Hierarchical firms are enterprises with rigid internal job ladders. We examine the state enterprise as the prototypical hierarchical firm. In the state enterprise, promotion of employees through the internal hierarchy is determined by the workers’ allocation of time between rent seeking and...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises that are central players in U.S. secondary mortgage markets. Over the past decade, these institutions have amassed enormous mortgage- and non-mortgage-oriented investment portfolios that pose significant interest-rate risks to the...

Personale Versorgungsbetriebe bieten personalintensive Dienstleistungen an, auf die ihre nicht unbedingt selbst zahlenden Kunden angewiesen sind und teilweise sogar einen Rechts­anspruch haben. Es handelt sich um personenzentrierte Dienstleistungsbetriebe mit einer gewissen Größe und...

This paper introduces and critically analyzes an emerging form of global infrastructure development by China's infrastructure construction companies, known as "integrated investment, construction, and operation" (IICO). This model has been promoted by the Chinese infrastructure industry,...

This paper aims to raise the awareness and knowledge about state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Germany - a sizable but often ignored part of the overall public sector which the authors of this ZEW expert brief, therefore, label the "other government" - to facilitate an informed debate about the...

Four decades ago, the main actors in global health were the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the United States of America and Northern European countries (through bilateral cooperation). Today we are witnessing a proliferation of actors in this...

Many African state-owned enterprises (SOEs), particularly those in infrastructure, have a long history of poor performance. From the outset, SOE financial and economic performance generally failed to meet the expectations of their creators and funders. By the late 1970s, the situation was...

We construct a comprehensive panel data of 96 publicly traded European utilities over the period 1994-2005 in order to study the relationship between the capital structure of regulated firms, regulated prices, and investments, and examine if and how this interaction is affected by ownership...

This paper reviews the state of thinking on the governance role of public ownership and control. We argue that the transfer of operational control over productive assets to the private sector represents the most desirable governance, due to the inherent difficulty for citizens to constrain...

This report provides an overview of the causes and consequences of the Italian State-owned Enterprises (SOE) reform process. Particularly, it analyzes the symbiotic link between share issue privatization (SIP), i.e. privatization in public equity markets, and financial market development, and...