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Full-Text Articles in Industrial Organization

Foreign Direct Investment And Industrial Agglomeration: Evidence From China, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Xuan Luo, Lianming Zhu Apr 2020

Foreign Direct Investment And Industrial Agglomeration: Evidence From China, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Xuan Luo, Lianming Zhu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on industrial ag-glomeration. Using the differential effects of FDI deregulation in 2002 in China on different industries, we find that FDI actually affects industrial agglomeration neg-atively. As FDI brings technological spillovers and various agglomeration benefits, other forces must be at work to drive our empirical finding. We propose a simple theory that FDI may discourage industrial agglomeration due to fiercer competition pressure. We find various evidence on this competition mechanism. We also examine an alternative theory based on spatial political competition, but find no evidence sup-porting it. On industrial growth, …


Common Power Laws For Cities And Spatial Fractal Structures, Tomoya Mori, Tony E. Smith, Wen-Tai Hsu Mar 2020

Common Power Laws For Cities And Spatial Fractal Structures, Tomoya Mori, Tony E. Smith, Wen-Tai Hsu

Research Collection School Of Economics

City-size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across a wide range of countries. But such distributions are also meaningful at other spatial scales, such as within certain regions of a country. Using data from China, France, Germany, India, Japan, and the United States, we first document that large cities are significantly more spaced out than would be expected by chance alone. We next construct spatial hierarchies for countries by first partitioning geographic space using a given number of their largest cities as cell centers and then continuing this partitioning procedure within each cell recursively. We find …


Why Do Businesses Grow Faster In Urban Areas Than In Rural Areas?, Lee, Jungho, Jianhuan Xu Mar 2020

Why Do Businesses Grow Faster In Urban Areas Than In Rural Areas?, Lee, Jungho, Jianhuan Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

We document that growth of business earnings is mostly observed among young firmsin metro areas. Three explanations are considered: metro areas attract more-productiveentrepreneurs, and reaching the optimal size takes time due to borrowing constraints;metro areas provide better learning opportunities; and high operating costs in metroareas allow only the productive firms to survive. We use a firm-dynamics model with alocation choice to quantify the extent to which the three theories explain the data. Wefind the first two theories largely explain the high growth among metro, young firms. Ourmodel also suggests the distortion in entrepreneurs’ location choice can induce substantialwelfare loss.


Uncertainty, Depreciation And Industry Growth, Roberto Samaiego, Juliana Yu Sun Nov 2019

Uncertainty, Depreciation And Industry Growth, Roberto Samaiego, Juliana Yu Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

When investment is irreversible, firms invest only when the mismatch between their productivity and their capital stock is large. This suggests that two factors should be related to the frequency of mismatch: volatility and capital depreciation. A canonical model of industry dynamics with investment irreversibility displays slow growth in times of high uncertainty, and decline is particularly pronounced in industries where capital depreciation is rapid. A differences-in-differences regression using industry growth data from a large sample of countries supports this result.


Industry 4.0: Challenges And Opportunities In Different Countries, Keng Siau, Yingrui Xi, Cui Zou Aug 2019

Industry 4.0: Challenges And Opportunities In Different Countries, Keng Siau, Yingrui Xi, Cui Zou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Along with the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), cyber-physical systems (CPSs), big data analytics, and cloud computing, Industry 4.0 — a subset of the fourth Industrial Revolution — has started to emerge and take root in many countries. Many expect that Industry 4.0 will be transformative and revolutionary for multiple industries and countries. Its impact will be much more significant than those of Industry 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Most studies and papers on Industry 4.0 have examined its impact on various industries, jobs, and organizations. In this article, we investigate the impact of Industry 4.0 on countries and groups …


Tax Uncertainty And Business Activity, Jungho Lee, Jianhuan Xu Jun 2019

Tax Uncertainty And Business Activity, Jungho Lee, Jianhuan Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate the extent to which uncertainties about tax policies affect business activities. We develop a statewide tax-uncertainty measure (TU measure) and show that it captures state corporate tax uncertainty. By comparing adjacent counties across state borders, we show that increasing tax uncertainty by one standard deviation (a 30% increase in the TU measure) leads to a 0.17% point per-year decrease in the growth rate of establishments over two years. The result holds after conducting a variety of robustness checks and is not likely to be driven by general state-policy uncertainties.


Does Foreign Direct Investment Lead To Industrial Agglomeration?, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Xuan Luo, Lianming Zhu Mar 2019

Does Foreign Direct Investment Lead To Industrial Agglomeration?, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Xuan Luo, Lianming Zhu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on industrial agglomeration.Using the differential effects of FDI deregulation in 2002 in China on different industries, we find that FDI actually affects industrial agglomeration negatively. This result is somewhat counter-intuitive, as the conventional wisdom tends to suggest that FDI attracts domestic firms to cluster for various agglomeration benefits, in particular technology spillovers. To reconcile our empirical findings and the conventional wisdom, we develop a theory of FDI and agglomeration based on two counter-veiling forces. Technology diffusion from FDI attracts domestic firms to cluster, but fiercer competition drives firms away. Which …


Competition, Markups, And Gains From Trade: A Quantitative Analysis Of China Between 1995 And 2004, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Guiying Laura Wu Jan 2019

Competition, Markups, And Gains From Trade: A Quantitative Analysis Of China Between 1995 And 2004, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Guiying Laura Wu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper provides a quantitative analysis of gains from trade in a model with head-to-head competition using Chinese firm-level data from Economic Censuses in 1995 and 2004. We find a significant reduction in trade cost during this period, and total gains from such improved openness during this period is 7:1%. The gains are decomposed into a Ricardian component and two pro-competitive ones. The procompetitive effects account for 20% of the total gains. Moreover, the total gains from trade are 13 31% larger than what would result from the formula provided by ACR (Arkolakis, Costinot, and Rodríguez-Clare 2012), which nests a …


Estimating Switching Costs With Market Share Data: An Application To Medicare Part D, Jung Won Yeo, Daniel P. Miller Nov 2018

Estimating Switching Costs With Market Share Data: An Application To Medicare Part D, Jung Won Yeo, Daniel P. Miller

Research Collection School Of Economics

Choice inertia and switching frictions are well-documented features of the demand for health insurance. In this paper, we estimate switching costs in the Medicare Part D market with aggregate market share data using standard discrete choice models for differentiated products. We consider various modelling assumptions: myopic and forward-looking consumers, and with and without random coefficients. Both myopic and forward-looking consumer models with no random coefficients yield switching cost estimates that closely match the actual average switching frequency, with implied dollar-valued switching costs of $1600 to $2000. We find the inclusion of random coefficients to the myopic consumer model results in …


Does Foreign Direct Investment Lead To Industrial Agglomeration?, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Xuan Luo, Lianming Zhu Sep 2018

Does Foreign Direct Investment Lead To Industrial Agglomeration?, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Xuan Luo, Lianming Zhu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on industrial agglomeration. Using the differential effects of FDI deregulation in 2002 in China on different industries, we find that FDI actually affects industrial agglomeration negatively. This result is somewhat counter-intuitive, as the conventional wisdom tends to suggest that FDI attracts domestic firms to cluster for various agglomeration benefits, in particular technology spillovers. To reconcile our empirical findings and the conventional wisdom, we develop a theory of FDI and agglomeration based on two counter-veiling forces. Technology diffusion from FDI attracts domestic firms to cluster, but fiercer competition drives firms away. …


When Does Limited Commitment Matter In A Production Economy?, Kyoung Jin Choi, Jungho Lee May 2018

When Does Limited Commitment Matter In A Production Economy?, Kyoung Jin Choi, Jungho Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate the conditions under which the first-best allocation without commitment is sustainable in a production economy. While it is widely known in the literature that allowing capital accumulation creates a distortion, we find that it can help to sustain the first-best allocation. We also find that for a certain set of endowment economiesin which the efficient allocation is not sustainable, the efficient allocation becomes sustainable once we introduce a production technology with very small returns to scale orany returns to scale higher than that of the minimum value. In some cases, gains fromefficient resource allocation between agents can be …


Research Note: Investor Perceptions Of Comparable-To-Industry Versus Higher-Than-Industry Pay Ratio Disclosures, Khim Kelly, Jean Lin Seow Mar 2018

Research Note: Investor Perceptions Of Comparable-To-Industry Versus Higher-Than-Industry Pay Ratio Disclosures, Khim Kelly, Jean Lin Seow

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The usefulness of the CEO-to-employee pay ratio disclosure to investors is subject to significant debate. Our experiment examines participant responses to higher-than-industry and comparable-to-industry pay ratio disclosures in a company. A prior experiment by Kelly and Seow (2016) (hereafter KS) found that incrementally disclosing a higher-than-industry pay ratio on top of higher-than-industry CEO pay had indirect negative effects on the company’s perceived investment potential, via negative perceptions about the fairness of the CEO pay and workplace climate. We find that the negative indirect effects of pay ratio disclosures on perceived investment potential in KS are replicable in our study, and …


Resource Scarcity, Effort, And Performance In Physically Demanding Jobs: An Evolutionary Explanation, Marko Pitesa, Stefan Thau Mar 2018

Resource Scarcity, Effort, And Performance In Physically Demanding Jobs: An Evolutionary Explanation, Marko Pitesa, Stefan Thau

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Based on evolutionary theory, we predicted that cues of resource scarcity in the environment (e.g., news of droughts or food shortages) lead people to reduce their effort and performance in physically demanding work. We tested this prediction in a 2-wave field survey among employees and replicated it experimentally in the lab. In Study 1, employees who perceived resources in the environment to be scarce reported exerting less effort when their jobs involved much (but not little) physical work. In Study 2, participants who read that resources in the environment were scarce performed worse on a task demanding more (carrying books) …


In Good Company: In The Future, Every Business Might Be Social, Christian Petroske Jan 2018

In Good Company: In The Future, Every Business Might Be Social, Christian Petroske

Social Space

It sounds like a riddle: why would Coca Cola, one of the biggest soft drinks companies in the world, be investing in a cause to empower fi ve million female entrepreneurs globally by 2020? It’s true:1 the Coca Cola Company’s initiative, called 5by20, is a forerunning example of a trend sweeping the corporate world. This trend is known by many names, the foremost of which are “shared value”, “inclusive business” or “sustainable business”. Their defi nitions can seem murky at fi rst, but these terms share a common thread. They sit at the intersection of economy and society, one that …


On The Relationship Between Household Wealth And Entrepreneurship, Jungho Lee Aug 2017

On The Relationship Between Household Wealth And Entrepreneurship, Jungho Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

Motivated by a substantial number of startup owners with negative household net worth, I present a model that incorporates credit borrowing into Evans and Jovanovic [1989]. The estimated model generates no relationship between household wealth and the propensity for business entry. Ignoring credit borrowing for potential business owners substantially overstates the efficiency loss from financial constraints in business entry. However, the efficiency loss in investments by the entrants is large even if credit borrowing is allowed. Individuals who start a business once credit borrowing is available are those whose business ideas are of a high-enough quality to compensate high financing …


Does Wage-Inflation Targeting Complement Foreign Exchange Intervention? An Evaluation Of A Multi-Target, Two-Instrument Monetary Policy Framework, Taojun Xie, Jingting Liu, Joseph D. Alba, Wai-Mun Chia Apr 2017

Does Wage-Inflation Targeting Complement Foreign Exchange Intervention? An Evaluation Of A Multi-Target, Two-Instrument Monetary Policy Framework, Taojun Xie, Jingting Liu, Joseph D. Alba, Wai-Mun Chia

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We assess the inclusion of wage inflation as an intermediate target of an emerging central bank using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with sticky wages and prices calibrated for the South Korean economy. The model includes wage inflation as an additional target jointly with domestic price inflation and the output gap in a Taylor- type interest rate rule operating with a sterilized foreign exchange (FX) intervention rule. Our results show a complementary relationship between wage inflation targeting and price inflation targeting. That is, by supplementing price inflation targeting with wage inflation targeting, welfare improves for cases with and without …


Free Entry And Social Inefficiency In Vertical Relationships: The Case Of The Japanese Mri Industry, Ken Onishi, Naoki Wakamori, Chiyo Hashimoto, Shun-Ichiro Bessho Aug 2016

Free Entry And Social Inefficiency In Vertical Relationships: The Case Of The Japanese Mri Industry, Ken Onishi, Naoki Wakamori, Chiyo Hashimoto, Shun-Ichiro Bessho

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper quantifies the welfare consequences of the medical arms race in the context of MRI adoption. We build and estimate a model of the vertical structure of the industry where MRI manufacturers sell high- and low-quality MRIs in the upstream market, whereas medical institutions provide medical services to patients in the downstream market. Simulation results suggest that the current free-entry policy in Japan leads to excess MRI adoption. Furthermore, regulating medical institutions’ MRI adoption, taxing MRI purchases, or softening competition among MRI manufacturers would increase social welfare substantially by mitigating the business-stealing effect in the downstream market.


Lumpy Investment, Lumpy Inventories, Ruediger Bachmann, Lin Ma Aug 2016

Lumpy Investment, Lumpy Inventories, Ruediger Bachmann, Lin Ma

Research Collection School Of Economics

The link between the microenvironment (frictions and heterogeneity) and the macroeconomic dynamics of general equilibrium macromodels is influenced by exactly how general equilibrium closes the model. We make this observation concrete using the recent literature on how nonconvex capital adjustment costs influence aggregate investment dynamics. We introduce inventories into a two-sector lumpy investment model and find that nonconvex capital adjustment costs dampen and propagate investment impulse responses, more so than without inventories. With two means of transferring consumption into the future, fixed capital and inventories, the tight link between aggregate saving and fixed capital investment is broken.


Productivity Growth And Structural Transformation, Roberto Samaniego, Juliana Y. Sun Jul 2016

Productivity Growth And Structural Transformation, Roberto Samaniego, Juliana Y. Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

Economies diversify and then re-specialize as they develop. These “stages of diversification” may result from productivity-driven structural change if initially resources are concentrated in industries other than those that dominate economic structure in the long run. A calibrated multi-industry growth model with many countries and with industry differences in productivity growth rates replicates the main features of the “stages of diversification”. We also present evidence that countries systematically shift resources towards manufacturing industries with rapid productivity growth, and towards sectors with low productivity growth, consistent with the model and supporting the “productivity mechanism” for structural transformation.


Macroeconomic Effects Of Energy Price Shocks On The Business Cycle, Bao Tan Huynh Apr 2016

Macroeconomic Effects Of Energy Price Shocks On The Business Cycle, Bao Tan Huynh

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a framework of endogenous energy production with convex costs to investigate the general equilibrium effects of energy price shocks on the business cycle. This framework explicitly models the consumption of durables and nondurables and implements a high complementarity between energy and the usage of durables and capital. The model predicts energy price elasticities of various consumption variables that fall within reasonable agreement with empirical estimates. Convex costs in energy production produce energy price and energy supply dynamics that tallies well with empirical behavior. Our analysis confirms in a theoretical setting recent observations that not all energy price …


Quantity Discounts And Capital Misallocation In Vertical Relationships, Ken Onishi Feb 2016

Quantity Discounts And Capital Misallocation In Vertical Relationships, Ken Onishi

Research Collection School Of Economics

I study transactions between aircraft manufacturers and airlines as well as airlines' utilization of their fleet. Aircraft production is characterized by economies of scale via learning-by-doing, which creates a trade-off between current profit and future competitive advantage in the aircraft market. The latter consideration makes large buyers more attractive than small buyers and induces quantity discounts. The resulting nonlinear pricing strategy may distort both production and allocation in favor of large buyers. In the data, there is a negative correlation between the size of aircraft orders and the per-unit price, and a positive correlation between the price paid and the …


Robust Information Cascade With Endogenous Ordering, Yi Zhang Jan 2016

Robust Information Cascade With Endogenous Ordering, Yi Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We analyze a sequential decision model with endogenous ordering in which decision makers are allowed to choose the time of acting (exercising a risky investment option) or waiting. We show the existence of a unique symmetric equilibrium and characterize information cascade under endogenous ordering. Further, if there are two or more risky investment options, individuals tend to wait longer with competition. Hence, we could end up with a dilemma: more options might be worse.


Technology And Contractions: Evidence From Manufacturing, Roberto M. Samaniego, Yu Sun Oct 2015

Technology And Contractions: Evidence From Manufacturing, Roberto M. Samaniego, Yu Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

Theory suggests a range of technological characteristics that might interact with the business cycle depending on what kind of shocks or propagation mechanisms are quantitatively important. We use variation in industry growth within manufacturing to determine which technological characteristics interact significantly with the business cycle. We find that growth in labor intensive industries is especially sensitive to contractions. We show this cross-industry asymmetry occurs specifically in contractions, not in recoveries nor over the cycle in general.


Reputation Building Through Failure, Huan Wang, Yi Zhang Jan 2015

Reputation Building Through Failure, Huan Wang, Yi Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In China, many entrepreneurs receive strong supports each time their business fails. This contradicts existing literature and differs from rare revival elsewhere. The major explanation lies in China’s unfriendly and unstable policy environments, due to which business failure per se cannot discern competence. Therefore, entrepreneurs failing because of policy shocks have the incentive for extra efforts to build reputation of competence and trustworthiness. This mechanism prepares a pool of seasoned entrepreneurs who can help alleviate damages of not only policy shocks, but also such system shocks as business cycle and sector upgrading, and therefore makes the economy more adaptable.


Negotiating Deals From A Position Of Powerlessness, Michael Schaerer, Roderick I. Swaab Dec 2014

Negotiating Deals From A Position Of Powerlessness, Michael Schaerer, Roderick I. Swaab

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

When you are negotiating a deal it pays to have viable alternatives to fall back on – or at least that’s what most people think. New research suggests that being powerless can be liberating and help you achieve better deals.


Exchange Rates And Export Structure, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Yingke Zhou Sep 2014

Exchange Rates And Export Structure, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Yingke Zhou

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies whether changes in the exchange rate affect a country’s export structure, using an arguably exogenous sudden appreciation of renminbi on July 21, 2005 as the main source of identification. Employing combined regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences approach, we show that China’s export structure became more similar to that of the developed countries after the currency appreciation. We also find that the majority of the appreciation effect comes from the inter-firm resource reallocation rather than the inter-region or intra-firm resource reallocation.


Number Of Firms And Price Competition, Kyle Bagwell, Gea Myoung Lee Feb 2014

Number Of Firms And Price Competition, Kyle Bagwell, Gea Myoung Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

The relationship between the number of firms and price competition is a central issue in economics. To explore this relationship, we modify Varianís (1980) model and assume that firms are privately informed about their costs of production. Allowing that the support of possible cost types may be large, we show that an increase in the number of firms induces lower (higher) prices for lower-cost (highercost) firms. We also characterize the pricing distribution as the number of firms approaches infinity, finding that the equilibrium pricing function converges to the monopoly pricing function for all but the lowest possible cost type. If …


China At The Crossroads, Singapore Management University Oct 2013

China At The Crossroads, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

When villagers in Wukan village (乌坎) in Southern China protested against illegal land grabs in September 2011, it highlighted a main source of tension in China: the displacement of rural Chinese by rapid urbanisation, sometimes done illegally. The Seige of Wukan was a case in point, where local Communist Party officials had sold communally held farmland


Contract Enforcement: A Political Economy Model Of Legal Development, Fali Huang Aug 2013

Contract Enforcement: A Political Economy Model Of Legal Development, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In an effort to understand why the relative usage of relational and legal contracts differs across societies, this article builds a political economy model of legal development where legal quality of contract enforcement is a costly public good. It finds that legal investment tends to be too small under elite rule but too large under majority rule in comparison with the socially optimal level. Furthermore, elite rule, low legal quality, and high-income inequality may form a self-perpetuating circle that hinders economic development. In contrast to the conventional view, this article suggests that the often-observed association between heavy reliance on relational …


Trade, Firm Selection, And Industrial Agglomeration, Wen-Tai Hsu, Ping Wang Nov 2012

Trade, Firm Selection, And Industrial Agglomeration, Wen-Tai Hsu, Ping Wang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop a model of trade and agglomeration that incorporates trade in both intermediate goods and final goods and allows all firms to choose their locations. There are two types of labor: skilled labor, which is mobile, and unskilled labor, which is immobile. Upon choosing its factory site, a final goods firm that is managed by skilled labor can produce these goods using local unskilled labor and a variety of intermediate goods produced by productivity-heterogeneous producers. We characterize world equilibrium and establish the conditions under which industrial agglomeration arises as a stable equilibrium outcome. We show that when the unskilled …