Board directors with foreign experience and stock price crash risk: Evidence from China

This study examines the impact of board directors with foreign experience (BDFEs) on stock price crash risk. We find that BDFEs help reduce crash risk. This association is robust to a series of robustness checks, including a firm fixed effects model, controlling for possibly omitted variables, and instrumental variable estimations. Moreover, we find that the negative association between BDFEs and crash risk is more pronounced for firms with more agency problems, weaker corporate governance, and less overall transparency. Our findings suggest that the characteristics of board directors matter in determining stock price crash risk.     

珠三角工业设计与工业互动比较研究：双重需求拉动与设计驱动增长的区域验证

动态比较珠三角工业发展阶段和设计水平不同的典型区域内，工业用户和最终消费者用户双重需求拉动设计创新以及设计驱动工业增长作用机制的异同，提出克服互动系统短板并因地制宜实施设计驱动转型升级的对策建议。基于SVAR建模的脉冲响应和方差分解分析发现：珠三角工业确实可以通过工业设计创新驱动实现内生性可持续增长，而设计水平的地区差异对设计驱动绩效有调节作用；工业发展质量和结构欠佳，无法有效拉动区域工业设计创新，是珠三角多数地区工业设计有效需求不足的根本原因。区域工业设计与工业互动系统的短板是缺乏内行和挑剔的最终消费者有效需求。最后基于模型稳健性检验，提出因地制宜科学实施设计驱动发展战略的对策建议。     

智能制造有利于增加企业技术创新投入吗——基于智能制造试点的准自然实验

智能制造是我国制造业转型升级的主攻方向,而如何准确客观评价智能制造的实施效果成为亟待解决的问题.从技术创新投入视角,将智能制造试点政策实施视为一次准自然实验,采用2011-2019年制造业上市企业面板数据,通过PSM-DID方法研究智能制造对企业技术创新投入的影响.研究结果表明,智能制造显著影响企业技术创新投入,即通过提升客户集成度、供应商集成度进而提高企业技术创新投入,且促进作用仅发生在民营企业和非高新技术行业中.该发现扩展了现有研究外延,同时,为解决当前国际困局和促进智能制造的持续推广提供了重要实践价值.     

Perceptions of the benefits of the A3 planner in facilitating project-based learning in accounting education

This paper evaluates ways of instilling project management skills into accounting-based learning by the use of an iterative A3 planner to plan, monitor and review assignment progress. The application of an A3 planner to facilitate a project-based learning (PBL) group assignment in undergraduate accounting education has been critically evaluated in terms of both the student and tutor experience. The study uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. Quantitative data assisting exploration of perceptions were collected through 100 undergraduate students. A series of focus group discussions were carried out to investigate students’ engagement and tutors’ teaching experiences regarding the adoption of the A3 planner. The results suggest that the A3 planner promotes active planning and effective management of a PBL group assignment. It makes students’ thought processes more visible thereby facilitating and enhancing the tutoring/mentoring process. Moreover a more interactive and transparent approach by doing assignment via the use of an iterative A3 planner has ensured more feedback points and action based efficiency in the doing approach for learners.     

The Effect of Fuel Price Changes on Fleet Demand for New Vehicle Fuel Economy

New vehicle purchases by private companies and government agencies, or ‘fleet’ buyers, represent a significant percentage of overall new vehicle sales in the United States. Yet little is known about fleet demand for new vehicle fuel economy including how it responds to fuel price changes. Using unique disaggregated data on fleet and household registrations of new vehicles from 2009 to 2016, we estimate how fleet demand for new vehicle fuel economy responds to fuel price changes. We find that fleet purchases of low fuel economy vehicles fall relative to high fuel economy vehicles when gasoline prices increase, a finding that is consistent with fleet buyers’ taking into account capitalization of fuel costs in the second‐hand market. Our estimates imply that raising gasoline prices by one dollar would increase fuel economy of new vehicles acquired by fleet buyers by 0.33 miles per gallon. We estimate a similar response for household buyers during the same period. This result justifies basing fuel economy responses to fuel cost changes on household data alone, an assumption widely used in the vehicle demand literature and the fuel economy valuation literature. We also find, however, that the response to fuel price changes varies across the types of fleet buyers: rental companies respond strongly to fuel price changes, whereas commercial and government buyers are insensitive. Our estimates imply that an increase in the federal gasoline tax would modestly increase fuel economy of vehicles bought by households and rental companies but would have little to no impact on fuel economy of vehicles bought by non‐rental companies and governments.     

(Under)Mining local residential property values: A semiparametric spatial quantile autoregression

Rock mining operations, including limestone and gravel production, have considerable adverse effects on residential quality of life due to elevated noise and dust levels resulting from dynamite blasting and increased truck traffic. This paper provides the first estimates of the effects of rock mining—an environmental disamenity—on local residential property values. We focus on the relationship between a house's price and its distance from a nearby rock mine. Our analysis studies Delaware County, Ohio, which, given its unique features, provides a natural environment for the valuation of property‐value‐suppressing effects of rock mines on nearby houses. We improve upon the conventional approach to evaluating adverse effects of environmental disamenities based on hedonic house price functions. Specifically, in the pursuit of robust estimates, we develop a novel (semiparametric) partially linear spatial quantile autoregressive model which accommodates unspecified nonlinearities, distributional heterogeneity, as well as spatial dependence in the data. We derive the consistency and normality limit results for our estimator as well as propose a consistent model specification test. We find statistically and economically significant property‐value‐suppressing effects of being located near an operational rock mine which gradually decline to insignificant near‐zero values at roughly a 10‐mile distance. Our estimates suggest that, all else equal, a house located a mile closer to a rock mine is priced, on average, at about 2.3–5.1% discount, with more expensive properties being subject to larger markdowns.     

Social media affordances in entry‐level employees’ socialization: employee agency in the management of their professional impressions and vulnerability during early stages of socialization

This study examined how entry‐level employees interacted with social media during three stages of organizational socialization. They navigated between four different media affordances (persistence, editability, visibility, and association) while experiencing them as both enabling and constraining in different socialization stages. Qualitative interview data analysis revealed during anticipatory socialization, job applicants realized visibility and persistence in relation to institutional and individualized socialization. During encounter, new employees managed personal and professional life boundaries carefully against the association and visibility affordances. Although some participants used both public and enterprise social media for obtaining job‐related information and understanding coworkers and company culture, during metamorphosis, most interviewees adopted passive information seeking strategies and experienced a paradoxical tension between the enabling and constraining affordances of social media. Findings are discussed with regards to employees’ exertion of agency in managing their professional impressions and coping with high levels of uncertainty and vulnerability during early stages of socialization.     

Hedonic pricing and the role of stud fees in the market for thoroughbred yearlings in Australia

Using data from one of Australia's largest thoroughbred auction houses, we investigate the price determinants of thoroughbred yearlings sold at auction. We include novel key variables to construct hedonic pricing models and examine the relative role of stud fees compared to the wide range of attributes in the pricing of yearlings. We find that the price effect of stud fees is influenced by the value buyers place on both the characteristics of sires and the characteristics of sire side siblings. The findings imply that the quality of dams a sire has been matched within the breeding market has consequential effects on yearling prices through the sire's stud fee and progeny.     

VIX term structure and VIX futures pricing with realized volatility

Using an extended LHARG model proposed by Majewski et al. (2015, J Econ, 187, 521–531), we derive the closed-form pricing formulas for both the Chicago Board Options Exchange VIX term structure and VIX futures with different maturities. Our empirical results suggest that the quarterly and yearly components of lagged realized volatility should be added into the model to capture the long-term volatility dynamics. By using the realized volatility based on high-frequency data, the proposed model provides superior pricing performance compared with the classic Heston–Nandi GARCH model under a variance-dependent pricing kernel, both in-sample and out-of-sample. The improvement is more pronounced during high volatility periods.     

基于冠层光谱和BP神经网络的水稻叶片氮素浓度估算模型

[目的]快速、准确地诊断水稻叶片氮素营养状况,为水稻氮肥精准管理提供依据。[方法]以江西省农科院8种不同施肥处理的晚稻为研究对象,于主要生育期同步测定了水稻冠层光谱反射率及叶片全氮浓度(Leaf Nitrogen Concentration,LNC),系统分析了原始光谱反射率、一阶微分光谱、"三边"参数以及由350～1 350nm两两波段组合的差值(SD (Rλ1,Rλ2))、比值(SR (Rλ1,Rλ2))及归一化(ND(Rλ1,Rλ2))光谱指数与水稻LNC的相关关系,筛选出敏感参数,并以之为自变量构建了水稻LNC的传统预测模型,另外构建不同指标个数的多元线性与BP神经网络模型,并对模型进行验证。[结果](1)水稻LNC与一阶微分光谱在751nm处的相关性最高(r=0. 822);(2)"三边"参数中的红边面积SDr与LNC的相关性较高(r=0. 687);(3) 750nm附近的红边波段与近红外波段差值组合、550nm附近的绿光波段与近红外波段的比值及归一化差值组合与水稻LNC的相关性较高,以SD (R752,R751)、SR (R534,R1 350)和ND (R534,R1 349)表现最好,相关系数分别为0. 827、-0. 790和0. 788;(4)传统回归模型中以SD(R752,R751)构建的一元线性模型最佳(RC2=0. 665、RV2=0. 750、RMSEV=0. 4%、RPD=2. 034);(5)利用5个指标((R'751、SDr、SD (R752,R751)、SR (R534,R1 350)、ND (R534,R1 349))经逐步回归筛选出的2个指标SD ((R752,R751)和SR (R534,R1 350))构建预测水稻氮素的BP神经网络模型,预测效果最佳,其验证参数值分别为R2=0. 859、RMSEV=0. 302%和RPD=2. 669。[结论]基于单指标构建的传统线性模型计算过程简单但精度略低,而基于2个指标(SD (R752,R751)、SR (R534,R1 350))构建的BP神经网络模型预测精度高于该2指标构建的多元线性模型,表明在指标适合的情况下,BP神经网络对氮素具有较好的预测能力,是一种快速准确估算水稻叶片全氮浓度的方法。