The southern pine beetle, Dendroctonus frontalis, is a major threat to pine forest health in the South, and is expected to play an increasingly important role in the future of the South’s pine forests (Ward and Mistretta 2002). Once a forest stand is infected with southern pine beetle (SPB), elimination and isolation of the infested and immediately surrounding trees is required to control the o...

In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy Joseph A. Schumpeter concluded that socialism would eventually displace capitalism in Western democracies. This would come about as a result of the superior performance of capitalism. We extract six ”stylized” propositions that are essential elements of Schumpeter’s prediction about the fate of capitalism. These propositions are confronted with the develop...

A large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between oil abundance and economic growth. The existing empirical evidence on the oil curse, however, does not account for variations in the ownership of oil. This article investigates whether the effect of oil abundance on growth varies with ownership structures. It also investigates whether institutional quality influences the effect o...

There has been little systematic discussion of the issues associated with private involvement in infrastructure. Analysis of the relative performance of the private and public sector in different phases of infrastructure provision suggests that in most cases, the private sector will be most efficient in the construction phase but the public sector will be best equipped to handle the risks assoc...

The argument for the privatization of state enterprises is based on the superior efficiency of private over state ownership. This argument is only true when it ignores the institutional constraints including insecure property rights enforcement, land, credit, and export-quota policies. By using a survey of ninety-six textile-garment enterprises in Vietnam, private and foreign enterprises were f...

All opinions expressed here are those of the authors and not those of the Economics Education and Research Consortium. Research dissemination by the EERC may include views on policy, but the EERC itself takes no institutional policy positions Based on panel data from 1995 – 1997, the paper focuses on the impact of ownership structure on the performance of Russian non-financial privatized compan...

This paper analyzes the relationship of ownership concentration and firm performance in the context of different institutional environments in 28 Central and Eastern European transition economies. Using the BEEPS data for the period from 2002 to 2009 we find an inverted u-shaped relation of ownership concentration and firm performance for those firms that operate in non-EU-member countries as w...

The ownership structures of firms are endogenous. This makes it difficult to produce w direct evidence on the Berle and Means Berle, A.A., Means, G.C., 1932. The Modern x Corporation and Private Property, New York. hypothesis that corporate governance becomes less efficient as the degree of separation of ownership and control increases. We address this issue by studying Austrian cooperative ban...

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 ...

This paper analyzes the effects of partial public ownership on product differentiation and social welfare in the framework of a mixed duopoly with spatial competition. It shows that unless the public ownership exceeds a critical level, maximal differentiation continues to hold and social welfare does not improve. However, both the critical level of ownership and the marginal effect of ownership...