The Korean economy experienced a slowdown in both productivity growth and exports in the 2010s. Here we analyze the relationship between changes in exports and in the growth of total factor productivity (TFP). Our empirical analysis of data from the Mine and Manufacturing Survey (2000 ∼ 2017) shows that there is a positive relationship between exports and productivity. We find that the positive relationship was stronger during periods in which exports decreased. We find that while the decrease in exports may have slowed or reduced the growth in productivity, the increase in exports did not necessarily increase productivity since 2000. We focus on the irreversibility of inputs as a possible explanation of the asymmetric relationship between exports and productivity growth. Our results show that in the input-inelastic sectors in which inputs are not flexibly adjusted, productivity declined further as export growth decreased.
We propose a canonical form of the CES production function. It includes the normalized CES function as a special case. It can represent factor-augmenting technological progresses through the factor efficiency term. In general, it can represent a family of CES-type function indexed by a parameter. The parameter may represent time, nations, regions, or industries. Finally, it treats well the concern on dimensional homogeneity.
We consider a multinational global firm that adopts corporate social responsibility (CSR) in two countries and examine international privatization policies with the strategic transmission of CSR. We find that the strategic level of CSR crucially depends on the percentage of the global firm’s shares held in each country. We show that single privatization increases (decreases) CSR when the share is small (large), while dual privatization always leads to the highest CSR. We also show that domestic welfare under global standard of CSR, which is set to improve global welfare, is higher (lower) than that under the global firm’s strategic CSR when the share is small (large). Finally, we show that dual nationalization is a unique equilibrium in an international privatization choice game, irrespective of imposing the global standard of CSR, which causes global welfare loss.
This paper introduces dynamic mechanism design in an elementary fashion. We first examine optimal dynamic mechanisms: We find necessary and sufficient conditions for perfect Bayesian incentive compatibility and formulate the optimal dynamic mechanism problem. We next examine efficient dynamic mechanisms: We establish the uniqueness of Groves mechanism and investigate budget balance of the dynamic pivot mechanism in some detail for a bilateral trading environment. This introduction reveals that many results and techniques of static mechanism design can be straightforwardly extended and adapted to the analysis of dynamic settings.
