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研討會總覽

Span of Control and Production Efficiency: Evidence from Korean and Taiwanese IT Firms

2012/02/07
  • 研討會日期 : 2012-02-07
  • 時間 : 14:30
  • 主講人 : Mr. Wen-Chieh Lee
  • 地點 : Conference Room B110
  • 演講者簡介 : Wen-Chieh Lee is going to get his Ph.D. in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis in May, 2012. His research field is in growth and development, macroeconomics, and industrial organization. He is applying for the position of the Institute of Economics, AS right now.
  • 演講摘要 : What is the relationship between industry structure and production efficiency within an IT manufacturing sector? To explore this question, I propose an industry-wide measure of total factor productivity (TFP) with which the measured industrial productivity is positively correlated with industrial span-of-control setup governing the firm-level returns to scale. I construct a dataset with relevant variables in three IT manufacturing sub-industries: DRAM, LED and TFT-LCD. My computed production efficiency using a suggested profile of industrial span-of-control setup reveals that Korean business groups (Chaebols) are much more efficient in the standardized DRAM industry than those of their Taiwanese rivals, whereas Taiwanese small and medium-sized firms dominate the customized LED business and are tied with Korean Chaebols in the TFT-LCD industry. In addition, potential DRAM integration in Taiwan could enhance productivity by 126%-183% in 2005, 31%-44% in 2006, 13%-14% in 2007, 15%-16% in 2008 and 17%-20% in 2009 based on three different integration scenarios. Counterfactual exercises on the decomposition of production inefficiency into output distortions and capital distortions shows that the distortion on the capital margin created by the uniform government policies does not generate much interfirm disparity in capital user costs within a sub-industry. The output distortion in terms of pricing restrictions in product markets, imposed product tax or product subsidies thereby becomes the dominant source in deriving production inefficiency in the IT manufacturing industries in Korea and Taiwan.