Anti-piracy enforcements and innovation quality

ADJUSTMENT OF PROFESSIONAL TALENTS' INNOVATIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL QUALITY AND EMOTIONAL STABILITY UNDER OBE MODE

Public and Private Enforcement of Corporate and Securities Laws: An Empirical Comparison of Hong Kong and Singapore

We examine whether public enforcement of US insider-trading laws affects price discovery. Examining insider-trading civil cases filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from 2003 to 2011, we find that the price impact on insider-trading days is much smaller than the effect documented for the 1980s, consistent with increased fear of prosecution. Moreover, we find that preannouncement anticipatory run-up in comprehensive samples of takeover bids and earnings announcements is negatively related to resource-based measures of public enforcement intensity, which suggests that aggressive SEC enforcement deters illegal activity. In addition, we find that quoted bid-ask spreads are negatively related to the SEC’s enforcement intensity, which suggests that greater enforcement improves liquidity. Moreover, the negative and significant relation between run-up and the SEC’s enforcement intensity persists after controlling for quoted spreads.

Private enforcement was built into many competition statutes from the start, or uncovered by the courts early in the life of the regime. Many aspects of private cartel enforcement impact on public enforcement, and vice versa. The relationship between public and private enforcement is complex and multifaceted. However, most examinations of the relationship tend to take public enforcement as given and examine the additional role that private enforcement can and should play. The answer is usually greater deterrence of cartel conduct or compensation for harms suffered by the victims of cartel conduct.

This paper sheds light on the ‘private-vs.-public enforcement’ debate. In the first part, using EU internal market law as an example, it will be illustrated that the (relative) effectiveness of private and public instruments of enforcement is significant not only from a policy point of view, but in fact also for the application of legal principles. An analysis of the ECJ’s case law reveals that there is no general obligation on the part of the Member States to provide in each context for mechanisms of both private and public enforcement to guarantee a sufficient level of compliance with substantive EU law. In the second part, taking a functional perspective, an overview of the ‘private-vs.-public enforcement’ debate is provided. An essential finding is that neither a model of purely private enforcement nor a model purely public enforcement can be constructed as a first-best-enforcement solution. The most one can hope for is a robust second-best enforcement strategy that will often, but not necessarily, require a mix of elements of private and public enforcement.

High-quality innovation can provide companies with a competitive advantage in the market, enabling them to become leaders and effectively respond to challenges from competitors. This paper aims to offer recommendations to Chinese policymakers on enhancing innovation quality. It adopts a corporate governance perspective to examine the impact of ownership structure (ownership concentration, state ownership, institutional ownership, and managerial ownership) on innovation quality. Using patent data from Chinese listed companies from 2012 to 2021, the study reveals that innovation quality is influenced by different ownership structures. State ownership, institutional ownership, and managerial ownership positively affect innovation quality. Contrary to expectations, ownership concentration leads to a decline in innovation quality. This approach differs from previous research in two key aspects. First, it identifies ownership factors that enhance innovation quality, addressing the limitations of earlier studies that focused solely on single ownership types. Second, by focusing on invention patent information, it captures innovation quality, providing a more accurate assessment of firms’ true innovative capabilities in a transitional economy.

Law and the Market: The Impact of Enforcement

Integrating Public and Private Enforcement of Competition Law in Europe -- Legal and Jurisdictional Issues

Removing the Tension between Public and Private Enforcement: Disclosure and Privileges for Successful Leniency Applicants

Disclosure of documents enhances the effectiveness of private enforcement but must not deter from making leniency applications. As established by the ECJ in DonauChemie absolute protection for certain documents is incompatible with the primary law principle of effectiveness. Thus the per se protection of corporate leniency statements and settlement statements must at least be reduced to a protection in principle that leaves room for a different decision in exceptional cases. The best solution, however, would be to privilege cartelists who receive immunity from fines by giving them the right to full contribution from their co-infringers. This would mean: Leniency applicants would not have to fear private enforcement, because they can recover any damages paid to victims from their co-infringers. Thus all documents could, subject to a court order in each individual case, be disclosed without deterring cartelists from filing leniency applications. The tension between public and private enforcement would be removed and both ways of enforcement would be strengthened: Public enforcement is strengthened because leniency applicants are not deterred from leniency applications but are rather given an additional incentive, namely immunity from civil liability. Private enforcement is strengthened because victims receive information necessary to claim damages and because the privileges granted to leniency applicants are not granted at the victims’ expense but at the expense of the co-infringers.

Labor Enforcement Theory: The Case of Public vs. Private Enforcement

Directive 2014/104/EU contains detailed provisions related to the disclosure of evidence in actions for damages before national courts that seek to strike a balance between a claimant’s right to access evidence in support of its private damages claim and the protection of leniency programmes, which are some of the main tools of public antitrust enforcement. Articles 5 to 8 of the Directive create a “microsystem” of the law of the evidences, which is highly specialised and based on the central role of the judge and on the principle that private enforcement must not compromise public enforcement. The Directive tackles the information asymmetry that characterises competition law litigation by acknowledging the right for a claimant “to obtain the disclosure of evidence relevant to their claim, without it being necessary for them to specify individual items of evidence”. However, the obtainment of the disclosure of evidence is circumscribed by a number of conditions and exceptions. The Directive creates three lists of documents that are characterised by a different level of protection: the black list, the grey list and the white list. After giving an overview of all these provisions, the article will focus on the disclosure of leniency statements and settlement submissions, by analysing the case law of the ECJ before and after the entry into force of the Directive. It will be found out that while the Court has always been cautious, by affirming that it is necessary to weigh up, on a case-by-case basis, the respective interests in favour of disclosure of such documents and those in favour of their protection, the European Legislator preferred to unconditionally protect the efficiency of leniency and settlement programmes to the detriment of parties that suffered a harm, which have to find any possible way to support their damage claim in a context in which the information asymmetry and the difficulty of the factual and economic analysis are evident. It seems that, with Article 6(6), the European Legislator did not succeed in its goal of making it easier for victims of antitrust violations to claim compensation from the offender, which is the general aim of the Directive. In fact, not having the possibility to have access to leniency statements or settlement submissions in stand-alone actions, it is highly difficult to prove that they suffered harm. Therefore, victims can only wait until the competition authority adopts a final infringement decision in order to start a probably successful follow-on action. Overall, all provisions on disclosure of documents contained in the Directive contribute to make a big step forward in the private enforcement sector, except for the provisions of Article 6(6), which could have probably been less rigid. In fact, while the rule on the right to obtain the disclosure of evidence, together with the provisions on disclosure of documents contained in the grey list and in the white list, strike a fair balance between public and private enforcement and facilitate victims of antitrust violations in bringing actions for damages, the same thing cannot be affirmed for provisions on disclosure of documents contained in the black list.

Ascertaining which enforcement mechanisms work to protect investors has been both a focus of recent work in academic finance and an issue for policy-making at international development agencies. According to recent academic work, private enforcement of investor protection via both disclosure and private liability rules goes hand in hand with financial market development, but public enforcement fails to correlate with financial development and, hence, is unlikely to facilitate it. Our results confirm the disclosure result but reverse the results on both liability standards and public enforcement. We use securities regulators’ resources to proxy for regulatory intensity of the securities regulator. When we do, financial depth regularly, significantly, and robustly correlates with stronger public enforcement. In horse races between these resource-based measures of public enforcement intensity and the most common measures of private enforcement, public enforcement is overall as important as disclosure in explaining financial market outcomes around the world and more important than private liability rules. Hence, policymakers who reject public enforcement as useful for financial market development are ignoring the best currently available evidence.

Ascertaining which enforcement mechanisms work to protect investors has been both a focus of recent work in academic finance and an issue for policy-making at international development agencies. According to recent academic work, private enforcement of investor protection via both disclosure and private liability rules goes hand in hand with financial market development, but public enforcement fails to correlate with financial development and, hence, is unlikely to facilitate it. Our results confirm the disclosure result but reverse the results on both liability standards and public enforcement. We use securities regulators' resources to proxy for regulatory intensity of the securities regulator. When we do, financial depth regularly, significantly, and robustly correlates with stronger public enforcement. In horse races between these resource-based measures of public enforcement intensity and the most common measures of private enforcement, public enforcement is overall as important as disclosure in explaining financial market outcomes around the world and more important than private liability rules. Hence, policymakers who reject public enforcement as useful for financial market development are ignoring the best currently-available evidence.

This chapter examines the impact of private and public enforcement of securities regulation on the development of capital markets. After a review of the literature, it considers empirical findings related to private and public enforcement as measured by formal indices and resources, with particular emphasis on the link between enforcement intensity and technical measures of financial market performance. It then analyses the impact of cross-border flows of capital, valuation effects, and cross-listing decisions by corporate issuers before turning to a discussion of whether countries that dedicate more resources to regulatory reform behave differently in some areas of market activities. It also explores the enforcement of banking regulation and its relationship to financial stability and concludes by focusing on direct and indirect, resource-based evidence on the efficacy of the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement actions.