Calendrier du 13 novembre 2017
Roy Seminar (ADRES)
Du 13/11/2017 de 17:00 à 18:30
Salle R1-13, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
KREMER Michael (Harvard University)
Raising Capital from Heterogeneous Investors
A firm raises capital from heterogeneous investors to fund a project. The
project is implemented only if the total capital raised exceeds an initially unknown
threshold, and the firm offers payments depending on project implementation.
We study the firm’s optimal self-financing scheme that maximizes its payoff subject
to all investors participating being the unique equilibrium outcome. The
optimal scheme features full collateral: if the project is not implemented, each
investor is refunded her capital. Under implementation, however, net returns differ
across investors. If the distribution of the investment threshold is log-concave,
the firm offers higher returns to larger investors. Moreover, higher dispersion in
investor size raises the firm’s payoff.
GSIELM (Graduate Students International Economics and Labor Market) Lunch Seminar
Du 13/11/2017 de 13:00 à 14:00
Room S3 MSE, 106-112 Bd de l’Hôpital, 75013 Paris
COTTERLAZ Pierre (Sciences Po)
The Percolation of Knowledge across Space
écrit avec Arthur Guillouzouic Le Corff (Sciences Po)
This paper provides an explanation for the persistent spatial frictions in knowledge diffusion. We argue that the underlying spatially-clustered network of innovators contributes to generating the effect attributed to distance on international knowledge flows. First, we present evidence that knowledge disseminates within a network of firms by delving into their citation behaviour. We find that firms are more likely to cite patents known by their contacts than comparable patents unknown by their contacts. We then incorporate this finding into a dynamic network formation model. The theoretical predictions hold remarkably well in the data: innovator sizes are Pareto distributed, and an increasing relationship exists between the size of an innovator and the distance at which it cites. Combining these two features is sufficient to generate a negative distance elasticity of knowledge flows.
Régulation et Environnement
Du 13/11/2017 de 12:00 à 14:00
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
DEMENTIEV Andrei (National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow))
Contracting out public services to asymmetric partnerships
ABSTRACT:
The paper studies an organisational structure of contracting out public utilities to an asymmetric partnership between the local authorities and a vertically integrated firm. Being fiscally constrained and politically motivated the government delegates pricing decision in the downstream market to a partnership while the upstream market for essential input is not regulated directly. The accompanying regulatory instrument, namely the net budget transfer, is valued at the social cost of public funds and can be set ex post making the firm’s participation constraint non-binding. A negative budget transfer effectively extracts the firm’s rent in the non-regulated upstream market and depends on the corporate structure of the partnership. We build a formal model that predicts that local authorities with relatively high share in the partnership should decrease the net transfer when the profit margin in the downstream market falls. The empirical support for this finding is found in the panel data for 25 suburban passenger companies in Russia in 2011-2015. The effect of the share structure on the relationship between the compensation ratio and farebox ratio is captured by the interaction variable highlighting the nonlinear effect. The failure to fully compensate operational losses in the transportation market is interpreted as a system of pseudo-franchising contracts in the Russian suburban railway transport that, to some extent, reflects political preferences of the local authorities in the country.