Partial Privatization And Firm Performance: Evidence From India

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39810/3/wp426.pd

Application-centric Resource Provisioning for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

In late 2009, Amazon introduced spot instances to offer their unused resources at lower cost with reduced reliability. Amazon's spot instances allow customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current spot price. The spot price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids exceed it gain access to the available spot instances. Customers may expect their services at lower cost with spot instances compared to on-demand or reserved. However the reliability is compromised since the instances(IaaS) providing the service(SaaS) may become unavailable at any time without any notice to the customer. Checkpointing and migration schemes are of great use to cope with such situation. In this paper we study various checkpointing schemes that can be used with spot instances. Also we device some algorithms for checkpointing scheme on top of application-centric resource provisioning framework that increase the reliability while reducing the cost significantly

Partial Privatization and Firm Performance: Evidence from India

Privatization in India is mostly limited to the diffuse sale of minority stakes in firms. Since control rights have not been transferred to private owners it is widely contended that the process has had little impact on firm behavior. We find however that even the sale of minority stakes has a positive impact on firm performance and productivity. As the government remains the controlling owner in these firms, we infer that the improvement is attributable to the role of the stock market in monitoring managerial performance rather than to a change in owners' objectives. Consistent with this interpretation, we find that improvements in earnings are due to an increase in the productivity of labor rather than layoffs. Partial privatization continues to affect the sales and operating efficiency of firms when we control for competitive conditions, and the evidence also suggests that privatization and competition have a complementary impact on firm performance.partial privatization,India, manager incentives, firm behavior, stock market monitoring

Financial Dependence, Stock Market Liberalizations, and Growth

Stock market liberalizations provide a natural experiment to test for the causal relation between financial development and economic growth. We test this relation by investigating whether liberalizations facilitate growth through the particular mechanism of reducing capital market imperfections that drive a wedge between the external and internal cost of capital to firms. Using panel data on a large sample of emerging markets, we find no evidence of a uniform shift across all sectors in average industry growth following liberalization. Instead, consistent with the hypothesis that liberalizations lower the incremental cost of external capital, it appears that industries that depend more on external finance experience significantly higher growth following liberalization. We also find that growth occurs through the creation of new establishments, which is more likely to require external funds, rather than through an expansion in the average size of existing establishments, which firms are more likely to finance with internal cash. These results are robust to alternative hypotheses, country and industry specific controls, other economic reforms, world business cycle e ects, and contemporaneous macroeconomic shocks.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39947/3/wp562.pd