2025-03-02-欧洲央行-企业所有权与激励性泄漏的宏观经济学（英）_74页_1mb

Summary

Introduction

• The paper addresses declines in business dynamism, characterized by increased market concentration and high mark-ups, linking to factor market inefficiencies. It explores how institutional structures can mitigate these issues through incentive leakage, defined as the lump-sum distribution of monopoly profits, which reduces factor supply incentives and creates distortions.

Key Findings

• Incentive Leakage: Standard models assume monopoly profits are lump-sum transfers, leading to inefficiencies. This "incentive leakage" is a hallmark of firm-optimal arrangements. Eliminating leakage through alternative ownership and remuneration structures—such as decentralised schemes—can reduce monopoly distortions and internalise aggregate demand externalities.
• Entrepreneurial Shareholders (ES) and Entrepreneurial Workers (EW): These structures disburse firm revenue proportionally to tied factors (capital for ES, or labour for EW), generating intra-firm competition and negative externalities. ES firms underexploit monopoly power by incentivizing capital accumulation, while EW firms shift focus to labour supply, leading to offsetting effects on capital and output.
• Zero-Incentive-L leakage Structures: ES and EW firms outperform standard models by closing part of the "monopoly gap" and, in ES's case, part of the "patience gap," outperforming perfect competition in steady-state welfare by leveraging monopoly profits for dynamic incentives.
• Workers’ Enterprises (WE): Aligns workers and owners, resulting in outcomes close to ES but slightly lower welfare, suggesting that capital-oriented incentives contribute more significantly to long-term welfare.

Methodology

• A dynamic general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition is used. Leaks are minimized by revenue allocation mechanisms. Numerical simulations and steady-state welfare comparisons, benchmarked against the Golden Rule, show welfare improvements under zero-leakage structures due to internalised externalities.

Welfare Implications

• The welfare ranking depends on capital provision incentives across structures. ES eliminates leakage while maintaining market power, encouraging savings and investment. RBC-PC removes market power entirely, but welfare under zero-leakage structures remains on steady-state welfare can exceed RBC-PC if β → 1 is required for the Golden Rule.
• Empirical data highlights rising corporate profit shares and declining factor incomes, suggesting incentive leakage is relevant empirically.

Conclusion

• The paper demonstrates that zero-leakage institutional structures—ES, EW, and WE—mitigate market power distortions by fostering endogenous incentives, enhancing long-term welfare. This suggests policy alternatives targeting firm structure could yield better long-term effects than traditional competition policies. The results are stable under decentralised decision-making and can be extended to other settings like oligopoly.

Source: ECB Working Paper Series No 3033