The “grabbing hand” or the “helping hand” view of corruption: Evidence from bank foreign market entries

This study adopts a resource perspective to explore a non-linear relationship between corruption and two measures of bank foreign market commitment, the capital invested and the share of equity, on a sample of 131 bank entries in forty host countries. Our findings support a U-shaped relationship providing evidence of the “grabbing hand” view at low to moderate levels of corruption and, supporting the “helping hand” view at high levels of it. In addition, market-seeking motives are found to have a positive moderating effect on this relationship. This study contributes to the long-standing debate about the effects of corruption on FDI.     

推进我国部门预算改革的路径选择

始于2000年的部门预算改革推行已有十多年,虽已实现统一收支、细化预算和加强约束等要求,但还是存在改革目标模糊、行为主体职责不清、编制内容不够完善和编制结果使用不理想等问题,这影响到部门预算所能发挥的更加积极的作用.通过对存在问题的梳理,寻找下一步推进我国部门预算改革的民主路径、效率路径和规划路径,使部门预算在预算编制的程序民主、预算资金的使用效率和预算行为的科学规划方面得到提升,从而有助于发掘围绕部门预算改革所能产生的深远涵义.     

财政支出效益评价的理论与实践研究

财政支出是以国家为主体,以财政的事权为依据进行的一种财政资金分配活动,集中反映了国家的职能活动范围及其所造成的耗费.凡是财政部门为行使职能所支付的一切支出以及具有满足公共需要性质的支出,都属于财政支出范畴.据此,财政支出效益的评价不仅要关注预算内支出,还应关注大量的"准财政活动"领域中形成的财政支出.     

Redistribution and education subsidies are Siamese twins

We develop models of optimal linear and non-linear income taxation with endogenous human capital formation to explore optimal education subsidies. Optimal subsidies on education ensure efficiency in human capital accumulation and thus play an important role in alleviating the tax distortions on learning induced by redistributive policies. If the government cannot verify all investments in human capital, education policy offsets some but not all tax-induced distortions on learning. Non-pecuniary educational costs (benefits) may increase (decrease) subsidies on education, especially if they are complementary to work effort.     

Does financial instability increase environmental degradation? Fresh evidence from Pakistan

The present study explores the relationship between financial instability and environmental degradation within the multivariate framework using time series data over the period of 1971–2009 in case of Pakistan. The long run relationship is investigated by the ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration, and error correction method (ECM) is applied to examine the short run dynamics. The stationary properties of the variables are investigated by applying Saikkonen and Lütkepohl unit root test. Empirical evidence confirms that there exists a long run relationship between both variables and financial instability increases environmental degradation.     

Cash policy and the bank-firm relationship

Bank health affects a firm's cash holding - a healthy bank can result in either more (because of the influential bank power) or less (because of precautionary motive) firm-level cash holding. Motivated by the contrasting views in the existing literature, this paper investigates whether bank policy determines firm-level cash policy. Using Japanese firm-level data over 2000–2014, we find that the difference in bank health effects stems from the firm's investment status. We find that healthy banks induce growing firms to hold more cash while declining firms hold more cash when borrowing from unhealthy banks. Furthermore, we find that banks with more liquidity also induce their growing borrowers to have more cash. Our results are robust to the endogeneity of bank selection. Our study indicates that bank-firm relationship can serve as an advance-signalling device for a firm's shareholder-wealth-maximizing investments and contributes to the literature that explains the cash holding puzzle.     

The role of Provincial Government Spending Composition in growth and convergence in China

China’s development policy since 1978 has differed across regions. With rapid aggregate growth has come widening regional inequality. The fiscal decentralisation reforms in 1994 shifted political pressure onto provincial officials to boost local growth through local public investments. These investments affect regional convergence by counteracting regulatory frictions in factor accumulation, and can also determine steady-state growth. However, the effect of public spending allocations across physical and human capital on growth and convergence processes is empirically unexplored for Chinese provinces. We take provincial time-series data on public spending by category, finding local public spending and its components augment convergence rates differently across regions. Spending on education and health contributes significantly more to growth and convergence than capital spending, confirming that the public capital-spending bias is not a local growth-optimising strategy. We suggest a policy of aligning local government promotion incentives to human capital targets to correct local resource misallocation.     

Adding space to the international business cycle

Growth fluctuations exhibit substantial synchronization across countries, which has been viewed as reflecting a global business cycle driven by shocks with worldwide reach, or spillovers resulting from local real and/or financial linkages between countries. This paper brings these two perspectives together by analyzing international growth fluctuations in a setting that allows for both global shocks and spatial dependence. Using annual data for 117 countries over 1970–2016, the paper finds that the cross-country dependence of aggregate growth is the combined result of global shocks summarized by a latent common factor and spatial effects accruing through the growth of nearby countries – with proximity measured by bilateral trade linkages or geographic distance. The latent global factor shows a strong positive correlation with worldwide TFP growth. Countries’ exposure to global shocks is positively related to their openness to trade and the degree of commodity specialization of their economies, and negatively to their financial depth. Despite its simplicity, the empirical model fits the data well. Ignoring the cross-country dependence of growth, by omitting spatial effects or common shocks (or both) from the analysis, leads to a marked deterioration of the empirical model’s in-sample explanatory power and out-of-sample forecasting performance.     

Explaining the choice of accounting standards in municipal corporations: Positive accounting theory and institutional theory as competitive or concurrent theories

Municipal corporations exist in an institutional twilight area, being both private and public, a characteristic, which presumably would be reflected in their choice of accounting standards. The literature of accounting choice does not, however, live in a twilight area, but is fragmented into two main divisions: positive accounting theory (PAT) and institutional theory (IT); only in a very few cases do the theories meet or cross-fertilize. We use both theories in this paper and derive hypotheses from them to explain accounting choices made by municipal corporations. Through testing the hypotheses on a sample of 545 Swedish municipal corporations, we indicate the empirical relevance of both PAT and IT. We conclude by suggesting an integrative approach of PAT and IT in an eclectic alternative.