http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7 2013-06-19T06:02:12Z 2013-06-19T06:02:12Z la Cour, Lisbeth Milhøj, Anders http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8686 2013-04-30T12:58:04Z 2013-04-30T00:00:00Z

Public procurement la Cour, Lisbeth; Milhøj, Anders Public procurement is estimated to constitute more than 16% of GDP in the EU, see e.g. Ramsey (2006). This is one of the reasons why a lot of interest has been attached to this topic. Most of the papers in this field have been of a theoretical nature but during the last ten years also a few empirical studies have become available, see e.g. Marion, J. (2007) and Bajari et al (2008). At the EU level liberalizations have been going on since the late 80’ies (see e.g. the EU commission (1985). Here certain regulations imply that public projects of a certain size need to be subject to a public tender. Again according to Ramsey (2006) around 16% of all public procurement in the EU is subject to these rules and regulations and information on the contracts corresponding to these 16% can be found in Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) database. In general, the hypothesis is that public procurement will increase competition and ultimately lead to cheaper contracts for the authorities, see e.g. Cecchini (1988) for the economic arguments. But in practice: do the rules and regulations ensure more competition? Do they lead to more internationalization in the sense that more foreign firms become contract winners? Do the government and municipalities in the EU countries actually gain economically from the procurement? Does the choice of type of procedure matter? A lot of interesting questions immediately pops up and some of them – but only some of them - may be analyzed based on the content of this data base. Still, due to the large coverage and the international nature of the data base we believe that a thoroughly study of the possibilities of TED is of major interest and the present study is just a first step in this direction. One of the students who extracted the TED data has also used them for analysis in his master thesis, see Bundsgaard (2010). He has, however, limited his interest to analyze the choice of procedure: auction vs. negotiation and therefore our study has a broader scope when it comes to available variables. To our knowledge we are the first group of researchers who begins to analyze the content of this database using explorative statistical techniques based on a broad range of variables.

2013-04-30T00:00:00Z Zhou, Haoyong http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8607 2012-12-21T09:04:02Z 2012-12-21T00:00:00Z

Essays on Family Firms Zhou, Haoyong The dissertation examines corporate performance and capital structure of family firms, contributing to the limited empirical research on family firms. Family firms are prevalent in national economies all over the world. It is the prevalence that makes family firms receive increasing attentions from academia. The dissertation consists of an introduction and three chapters. Each chapter is an independent paper. The first chapter is a joint work with Professor Morten Bennedsen and Dr. Markus Ampenberger. The version of in the dissertation will be published as Chapter 6 in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Entrepreneurial Finance by Oxford University Press. The second paper and third paper are single-authored papers. In the first chapter, we discuss the capital structure of family firms, with a focus on the debtequity mix. Two parts comprise the chapter. In the first part, we provide a literature review on existing theoretical and empirical research in the capital structure of family firms. The literature review shows that the most important theories to explain capital structure in family firms seem to be risk aversion, agency theory, and control considerations. We argue that risk aversion and control considerations have opposing impacts on the optimal choice of debt leverage of family firms. On one hand, controlling families of family firms are typically non-diversified investors with most of their wealth and human capital tied to the company and consequently family firms use less debt. On the other hand, controlling families want to maintain the control over their companies. This control consideration restricts the willingness to raise new equity outside the family and therefore often lead to a stronger dependence on banks and other debt instruments. The literature review also shows that evidence on capital structure choices of family firms is inconclusive. Large-scale evidence on private family firms is almost missing.

2012-12-21T00:00:00Z Deng, Poul Jefferson, Gary http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8594 2012-12-10T09:18:04Z 2012-12-10T00:00:00Z

Foreign Entry and Heterogeneous Growth of Firms Deng, Poul; Jefferson, Gary We adopt the framework of Schumpeterian creative destruction formalized by Aghion et al. (2009) to analyze the impact of foreign entry on the productivity growth of domestic firms. In the face of foreign entry, domestic firms exhibit heterogeneous patterns of growth depending on their technological distance from foreign firms. Domestic firms with smaller technological distance from their foreign counterparts tend to experience faster productivity growth, while firms with larger technological distance tend to lag further behind. We test this hypothesis using a unique firm-level data of Chinese manufacturing. Our empirical results confirm that foreign entry indeed generates strong heterogeneous growth patterns among domestic firms.

2012-12-10T00:00:00Z Fosse, Henrik Barslund http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8541 2012-10-11T09:10:34Z 2012-10-11T00:00:00Z

Empirical Essays in International Trade Fosse, Henrik Barslund The thesis consists of an introduction followed by three numbered chapters (independent papers). It covers topics in international trade, and in di¤erent ways the thesis investigates aspects of heterogeneity. The rst chapter is coauthored with Pascalis Raimondos-Møller. The version of this chapter is published in the CESifo Working Paper Series and serves as the nal background paper for the compressed journal article published in Review of Development Economics, May 2012. The second chapter is coauthored with Madhura Maitra, senior PhD student at Columbia University at the time. The third chapter is a solo paper. In the rst chapter we introduce a traditional macro model of trade and change the com- petitive environment by introducing state-owned enterprises. We also include heterogenous households to analyze e¤ects on the income distribution. The chapter focuses on Vietnam s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2007. Upon entry, Vietnam was granted an accession period lasting till 2014. During this period tari¤s would have to fall according to the accession agreement. This rst chapter evaluates this 2007-2014 trade liberalization by building an applied general equilibrium model and calibrating it to the Vietnamese data. The model pays careful attention to the fact that Vietnam has many state-owned enterprises that do not behave in a pro t maximizing way. The model simulations show that the WTO imposed tari¤ reforms will reduce the overall welfare level of the Vietnamese households. Moreover, the biggest loss of income will take place among the poor rural households in Vietnam. We propose other tari¤ reforms that both raise overall welfare and reduce income inequality.

2012-10-11T00:00:00Z