolitan statistical areas there is also less redistribution into public goods supportive of entrepreneurship such as schooling and the judiciary income per capita consequently grows more slowly

saving the banks the political economy of bailouts how much leeway did governments have in designing bank bailouts and deciding on the height of intervention during the 2007 2009 financial crisis by analyzing the variety of bailouts in europe and north america we will show that the strategies governments use to cope with the instability of financial markets does not depend on economic conditions alone rather they take root in the institutional and political setting of each country and vary in particular according to the different types of business government relations banks were able to entertain with public decision makers still crony capitalism accounts overstate the role of bank lobbying with four case studies of the irish danish british and french bank bailout we show that countries with close one on one relationships between policy makers and bank management tended to develop unbalanced bailout packages while countries where banks negotiated collectively developed solutions with a greater burden sharing from private institutions

politicians and banks political influences on government owned banks in emerging markets abstract government ownership of banks is very common in countries other than the united states this paper provides cross country bank level empirical evidence about political influences on these banks it shows that government owned banks increase their lending in election years relative to private banks this effect is robust to controlling for country specific macroeconomic and institutional factors as well as bank specific factors the increase in lending is about 11 of a government owned bank s total loan portfolio or about 0 5 of the median country s gdp per election per government owned bank

accounting the effects of wto accession on trade embodied emissions evidence from china abstract the indicators of the emissions embodied in exports the balance of emissions embodied in trade and the net emissions contributed by trade are used to measure the trade embodied environmental impacts from various angles a counterfactual scenario of without wto accession is formed as the comparative baseline with the support of a dynamic computable general equilibrium model then the difference between factual and counterfactual scenarios is worked out to reflect the impact of china s wto accession on emissions embodied in trade according to the present study wto accession produced a measureable increment of the emissions embodied in exports through exports expansion which slightly intensified environmental stress in china if considering the difference in emissions embodied in exports and imports then the difference of the balance of emissions embodied in trade between factual and counterfactual scenarios indicate that china has suffered more local emissions than its trade partners after its wto accession if considering the offset effect of imports embodied emissions to domestic emissions then the difference of the net emissions contributed by trade between factual and counterfactual scenarios indicate that wto accession had a trivial effect on aggregating trade embodied emissions the study results suggest that china should continue pushing for trade liberalization and at the same time reduce the adverse effects on the environment by reducing its total emissions intensity of domestic production and optimizing trade structure

does competition kill corruption corrupt agents officials or gangsters exact money from firms corruption affects the number of firms in a free entry equilibrium the degree of deep competition in the economy increases with lower overhead costs relative to profits and with a tendency toward similar cost structures increases in competition may not lower corruption the model explains why a rational corrupt agent may extinguish the source of his bribe income by causing a firm to exit assessing the welfare effect of corruption is complicated by the fact that exit caused by corruption does not necessarily reduce social welfare

law and finance at the origin what are the key determinants of financial development and growth a large literature debates the relative importance of countries legal and political environment in this paper i present evidence from ancient rome where an early form of shareholder company the societas publicanorum developed i show that the societas publicano rum flourished in a legally underdeveloped but politically supportive environment roman republic and disappeared when roman law reached its height of legal sophistication but the political environment grew less supportive roman empire in the roman case legal development appears to have mattered little as long as the law as practiced was flexible and adapted to economic needs the law as practiced in turn reflected prevalent political interests after discussing parallels in more recent history i provide a brief overview of the literature on law and finance and on politics and finance the historical evidence suggests that legal systems may be less of a technological constraint for growth than previously thought at least at the origin