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

regulatory reform and productivity growth in the uk s public utilities the reforms in the regulation of the uk nationalised industries over the last decade are examined and the extent to which they have been successful in achieving one of their declared aims that of increasing the efficiency of the enterprises operations is considered to achieve this the productivity performance of nine of the largest enterprises over the last twenty years was analysed the results show that the rate of productivity growth has been significantly higher during the 1980s compared with the preceeding decade it is concluded that a large part of the observed upturn in productivity is a result of changes in efficiency

hospital ownership and performance this study compares the performance of three ownership forms of hospitals for profit private nonprofit and public further classified according to whether or not the hospital is run by a hospital chain data come from a 1979 national survey of u s hospitals the authors find that hospital cost is quite similar among alternative ownership forms as is profitability the results do not provide much empirical support for standard property rights theory several reasons are suggested why this may be so

measuring hospital performance a non parametric approach abstract in this paper a technique for assessing the relative performance of firms is introduced and applied to a sample of hospitals in california hospitals are compared on the basis of their relative technical efficiency the reference technology is constructed from observed outputs and inputs including physicians using programming techniques and efficiency is assessed relative to the frontier of the technology using measures similar to those suggested by farrell the technique used here imposes no prespecified functional form allows for multiple outputs and inputs allowing for differences in case mix and yields information on the productive performance of individual hospitals this technique can also be used to determine whether different types of hospitals use different technologies our results although illustrative rather than definitive suggest that ownership affects efficiency as measured here public and nfp hospitals have different best practice frontiers and public hospitals appear to use relatively fewer resources these results could reflect differences in quality of care by ownership

the technical efficiency of vacuum pan sugar industry of india an application of a stochastic frontier production function using panel data abstract a stochastic production frontier method is used to examine technical efficiency among indian vacuum pan sugar factories over a five year period most factories are close to indian best practice in terms of technical efficiency smaller firms and firms with access to sweeter cane are likely to be more efficient than other firms while publicly owned firms are less efficient there are transitory positive effects of a long crushing season on technical efficiency

privatization and employment a study of the jute industry in bangladesh this paper analyzes the effect of privatization upon employment in the bangladeshi jute textile industry privatization was partia and the selection of mills which were privatized was not based on current economic performance this provides us with a panel data set which permits reliable estimates of the effects of ownership on employment and output privatization has reduced employment of all categories of permanent workers significantly but the extent of employment reduction has been substantially greater among clerical workers and managers as compared to manual workers this implies that public sector excess employment benefited white collar workers who were both better off and better educated and suggests that public sector behaviour was clientelist rather than welfarist

a wage structure theory of inflation industrial conflicts and trade unions the wage structure theory in this paper has three levels i the micro level considers the relative wage income r between two groups one r termed r is a conflict equilibrium which also gives the minimum number of conflicts the deviation of r from r is the labormarket tension ii these concepts are shown to generalize to the macro level leading to a macro conflict relation and a conflict augmented phillips curve iii institutions are introduced into the theory and it is shown how a central trade union reduces the number of conflicts by internalizing parts of the wage structure

what does a small corporate effect mean a variance components simulation of corporate and business effects in a widely cited paper rumelt 1991 presents estimates of the relative influence of corporate business unit and other influences on business unit profitability and finds the corporation explains almost none of the variability in business unit profitability using a monte carlo simulation we examine the relation of variance component magnitudes to other indicators of the importance of a particular effect our results demonstrate that variance components can be an extremely nonlinear indicator of importance we also question whether rumelt s corporate effect represents the possible contributions of corporate strategy to business unit performance this addresses a puzzle raised by rumelt 1991 concerning the small effect of corporations in explaining performance and suggests that rumelt s findings should not be seen as demonstrating the insignificance of corporate strategy 1997 john wiley sons ltd

does ownership always matter abstract the objective of this paper is to explain and illustrate the complex relationship between ownership arrangements and enterprise performance it is commonly argued that efficiency will be lower in the public sector than the private because enterprise objectives deviate from maximisation of profits and because monitoring arrangements are inadequate due to the absence of capital market discipline we argue that public ownership does make the owner manager relationship more complicated because the chain of principals and agents is expanded objectives are politically determined and these are conveyed by a policy making administrative structure to management but the relative efficiency of public as against private ownership actually depends on the efficacy of capital market monitoring on the political and constitutional system on the information and sanctions available to policy makers and on the nature of the management market variation in these factors can help to explain the different natures and roles of the public sector between countries

the financial and operating performance of newly privatized firms an international empirical analysis this study compares the pre and postprivatization financial and operating performance of 61 companies from 18 countries and 32 industries that experience full or partial privatization through public share offerings during the period 1961 to 1990 our results document strong performance improvements achieved surprisingly without sacrificing employment security specifically after being privatized firms increase real sales become more profitable increase their capital investment spending improve their operating efficiency and increase their work forces furthermore these companies significantly lower their debt levels and increase dividend payout finally we document significant changes in the size and composition of corporate boards of directors after privatization the last fifteen years have witnessed a significant global shift away from state socialism towards entrepreneurial capitalism one of the most important and visible aspects of this trend has been the enthusiasm with which governments of all political persuasions have sold their state owned enterprises soes to private investors in hopes that the generally unsatisfactory economic performance of these firms can be improved by the discipline of private ownership this denationalization process given its current title of privatization by the conservative government of margaret thatcher in

productive efficiency of public enterprises a macroeconomic analysis based on cross section estimation of a neoclassical production function over the past decade the role of public enterprise in the economic development process has been a subject of active debate using cross section estimates of a neoclassical production function incorporating vakue addition of the parasatal sector as a variable supplementary to the factors and capital it is shown onthe basis of macroeconomic data for the periods 1970 81and 1970 85 that hypothesis derived fromm the propely rights bureaucracy and x inefficiency cannot be rejected

lessons from privatization in britain abstract the process of privatizing most of britain s major public enterprises yields interesting conclusions on the three related issues 1 a problem of policy assignment arose in the use of privatization and liberalization to achieve both allocative and productive efficiency 2 evidence on the behavior of the public enterprises is consistent with an organizational model of the relevant principal agent relationships predicting certain types of slack absorption 3 the privatization process entailed policy choices that bear on their future productive efficiency effectiveness of monitoring by the market for corporate control and allocative efficiency provision for regulation

green expectations current effects of anticipated carbon pricing i report evidence that an anticipated strengthening of environmental policy increased emissions i find that the breakdown of the u s senate s 2010 climate effort generated positive excess returns

interactions between hospital admissions cost per day and average length of stay hospital cost per day cost annual admissions per capita admit and average length of stay alos are important health policy variables because each variable provides important information about hospital industry performance this study uses country level data to explore the empirical relationships between cost admit and alosin three steps ols estimation application of the wu hausman endogeneity test and re estimation with two stage least squares the major results are i admitand alosexert exogenous influences on costand ii admitand alosare endogenously related with possible one way casuality from admitto alos

ownership versus competition efficiency in public enterprise certainly the introduction of product market competition into potentially competitive or at least contestable markets can improve performance to take just one example morrison and whinston 1986 1986 estimate that even in the imperfectly contestable u s airline industry the annual u s welfare gains from deregulation have been around 6 billion

efficiency differences between private and state owned enterprises in the international petroleum industry technical managerial scale and allocative efficiency differences between private and state owned firms in the international petroleum industry are estimated the estimation of aigner chu deterministic frontiers maximum likelihood stochastic frontiers and maximum likelihood gamma frontiers make this analysis the most complete and sophisticated testing of property rights theory available the empirical findings suggestceteris paribus that state firms could satisfy the demand for their output with something less than half of their current resource inputs simply by being converted to private for profit enterprizes

privatization in theory and practice privatization george yarrow this paper examines the theoretical and empirical case for private versus public ownership privatization usually leads managers to place greater emphasis on the pursuit of profits however whether this is beneficial to society depends on the trade off between possible market failures due to a lack of competition and deficiencies in government control of public firms the competitive and regulatory environment is more important than the question of ownership per se in competitive markets there is a presumption in favour of private ownership where there is a natural monopoly vigorous regulatory action is required the evidence suggests that privatization has led to improved performance by firms such as the national freight corporation and cable and wireless which operate in a relatively competitive environment the benefits are less clear in the case of firms like bp britoil and british aerospace however the most worrying case is that of british telecom and the projected privatization of british gas where little thought has been given to limiting the abuse of monopoly power rather the regulatory environment has been tailored to the needs of the existing management and to ensuring a successful share flotation privatization is also advanced as a weapon for reducing trade union power encouraging wider share ownership redistributing wealth and improving the public finances however there are other policy instruments better suited to achieving these objectives the existing privatization programme has not led to a marked widening of share ownership and has resulted in windfall gains to a small group of investors at the expense of taxpayers in general

economic perspectives on privatization despite being one of the most fundamental issues in political economy the question of the appropriate boundary between public and private enterprise received relatively little attention in mainstream economic analysis until quite recently in the 1980s however programs of ownership reform were started in many developed and developing countries dramatic though some of these policies have been they are likely to be overshadowed in the 1990s by even greater privatization in the reforming socialist economies the opening sections of this paper are organized around three broad and interrelated questions how does ownership matter for the efficiency of enterprise performance what is the role for privatization in financing public debts and deficits what are the distributional and political implications of privatization finally we examine privatization in practice in three countries britain chile and poland

public versus private water delivery a hedonic cost approach automotive news 1967 almanac detroit slocum publishing co 1967 bucklin louis p competition and evolution in the distributive trades englewood cliffs new jersey prentice hall 1972 federal trade commission annual line of business report 1974 washington ftc 1981a processed annual line of business report 1975 washington ftc 1981b processed guth louis a robert a schwartz and david k whitcomb the use of buyer concentration ratios in tests of oligopoly models this review 58 nov 1976 488 491 jeifreys james b the distribution of consumer goods new york cambridge university press 1950 lilly digest indianapolis ely lilly and co 1976 martin stephen advertising concentration and profitability the simultaneity problem belljournal 10 autumn 1979 639 647 national petroleum news fact book 1976 new york mcgraw hill 1976 ncr expenses in retail business dayton ohio ncr undated but about 1966 and about 1976 strickland allyn d and leonard w weiss advertising concentration and price cost margins journal of political economy 84 oct 1976 1109 1123 u s department of commerce bureau of economic analysis the detailed input output structure of the u s economy 1972 volume 1 the use and make of commodities by industries washington d c government printing office 1979 u s treasury department internal revenue service statistics of income source book 1972 processed ward t s the distribution of consumer goods structure and performance new york cambridge university press 1973 weiss leonard w the geographic size of markets in manufacturing this review 54 aug 1972 245 257 case studies in american industry new york john wiley and sons 1980

a theory of privatisation public enterprises around the world have proved to be highly inefficient primarily because they pursue strategies such as excess employment that satisfy the political objectives of politicians who control them privatization of public enterprises can raise the cost to politicians of influencing them since subsidies to private firms necessary to force them to remain inefficient are politically harder to sustain than wasted profits of the state firms in this way privatization leads to efficient restructuring of firms moreover privatization is more effective when combined with a tight monetary policy and when the new owners of firms are profit maximizing investors rather than their employees or even managers copyright 1996 by royal economic society

public versus private economic activity a new look at school bus transportation thomas borcherding 1977 in commenting on the public versus private literature offered the generalization that removal of an activity from the private to the public sector will double its unit costs of production the results of this paper obviously are not consistent with borcherding s rule of two generalization at the same time however the 12 cost per mile differential in favor of private ownership indicated by the results for the overall sample is not a trivial sum in absolute terms the cost per mile differences in favor of private buses contained in the five trip groups are not trivial either nor is the direct evidence from the 82 joint systems in attempting to assess the results much depends on the perspective against which they are judged

comment on m bruno theoretical developments in the light of macroeconomic policy and empirical research the paper by michael bruno is a very interesting and thought provoking survey of the key new likely desirable developments in macroeconomics as seen by a distinguished economist and policymaker i like and agree with most of bruno s arguments and assessments so all i will do is add three further reflections on points in his paper this is a comment in a volume dealing with no less than the development of macroeconomics therefore i have chosen to discuss grand subjects where all i can do is outline the problems and leave the answers to the reader let me begin with bruno s comments on the re emergence of the pricewage spiral in economic theory the importance of the cola the importance of external price rises etc broadly speaking these remarks deal with the importance of institutions for the dynamics of prices and wages i think these remarks are part of a complex something we all should have faced long ago maybe we academic economists have been led astray by analytical convenience into almost universal acceptance of a belief that we should never have accepted without solid empirical support even if it

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

evolution economic competence and the market for corporate control abstract to assess the merits of the market for corporate control this paper examines two processes which standard analysis does not study the allocation of economic competence and the evolution of organizational structures economic competence is seen to be an unusual scarce resource embodied in the very ways in which individuals and organizations take economic decisions which guides the allocation of all scarce resources including itself its efficient allocation is shown to require an evolutionary trial and error process where the market for corporate control plays a crucial role

are perceptions of inflation rational some evidence for sweden this survey paper argues that walrasian markets and monetary exchan ge are alternative not complementary arrangements for coordinating economic activity that if one realizes this many informational anomalies and price rigidities that appear irrational in a walrasia n context can be understood as the outcome of maximizing behavior in a monetary economy and that the precautionary approach to modelin g the demand for money takes on a particular importance in this way of looking at things empirical evidence on the demand for money is cite d in support of this point of view which tends to reinstate the quantity of money as an important economic variable in contrast to the new classical vision of the economy whi ch downgrades money s importance this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

productivity growth and firm ownership an analytical and empirical investigation we focus on the effect of state versus private ownership on the rates of firm specific productivity growth and cost decline by developing a model of endogenous firm specific productivity growth and testing its implications against panel data on 23 international airlines of varying levels of state ownership over the period 1973 83 our model and empirical results show that state ownership can lower the long run annual rate of productivity growth or cost decline but not necessarily their levels in the short run observed level differences in productive efficiency across private and state owned firms may thus be a function of the age distribution of the firms being compared these results appear to be independent of whether the firms operate under apparently more or less competitive or regulated markets and whether they differ in production scales the analysis offers new insights concerning the recent trend toward privatizing state owned enterprises that has been observed in many countries

from state to private ownership issues from strategic industries abstract this paper investigates the effects of privatization for a panel of 189 firms from strategic industries headquartered in 39 countries and privatized between 1984 and 2002 strategic firms can hardly be compared to manufacturing or competitive industries as they are generally under state monopoly and involve specific issues such as regulation political and institutional constraints we examine the change in ownership and postprivatization means of control by the government and assess whether positive changes in performance obtain in these particular industries that include firms from the financial mining steel telecommunications transportation utilities and oil sectors we document that governments continue to exert influence on former state owned firms after three years by retaining golden shares and or appointing politicians to key positions in the firm our multivariate results reveal a negative effect of state ownership on profitability and operating efficiency which the presence of a sound institutional and political environment moderates

the relative efficiency of public and private firms in a regulated environment the case of u s electric utilities abstract the relative efficiency of privately owned and publicly owned electric utilities is investigated using theoretical and econometric models that allow for the effects of both ownership type and regulation the estimation results indicate that the two types of firms are equally cost inefficient in the united states the average effect of inefficiency is to increase the cost of production by 2 4 percent holding output constant inefficiency increases the average quantities demanded of capital and labor and decreases the average quantity demanded of fuel