State-owned enterprises (SOEs) account for a substantial proportion of GDP, employment and assets in many countries. This article reviews the theory relating to SOEs: their economic rationale, the circumstances in which SOEs are the preferred form of government intervention, and their efficiency...

In a deregulatory environment, what do regulated firms do? The standard assumption is simple: firms revert to their preregulatory form. This Essay challenges that basic assumption. Increasingly, regulation is conducted through broad standards foisted on firms to implement internally. Congress...

A city establishes a garbage collection company in order to generate revenue, but destroys the business of an existing private garbage collection company in the process by supplanting the private company's customer base. As a general proposition, the private company has no right to complain...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac resisted effective supervision and capital standards and compounded the problem by taking on excessive risk just when housing prices peaked. The GSE lives or dies according to its charter and other laws that determine conditions under which it operates. GSEs selected...

The decision oriented theory of the public firm (Feng, Friedrich 2013) becomes extended. The authors consider that sometimes public firms compete horizontally as well. This can be due to competition among the public owners (e.g. municipalities) considering location choices for public firms they...

This paper studies the objective function of state-owned banks. Using information on individual loan contracts, I compare the interest rate charged to two sets of companies with identical characteristics borrowing respectively from state-owned and privately owned banks. State-owned banks charge...

We examined the association between financial disclosure and Net Interest Costs (NIC) in terms of finance studies that have suggested that the municipal bond market is segmented. Our results indicate that financial reporting measures are more strongly associated with NIC in the regional primary...

This paper shows that the abolition of state guarantees to publicly owned banks in Germany resulted in an increase in funding costs at German savings banks. Rather than being the result of increased market discipline, the increase in funding costs is shown to be driven by spillover effects from...