Rent Seeking and Government Ownership of Firms: An Application to China’s Township-Village Enterprises.

Using its control of regulated inputs, a government agency extracts rents from a manager who undertakes an investment. Such government rent-seeking activity leads to a typical hold-up problem. Government ownership serves as a second-best commitment mechanism, through which the government agency will restrain itself from the rent-seeking activity and may even offer the manager assistance in the form of tax breaks and subsidies. This mechanism works at a cost, however, as government ownership also compromises ex post managerial incentives and creates distortion in resource allocation. Nevertheless, government ownership Pareto dominates private ownership under certain conditions. These conditions correspond to a host of stylized empirical observations concerning local government-owned firms, i.e., township-village enterprises, during China’s transition to a market economy.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39882/3/wp497.pd

Decentralized Financing, Centralized Financing and the Dual Track System: Toward a New Theory of Soft Budget Constraints

I put forward a new theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between soft budget constraint syndrome and the economic performances of firms. It differs from the existing theoretical framework, à la Dewatripont and Maskin (1995), in the soft budget constraint literature. In this paper, soft budget constraint syndrome arises when firms that are expected to lose money are financed. The paper highlights a trade-off between hard and soft budget constraints. While soft budget constraints may compromise firms' incentives to improve performances, an all-out effort to harden budget constraints may put macro stability at risk, especially for economies suffering from allocative inefficiency. Based on this trade-off, the paper shows that a transition from centralized financing to decentralized financing in fact compromises firms' incentives to improve their performances, whereas a transition from centralized financing to a dual track system enhances efficiency. In the dual track system, budget constraints are soft in the centralized track but the macro stability of the economy is assured as a result. The macro stability enhances the disciplinary effect of hard budget constraints in the decentralized track, which in turn promotes firms' incentives to improve performances. The paper sheds light on a complementary relation between soft budget constraint syndrome in the state sector (i.e., the centralized track) and the remarkable growth of the non-state sector (i.e., the decentralized track) in China.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39646/3/wp261.pd

From the Grabbing Hand to the Helping Hand

I present a study of ownership of firms under government rent seeking. Using its control of regulated inputs, a government agency extracts rents from a manager who undertakes an investment. Such a government rent seeking activity leads to a typical hold-up problem. Government ownership is shown to serve as a second best commitment mechanism through which the government agency will restrain itself from the rent seeking activity and even offer the manager support and favor such as tax breaks and subsidies. This mechanism works at a cost as government ownership compromises ex post managerial incentives and creates distortion in resource allocation. Nevertheless, under some fairly general conditions, government ownership Pareto dominates private ownership. The analysis corresponds to a host of stylized empirical observations concerning local government-owned firms during China's transition to a market economy. Based on this analysis, I suggest that local government owned firms will be transformed to private ownership as China's input markets become more liberalized.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39448/3/wp58.pd

The Life Cycle of Government Ownership

Government ownership may dominate private ownership under government failure. Such dom- inance disappears as product markets grow mature, giving rise to the need for privatization. Buyers' limited wealth imposes a constraint on how and when privatization takes place. In particular, ¯rms may be underpriced during privatization, and privatization may take place at a sub-optimal timing which results in ¯rm performances to deteriorate in the short run, and to improve only in the long run. Partial privatization may alleviate the constraint in some cases but exacerbates the e±ciency loss in others. When the government is lesser an interventionist or when the product market grows mature very rapidly, privatization is likely to take place at a sub-optimal timing. The analysis is applied to the dynamics of the Chinese non-state sector.government rent seeking, government ownership, privatization

From the Grabbing Hand to the Helping Hand: A Rent Seeking Model of China's Township-Village Enterprises

Ownership of firms, Government, Rent seeking, Township and village enterprises, China

From the Grabbing Hand to the Helping Hand

I present a study of ownership of firms under government rent seeking. Using its control of regulated inputs, a government agency extracts rents from a manager who undertakes an investment. Such a government rent seeking activity leads to a typical hold-up problem. Government ownership is shown to serve as a second best commitment mechanism through which the government agency will restrain itself from the rent seeking activity and even offer the manager support and favor such as tax breaks and subsidies. This mechanism works at a cost as government ownership compromises ex post managerial incentives and creates distortion in resource allocation. Nevertheless, under some fairly general conditions, government ownership Pareto dominates private ownership. The analysis corresponds to a host of stylized empirical observations concerning local government-owned firms during China's transition to a market economy. Based on this analysis, I suggest that local government owned firms will be transformed to private ownership as China's input markets become more liberalized.corruption, bribery, government ownership, China's non-state sector

Adjusted empirical likelihood with high-order precision

Empirical likelihood is a popular nonparametric or semi-parametric statistical method with many nice statistical properties. Yet when the sample size is small, or the dimension of the accompanying estimating function is high, the application of the empirical likelihood method can be hindered by low precision of the chi-square approximation and by nonexistence of solutions to the estimating equations. In this paper, we show that the adjusted empirical likelihood is effective at addressing both problems. With a specific level of adjustment, the adjusted empirical likelihood achieves the high-order precision of the Bartlett correction, in addition to the advantage of a guaranteed solution to the estimating equations. Simulation results indicate that the confidence regions constructed by the adjusted empirical likelihood have coverage probabilities comparable to or substantially more accurate than the original empirical likelihood enhanced by the Bartlett correction.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOS750 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org