Corporations are evil

Or are they?

But before one jumps to the conclusion that therefore corporations should be denied the right to influence political decisions in the interests of efficiency, more must be considered. For example, last month, over one hundred public corporations, most of them high-tech firms, filed a brief opposing the legality of the executive order signed by President Trump barring various immigrants.1) This can be viewed as collective action by firms in defense of capitalism and the free flow of goods and services. Those opposed to firms lobbying regulatory agencies would probably approve this defense by corporations of human rights. Nor was this case unique. Corporations, like Apple, Facebook, and Google, have regularly defended human rights.

The above quote is from John C. Coffee Jr (Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law and director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School) in an interview at the Pro-Market blog. The idea that firms can be defenders of human rights is not an idea that many of our anti-corporation, anti-capitalism, anti-globalisation, anti-free trade warriors have given much thought but it is an idea that deserves more attention than it gets.

No government cash for new Auckland stadium

Some good news is reported in the New Zealand Herald,

An Auckland central city stadium wouldn't get Government funding, Prime Minister Bill English says.

A stadium is back on the cards after Auckland Mayor Phil Goff commissioned work on the feasibility of a new central city site costing up to $1 billion.

This morning English said the Government's position remained the same - it would not put up any money towards a stadium.

"Our top priority right now is this billion-dollar housing infrastructure fund, which we're in intense negotiations with the council about right now. That's going to take all our attention and cash for a while," English told The Am Show.

"It hasn't been raised with us. It's not a high priority. We're not aiming to put money into it."

Given that all economic studies on stadiums show that they are white elephant such news will please economists, if not many non-economists. The view of economists is summarised by Dennis Coates and Brad R. Humphreys in their article Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Subsidies for Sports Franchises, Stadiums, and Mega-Events?

This paper reviews the empirical literature assessing the effects of subsidies for professional sports franchises and facilities. The evidence reveals a great deal of consistency among economists doing research in this area. That evidence is that sports subsidies cannot be justified on the grounds of local economic development, income growth or job creation, those arguments most frequently used by subsidy advocates. The paper also relates survey evidence showing that economists in general oppose sports subsidies. In addition to reviewing the empirical literature, we describe the economic intuition that probably underlies the strong consensus among economists against sports subsidies.

Now if we could just encourage the Auckland council to follow central government's lead.

Dan Griswold on trade deficits

Strangely national income accounting is big news right now, at least insofar as it pertains to trade. Thanks to some very weird thinking on trade in the Trump administration trade deficits are all the rage. Not that they are well understood.

This lack of understanding has bought forth a new paper by Daniel Griswold on Plumbing America’s Balance of Trade (pdf) to help people get a handle on the issue of the trade deficit.

The abstract reads,

By focusing only on the trade deficit, critics miss the full economic benefits of a more open American economy. This paper provides original analysis of the total inflow and outflow of dollars through numerous “pipes” that make up the plumbing of US commerce with the rest of the world. It explains how underlying macroeconomic factors determine the size and direction of America’s trade balance, why bilateral deficits with trading partners do not indicate a failure of US trade policy, and why efforts to employ trade policy to fix the overall trade deficit or bilateral deficits would be futile and self-damaging. Among the key policy conclusions: America’s net positive inflow of capital year after year indicates the continuing attractiveness of the United States as a destination for foreign investment; imports benefit US consumers as well as producers; and direct foreign investment abroad by US companies is not primarily a platform for importing goods and services back to the United States but for expanding sales to foreign customers.

P.J. O'Rourke on Trump, populism, and "How the Hell Did This Happen?"

In the latest Reason Podcast, O'Rourke tells Nick Gillespie what he learned about Donald Trump's appeal from his time spent covering the 2016 election, why populism is a "tragedy" for libertarians, and why he wants his kids to study English and the liberal arts at college. "Be immersed in the history of civilization, you know, in literature, in the arts," he says. "You're going to be force-marched through these things. Some of it's going to be boring. Some of it you won't appreciate for another 40 years, but it's that college liberal arts education, is the last chance you really get to [immerse yourself in art, music, and culture]."

Robert Whaples on the economics of Pope Francis

For those with an interest in the economics of religion here is an interview with Robert Whaples in which he discusses the Economics of Pope Francis.

Is capitalism part of the poverty problem facing the world or part of the solution? Are human beings doing a good job preserving the earth for future generations? To improve the world, should we improve capitalism or ourselves? Robert Whaples of Wake Forest University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about "Laudato Si'," Pope Francis's encyclical on capitalism, poverty, and environmental issues.

A direct link to the audio.

Benefits of importing: Evidence from US firms’ global sourcing decisions

Globalisation is under threat, just think of the Trump administration's approach to trade policy. One thing they miss when attacking trade is the fact that US firms benefit significantly from increased import opportunities as they lower their costs and expand. Thus increased protectionism in the form of higher domestic tariffs would decrease these domestic firms’ competitiveness both at home and abroad.

In a recent column at VoxEU.org, Pol Antràs, Teresa Fort and Felix Tintelnot discuss research that brings a new perspective to the trade debate by focusing on a potentially positive effect of trade: namely, the opportunity for firms to access cheaper inputs from foreign suppliers. Distinguishing final good trade from firms’ input sourcing decisions is important, since intermediate inputs account for approximately two thirds of international trade and vertical specialisation across countries is an important and growing feature of the world economy.

Antràs, Fort and Tintelnot develop a framework for analysing global sourcing.

Our research provides a theoretical framework that can explain these results, and that can be used to quantify the aggregate implications of an improvement in the potential savings from Chinese imports. In our paper, we present a model with heterogeneous firms that self-select into importing based on their productivity and country-specific variables, such as wages, trade costs, and technology. Firms can, in principle, buy intermediate inputs from any country in the world. However, adding a country to the set of countries from which a firm is able to import requires incurring a market-specific fixed cost.

In this setting, it is difficult to determine the profit-maximising set of countries from which a firm will import. This is because the marginal benefit of adding a particular country depends on the other countries from which the firm imports. Sourcing decisions across countries are therefore interdependent, which affects whether improvements in one country (e.g. China) will lead firms that import from China to increase or decrease their sourcing from other countries.

Despite these complications, we show that, under an empirically relevant condition, selection into importing exhibits complementarities across source markets. More specifically, when demand is responsive to changes in price, or there is large dispersion of input productivities across locations, the addition of a country to a firm's portfolio of input sources necessarily increases the marginal gain from adding other locations. As a result, the model predicts that the number of countries from which a firm imports will be increasing in firm size, a prediction that holds in our US data, [ ... ]

We use the Census data to estimate the model and confirm that the condition guaranteeing complementarity in firms’ sourcing decisions is indeed satisfied in the data. Our estimates also imply that an average US firm sourcing from all 66 foreign countries in our sample faces around 9% lower input costs than a purely domestic firm, and consequently has sales that are approximately 32% larger. A firm at the 90th percentile of foreign sourcing intensity imports 47% of its input purchases, which implies cost savings of 30% and a 176% increase in its sales due to global sourcing.

We also use the model to analyse the implications of a positive ‘shock’ to the potential cost savings from China. In the ‘complements case’, the model predicts that firms that begin importing from a new country (such as China) will also increase their domestic and third-market sourcing. The results from the counterfactual analysis confirm this prediction, and are consistent with the reduced-form evidence on China importers described above. In contrast, non-China importers shrink in response to the shock, since they compete against the importers who now have lower costs.

Antràs, Fort and Tintelnot also look at the effects on consumers and workers.

Finally, our framework and estimation shed light on the impact of global sourcing on US consumers and workers. In our model and counterfactual analysis, China’s increased savings potential causes the US price index to fall 0.2%, as firms sourcing from China lower their prices. This reflects the fact that cheaper inputs allow some firms to lower their costs, thereby increasing the competitive environment in which all firms operate. This leads importing firms to expand, while the less productive firms that cannot take advantage of the China shock shrink. [ ... ] Firms at the top of the distribution grow, while medium and small firms that are not sufficiently productive to import from China shrink or exit altogether. Our framework thus predicts that global sourcing magnifies pre-existing differences in underlying firm productivity and increases the skewness in the size distribution of firms. Although this reallocation will entail displacement for some workers, consumers all enjoy lower prices and aggregate productivity grows.

When looking at the effects of input sourcing from China Antràs, Fort and Tintelnot write,

In line with previous work, we document the impact of changes in imports from China from 1997 to 2007. Using firm-level US Census data on production and imports, we show that US manufacturers that grew their imports from China also grew their domestic sourcing, their sourcing from third markets, and the number of countries from which they import. These results are surprising, since one might have expected imports sourced from China to displace inputs made elsewhere. In contrast, the data suggest that savings from China allow firms to grow sufficiently so that they also use more third-market and domestic inputs. Since domestic inputs require labour to produce, the results imply that importers increase the demand for US workers used in their firm and/or by their suppliers.

We also estimate the causal impact of changes in US manufacturers’ Chinese imports on domestic and third-market sourcing. To do so, we exploit the significant productivity growth within China and its accession to the WTO in 2001 to construct a firm-specific, exogenous shock to the potential savings from Chinese imports. In the spirit of Autor et al. (2013) and Hummels et al. (2014), we instrument for changes in US firms’ imports from China using changes in Chinese export shares to other high-income countries in a firm’s 1997 input industries. To distinguish the role of sourcing from import competition, we also include specifications in which we control for changes in import penetration from China in a firm’s output industry, and in which we instrument for changes in import penetration using a shock to Chinese potential in a firm’s output industry. Across all specifications, we find that firms that increase their Chinese imports also grow their domestic sourcing, sourcing from third markets, and the number of countries from which they import. In contrast, increased import competition generally has a negative impact on these outcomes.

Implications for trade policy?

There is mounting evidence that there are winners and losers from trade. While the theory in our paper is consistent with these findings, our work also points to a big potential cost of addressing these distributional consequences by limiting trade. In particular, it is clear that some US firms benefit significantly from increased import opportunities as they lower their costs and expand. Even if trade partners do not retaliate in response to increased protectionism, higher domestic tariffs would decrease these domestic firms’ competitiveness both at home and abroad. This represents a potentially significant drawback of protectionism that should not be ignored in the current debate about the costs and benefits of globalisation.

Marriage, kids, and the wage gap

The career dynamics of the gender gap for graduates of the Chicago Business School, as studied by Bertrand, Goldin, and Katz (2010), illustrate a common pattern. While women and men start their careers with similar earnings, a substantial gap arises over time, and the arrival of children is a major concurrent factor in the rising earnings gap. At least in this highly (and homogeneously) educated population, only a small share of the gender gap is due to premarket factors such as training and coursework; instead, family formation sets the gap in motion.

In short, kids are bad for the income of women. The above quote comes from Specialization Then and Now: Marriage, Children, and the Gender Earnings Gap across Cohorts by Chinhui Juhn and Kristin McCue, Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 31, Number 1—Winter 2017—Pages 183–204.

The conclusion of the paper reads, in part:

Given women’s gains in the labor market, Becker’s (1981) seminal model predicts that patterns of specialization should become less gendered. It predicts that the gender earnings gap associated with marriage should fall, and it has. However, the gender earnings gap associated with children has been more persistent, and the proportion of the remaining gender earnings gap associated with children has risen.

The persistent nature of the motherhood gap—particularly among professional women poised for high-paying careers, and among women who have access to generous leave benefits and childcare subsidies—brings home the point that women still devote much more time to child-rearing over the course of their careers than do men with similar human capital characteristics. One set of explanations put forward revolve around social norms that are slow to change and resist economic forces (Fortin 2005; Bertrand 2011; Bertrand, Kamenica, and Pan 2015). Social norms can serve as both push or pull factors. On the pull side, women may still by-and-large identify themselves as the primary caretaker of children. On the push side, work places may still be governed by norms from an earlier era of male breadwinners with stay-at-home wives. According to this set of norms, an employee is a “good” employee only if he or she is married to the job and willing to work long hours. A number of papers have shown that the gender gap is particularly large in jobs that require long hours (Goldin 2014; Gicheva 2013; Cha and Wheeden 2014; Cortes and Pan 2016) (Emphasis added.)

As an example of this consider some recent research that suggests women earn, on average, around 31% less that men in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics) subjects after gaining a PhD.

The obvious question is why.

Perhaps surprisingly the answer to this questions can be reduced to just two factors: 1) field of study and 2) kids.

But after controlling for differences in academic field, the pay gap between males and females is reduced to around 11% in first-year earnings. There is a tendency for women to graduate in less-lucrative academic fields - such as biology and chemistry than comparatively industry-friendly fields, such as engineering and mathematics.

This 11% difference can be explained by the finding that married women with children earned less than men. Note that an unmarried, childless woman earned, on average, the same annual salary after receiving her doctorate as a man with a PhD in the same field.

These results come from a paper, "STEM Training and Early Career Outcomes of Female and Male Graduate Students: Evidence from UMETRICS Data Linked to the 2010 Census" by Catherine Buffington, Benjamin Cerf, Christina Jones and Bruce A. Weinberg published in the American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings 2016, 106(5): 333–338.

This would suggest that if you are studying the pay gap between men and women two things to take into account are hours worked and time off for kids.

End the federal prohibition on marijuana

From the Cato Institute comes this Cato Daily Podcast in which Rep. Thomas Garrett (R-VA) talks to Caleb O. Brown about the enforcement of federal marijuana laws,

As long as the feds refuse to enforce marijuana laws uniformly across the United States, Rep. Thomas Garrett (R-VA) says it’s time to end federal cannabis prohibition.

An empirical analysis of mergers

Are mergers between firms always the great evil that some people would have us believe? A recent working paper by Celine Bonnet and Jan Philip Schain suggests may be not.

The paper is An Empirical Analysis of Mergers: Efficiency Gains and Impact on Consumer Prices. Its abstract reads,

In this article, we extend the literature on merger simulation models by incorporating its potential synergy gains into structural econometric analysis. We present a three-step integrated approach. We estimate a structural demand and supply model, as in Bonnet and Dubois (2010). This model allows us to recover the marginal cost of each differentiated product. Then we estimate potential efficiency gains using the Data
Envelopment Analysis approach of Bogetoft and Wang (2005), and some assumptions about exogenous cost shifters. In the last step, we simulate the new price equilibrium post merger taking into account synergy gains, and derive price and welfare effects. We use a home scan data set of dairy dessert purchases in France, and show that for two of the three mergers considered, synergy gains could offset the upward pressure on prices post. Some mergers could then be considered as not harmful for consumers.

A dialogue on Israel Kirzner and his contributions to price theory and the competitive market process

From Peter Boettke at the Coordination Problem blog comes this bit of good news,

Liberty Matters this month features an essay by me on Kirzner with commentary by Mario Rizzo, Peter Klein, and Frederic Sautet. Please join the conversation once it opens to the public in a week or so.

Well worth taking the time to read.

Larry White on India’s demonetization and Austrian macroeconomics

From David Beckworth’s new podcast series, Macro Musings comes this audio of an interview with Larry White,

Larry White is a professor of economics at George Mason University and has written widely on monetary theory, free banking, and the Austrian School of Economics. Today, he joins the show to discuss the recent demonetization efforts in India to crack down on corruption. White argues that India’s efforts to end the circulation of large notes and begin the circulation of new notes is having pernicious effects on the Indian population. He and David also discuss Austrian Business Cycle Theory, how this theory was developed by great economists such as Ludwig von Mises, and how the theory may have played a role in the lead up to the Great Recession.

Mark Koyama on the macroeconomics of ancient Rome

From David Beckworth’s new podcast series, Macro Musings comes this audio of an interview with Mark Koyama

Mark Koyama is an Assistant Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. He joins the show to discuss his research on the economic history of ancient Rome from the rise of the Roman Republic to the transition to the Roman Empire to the Empire’s eventual fall.

Navarro on the trade deficit (updated)

As bizarre as this sounds Peter Navarro, Trump's main trade adviser - Navarro is director of the White House National Trade Council, has written in an article in the Wall Street Journal that

The economic argument that trade deficits matter begins with the observation that growth in real GDP depends on only four factors: consumption, government spending, business investment and net exports (the difference between exports and imports). Reducing a trade deficit through tough, smart negotiations is a way to increase net exports—and boost the rate of economic growth.

Now as a matter of national income accounting this is just plan wrong, as any Econ101 student will be able to tell you. Let us ignore the economics of it for now.

The national income identity that Navarro is using is GDP=C+I+G+NX, where C is consumption, I is investment, G is government spending and NX is net exports which equals exports (X) minus imports (M) so we can write GDP=C+I+G+X-M. Now looking at that equation its looks like reducing M will increase GDP, but this is not so. Why?

To see why think about C. When we consume we consume both New Zealand made goods and foreign made goods, so C includes some imports. The same is true for I and G, both these include a component of imports. But as we are interested Gross Domestic Product we only want to include the New Zealand component of C, I and G, so we minus off imports at the end to remove the foreign components of C, I and G, leaving us with only the New Zealand component. That is, if we don't subtract M in the national income identity, we would overstate our GDP by the value of our imports.

Now think about what happens if we reduce imports and thus increase net exports. We reduce M, which makes it look as though GDP will go up but we also reduce the foreign component of C, I and G by exactly the same amount and thus nothing happens to GDP.

What if net exports could be increased by increasing exports via "smart negotiations"? (Whatever that means.) This would reduce the trade balance and thus the size of any current account deficit. But as the balance of payments must be zero a decrease in a current account deficit also means a decrease in the capital account surplus. There has to be a capital account surplus to get the balance of payments to be zero given a current account deficit. But this reduction the capital account means there is less investment and consumption taking place in the economy. A capital inflow lowers the interest rate and thus simulates domestic investment and consumption A smaller current account means a smaller capital account which implies higher interest rates meaning less investment. So if we could somehow increase X we would decrease I and C.

So again it's not clear GDP goes up.

When you start thinking about economics of reducing imports or increasing exports things get even worse but the national income accounting view of Navarro's statement alone should have you wondering about the standard of thinking on trade in the Trump administration.

Update: Don Boudreaux comments on the Navarro piece here, Tim Worstall comments here, Daniel Ikenson comments here, Phil Levy comments here, Richard A. Epstein comments here and Linette Lopez comments here.

Buchholz on Abraham Lincoln on tariffs

Daniel Pearson writes in The Hill,

In his address to a joint session of Congress this week, President Trump quoted President Lincoln’s views on international trade: “The first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, warned that the ‘abandonment of the protective policy by the American government [will] produce want and ruin among our people.’ Lincoln was right.”

Ten years before, Todd Buchholz had written the answer to Trump,

Abraham Lincoln put one protectionist argument pithily: "I don't know much about the tariff, but I do know if I buy a coat in America, I have the coat and America has the money--if I buy a coat in England, I have the coat and England has the money." He was right--he did not know much about the tariff (Buchholz 2007: 76).

And, it is clear, Trumps doesn't know much about the tariff either. Pearson continues,

Lincoln likely saw Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the marketplace to be doing a fine job of allocating resources within the United States, so may not have perceived much additional benefit from allowing it to work across national borders. He likely never contemplated David Ricardo’s concept of “comparative advantage,” which explains that neither individuals nor nations should seek self-sufficiency, because not everyone or every country can do everything well. The better approach is for people to specialize in activities at which they are most productive, then trade to obtain other needed goods and services.

and

Lincoln was a thoughtful man. If he was alive today, his views on trade likely would have evolved to reflect the economic experience of the intervening years. Perhaps he would even support the position articulated by another great Republican president, Ronald Reagan, in his 1983 State of the Union address: “As the leader of the West and as a country that has become great and rich because of economic freedom, America must be an unrelenting advocate of free trade.”

In short, self-sufficiency leads to poverty, trade to wealth. Trump's anti-trade agenda will make Americans poor, not great.

Ref.

• Buchholz, Todd G. (2007). New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought, Completely Revised and Updated, New York: Plume.

A structural model of the retail market for illicit drugs

An interesting new paper on A Structural Model of the Retail Market for Illicit Drugs by Manolis Galenianos and Alessandro Gavazza, has appeared in the American Economic Review, March 2017, Vol. 107, No. 3: Pages 858-896.

The abstract reads,

We estimate a model of illicit drugs markets using data on purchases of crack cocaine. Buyers are searching for high-quality drugs, but they determine drugs' quality (i.e., their purity) only after consuming them. Hence, sellers can rip off first-time buyers or can offer higher-quality drugs to induce buyers to purchase from them again. In equilibrium, a distribution of qualities persists. The estimated model implies that if drugs were legalized, in which case purity could be regulated and hence observable, the average purity of drugs would increase by approximately 20 percent and the dispersion would decrease by approximately 80 percent. Moreover, increasing penalties may raise the purity and affordability of the drugs traded by increasing sellers' relative profitability of targeting loyal buyers versus first-time buyers.

So one advantage of legalising drugs would be an increase in the quality of drugs sold and a reduction if the range of quality in the market with low quality drugs being driven from the market due to more information on quality being available before  purchase. This has a obvious advantage when you consider the effects of low quality drugs on users.

But like with most repugnant markets people - and politicians - will react on emotion rather than evidence and so the war on drugs will continue to be fought and lost.

Feds should focus on privatisation over new infrastructure spending

From the Cato Institute comes this Cato Daily Podcast in which the Cato Institute's Chris Edwards talks to Caleb O. Brown and argues that President Trump’s massive centrally planned infrastructure proposal misses the mark. Edwards argues that Trump should focus on devolving control of assets and privatize many currently public infrastructure projects.

Firm outcomes and local migrant worker supply

Immigration ,and its effects on labour markets, is a hot topic these days. While there have been numerous studies exploring how immigration affects local labour markets, there is much less evidence on the impact of immigrants on firms’ productivity levels. Productivity being important for things like wages in firms. A new column, written by Cristina Mitaritonna, Gianluca Orefice and Giovanni Peri, at VoxEU.org uses detailed, firm-level data from France, to explore how firms react to an increase in the supply of immigrant workers. It finds that provinces that has a large increase in immigrant supply experienced higher productivity growth, especially among firms that were initially less productive. This suggests immigration can promote convergence in firm size and productivity levels.

The productivity effects of immigrates,

A 10% increase in the supply of immigrant workers in the province implies 1.7 and 2.7 log-points increase in the TFP and in the domestic market share of the average firm, respectively. But firms’ heterogeneity matters – initially less productive and smaller firms benefit more from increases in the migrant labour supply. For firms with TFP initially below the median, a 10% increase in the local supply of immigrants implies increases of 3.6 and 8.2 log-points in TFP and domestic market share, respectively. Similarly, for firms with initial employment below the median, a 10% increase in the local supply of immigrants is associated with increases of 2.9 and 8.8 log-points in TFP and domestic market share, respectively.

One of the more controversial aspects of immigration is the employment/wage effect of an increase in immigrants

Finally, higher productivity, higher investment in physical capital, and lower exit probability should help native workers in affected firms. While immigrants may in part compete with natives for jobs, the effects described above will help existing workers, especially those in initially less-productive firms. Using the same empirical strategy, we show that an increase in the immigrant share in the province has a positive effect on the average wage of natives in the firm – a 10% increase in immigrants is associated with a five log-point increase in native wages in the average firm. This effect is slightly smaller (but still positive) for firms with low initial productivity or small initial size. Mobility and selection of native workers across firms, in response to immigrants, may explain this result – while firms with initially low TFP attract highly skilled immigrants (who in turn increase their productivity), highly skilled native workers move to firms that do not hire immigrants (those with initially high TFP). This composition effect explains why the average wage of native workers increases more in firms with smaller increase in immigrant workers (i.e. initially less-productive firms).

The mobility of highly skilled native workers towards firms that hire fewer immigrants may be an important channel of positive spillovers within a province. Firms that do not hire immigrants may experience part of the benefit via an increase in their set of skilled employees.

In summary,

The immigration of highly skilled workers to France over the period 1995-2006 promoted some convergence in size and productivity levels across firms. Provinces with a large increase in immigrant supply experienced higher productivity growth of firms that were initially less productive. We find that this may be due to the fact that smaller, less productive firms were more likely to hire immigrants in order to cut costs and/or adopt new technologies, improve efficiency, and invest in capital and methods that complement the skills of immigrants. This is an interesting and previously unexplored, effect of immigration on local economies.

Is state-ownership detrimental to firm performance? New Zealand evidence

The evidence on the relationship between state-ownership and performance across the globe is mixed, so what does the New Zealand experience have to say on the issue? A forthcoming paper - New Zealand State-owned enterprises: is state-ownership detrimental to firm performance? by Kenny Ka Yin Chan, Li Chen and Norman Wong - in New Zealand Economic Papers looks at the New Zealand situation.

The abstract reads,

This study examines the performance of State-owned enterprises by conducting a contemporary examination in the New Zealand environment. Applying both a cross-sectional and time-series approach, we document significant and consistent evidence that state ownership is negatively associated with firm profitability compared to private ownership. We also find evidence suggesting that state ownership is positively associated with asset turnover and labour intensity, but not associated with labour turnover. This implies that SOEs on average experience a higher asset turnover due to excessive labour employment, compared to private firms.

The paper's conclusion states,

We investigate the relationship between state-ownership and firm performance from two perspectives. Cross-sectional comparisons examine the hypothesis of whether SOEs inherently perform worse than private firms, while time-series analyses test whether performance improves after privatisation. We find consistent results between the cross-sectional and time-series analyses.

The cross-sectional evidence suggests a significant negative association between state ownership and firm profitability, in line with prior research. We do not find a significant relation between state ownership and labour turnover. However, we find SOEs are more efficient in utilising operating assets to generate revenues but are less efficient in terms of labour employment compared to private firms. Consistently, time-series results from industry-adjusted models reveal significant improvements in profitability, as well as declines in both asset turnover and labour intensity after privatisation. Given the lack of compelling evidence on labour turnover, SOEs’ superior efficiency in ATO appears to come at the expenses of excessive labour employment.

The results contribute insights to academia and policy-makers that may be useful. Prior literature has generally only considered performance differences from either a cross-sectional or time-series perspective, so by examining both angles together, our study provides a more holistic view of the issue. Additionally, this study adds to an emerging line of country-level studies (e.g. Ejelly (2009) on Saudi Arabia; Nahadi and Suzuki (2012) on Indonesia; Lau and Tong (2008) on Malaysia), by examining New Zealand privatisations. Given the National government’s campaign of a mixed-ownership model, empirical evidence of the effects of privatisation becomes vital. Importantly, given that both the cross-sectional and time-series evidence finds a positive relationship between private-ownership and firm profitability, the regime to privatise SOEs is not only a method of raising government funds but also a superior form of commercial management.

Overall, this study addresses an apparent gap in the New Zealand literature regarding the performance effects of state- versus private-ownership. This insight is becoming increasingly important in the near future, as the National government continues their regime of partially privatising the major SOEs.

One thing that is worth mentioning is that privatisation should not be seen as a way of "raising government funds". If you really want to raise money then you would just sell monopolies and that would do nothing for the economy. The advantages of privatisation come from increased efficiency and increased competition but efficient firms in competitive markets sell for less than monopolies, so raising fund should be well down the list of priorities. Also, as I have argued before it can be reasonably argued that the practice of selling less than 51% of an SOE does not constitute privatisation. Under such a plan, the state remains the primary force responsible for deciding the outputs (and possibly the inputs) of the firm, rather than the market. This means that programmes such as the recent policy by the New Zealand government of selling just 49% of an SOE is not genuine privatisation. This policy means that, in practice, little will change in terms of the behaviour of the SOEs: they will remain, for all intents and purposes, government-controlled entities. This contradicts the very reason for privatising SOEs in the first place. Evidence on the difference in performance between fully and partially privatised firms would be interesting.

Chinese imports, and US manufacturing employment

What is the relationship between Chinese imports and employment in US manufacturing? In the past some empirical work has argued that the relationship is negative. But a new working paper argues against this idea.

The abstract of the paper, Firm Reorganization, Chinese Imports, and US Manufacturing Employment (pdf) by Ildiko Magyari, reads,

What is the impact of Chinese imports on employment of US manufacturing firms? Previous papers have found a negative effect of Chinese imports on employment in US manufacturing establishments, industries, and regions. However, I show theoretically and empirically that the impact of offshoring on firms, which can be thought of as collections of establishments - differs from the impact on individual establishments - because offshoring reduces costs at the firm level. These cost reductions can result in firms expanding their total manufacturing employment in industries in which the US has a comparative advantage relative to China, even as specific establishments within the firm shrink. Using novel data on firms from the US Census Bureau, I show that the data support this view: US firms expanded manufacturing employment as reorganization toward less exposed industries in response to increased Chinese imports in US output and input markets allowed them to reduce the cost of production. More exposed firms expanded employment by 2 percent more per year as they hired more (i) production workers in manufacturing, whom they paid higher wages, and (ii) in services complementary to high-skilled and high-tech manufacturing, such as R&D, design, engineering, and headquarters services. In other words, although Chinese imports may have reduced employment within some establishments, these losses were more than offset by gains in employment within the same firms. Contrary to conventional wisdom, firms exposed to greater Chinese imports created more manufacturing and nonmanufacturing jobs than non-exposed firms.

"Au Contraire, Mr. President: Trade Deficit Is Not a Big Deal"

Daniel R. Pearson discusses his article "Au Contraire, Mr. President: Trade Deficit Is Not a Big Deal" on Freedomworks' The Paul Molloy Show.