Incentive Effects, Monitoring Mechanisms and the Market for Corporate Control: An Analysis of the Factors Affecting Public to Private Transactions in the UK

Abstract:   This paper investigates the factors that influence the decision to change the status of a publicly quoted company to that of a private company. We find that firms that go private are more likely to have higher CEO ownership and higher institutional ownership. In relation to their board structures, firms going private tend to have more duality but there is no statistical difference in the proportion of non‐executive directors. They do not show signs of having excess free cash flows but there is some evidence of lower growth opportunities. We do not find that firms going private experience a greater threat of hostile acquisition. The results are therefore consistent with incentive and monitoring explanations of going private. Calculation of the probability of going private shows that incentive effects are stronger than the monitoring effects.     

An International Comparison of Materiality Guidance for Governments, Public Services and Charities

The annual report is promoted and regarded as the primary medium of accountability for government agencies. In Australia, anecdotal evidence suggests the quality of annual reports is variable. However, there is scant empirical evidence on the quality of reports. The aim of this research is to gauge the quality of annual reporting by local governments in Queensland, and to investigate the factors that may contribute to that level of quality. The results of the study indicate that although the quality of reporting by local governments has improved over time, councils generally do not report information on aspects of corporate governance, remuneration of executive staff, personnel, occupational health and safety, equal opportunity policies, and performance information. In addition, the results indicate there is a correlation between the size of the local government and the quality of reporting but the quality of disclosures is not correlated with the timeliness of reports. The study will be of interest to the accounting profession, public sector regulators who are responsible for the integrity of the accountability mechanisms and public sector accounting practitioners. It will form the basis for future longitudinal research, which will map changes in the quality of local government annual reporting.     

What Drives Fiscal Decentralisation? Further Assessing the Role of Income*

This paper investigates the determinants of fiscal decentralisation, focusing in particular on the impact of the level of income on the level of fiscal decentralisation. Various measures of fiscal decentralisation, several of them novel in this context, are employed in a cross‐country econometric model to test established and more recent hypotheses. Paying careful attention to variable measurement, model specification and sample coverage, the results suggest that there are significant relationships between fiscal decentralisation and income, as well as a range of other factors. However, these relationships may be more complicated than previously reported. For the entire large sample of countries, and for the OECD subsample, a positive relationship between income and decentralisation is found. This corroborates the results found in earlier studies. However, for the middle‐ and lower‐income nations, higher income is found to be associated with less decentralisation.     

Expenditure on healthcare in the UK: A review of the issues

This review examines the performance of the UK healthcare system. After presenting data on the level and distribution of resources, three topics are examined. The first is the lessons from international comparisons of evidence on expenditure, equity and healthcare outcomes. The second is the lessons from the recent internal market reforms. The third is the lessons from an analysis of the role for private finance in UK healthcare. The review concludes that economists and policymakers need to focus more attention on the relationship between healthcare inputs — expenditure — and health outcomes, and, within this, on the incentives facing suppliers and demanders of healthcare.     

我国国家审计职能的演化规律研究

本文首先分析了国家审计职能的内涵和国家审计职能的演化特点。在此基础上,从国家审计的本质性职能和功能性职能两个方面,提出了国家审计职能演化的一般规律,即国家审计本质性职能恒久不变,但其内涵不断丰富外延不断扩大;国家审计功能性职能将被不断发掘和发现,具有发散性和收敛性。     

Borrowing to Finance Public Investment? The ‘Golden Rule of Public Finance’ Reconsidered in an Endogenous Growth Setting*

In this paper, we look for long‐run and short‐run effects of fiscal deficits on economic growth and welfare in a standard endogenous growth model. We show that, under very general hypotheses, the ‘golden rule of public finance’, which allows a government to run public‐investment‐oriented fiscal deficits, leads to a lower balanced‐growth path in the long run, and eventually in the short run, compared with balanced‐budget rules. Welfare effects are more difficult to assess, and depend on the form of the utility function. Our model shows that debt rules such as the golden rule may improve (if the consumption elasticity of substitution is ‘low’) or weaken (if the consumption elasticity of substitution is ‘high’) intertemporal welfare. Consequently, a balanced‐budget rule does not necessarily dominate debt rules from the point of view of welfare, while it does from the point of view of long‐run economic growth.     

我国行政问责制实施中的困境及对策分析

突发公共事件应急管理中的问责是问责制中的重要内容.近几年来,我国对突发公共事件的责任追究取得了令人瞩目的成就:问责制度化逐渐提高,问责的领域越来越广泛.但同时也暴露出一些问题:问责的“应急”色彩比较明显,问责制度仍然比较粗糙,问责制的监督体制存在缺陷.针对这些问题,本文对此作了初步分析并进一步提出完善对策,从而健全政府职责体系,促进责任型政府建设.     

论民营医疗机构的市场准入规制——以法经济学为视角

随着市场经济的深化发展,多元化医疗服务竞争机制的形成需要民营医疗机构市场准入.在我国鼓励社会资本办医政策下,民营医疗机构有了一定发展,但却存在逐利性和市场退出制度缺失等问题.引发这些现象的主要原因是医患信息不对称、医疗服务负外部性、供给诱导需求、医疗公共产品短缺等市场失灵现象.基于此,为确保医疗事业发展和医疗安全,政府应以从严规制与从宽规制相结合的方式,对民营医疗机构市场准入适度干预,建立民营医疗机构市场准入法律制度,明确其市场准入条件和准入范围,建立市场退出制度,以促进和引导民营医疗机构健康、快速和稳定发展.     

Optimal subsidies and guarantees in public–private partnerships

In this paper, we analyse how certain subsidies and guarantees given to private firms in public–private partnerships should be optimally arranged to promote immediate investment in a real options framework. We show how an investment subsidy, a revenue subsidy, a minimum demand guarantee, and a rescue option could be optimally arranged to induce immediate investment, compensating for the value of the option to defer. These four types of incentives produce significantly different results when we compare the value of the project after the incentive structure is devised and also when we compare the timing of the resulting cash flows.     

Accounting for Infrastructure Service Delivery by Government: Generational Issues

Infrastructure service provision by government creates huge distributional issues about service availability and performance over time and the relative funding burdens borne by successive generations of consumers across time. But providing financial disclosure on these issues through inter-generational accounting pre-supposes that accounting measurement is both generationally neutral (temporal neutrality) and does not legitimate any particular pattern of distribution. At the very least, accounting measurements of service provision costs should possess the attribute of distributional fairness. They should not bias the inter-generational allocation of cost or funding burdens. We argue that the forced application of inappropriate commercial accounting concepts of asset valuation, depreciation and capital maintenance does produce significant generational bias. More flexibility is required to produce the necessary accounting measurement attributes for financial disclosure on whether government has discharged its continuing accountability for inter-generational equity in burden sharing. We discuss three conceptual issues and illustrate the need for flexibility by proposing an alternative 'flow of obligations' approach which does not require reference to valuations of community service resources or arbitrary cost allocations under depreciation.     

对我国农村公共产品供给不足的再思考

农村公共产品供给关系到农村经济的发展、社会的稳定与和谐。在城乡差距不断拉大的情况下应努力探索农村公共产品的有效供给机制。适度的财政分权有助于农村公共产品的供给,财政分权的关键是明确各级政府的职责。应从明确政府与市场的关系、合理定位各级政府在农村公共产品供给中的职责范围与财力分配、遵循事权与财权相匹配的原则合理划分事权与财权、建立科学的转移支付制度、提高地方政府收入等方面入手,着力解决农村公共产品供给不足的问题。