Economics & Politics最新文献

The vast contest literature disregarded the possibility of optimal contest design with simultaneous attainment of various objectives. The main goal of the current article is to illustrate the potential usefulness of a navigation tool that allows the designer to achieve, simultaneously, multiple objectives in contests between companies (competing for resources/patents/market-share, etc), based on a unit tax and a lump-sum subsidy. Our proposal is illustrated applying the most common simple setting of two contestants whose winning probabilities are determined by the simple lottery contest success function (CSF). We focus on seven main objectives: reducing the competition's intensity in terms of efforts: increasing profit for the state treasury; promoting equality between the players in terms of gap between the contestants' efforts, winning probabilities and expected payoffs, and budget and expenditure balancing. We also analyze the possible negative external effects of achieving a particular objective. Our main insight is that a complete differential policy can be used to attain, simultaneously (with two exceptions), all the objectives of the designer. In contrast, the use of a uniform policy, subject to a balanced budget objective, cannot ensure complete equality or maximize profit. It nevertheless guarantees a Pareto-superior outcome relative to the situation before the designer's intervention. Future research may generalize the findings to any type of contest or CSF and multiple contestants.

From the perspective of Transaction Cost Theory, this paper proposes a conceptual model to assess ownership and management control decisions of private partners in public-private partnerships for infrastructure with regard generic risk factors, namely asset specificity, demand risk, environmental risk, social risk, macroeconomic risk, and governance or behavioral risk. Using an ordinal logistic model, hypotheses are tested on data covering 2152 projects in 12 emerging countries for the period 2010–2019. Overall results indicate that the extent of private ownership and management control is negatively related to risks, the marginal effects of which are moderated by high-quality public institutions.

Using a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms over the period 2010–2017, this paper investigates the impact of local donation culture on corporate tax avoidance. We find that firms located in areas with a strong local donation culture are less engaged in tax avoidance. The results remain robust under a variety of robustness tests. Furthermore, we find that this relationship is driven by enhancing the moral identity of managers. In further analysis, we also explore the role of media attention, chief executive officer's (CEO's) childhood famine experience, and CEO duality in the relationship between local donation culture and corporate tax avoidance. This study enriches the existing literature on culture and firms' behaviors, and the conclusion of this paper has significant policy implications for governing corporate tax avoidance.

This study examines the impact of Social Insurance Law in 2011 on enterprises' digital transformation, using a quasi-natural experiment with difference-in-differences method. Implementation of the law contributes to enterprises' digital transformation. Mechanism tests reveal that implementation of the law promotes enterprise digital transformation by increasing labor costs. Heterogeneity analysis demonstrates that nonstate enterprises, enterprises with weaker financing constraints, and mature enterprises experience a more pronounced impact of the law. Enterprises in regions with highly integrated digital development and those in industries with a high level of digital transformation are more affected by the law.

At a subnational level, studies typically find that embedded or local leaders are better at providing public goods relative to leaders appointed from other areas. This paper tests whether this finding holds in the context of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Specifically, it examines the impact of a cadre transfer policy whereby the central government assigns (nonresident) officials to provincial leadership positions rather than them being elected locally. Using data covering the period 2005–2017, changes in the development of provinces led by local (embedded) leaders versus nonlocal leaders are compared. Provincial development is measured using the incidence of headcount poverty as well as “vegetation” and “build-up” indices constructed using satellite data. Using fixed-effects modeling, findings suggest that improved provincial development is associated with nonlocal leaders. This finding is in contrast to those of existing studies including those examining embeddedness in other authoritarian states.

This paper examines whether capital flow management and monetary policies effectively reduce credit growth in emerging market economies in the presence of both conventional and unconventional monetary policy actions undertaken by advanced economies. We apply a dynamic panel model with fixed effects to a sample of 21 emerging market economies from 2000 to 2020 using quarterly data and more continuous variables than in other studies rather than limiting the variability using proxies. We find that capital controls and macroprudential regulation, as tools of capital flow management policy, moderate credit growth. This effect is particularly shown in countries with tighter monetary conditions. Our main findings highlight the useful role of coordinating capital flow management and monetary policies. This role stands for both fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes. Lastly, we find capital flow management and monetary policies manage to control credit in normal periods, but their coordination is less effective during crises and high volatility periods. Robustness checks suggest that these findings are stable across alternative proxies used in the literature, thus providing additional support for the validity of our results.

There is a vast body of literature dedicated to identifying the major drivers that explain human impacts on the environment. In this study, we utilize the STIRPAT framework to assess whether two controversial factors should be considered when examining how humans affect the environment. Specifically, we investigate whether the quality of the democratic regime and the size of the informal economy play significant roles in determining human impacts on the environment. To address this question, we employ the extreme bounds analysis (EBA) to characterize these drivers as either robust or fragile. Based on the findings of this paper, both variables are classified as fragile, suggesting that they may not fully explain human impacts on the environment. We have taken great care in interpreting the results.

This study examines the relationship between welfare state or social expenditure composition and health human capital in 37 OECD countries spanning 1980–2018. Our findings confirm that public health spending has a positive effect on health capital formation. Dissecting social expenditure according to other nine social spending categories reveals a positive influence for old age pensions and unemployment benefits. The results for the remaining social programs vary with the health capital proxy and estimation method used. It thus appears that more comprehensive and universal social programs, possibly by guaranteeing the necessary income, do a better job in improving health human capital.

This paper explores whether the assessment of local government officials affects firm participation in targeted poverty alleviation. Using a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies in the Midwest from 2016 to 2019, the results show that the greater the importance of officials' poverty alleviation assessment, the higher the participation of firms in precise poverty alleviation. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) contribute more to the reduction of destitution than private enterprises. We further find that local SOEs' participation in precision poverty alleviation enhances the likelihood of executive promotion, while private enterprises' participation in precision poverty alleviation increases government subsidies and reduces the cost of debt financing. These findings imply that the evaluation mechanisms of Chinese officials can effectively promote enterprises fulfilling social responsibilities.

This study aims to empirically examine whether and how the innovation activities would change in the face of shocks caused by heightened US-China tensions for US high-tech firms from trade sectors with China. It is found that although the overall innovation intensity slides down during periods of heightened geopolitical risk and policy uncertainty, innovativeness of the US high-tech companies from trade sectors with China is not completely suppressed by the escalated tensions and still maintains certain levels of momentum compared with other firms. However, the empirical evidence demonstrates that the superiority of the innovation intensity of US high-tech companies from trade sectors with China to other firms is curbed during periods of heightened tensions in comparison with periods in the absence of geopolitical shocks and economic uncertainty. Moreover, the negative impact of US-China tensions on corporate innovation is further amplified when the firm is less established, more financially constrained and of smaller size and less human power capital, each of which serves as an important moderator driving the negative relation. The findings of the paper are based on multifaceted empirical methods and contribute to the literature on corporate innovation, international trade, and geopolitical and economic tensions between nations.