Economics of Transition and Institutional Change最新文献

The relationship between international investment and the environment is always concerned around the world, but the literature mainly focuses on the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) (especially from developed countries to developing countries). Currently, many developing countries have regarded outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) as a critical task of economic development and encourage firms to ‘Going global’. After OFDI, how do firms' pollution emissions change? In this study, we employ the data of Chinese industrial firms to empirically answer this question. In particular, we combine inverse probability weighted matching with a difference-in-difference approach to identify the causal effect of OFDI on firm-level pollution emissions. Our result indicates that OFDI leads to the reduction in both emission intensity and emission levels. This pollution reduction is driven by improving abatement technology and decreasing energy intensity. It potentially implies that OFDI reduces pollution emissions mainly through the ‘reverse technology spillover’ effect rather than ‘pollution transfer’ effect. In addition, pollution reductions caused by OFDI are prominent for local production OFDI and resource exploitation OFDI, OFDI to high-income countries as well as capital-intensive industries. Overall, this study not only provides an initial evidence for the relationship between OFDI and the environment at the firm level but also provides enlightenments for international investment and sustainable development.

While the diffusion of industrial robots has had a significant impact on the economy and society, more research is needed to understand how robots contribute to sustainable growth. This study uses paired data on China's county-level carbon emissions and industrial robot installations from 2008 to 2017, employing a Bartik shift-share instrumental variable design to estimate the economic and sustainable effects of industrial robot diffusion. The study finds that industrial robots significantly promote economic growth and contribute to carbon emission reduction as confirmed by robust IV 2SLS and general PSM-DID methods. Additionally, a heterogeneity analysis shows that industrial robots have a stronger impact on sustainable growth in underdeveloped and small-medium cities, especially in low-skilled industries. Finally, the study identifies industrial structural change, clean energy use, and improved productivity and innovation as key factors that mediate the impact of industrial robots on sustainable development.

This paper uses a patient discharge dataset from China to study whether and how medical expenses increase for those patients who have better insurance coverage. It uncovers consistent increases in total medical expenses and across each of the three broad categories of expenses (prescription drug expenses, diagnostic test expenses, and other service expenses), no improvement in the quality of care delivered. These increases in expenses can be attributed to patients, physicians, or both. The study provides evidence that physicians' financial incentives play an important role in inducing the increase in medical expenses and that physicians' workload level affects the role of their financial incentives.

We explore the role of staff training and experience for banks' efficiency and profitability, while accounting for size, solvency, liquidity and business model of the banking sector. We try answering two questions: (i) are banks with higher levels of staff training and experience more efficient and profitable and (ii) do banks that spend more to increase the quality of their staff have better outcomes in terms of NPLs, in case of a downturn? We use two novel sources of microdata from a one-off survey about banks' HR policies and a database on banks' balance sheets and P&Ls regarding the Romanian banking sector. We apply the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to estimate production frontiers and rank banks by cost and income efficiency. Our main findings support the conclusion that it pays off to invest more in the quality of bank staff, from both risk management and revenue efficiency perspectives.

A longstanding concern has been the proposition that the international investment treaty system lacks reform. Governments forgo Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and thus forgo a driver of economic growth, employment and innovation. We assess the validity of this concern in the context of a major home and host country for global foreign direct investment, China, and the major reform of its Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs). Besides other innovations, the so-called ‘third-generation’ BITs of China introduce a strong dispute resolution mechanism, which makes Chinese BITs more investor-friendly. Our evidence suggests that more investor-friendly BITs exert a positive impact on FDI in China. We argue that the positive impact of reforming BITs in a country like China, which offers a high degree of stability of the legal and political system and a strong culture of informal dispute resolution, points towards the relevance of the enforceability of property rights for investments.

India initiated the unilateral mass termination of bilateral investment treaties (BIT termination) in 2016. We consider it a natural experiment to clarify the issue of whether BITs attract foreign direct investment (FDI) to a developing country. We evaluate the effect of BIT termination on the FDI inflows using the double and triple difference approaches (DD and DDD) and the synthetic control (SCM) methods. Our study finds that BIT termination led to a significant decrease in FDI inflows from the country with which India terminated the agreement. Thus, the study confirms that BIT is an essential mechanism for attracting FDI.

The mixed ownership reform aims to improve the performance of firms, which is important for optimizing the overall economic layout and promoting firms to sustainable development. Therefore, an important issue is whether state ownership participation in private firms improves their performance in the context of the mixed ownership reform. This study investigates whether and how state ownership participation affects the performance of private firms using Chinese listed private firms from 2010 to 2020. The results of this study indicate that state ownership participation significantly eliminates the performance of private firms. Further results show that there is a U-shaped relationship between the mixed ownership model and the performance of private firms. At the same time, firm transparency and financing constraints play a negative moderating role in the relationship between the mixed ownership model and the performance of private firms. The findings of this study enrich the literature on factors influencing the performance of private firms, provide empirical evidence for mixed ownership reforms in China, and further reveal the characteristics of Chinese accounting practices and the logical rules behind the operation of these practices.

Developing countries are striving to reform their tax revenue structure to reduce its dependence on international trade tax revenue. The present study has investigated the effect of trade costs on this type of tax revenue structure reform (also referred in the present analysis to as ‘Tax transition Reform’—TTR) through the trade openness channel in developing countries. The analysis has used a set of 124 countries over the period from 1996 to 2019 and several econometric estimators. It shows that higher overall trade costs (notably non-tariff costs) undermine the TTR process, notably in countries that enjoy high degrees of openness to international trade. In other words, countries that wish to pursue their TTR process, while concurrently further opening up their economies to international trade, have to reduce their trade costs.