Wendy Carlin

A Minimum of Rivalry: Evidence from Transition Economies on the Importance of Competition for Innovation and Growth

This paper examines the importance of competition in the growth and development of firms. We make use of the large-scale natural experiment of the shift from an economic system without competition to a market economy to shed light on the factors that influence innovation by firms and their subsequent growth. Using a dataset from a survey of nearly 4,000 firms in 24 transition countries, we find evidence of the importance of a minimum of rivalry in both innovation and growth: the presence of at least a few competitors is effective both directly and through improving the efficiency with which the rents from market power in product markets are utilised to undertake innovation.

How Do Financial Systems Affect Economic Performance

This paper examines the relation between financial, corporate and legal systems, and economic performance in different countries. It reviews international comparisons that undertake detailed analyses of individual, developed countries and studies that use large, cross-country data banks, including developing countries. While the former do not provide evidence of a clear relation between different types of systems and economic performance, the latter report a strong association of financial development with economic growth. A recent theoretical literature offers a way of reconciling these two sets of studies. It points to a relation between financial/ corporate systems and types of activity with some systems favouring high risk, short-term investments and others promoting long-term, relatively low risk investments. These theories also suggest that systems may be related to stages of economic development. The paper summarizes a first empirical study that reports an association between financial/ corporate systems, types of activity and stages of economic development. The paper concludes that these relationships have important implications for the design of regulation and legal systems in different countries.

Shocks to the System: the German Political Economy Under Stress:

The German economy is recovering hesitantly from the sharp post-unification boom and recession. Two features of recent West German performance are novel: there has been an unprecedented loss of jobs in industry, and manufacturing profitability has been pushed to its lowest level ever and is now low relative to other OECD economies. Serious problems with labour costs and innovation would be expected to show up in a weakening in the trend of export performance. That this has not yet happened is the consequence of the existence of an apparently robust innovation system which enables companies to pursue high quality incremental innovation strategies. However, the experiment of transferring the West German model to the East has proved extremely costly and has not so far established the basis for self-sustaining growth. Problems in profitability, investment and employment in West Ger many reflect the failure of the bargaining system-unions, employers, Bundesbank and public sector—to negotiate the sharing of the burden of unification.

The 3-Equation New Keynesian Model: A Graphical Exposition

We develop a graphical 3-equation New Keynesian model for macroeconomic analysis to replace the traditional IS-LM-AS model. The new graphical IS-PC-MR model is a simple version of the one commonly used by central banks and captures the forward-looking thinking engaged in by the policy maker. Within a common framework, we compare our model to other monetary-rule based models that are used for teaching and policy analysis. We show that the differences among the models centre on whether the central bank optimizes and on the lag structure in the IS and Phillips curve equations. We highlight the analytical and pedagogical advantages of our preferred model. The model can be used to analyze the consequences of a wide range of macroeconomic shocks, to identify the structural determinants of the coefficients of a Taylor type interest rate rule, and to explain the origin and size of inflation bias.

Restructuring Enterprises in Eastern Europe

Eastern Europes enterprises are undergoing fundamental reform. This paper evaluates alternative forms of corporate restructuring, emphasizing different sequences in which reforms can be organized. In some countries, restructuring is undertaken by the state prior to privatization; in some, restructuring is delegated to private sector institutions before shares are offered to the public at large; and in some, public share offerings are preceding restructuring. The paper develops a general framework for evaluating sequencing, drawing on recent literature on corporate ownership and vertical integration. It points to market failures that are particularly acute during the initial stages of transition. These discourage privatization through wide share ownership and explain why privatization has in practice progressed slowly. The paper examines in some detail restructuring in the one country in which reform has been rapid -- East Germany. The paper discusses the role of the government, the Treuhandanstalt, the banks, the incumbent management and Western firms in the reform process. It uses the theoretical framework to explain the contributions of public and private sector institutions and considers whether any lessons can be drawn for the design of institutions elsewhere.

The Economics of Enterprise Restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe

This paper begins from the twin observation that on the one hand, privatization which leaves control in the hands of the insiders has produced little restructuring while on the other, state-owned enterprises have engaged in some restructuring even in the absence of a clear prospect of privatization. It situates enterprise restructuring at the heart of the process of transition of the state-owned enterprise sector. A set of theoretical tools is assembled which permits the analysis of the speed and depth of restructuring, and clarifies the roles of managers, employees, the state, and banks in bringing it about. A mapping is provided between the theoretical predications and a large body of anecdotal evidence on enterprise behaviour in the Central and East European economies.

Understanding "the essential fact about capitalism": markets, competition and creative destruction

This paper examines two ways in which competition works in modern capitalist economies to improve productivity. The first is through incentives : encouraging improvements in technology, organisation and effort on the part of existing establishments and firms. The second is through selection : replacing less-productive with more productive establishments and firms, whether smoothly via the transfer of market shares from less to more productive firms, or roughly through the exit of some firms and the entry of others. We report evidence from the UK suggesting that selection is responsible for a large proportion of aggregate productivity growth in manufacturing, and that much of this is due in turn to selection between plants belonging to multi-plant firms. We also investigate whether the nature of the selection process varies across the business cycle and report evidence suggesting that it is less effective in booms and recessions. Finally, although in principle productivity catch-up by low-income countries ought to be easier than innovation at the frontier, in the absence of a well functioning competitive infrastructure (a predicament that characterises many poor countries), selection may be associated with much more turbulence and a lower rate of productivity growth than in relatively prosperous societies. We report results of a survey of firms in transition economies suggesting that, particularly in the former Soviet states (excluding the Baltic states), poor output and productivity performance has not been due to an unwillingness on the part of firms to change and adapt. On the contrary, there has been a great deal of restructuring, much new entry and large reallocations of output between firms; but such activity has been much more weakly associated with improved performance than we would expect in established market economies.

Competition, Innovation and Growth in Transition: Exploring the Interactions between Policies

Transition has entailed the introduction of policies to stimulate product market competition, to establish effective corporate governance and to harden enterprise budget constraints. How do these policies interact? Are they substitute policy instruments or does one policy reinforce the effect of another? Although early endogenous growth models predicted a negative relationship between competition and innovation, Aghion, Dewatripont and Rey (1999) showed that this could be reversed if agency considerations were introduced. In their model competition acts as an incentive mechanism to reduce managerial slack, which produces the additional prediction that competition and corporate governance are substitutable. But in a profit-maximizing framework in which incumbent firms innovate to escape competition, there will be complementarity between increased product market competition and governance and between competition and hard budget constraints (Aghion and Howitt 2002). We use the EBRD-World Bank Enterprise survey of over 3,000 firms in 25 transition countries to test for interaction effects between policies. We find that competition and hard budget constraints are complementary. We also find that competitive pressure (a) enhances the performance of old firms, which is suggestive of a role if agency effects and hence of policy substitutability and (b) enhances the performance of new firms, which is consistent with complementarity. Finally, the evidence points to the prevalence of financing constraints facing new firms.

Empirical Analysis of Corporate Governance in Transition

The practical problem of trying to understand the transition has focused attention on the nature of the firm in a capitalist economy and on the role of corporate governance in catch-up growth and for economic performance more generally. The limited capacity of economic theory to provide an explanation for the different patterns of ownership and control of companies across mature market economies is matched by the relatively small volume of empirical research investigating the relationship between the structure of ownership and control and performance.

Teaching Intermediate Macroeconomics using the 3-Equation Model

Book description: In recent years, there has been much debate over the extent to which undergraduate textbook macroeconomic models are theoretically well grounded and whether they adequately reflect the latest developments in the field. The aim of Macroeconomic Theory and Macroeconomic Pedagogy is to encourage and advance this debate, with a specific view to improving macroeconomics education. The book contains sixteen essays from internationally renowned scholars working in the field of macroeconomics. Contributions examine teaching models in light of recent developments in theory, with an eye to promoting a better understanding of real world issues. Topics include the 3-equation New Consensus model, extensions and alternatives to this model, and endogenous money and finance.