Export pricing in state-owned and private MNEs: Evidence from the international petroleum market

Abstract

This paper undertakes a comparison of firm conduct, examining prices charged for crude oil by state-owned and private petroleum companies. The literature that compares public and private enterprise has tended to focus on local monopolies, and their profitability and technical efficiency. The behavior of public and private firms in competition with each other, however, has received little theoretical and virtually no empirical attention. In contrast to the literature, this paper presents an industry case-study. We conduct tests on the differences between prices for crude oil, a heterogeneous commodity with no centralized market, taking advantage of an unusual micro-database of individual import transactions. There is little evidence of difference between prices obtained by private and state-owned multinational enterprises.