Corporate ownership,efficiency and performance under state capitalism: Evidence from China

This paper studied the relationship between business performance and the ownership structure of firms focusing on Chinese state owned enterprises (SOEs) using a firm level panel data set of China from 1999 to 2011. By classifying all firms into different types based on their ultimate controlling shareholders, we found that SOEs in general underperform in the marketplace than private enterprises. However, among the SOEs in our sample, the SOEs controlled by central government outperformed all types of firms because they offered the highest asset turnover ratio and lowest business administration ratio by receiving favourable government treatment. We conclude that firm ownership type and work efficiency are the main factors that influence the differences in firm performance. In particular, the performance of SOEs controlled by central government is greatly determined by the degree of government intervention, which is referred to as State Capitalism.     

Managerial hubris, firm expansion and firm performance: Evidence from China

Examining Chinese publicly traded firms from 2002 to 2005, we find managerial overconfidence to be positively correlated with the rate of firm expansion. In particular, overconfident managers tend to internally expand firms in an aggressive manner. We also find a negative, though not statistically significant, relationship between managerial overconfidence and M&A activity. Lastly, we examine the relationship between managerial overconfidence and firm performance, finding that managerial overconfidence decreases firm profitability due to overinvestment.     

Firm internationalization and performance: Evidence for designing policies

The debate on the relationship between internationalization and performance is still open and is a hot topic for policymakers, but they ignore the impacts for most of the firms supported. The paper is based on a large database of seven years that considers quantitative-qualitative and control variables. To reduce industry and country heterogeneity we focused on the Italian automotive supply chain. We tested 5 modes of internationalization on firms’ profitability so to support the design of policies. Our results are partially in contrast with literature; therefore we identify specific environments where policies, namely for exporting, could be more effective.     

Macroeconomic and financing determinants of out of pocket payments in health care: Evidence from selected OECD countries

In this paper, we examine the impact of macroeconomic, as well public and private health insurance financing (PHI) factors on out of pocket (OOP) healthcare expenditures, by using fixed/random effects and dynamic panel data methodology to a dataset of 26 EU and OECD countries for a period lasting from 1995 to 2013. The existing empirical literature has focused on testing the hypothesis that several macroeconomic and health financing determinants have an effect on OOP healthcare expenditures. Nevertheless, the related articles have not well tested the hypothesis concerning the potential impact of PHI financing on OOP spending. We find that public and PHI financing have a significant countervailing effect on OOP spending. Moreover, we show that unemployment rate has a significant positive impact on OOP expenditures. Sensitivity tests with variation of specifications and samples show that our findings are robust. We argue that policy-makers should give serious consideration to PHI institution; our results indicate that there is an inverse effect on OOP spending. We suggest that our examined countries have to provide financial risk protection to their citizens against OOP payments, rather than only attending health budgetary retrenchments in order to adjust public finances.