Cartels, managerial incentives, and productive efficiency in German coal mining, 1881-1913

Carsten Burhop () and Thorsten Luebbers ()
Additional contact information
Carsten Burhop: Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
Thorsten Luebbers: Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

No 2008_13, Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

Abstract: In this paper, we evaluate the impact of cartelisation and managerial incentives on the productive efficiency of German coal mining corporations. We focus on coal mining in the Ruhr district, Germany’s main mining area. We use stochastic frontier analysis and an unbalanced dynamic panel data set for up to 28 firms for the years 1881-1913 to measure productive efficiency. We show that coal was mined with decreasing returns to scale. Moreover, it turns out that cartelisation did not affect productive efficiency. Controlling for corporate governance variables shows that stronger managerial incentives were significantly correlated with productive efficiency, whereas the debt-equity ratio did not influence it.

Keywords: Economic history; Germany pre-1913; Cartel; Productive efficiency; Corporate Governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L41 L71 N53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2008-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-eff, nep-his and nep-ind
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2008_13online.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2008_13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marc Martin ().