Weak-Form Market Efficiency of the Nigerian Stock Market in the Context of Financial Reforms and Global Financial Crises

The weak-form efficient market hypothesis for the Nigerian Stock Market (NSM) is explored using different statistical tests. The analyses use overall stock market returns collected over the period 2000–2010. It is shown that the NSM is not weak-form efficient which questions the benefits of the 2004 financial reforms. It is also shown that the degree of market inefficiency varies across the periods corresponding to the financial reforms and 2007 global financial crisis, for daily and monthly returns. The results are important to security analysts, investors, and security exchange regulatory agencies in their investment, stock market development, and policy-making decisions.     

Income and Fiscal Incidence by Age and Gender: Some Evidence from New Zealand

With many fiscal policies likely to have quite different age/gender incidences, this paper examines age and gender dimensions of income distribution and fiscal incidence in New Zealand using Household Economic Survey data for 2010. Applying, and testing, an intra‐household income sharing rule, our evidence suggests strong life‐cycle and gender aspects to fiscal incidence. Net tax liabilities are found to be low and negative, at younger and older ages but positive during much of the “working age.” Notwithstanding considerable within‐gender heterogeneity, women are found on average to have systematically and persistently lower net fiscal liabilities than men, especially at older ages.     

Sustainable fisheries development in the tropics: trawlers and licence limitation in Malaysia

Sustainable fisheries development requires sound fisheries management. Area licence limitation programmes may form the cornerstone for most tropical multispecies fisheries management programmes. An empirical analysis of Peninsular Malaysian fishing trawlers is used to design an area licence limitation programme that conforms to the multiproduct production technology, and cost and revenue structures to best accommodate condtions of asymmetric information between the regulator and fishing vessels.     

Developing country fisheries and technical efficiency: the Java Sea purse seine fishery

The analysis of technical efficiency in developing country agriculture is well established but has been overlooked for developing country commercial marine fisheries. Policies raising technical efficiency in agriculture are viewed as uniformly positive but are a mixed blessing in fisheries due to the open-access property right and common-pool resource. This study explores this contradiction and policies aimed to promote sustainable development and management of renewable common pool resources through a case study of the Java Sea purse seine fishery. Season of the year rather than fisher or vessel characteristics primarily determines technical efficiency. The results are contrasted with developing country agriculture and conclusions drawn for fisheries development strategies.     

China??s banking system, market structure, and competitive conditions

This paper presents an empirical assessment of the market structure and the competitive conditions of the Chinese banking sector. We applied the Panzar-Rosse H-statistic on the data collected from a panel including 16 most significant Chinese banks for the period 2004–2007. Equilibrium tests and the competitive conditions tests were applied on the data. From the pooled regression in the whole period, we found that the banking sector in China for 2004–2007 was monopolistically competitive. We also show that the Chinese banks were not able to achieve high records of profitability in monopolistically competitive markets.     

Disclaiming onerous property in insolvency: A comparative study

Insolvency practitioners in charge of certain insolvency procedures have a facility open to them to disclaim property deemed to be onerous and whose retention as part of the debtor's estate may affect the mass of creditors. This article takes a comparative survey of a number of jurisdictions in the common‐law and civil‐law worlds. Its purpose is to assess whether work carried out at international level seeking to benchmark insolvency procedures generally should be revised to take into account enviornmental concerns in relation to such disclaimed property. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Development of accounting regulation in Jordan

This study examines the development of accounting regulation in Jordan with emphasis on the dominant environmental factors that influence it. In order to have a better understanding of Jordan's present accounting practices, and its future development tendencies, we examine the path of accounting in Jordan since the early days of the nineteenth century, and analyze how Jordan's accounting environment — political, economic, legal and cultural — influenced the development of accounting in Jordan. We also examine Jordan's recent move towards full adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and find that Jordan's colonial past has exerted a strong influence. In addition, we conclude that political and economic factors, through privatization and the resulting accounting reforms, contributed more to the development of accounting practices than other environmental factors. Privatization led to reforming Jordan's disclosure regulation and laying down of the corporate-governance policy framework. Our conclusions could be of interest to other countries, particularly developing countries, who want to improve the quality of their accounting disclosures and practices.     

Embodied Technological Change,Learning‐by‐doing and the Productivity Slowdown*

The productivity slowdown in the US economy since the first oil shock has recently been associated with a larger decline rate of the relative price of equipment investment and a smaller rate of disembodied technical change. We set up a growth model in which learning‐by‐doing is the engine of both embodied and disembodied technological progress. A shift in the relative efficiency of learning‐by‐doing from the consumption to the investment sector is shown to imply a technological reassignment consistent with the above‐mentioned evidence. This result derives from the interaction between the obsolescence costs inherent in embodiment and the learning‐by‐doing engine.     

International mobility of capital,wage indexation,and the cost of policy mistakes under ambiguity: a CGE evaluation

In this paper we focus on the role institutions and structural parameters play in macroeconomic policy design and test the differential effects of tax policies on two structural parameters: the degree of international capital mobility and the rules of wage indexation practiced in the economy. We evaluate counterfactual changes in taxation in the Argentine economy using a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Model with unemployment, calibrated with 2006 data, showing that policy mistakes (diagnosis failures) are costlier when the degree of capital mobility is greater and the rules to determine salaries could amplify the losses. Among other taxes, we evaluate the choice of export taxation, historically one of the preferred revenue sources of Argentine governments. We discuss the choice of taxes that an optimistic and a pessimistic policymaker will make under Knightian uncertainty and find that, in the case of our CGE, an optimistic policymaker prefers to tax export goods, while a more pessimistic one tends to tax imports or non-tradable goods.     

The Trickle‐down Effect of the Mining Boom in Australia: Fact or Myth?

This paper examines the relationship between the output levels in the mining sector and various non‐mining sectors in an attempt to understand the role of the mining sector in Australia. The unobserved components time series model is used to estimate the effects of the output gap and the growth regime in the mining sector on the output level of each of several non‐mining sectors. Overall, the estimates obtained do not suggest an overwhelmingly positive effect running from the mining sector to other production and services sectors, implying that the trickle‐down effect of the mining boom may be a myth.