Bulletin of Economic Research最新文献

This study considers an endogenous timing game of R&D decisions with research spillovers and compares the effects of output and research subsidies. We show that the simultaneous-move (sequential-move) game is an equilibrium if the spillover rate is low (high) under an output subsidy while this equilibrium is socially beneficial if the spillover rate is high or low enough. Under a research subsidy, however, the simultaneous-move game is a unique equilibrium regardless of the spillover rate, which is always socially beneficial. We also show that an output subsidy in the simultaneous-move game provides higher (lower) social welfare than a research subsidy if the spillover rate is low (high). Finally, we provide the robustness of our findings and some policy-relevant discussions.

Class size is one of the predominant topics in educational policy debate, as its impact on academic performance has not always yielded consistent findings. Nevertheless, less emphasis was paid to noncognitive outcomes such as well-being and behavioral issues. This study employs rich administrative and survey data to investigate the effects of class size on students’ bullying and violent behavior as well as cognitive abilities tests. The study uses the maximum class size rule to create a regression discontinuity (RD) relation between cohort enrollment size and class size in the public and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency school system in the West Bank. Further, this study provides evidence that there is no violation of the RD assumptions resulting from discontinuities in the relationship between enrollment and students’ household background at cutoff points induced by a maximum class size rule. The findings suggest that class size reduction improves the quality of life for children by mitigating bullying and violent behavior among pupils, which might have long-term adverse effects on academic attainment. Finally, peer relationships and mental health problems are identified as potential mechanisms through which class size influences self-reported levels of bullying and violent behavior among students.

This study investigates the role of money illusion (MI) in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. We introduce MI such that households, in their intertemporal optimization, erroneously recognize nominal variables as real ones. We find that first, our model could exhibit money nonneutrality in the long run; second, the Taylor principle is a sufficient condition for determinacy but not a necessary condition; third, the response to output in monetary policy rule matters for the model not to exhibit money nonneutrality in the long run; and finally, MI could flatten the slope that represents the output-inflation trade-off.

We study how passive cross-holdings affect product differentiation and welfare in a Cournot duopoly. We show that increasing unilateral ownership stimulates total investments, and therefore improves social welfare. Such cross-holdings should not be controlled in view of social welfare. However, we identify an inverted-U (a negative) relationship between consumer surplus and ownership when the demand is small (large). Then a government might apply intervention thresholds for passive ownership if it uses consumer surplus as the appropriate standard for antitrust enforcement. We further consider symmetric bilateral cross-holdings and show that our results are in general robust, but increasing ownership will generate more serious competition harms than unilateral cross-holdings. Thus, special concerns need to be given to bilateral cross-holdings.

In this paper, we assume that the domestic public firm competes in the market with a foreign private firm that cares about consumer surplus and the domestic government imposes tariffs on foreign firm. We aim to analyze the influence of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) level of foreign firm on privatization and tariff policy. It shows that if the government implements a privatization policy for the domestic public firm, the optimal degree of privatization decreases in the CSR level of foreign firm. Under the optimal privatization policy, if the product differentiation is relatively small, the equilibrium tariff increases in the CSR level; if the product differentiation is relatively large, the equilibrium tariff decreases in the CSR level; if the product differentiation is moderate, the relationship between the equilibrium tariff and CSR level is an inverted U-shape. We further consider the policy implications under sequential moves of firms.

This study uses the Plain Writing Act of 2010 as an exogenous variation in the readability of 10-K reports to establish the impact of report improvements on firm risk. We find that better readability significantly decreases total and idiosyncratic risks for US firms experiencing shocks to their readability environment during 2001–2016. The impact is stronger among firms with poorer governance, less external monitoring, and greater product market competition. The results based on supporting the causal impact of readability on firm risk are robust. Our findings suggest that more readable 10-K reports facilitate investor monitoring, inducing firms to manage risk better.

This paper proposes a frequentist model averaging approach in the presence of parameter instability and heteroskedasticity. We derive optimal weights combining the stable and break specifications of a predictive model, with the weights from minimizing the leave-one-out cross-validation information criterion (CV). We characterize the asymptotic distribution of the CV and provide the analytical expressions of the feasible optimal CV weights. Our simulations and applications forecasting the US and Taiwanese GDP growth demonstrate the superior performance of the CV model averaging relative to other methods such as the Mallows averaging, the approximate Bayesian averaging, and equal weighting.

This study investigates institutional distance as a factor of investors’ monitoring of corporate earnings attributes. We analyze the US cross-listing market to determine whether institutional monitoring depends on geographic or market proximity. We find that shareholdings of non-US institutions headquartered in the same country as the investee firm are significantly and positively related to earnings quality. However, we do not find such a monitoring role in the United States, or in institutions not incorporated in the investee firm's home country. Our findings support a geographic proximity advantage over market proximity, which is more pronounced when firms’ information opacity is more severe; the results are not altered by the choice of earnings attribute variables.

In this study, we analyze the effect of a merger between banks by extending a structural model of the banking industry with the possibility of bank runs developed by Egan et al. (2017; American Economic Review, 107, 169–216). We use our framework to analyze whether the 2008 merger between Wells Fargo and Wachovia was beneficial for social welfare. The results suggest that the stability of the financial system is critical for evaluating mergers in the banking industry.

In this paper, we study the impacts of cross-ownership structure on double marginalization problem (DMP) and social welfare under downstream the Bertrand and Cournot competition. We find that in the Bertrand competition, DMP is more serious under backward cross-ownership than under forward cross-ownership. Under forward cross-ownership, because the upstream firm internalizes part of a retailer's profit, it alleviates the DMP. However, for the whole society, forward cross-ownership is beneficial with respect to backward cross-ownership. The mark-up ratio under forward cross-ownership is the largest, followed by that under vertical separation. The lowest one is under backward cross-ownership. The results hold under Cournot competition as well.