We develop a theoretical model in which firms are either private or state-owned. When firms become insolvent, the government can intervene with general measures, like subsidies, or by nationalizing firms. The government only intervenes when the bankruptcy of a firm entails social costs. In a stylized model, we analyze how government interventions affect allocative and productive efficiency. Nat...

Government ownership of banks is very common in countries other than the United States. This paper provides cross-country, bank-level empirical evidence about political influences on these banks. It shows that government-owned banks increase their lending in election years relative to private banks. This effect is robust to controlling for country-specific macroeconomic and institutional factor...

Few would argue that economic growth is the sole aim of society or, as conventionally measured, it is always an unmitigated blessing. Development can brings with it a degradation of the environment and the narrowing of ecological diversity. Certain industries, although not many, are natural monopolies or at best unstable oligopolies feared by the public as taking advantage of their privileged p...

Using hand-collected data, we study the evolution, causes, and economic effects of the pyramidal ownership structure in China’s listed firms over 2001-2008. We quantitatively characterize the use of pyramidal structure by private firms and local state controlled firms. We find that private owners in China show strong incentives to build more extensive pyramids in weak institutional environments...

BACKGROUND In order to measure and analyse the technical efficiency of district hospitals in Ghana, the specific objectives of this study were to (a) estimate the relative technical and scale efficiency of government, mission, private and quasi-government district hospitals in Ghana in 2005; (b) estimate the magnitudes of output increases and/or input reductions that would have been required to...

In this study, the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR ) disclosure on idiosyncratic risk has been investigated concerning three stakeholder theory, information asymmetry, and risk management. It also goes further and explores the impact of some corporate governance mechanisms such as ownership structure, board characteristics, and incentive contracts on this relationship. To achieve...

We show that 70% of Chinese listed companies are ultimately controlled by government agencies, thereby indicating that state ownership remains widespread in China’s stock markets. Three questions are considered that are related to government control structures and their impact on firm value: (1) how do government agencies maintain their control of listed companies; (2) what are the impacts of d...

This systematic review examines what factors explain the diversity of findings regarding hospital ownership and quality. We identified 31 observational studies written in English since 1990 that used multivariate analysis to examine quality of care at nonfederal general acute, short-stay US hospitals. We find that pooled estimates of ownership effects are sensitive to the subset of studies incl...

Despite the positive effect electricity grids separated from generation and supply by ownership are expected to have on the level of competition in the non-network activities, several EU member states still adhere to a solely legally unbundled transmission grid. This choice might be induced by regulators focusing on objectives other than the promotion of consumer interests: theoretically analyz...

Economist Michael Kremer recently proposed that the government offer to buy important pharmaceutical patents from their respective patent holdersJ His argument is that public ownership would largely eliminate the monopolist ic distortions caused by the patent system, distortions that tend to be especially acute in the pharmaceutical context, z Under Kremer ' s proposal, the government would pay...