Economics of Transition and Institutional Change最新文献

This study tries to identify the impact of recent economic turmoil including the COVID-19 pandemic and global financial crisis on a corporation's banking relationships. Using a wide range of unique data from 2008 to 2020 in the Korean loan market, this study compares the two crises periods to the ordinary periods. It is found that the effects of firm-specific factors on banking relationships are strengthened (for loan amount) or weakened (for corporate size and credit rating) during the two crises. However, for the industrial sector a firm belongs to, the interaction effects of the crises show opposite signs.

This paper characterizes the power dynamics of firms in product and labour markets in Lithuania between 2004 and 2018. We first show that both markets are not perfectly competitive, as both price markups and wage markdowns are far from unitary and homogeneous. We show that the dynamics of these margins followed different patterns. On the one hand, dispersion and the economy-wide markup have increased, suggesting an increase in product market power. On the other hand, we document a decline in monopsony power, as heterogeneity and the aggregate markdown have declined. Altogether, our results underscore the importance of jointly analyzing product and labour markets when assessing firms' market power.

To examine the important role of regional intellectual property (IP) protection, we empirically check the impact of infringement disputes on corporate innovation investment persistence. We document that IP protection enforcement can significantly and negatively mitigate the infringer's innovation investment persistence but positively enhance that of the infringed firm. This effect is more pronounced for non-high-tech or non-state-owned firms. Moreover, IP protection mainly reshapes a firm's perceptions of innovation investment persistence through the efficiency and fairness of law enforcement. Our findings provide insights into optimizing the IP protection environment, especially for emerging economies.

At the turn of the millennium, developing countries face a twofold challenge. First, for reasons related to both intra- and inter-generational justice, these countries need to follow sustainable development pathways. Second, they need to understand the deep principles underpinning informality, which is by now recognized as a structuring phenomenon of their economies. This paper sheds light on the relationship between these two goals by investigating how a Nigerian firm being formal versus informal affects its sustainable and responsible innovation (S&RI) activity. Using the entropy balancing methodology to analyze a novel database extracted from the Nigerian Business Innovation Surveys, we find that registered Nigerian firms engage in S&RI much more than those that are not. This suggests that, from the perspective of sustainable development, there should be no hiatus between recognizing the important role of the informal sector in the economy and promoting policies that give firms incentives to exit from it. By encouraging the registration of firms operating informally, these policies should help Nigeria in its transition to a sustainable market economy.

This study examines the effect of bilateral political ties on the stability of service exports. The results show that the deterioration of political ties can decrease the stability of service exports by strengthening non-tariff barriers and weakening immigration networks. A decrease in voting similarity among trading partners in the United Nations General Assembly corresponds to heightened instability in service exports. In particular, political ties have a more pronounced impact on the stability of tourism service exports than on other services. Developing countries, in contrast to developed countries, should pay particular attention to the impact of political ties on the stability of service exports. Moreover, improvements in technological advantages and Internet openness in exporting countries can weaken the impact of political ties.

The judicial institutions of a country impact corporate litigation. From 2003 to 2010, China allowed the appointed secretaries of the Committee of Political and Legislative Affairs to hold concurrent administrative roles (CAR) as directors of the Police Departments in their respective provinces. Such a policy provides a natural experiment on the change of the judicial environment. In this paper, we employ a Staggered Difference-in-Differences method to study the effect of changes in judicial institution on corporate litigation using data on publicly traded corporations from 1998 to 2010. We find corporations engage in fewer corporate litigations during the time period of China's CAR policy (i.e., when judicial justice was likely weaker). Further analysis shows that the probability of winning lawsuits increases for non-state-owned enterprises. Mechanism analysis shows that the CAR policy heightens the uncertainty of economic policies by changing companies' perceptions of the status of political and legal institutions in the judicial system, thereby reducing corporate judicial participation.

The paper studies the effect of household poverty on child labour (CL) and explores how CL affects working children's health using an instrumental variable strategy. After correcting for endogeneity, we find that household poverty significantly contributes to the incidence of CL whilst increasing the working hour of children increases the likelihood that working children would sustain wounds/cuts, get skin diseases, or get burned by fire, signifying the adverse effect of CL on child health in Ghana. These findings are robust to different approaches to addressing endogeneity. The study recommends that while it is imperative to implement policies to reduce children's engagement in all hazardous forms of child work and to protect the health of working children, government policies that address poverty might also be necessary.

The impact of a firm's origins on its strategic decision-making has attracted scholarly attention in recent years. Focusing on firms' origins, this paper explores the relationship between the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and family business internationalization. Based on data from listed family businesses in China from 2003 to 2022, we find that compared to entrepreneurial family businesses, restructured family businesses have a lower internationalization degree. Moreover, high trade policy uncertainty strengthens the negative relationship between the privatization of SOEs and family business internationalization, while high family involvement plays a weakening role. Several robustness tests later, the findings remain valid. This study introduces the firm's origin as a vital determinant, which may contribute to the prior studies on family business internationalization. Besides, this paper complements research on the economic consequences of the privatization of SOEs in China. Finally, this paper may help Chinese family businesses actively participate in the international cycle to achieve competitive advantage and high-quality development.