Determinants of Privatization Prices

Generating government revenue is a common objective in privatization. This paper asks: what determines privatization prices? Pursuing this query helps resolve the current controversies about the bearing of speed and the role for government actions prior to privatization. The data, gathered from primary sources, encompass 361 privatized Mexican companies in 49 four-digit industry codes. The determinants of auction privatization prices are divided into three groups: (1) company performance and industry parameters; (2) the auction process and its requirements; and (3) the prior restructuring actions taken by the government. Controlling for company and industry effects reveals the significant impact of the costs and characteristics of the labor force. Minority control packages carry large discounts. Auction requirements that allow foreign investors result in higher sale premia, while restrictions constraining participation or payment forms reduce net prices. The speed of privatization substantially influences net prices: the longer it takes to put the company on the block, the more severe the deterioration in performance, and the lower the premium obtained. Pre-sale reductions in labor force, and particularly the firing of CEOs, lead to significantly higher premiums. Debt absorption, investment, and performance improvement programs do not increase the net price, while de-investment measures prove more beneficial. Overall, the results show increased premia for government actions that stimulate bidder participation and expedite the privatization process.

Related Lending

In many countries, banks lend to firms controlled by the bank?s owners. We examine the benefits of related lending using a newly assembled dataset for Mexico. Related lending is prevalent (20% of commercial loans) and takes place on better terms than arm?s-length lending (annual interest rates are 4 percentage points lower). Related loans are 33% more likely to default and, when they do, have lower recovery rates (30% less) than unrelated ones. The evidence supports the view that rather than enhance information sharing, related lending is a manifestation of looting.

Courts: the Lex Mundi Project

In cooperation with Lex Mundi member law firms in 109 countries, we measure and describe the exact procedures used by litigants and courts to evict a tenant for non-payment of rent and to collect a bounced check. We use these data to construct an index of procedural formalism of dispute resolution for each country. We find that such formalism is systematically greater in civil than in common law countries. Moreover, procedural formalism is associated with higher expected duration of judicial proceedings, more corruption, less consistency, less honesty, less fairness in judicial decisions, and inferior access to justice. These results suggest that legal transplantation may have led to an inefficiently high level of procedural formalism, particularly in developing countries.

Law and Finance

This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common law countries generally have the best, and French civil law countries the worst, legal protections of investors, with German and Scandinavian civil law countries located in the middle. We also find that concentration of ownership of shares in the largest public companies is negatively related to investor protections, consistent with the hypothesis that small, diversified shareholders are unlikely to be important in countries that fail to protect their rights.

The Guarantees of Freedom

Hayek (1960) distinguishes the institutions of English freedom, which guarantee the independence of judges from political interference in the administration of justice, from those of American freedom, which allow judges to restrain law-making powers of the sovereign through constitutional review. We create a data base of constitutional rules in 71 countries that reflect these institutions of English and American freedom, and ask whether these rules predict economic and political freedom in a cross-section of countries. We find that the English institutions of judicial independence are strong predictors of economic freedom and weaker predictors of political freedom. The American institutions of checks and balances are strong predictors of political but not of economic freedom. Judicial independence explains half of the positive effect of common law legal origin on measures of economic freedom.

Do Institutions Cause Growth?

We revisit the debate over whether political institutions cause economic growth, or whether, alternatively, growth and human capital accumulation lead to institutional improvement. We find that most indicators of institutional quality used to establish the proposition that institutions cause growth are constructed to be conceptually unsuitable for that purpose. We also find that some of the instrumental variable techniques used in the literature are flawed. Basic OLS results, as well as a variety of additional evidence, suggest that a) human capital is a more basic source of growth than are the institutions, b) poor countries get out of poverty through good policies, often pursued by dictators, and c) subsequently improve their political institutions.

The Regulation of Labor

We investigate the regulation of labor markets through employment laws, collective bargaining laws, and social security laws in 85 countries. We find that richer countries regulate labor less than poorer countries do, although they have more generous social security systems. The political power of the left is associated with more stringent labor regulations and more generous social security systems. Socialist and French legal origin countries have sharply higher levels of labor regulation than do common law countries, and the inclusion of legal origin wipes out the effect of the political power of the left. Heavier regulation of labor is associated with a larger unofficial economy, lower labor force participation, and higher unemployment, especially of the young. These results are difficult to reconcile with efficiency and political power theories of institutional choice, but are broadly consistent with legal theories, according to which countries have pervasive regulatory styles inherited from the transplantation of legal systems.

Privatization in the United States

In the United States, the two principal modes of producing local government services are inhouse provision by government employees and contracting out to private suppliers, also known as privatization. We examine empirically how United States counties choose their mode of providing services. The evidence indicates that state clean- government laws and state laws restricting county spending encourage privatization, whereas strong public unions discourage it. The evidence is inconsistent with the view that efficiency considerations alone govern the provision mode, and points to the important roles played by political patronage and taxpayer resistance to government spending in the privatization decision.

What do Firms do with Cash Windfalls?

Suppose that a firm receives a cash windfall which does not change its investment opportunity set, or equivalently its marginal Tobin's Q. What will this firm do with the money? We provide empirical answers to this question using a sample of firms with such windfalls in the form of a won or settled lawsuit. We examine a variety of decisions of the firm to shed light on alternative theories of corporate financing and investment. Our evidence is broadly inconsistent with the perfect capital markets model. The results need to be stretched considerably to fit the asymmetric information model in which managers act in the interest of shareholders. The evidence supports the agency model of managerial behavior, in which managers try to ensure the long run survival and independence of the firms with themselves at the helm.