Capital Market Imperfections, Uncertainty and Corporate Investment in the Czech Republic

In this study we examine private investment behavior of firms in the Czech Republic. A special feature of the study is that the investment equations include variables which may give some more insights into the role of capital market imperfections as well as the effect of uncertainty. Our results find support for the accelerator model. We find evidence for cash-flow effects on Czech corporate investment. It is striking that indeed smaller longer privatized firms face relatively less cash flow restrictions. Financial structure doesn't matter as much as we expected. We find that smaller firms react positively to more uncertainty.     

Globalization as Boundary‐Blurring: International and Local Law Firms in China's Corporate Law Market

The worldwide expansion of international law firms has generated regulatory battles and workplace conflicts in advanced market economies as well as developing countries. This article uses the case of China to explore the changing global–local relationship in the globalization of the legal profession and to understand the role of the government in constituting the corporate law market. The author argues that the globalization of the Chinese corporate law market is a process of boundary‐blurring and hybridization, by which local firms become structurally global‐looking and global firms receive localized expertise. Boundary‐blurring occurs in law firms' workplaces, in lawyers' career trajectories, and in state regulatory policies. It has produced a localized expertise that can be diffused conversely from local firms to global firms and has partially changed their relationship from collaboration to competition. Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult for the government to make or enforce any substantive policy to clarify the market boundary between these two types of law firms.     

Beyond Endogeneity: How Firms and Regulators Co‐Construct the Meaning of Regulation

What role do regulators and firms play in the construction of open‐ended regulatory terms? The new institutional legal endogeneity model posits that organizations respond to legal uncertainty by adopting formal structures to symbolically signal their compliance. These structures, however, tend to embody businesses' managerial and commercial values, as opposed to regulatory goals. Law becomes endogenous insofar as legal actors then defer to businesses' institutionalized ideas about regulation and compliance. Professionals, such as lawyers and human‐resource managers, and their strategic deployment of framing, are portrayed as the engines of the above process of legal endogeneity. By comparison, administrative agencies' strategies in shaping the meaning that corporations attach to the law are practically ignored. Building on a detailed case study of British financial firms' responses to the Financial Services Authority's Treating Customers Fairly initiative, this article problematizes the supposition of regulatory deference to business constructions of law. Instead, it develops a more balanced model that recognizes business professionals' and regulators' co‐construction of regulation and compliance. The process of regulatory meaning co‐construction, as depicted by this model, involves alignment and disputes between regulators' and professionals' strategic framing of regulatory concerns with tangible consequences for the enactment of regulation.     

Technology policy and defense conversion in Israel, 1967–1995

Technology policies and their effect on technology transfer from defense to civilian industries in Israel from 1967 to 1995 are explored. Defense technology policy is found to drive the growth of the defense industry and to limit defense conversion to commercialization initiatives developed primarily through intra-organizational technology transfer. The case of the Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) is presented. Also the development of national technology policy in Israel is traced and found wanting. Civilian and defense technology policies are found to be uncoordinated with each other and together are incapable of producing interorganizational technology transfer so as to significantly effect defense conversion on a wide number of economic actors particularly small firms. To achieve a socially effective defense conversion process (in which technologies are transferred from defense firms to many economic actors), the analysis suggests that a national technology policy should be designed and implemented under Prime Minister's leadership.     

Insider Privatisation and Restructuring Incentives

In the literature on privatisation and restructuring it is a generally held belief that manager owned firms will be restructured more rigorously than worker owned companies. This gives the clear recommendation that property rights and control rights should be allocated to managers in the process of (insider-) privatisation. One of the implied arguments is, that managers' career concerns will make them eager to prove their ability by improving company efficiency. The present model shows that in the transition context managers' career concerns might result in the opposite effect. If the bulk of job opportunities are in worker controlled firms, the managers of the few manager controlled firms will want to appear soft on excess labour capacity – hence, restructure less harshly – in order to improve their career opportunities.     

The use of warnings in the presence of errors

This article studies the effects of warnings, an enforcement instrument which is often used by environmental inspection agencies. Due to regulatory errors, measured emissions are uncertain and some firms are unjustly penalized. Warnings can then be used as a means to reduce the consequences of these errors. Even though the presence of warnings creates some underdeterrence of medium-cost firms, such a system reduces the overcompliance of low-cost firms caused by the uncertainty surrounding measured emissions. Further, warnings reduce the number of incorrect prosecutions in the case of measurement errors, which is also welfare enhancing, albeit at the cost of increasing the number of violators that go unpunished. For small error sizes, the use of warnings is shown to be welfare improving compared to only using fines.     

University Technology Transfer: Do Incentives, Management, and Location Matter?

University technology transfer activities are increasingly important as a source of regional economic development and revenue for the university. We use regression analysis, a two-stage model and the most recent data to examine the determinants of technology transfer. Our analysis strongly support four factors, not previously examined in the literature, enhancing university technology transfer: greater rewards for faculty involvement in technology transfer, location of the university in a region with a concentration of high technology firms, a clear university mission in support of technology transfer and the experience of the university's technology transfer office.     

Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Understanding Disparate Results

Objectives

Investigate how different model assumptions have driven the conflicting findings in the literature on the deterrence effect of capital punishment.

Methods

The deterrence effect of capital punishment is estimated across different models that reflect the following sources of model uncertainty: (1) the uncertainty about the probability model generating the aggregate murder rate equation, (2) the uncertainty about the determinants of an individual’s choice of committing a murder or not, (3) the uncertainty about state level heterogeneity, and (4) the uncertainty about the exchangeability between observations with zero murder case and those with positive murder cases.

Results

First, the estimated deterrence effects exhibit great dispersion across models. Second, a particular subset of models—linear models with constant coefficients—always predict a positive deterrence effect. All other models predict negative deterrence effects. Third, the magnitudes of the point estimates of deterrence effects differ mainly because of the choice of linear versus logistic specifications.

Conclusions

The question about the deterrence effect of capital punishment cannot be answered independently from substantive assumptions on what determines individual behavior. The need for judgment cannot be escaped in empirical work.     

Impact of university intellectual property policy on the performance of university-industry research collaboration

Despite the expectation of various advantages, university-industry research collaboration (UIC), a relationship between two different worlds, often faces serious conflicts. The performance of UIC depends on the research partners’ strategies and institutional designs through which they seek to mitigate these conflicts and increase partner incentives. We pay special attention to the role of the university intellectual property (IP) policy, formally introduced to Japan in 2003, as the basis of UIC contracts and empirically examine its impact on the performance of UIC projects, considering the factors in firms’ participation in UIC. We argue that the university IP policy that is equitable in sharing revenue and royalty from innovative outcomes and applied flexibly according to the partner’s needs may contribute to improving project performance by enhancing the commitment of firms, and we test our hypotheses using a sample of Japanese firms obtained from our original survey. The estimation results support the hypotheses, although the mediation via the firm’s commitment only partially explains the relationship between the university IP policy and UIC performance.     

The Private Interests of Public Officials: Financial Regulation in the US Congress

Legislators' private financial holdings affect policy decisions. Due to financial self‐interest, we theorize that legislators whose personal investment portfolios include equities from firms affected by proposed policies vote for legislation that benefits those firms. We also theorize that legislators with greater personal exposure to equity investments support policies that benefit equities markets generally. We create a novel data set of legislators' personal stock investments and examine major congressional actions since the 1990s on financial deregulation and market intervention. US House members who own stocks in firms who benefit from financial deregulation vote for deregulation. House members with greater exposure to financial and automotive stocks support the financial and auto bailouts, respectively. General exposure to equities markets is also associated with support for key legislation boosting markets. The normative implications are significant, as legislators' private interests influence decisions in the public sphere.     

集体建设用地制度改革的征税与征收模式辨析

我国集体建设用地制度改革正面临"征收+出让"抑或"入市+征税"的模式选择难题。由于在公共基础设施成本与收益的测算、土地自然增值与非自然增值的区分以及土地增值税的税基、税率确定上存在诸多困难,征税模式在回收公共基础设施投资和实现地利共享的目标上不占优势。而且,集体经营性建设用地入市还面临后续经营上的不确定性,从而会对公共基础设施投资的回收和地利共享目标的实现带来更大风险。实际上,征税和征收绝非截然对立,土地增值税在性质、功能和效果上与土地征收有相似性,人为拔高征税地位,认为其比征收更文明的观点并不科学。因而,我们尚不能断定征税必然优于征收,故集体建设用地制度的改革仍需因地制宜,让"征收+出让"与"入市+征税"两种模式相互竞争、借鉴,并在地尽其利、地利共享的目标下获得融贯发展。     

Taxation of Electronic Commerce: A Developing Problem

The rapid growth of e-commerce, especially the sale of goods and services over the internet, has fuelled a debate about the taxation regimes to be used. The shift from a physically oriented commercial environment to a knowledge-based electronic environment poses serious and substantial issues in relation to taxation and taxation regimes. Tax administrations throughout the world face the formidable task of protecting their revenue base without hindering either the development of new technologies or the involvement of the business community in the evolving and growing e-market place. Concerns of governments centre on the impact of e-commerce on the state and local revenue. Whereas states can impose a tax on residents' purchases from out-of-state vendors, they cannot impose an obligation on those vendors to collect the tax unless the vendor has a substantial presence, or nexus, in the state. These problems will be greater for developing countries. The shrinking of the tax base will have a disproportionate effect and further jeopardize the already fragile economy of the developing world.     

Structured uncertainty: a pilot study on innovation in China’s mobile phone handset industry

This paper explains why many small and medium-sized (SME) private high-technology Chinese manufacturing firms survive and thrive within an institutional and political system arrayed against them. We use the mobile phone handset industry as an illustrative case of the vitality and capabilities of Chinese SMEs. We argue that in capitalizing on the advantages offered by the global fragmentation of production, while also being constrained by an institutional climate of structured uncertainty, Chinese non-state firms have chosen a pattern of incremental innovation in their search for competitive advantage. Despite falling outside central government innovation plans and engaging in practices inimical to nurturing novel product innovation capabilities, these firms have a sustainable business model based on niche tailoring, rapid product introduction and utilization of standardized components.     

Legislative Term Limits and Fiscal Policy Performance

Do term limits impede the ability of legislators to effectively set fiscal policy? To address this question, I examine state bond ratings from 1996 to 2009. Bond ratings serve as a valuable indicator of a state's fiscal performance, gauging the risk and uncertainty that investors face when buying these bonds. In addition, bond ratings are important policy ends in themselves. High bond ratings make it easier for states to borrow and raise revenue, while lowering interest rates. Results from analyses of “Term‐Limitedness” and legislator experience suggest that term limits negatively impact a state's fiscal performance, leading to lower bond ratings.     

Why the “Haves” Do Not Necessarily Come Out Ahead in Informal Dispute Resolution

This article explores the implications of Galanter's distinction between repeat and one‐off players to informal dispute resolution settings. Relying on quantitative and qualitative data regarding one British “private‐Ombudsman” scheme, the article analyzes the extent to which complaint handlers' decision making advantaged more experienced and better resourced firms and/or high‐status and more assertive complainants. The article's tentative theoretical proposition is that the typically indeterminate nature of informal dispute resolution settings renders them less susceptible to large organizations' and other repeat players' capacity to “play for rules.” Yet, this indeterminacy makes such processes more vulnerable to decision makers' reliance on heuristics.     

Multiplicative-innovation synergies: tests in technological acquisitions

Technological innovations enjoy synergies that vary in their speed and magnitude of impact, depending upon whether they are additive or multiplicative in nature. Additive-innovation synergies build incrementally on familiar technologies (as is reflected in the technologies built upon within their patents’ respective antecedents) and the duration of their effect is shorter-lived. Multiplicative-innovation synergies arise from combining greater proportions of diverse technologies and their effects have longer duration. The most-effective organizational-learning processes accompanying exposure to exotic technology streams via technological acquisition will occur if firms have properly invested in adaptive capacity to synthesize inventions using the unfamiliar knowledge. In the first tests of innovation synergies on firm performance, we find that technological novelty in patent content improves return on assets for firms that consistently invested in R&D. Using patent-content scores to characterize whether inventors have integrated greater proportions of exotic technological antecedents into their inventions (or not), we test the impact of innovation synergies on firms’ performance after technological acquisitions. Diversification posture (which could be an alternative explanation for performance differences) is negatively-correlated with innovation synergies in our results.     

An elasticity approach to the analysis of Romanian foreign trade policy during the years of transition

This paper focuses on the effect of exchange rate variations on the economic evolution of a country in transition, facing inflation, output decrease and negative external shocks; the particular case of Romania is considered. The theoretical part is linked to the Fleming-Mundell model for an open economy, but additional assumptions of price mobility and capital immobility are introduced. The usual interest rate versus output graphic framework is switched from one to another, which plots the exchange rate (or real exchange rate) versus output; the author considers that such a representation fits the behavior of an economy in transition towards a market-based system better. A main role, according to this interpretation, is played by the exchange rate elasticities of imports and exports, which influence the images of the equilibria on the goods market and the balance of payment (the IS and BOP curves' slopes). Finally, an empirical analysis is made, as an example, on the Romanian energy imports data series; the attempts to calculate the exchange rate elasticity may be considered as reliable only in the short term. In order to estimate the global exchange rate elasticities of imports and exports, some aggregations of partial sectorial results might be a possible solution. In the Romanian case, the resulting elasticities seem to be lower than for other countries; this poses the question as to the effectiveness of exchange rate policies in managing the Romanian economy.     

Advance price announcements and antitrust policy

This paper analyzes the competitive significance of advance price announcements. In the model, advance price announcements are used by firms to communicate private information on demand or cost. By so sharing the information, the firms are able to set their prices at more profitable levels. When the advance price announcements resolve demand uncertainty, profits rise and consumer surplus falls. Interestingly, when the advance price announcements resolve cost uncertainty, both profits and consumer welfare rise. Finally, we examine U.S. antitrust policy regarding price announcements.     

The Techno-Economic: Perspectives for Analysis and Intervention

This paper compares the macro- and micro- analyses of techno-economic change. Arguing for perspectives which are sensitive to the local flexibility of innovation but which can also provide suggestions for policy and intervention, it describes and reviews the two major contributions: work on Techno-Economic Networks, and on Techno-Economic Paradigms. It is argued that the former has greater depth of analytical sensitivity, whilst the latter is more policy-relevant. Whilst there are approaches, such as Constructive Technology Assessment, which attempt to combine the two perspectives, these are seen as failing to retain sensitivity to the power differentials between key actors such as firms, experts, governing agencies or citizens' groups. The paper concludes by advocating attention to the ‘meso-level techno-economic’—the networks of institutions and actors at work in: geographically bounded systems of innovation; scientific and technological disciplines; firms, their strategies and linkages; and the nexus between production and consumption.     

The Intersection of Crime Seriousness,Discretion, and Race: A Test of the Liberation Hypothesis

Spohn and Cederblom’s interpretation of the liberation hypothesis asserts that with trivial crimes, judges are “liberated” to consider extra-legal attributes such as race when making sentencing decisions. The current study posits that this perspective may be too theoretically simplistic because it fails to distinguish between the concepts of discretion and uncertainty. In light of this argument, we examine the sentencing decisions of felony cases in the Florida circuit courts. Results indicate that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be imprisoned than whites, and males more so than females. Contrary to expectations, this disparity increases with crime seriousness. Consistent with the imprisonment model, blacks and males receive longer sentences and the effect increases with case seriousness. We found no evidence that the effect of offender extra-legal attributes depends upon the characteristics of the judges handling the cases. Suggestions for future research and implications for the liberation hypothesis are discussed.