Detection and Impact of Industrial Subsidies: the Case of World Shipbuilding

在整个经济史上，政府对工业的补贴一直很普遍，并在一些国家引导了工业化和增长。一个重要而开放的问题是，它们对各国之间的生产分配、行业价格、成本和盈余有何影响。这项任务面临的一个重大挑战是，政府对行业的补贴是出了名的难以察觉。事实上，部分由于世贸组织协议禁止基础设施以外的直接和实物补贴，此类补贴的存在和规模往往不为人知。拟议中的研究为评估补贴后果的努力提供了两项贡献。首先，它提供了一个基于模型的实证策略来检测政府补贴的存在和衡量政府补贴的大小。其次，量化了这些补贴对产业演进的影响。PI将这一战略应用于全球造船业，这是一个被认为补贴发挥突出作用的行业的典型例子。2000年代的造船业是一个特别有趣的例子，因为生产发生了惊人的重新分配：仅在2006年，中国的市场份额就翻了一番，从25%增加到50%，而日本、韩国和欧洲则落在后面。2006年，中国启动了资本补贴计划；这些资本补贴是已知的、遵守的、不禁止的。然而，许多人断言，中国的快速崛起也受到政府生产补贴的推动，而这些补贴是不为人知、不被观察和禁止的；在这里，PI分离了促成因素（例如差异化产品，固有成本差异，以及最重要的资本和生产补贴）。该提案将开发和估计造船业的模型，提供工业组织中第一个研究需求和供给侧动态代理的实证分析之一。大量造船厂提供耐用、差异化的船舶。由于建造时间的原因，他们的生产决策受到动态反馈的影响：造船厂积累积压，这影响了他们未来接受新船订单的能力。生产还受到总随机成本冲击的影响，这体现在关键的生产投入——钢铁价格上。每个时期都有大量相同的潜在船东决定通过从世界造船厂购买新船来进入货运市场。对新船的需求是由对国际海上运输的需求驱动的，而这种需求是不确定和不稳定的。由于船舶是船东的长期投资，对新船的需求是动态的。利息的模型原语是潜在补贴企业的成本函数。然而，与许多行业一样，生产成本并没有被观察到。π吗?S策略相当于从需求变化中估计成本，这在经验工业组织中很常见，但在动态需求和供给的框架中。该估计策略首先利用新船和二手船的价格来估计购买新船的意愿，然后将其引入造船商的动态优化问题中。实证分析的第一个目标是发现和衡量与补贴相一致的成本变化。实证分析的第二个目标是利用估计模型量化中国补贴对船舶价格、各国生产再分配以及行业成本和托运人盈余的影响。PI提出的问题是，这种影响是否因不同类型的补贴（资本补贴或生产补贴）而异。

Government subsidies to industries have been prevalent throughout economic history and in several countries have steered industrialization and growth. An important and open question is what is their impact on production allocation across countries, industry prices, costs and surplus. A significant challenge in this task is that government subsidies to industries are notoriously difficult to detect. Indeed, partly because WTO agreements prohibit direct and in-kind subsidies other than infrastructure, the existence and magnitude of such subsidies is often unknown. The proposed research offers two contributions to the effort of assessing the consequences of subsidies. First, it provides a model-based empirical strategy to detect the presence and gauge the magnitude of government subsidies. Second, it quantifies the impact of these subsidies on industrial evolution. The PI applies this strategy to the world shipbuilding industry, a prototypical example of an industry in which subsidies are believed to play a prominent role. Shipbuilding in the 2000's is a particularly interesting case because a striking reallocation of production took place: in a single year (2006), China doubled its market share from 25% to 50%, leaving Japan, S. Korea and Europe trailing behind. In 2006, China launched a capital subsidization plan; these capital subsidies are known, observed and not prohibited. However, many asserted that China's rapid rise was also driven by government production subsidies, which are not known, unobserved and prohibited; here the PI disentangles the contributing factors (e.g. differentiated products, inherent cost differences, and most importantly, capital and production subsidies). The proposal will develop and estimate a model of the shipbuilding industry, providing one of the first empirical analysis in industrial organization looking at dynamic agents on both the demand and the supply side. A large number of shipyards offer durable, differentiated ships. Their production decisions are subject to a dynamic feedback because of time to build: shipyards accumulate backlogs, which affect their future ability to accept new ship orders. Production is also subject to an aggregate stochastic cost shock, summarized in the price of steel, a key production input. Every period a large number of identical potential shipowners decide to enter the freight market by buying a new ship from world shipyards. Demand for new ships is driven by demand for international sea transport, which is uncertain and volatile. As ships are long-lived investments for shipowners, demand for new ships is dynamic. The model primitive of interest is the cost function of potentially subsidized firms. As in many industries, however, costs of production are not observed. The PI?s strategy amounts to estimating costs from demand variation, as is common in empirical industrial organization, but in a framework of dynamic demand and supply. The estimation strategy first uses new and used ship prices to estimate the willingness to pay for a new ship and then inserts it into the dynamic optimization problem of shipbuilders. The first objective of the empirical analysis is to detect and measure changes in costs that are consistent with subsidies. The second objective of the empirical analysis it to use the estimated model to quantify the impact of China's subsidies on ship prices, production reallocation across countries, as well as industry costs and shipper surplus. The PI asks the question whether this impact varies by different types of subsidies (capital or production subsidies).