We document evidence of corruption in Chinese state asset sales. These sales involved stakes in partially privatized firms, providing a benchmark—the price of publicly traded shares—to measure underpricing. Underpricing is correlated with deal attributes associated with misgovernance and corruption. Sales by “disguised” owners that misrepresent their state ownership to elude regulatory scrutiny...

forcement of the law while litigation is pending. To be granted a preliminary injunction, the requesting party must show their case is likely to succeed on the merits. Cooke’s order provides a preview into the approach the court will take in analyzing the merits of the case and suggests the law is unlikely to withstand legal challenge. After establishing that the law concerns the First Amendmen...

Human social life is structured by social norms creating both obligations and entitlements. Recent research has found that young children enforce simple obligations against norm violators by protesting. It is not known, however, whether they understand entitlements in the sense that they will actively object to a second party attempting to interfere in something that a third party is entitled t...

A friendship system is introduced for modular static verification of object invariants. It extends a previous methodology, based on ownership hierarchy encoded in auxiliary state, to allow for state dependence across ownership boundaries. Friendship describes a formal protocol for a granting class to grant a friend class permission to express its invariant over fields in the granting class. The...

In many countries infrastructure liberalization proceeded faster than the privatization of former state monopolies. Regulatory agencies, established to oversee the transition and safeguard the preconditions for competition, therefore monitor state-owned firms in addition to privately owned firms. The research on public-private firms has generated heterogeneous findings, with some pointing to th...

Privatization—defined here as the transfer of ownership state-owned organizations to private parties—has attracted attention scholars across multiple fields. Privatization programs have been based on assumption, grounded in microeconomic theory, that a shift from public will incentivize more efficient management available resources. However, failure deliver expected outcomes some cases and nuan...

Privatization shifts ownership and control of public assets to private investors. Many governments use it as an important means to invigorate their state-owned enterprises (SOEs). However, it is not clear how changes in government ownership affect firm performance. Some economists argue that, in competitive markets without significant externalities, government ownership is inferior to private o...

The Institute of Medicine noted that effective substance abuse treatment (SAT) programs integrate individual therapeutic approaches with transitional/ancillary services. In addition, research suggests that type of ownership impacts SAT services offered and that Medicaid plays a key role in SAT access. Data from the National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services for the years 2000 and 200...