L20 - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior: GeneralReturn

Arrangements to cooperate on innovation facilitate access to external sources of knowledge. By using panel data derived from the five waves of Community Innovation Survey in the Czech Republic, we examine whether firms engage in these arrangements persistently or rather revert to other behaviour. Econometric estimates of dynamic random effects and multivariate probit models provide strong support to the thesis of persistence, particularly of linkages with the university sector and suppliers. The results are robust to the initial conditions problem and serial correlation in idiosyncratic errors. Government programmes initiating cooperation on innovation therefore have the potential to induce durable changes in the innovative behaviour of firms.

This paper works with a broad data sample of Czech voucher-privatized firms. The period of 1996 - 1999 enables to capture true post-privatization effects. It analyzes the effect of ownership structure on corporate performance and firm's characteristics. Results show that overall ownership concentration cannot be associated with improving corporate performance. Further, particular types of domestic owners do not affect firm's performance but they do affect firm's characteristics. Effect of foreign owners is limited. No clear or unambiguous effect of changes in ownership structure on corporate performance emerged.

In this paper I study the behavior of two TV broadcasters on a market where viewers perpetually make a decision whether to watch TV and which TV channel to watch. Both broadcasters optimally allocate time periods where their TV program is replaced by advertising. While TV programs represent broadcaster's costs, commercials bring in revenue that is proportional to the audience reach. I assume that viewers choose among products and the outside option following a Markov process where probabilities of transition reflect various attractiveness of the products. Given symmetrical positions of the broadcasters, I prove that their optimal strategy is to put their commercial breaks into the same or very close times. In the case when commercials overlap perfectly, both broadcasters are better off if they fragment their breaks into shorter breaks keeping the total amount of commercial time the same.