Trade liberalization and wage inequality: Evidence from Korea

This paper investigates the heterogeneous income distribution effects of trade liberalization using Korean survey data from years of 2000–2015. Following the Stolper-Samuelson theorem most of previous research studying the effects of trade liberalization on wage differences focus on workers’ characteristics (e.g., skilled or unskilled) while heterogeneity within the same worker group has not been yet substantially investigated. To fill this gap, this paper provides empirical evidence of wage inequality across firms within the same group of workers caused by trade liberalization, potentially implied in the new-new trade models with firm heterogeneity. Employing a difference-in-differences (DID) specification, we find that the wages of unskilled workers in Korea have increased since its FTAs with more advanced countries, such as members of EU and the US, came into effect, while the effects on the wages of skilled workers are negative but not statistically significant. We also show that wage effects are heterogeneous across firms within unskilled and skilled worker groups, while the positive effects are statistically significant and largest for unskilled workers in medium-large sized firms. These findings are in line with both traditional and new-new trade models.     

技术型企业过往绩效对团队创新行为的影响：关系冲突的中介效应

基于IMOI模型，引入具备动态特征的“过往绩效”概念，利用长三角地区101个项目导向型研发团队问卷数据，依据社会信息处理理论和归因理论探讨过往绩效对团队创新行为的影响效果与内在机制。结果发现，过往绩效与团队创新行为显著正相关，关系冲突在过往绩效影响创新行为路径中起部分中介作用，并且关系冲突的中介机制在中国“人情”文化背景下能得到更好的解释；进一步，团队内部的恶意归因倾向在这一过程中发挥着调节作用。研究结果有助于从新视角探索技术型团队创新行为诱发机制，对双创背景下技术型企业创新管理实践具有一定参考意义。     

Firm financing and growth in the Arab region

This paper documents how firms in Arab countries use equity, corporate bond and syndicated loan markets to obtain financing and grow. Working with a new dataset on issuance activity in domestic and international markets and firm performance, the paper finds that capital raising through these markets has grown rapidly since the early 1990s and involved an increasing number of firms. Whereas the amounts raised in equity and loan markets (relative to gross domestic product) stand well relative to international standards, bond issuance activity lags behind. However, bond financing has gained importance over time. Equity issuances take place primarily in domestic markets, whereas bonds and loans are mostly issued internationally, display long maturities and entail low levels of credit risk. Issuing firms from the Arab region are very large compared to international standards. They also tend to be larger, faster growing and more leveraged than non-issuing firms in Arab countries.     

Alienation and anxiety in tourism motivation

Although underexplored in tourism studies, recent work suggests theories of alienation, as the dialectic of authenticity, have much to contribute to our understanding of tourism motivation. This paper uses three major theoretical tropes (Marxism, existentialism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis) to examine the role of alienation in the motivations of hiking and rock climbing tourists. In particular, these tourists describe only temporary and retrospective relief from anxiety, articulating authenticity as an elusive experience that lies at the horizon, in the next adventure, or in the past as a memory. Alienation is an ever-present component of the human condition, and as such, anxiety is omnipresent in our lives, contributing significantly to touristic desires for escape, rejuvenation, and existential experiences.     

Tax incentive,R&D investment and firm innovation: Evidence from China

We estimate the effect of R&D tax incentives on firm-level R&D expenditures (RDE) and patenting using a change in the eligibility criteria for a super deduction in China. In 2006, the Chinese government relaxed the “10 % eligibility criterion”, which stated that only firms with a 10 % or higher increase in prior-year RDE can claim an additional 50 % tax deduction. We use an event study approach to show that firms that became newly eligible to claim the super deduction (those just below the criterion) catches up on RDE and product innovation measured by the sales of new products. In the long run, we also observe a closing gap in the number of patents between the two groups of firms. Moreover, extending tax benefits to all firm helps to lower the tax burden, and we find no evidence of manipulation and relabeling.     

Lack of successors,firm default,and the performance of small businesses

We investigate the effects of the lack of successors on small businesses with an elderly manager. Using firm-level data from Japan, a country with an aging population, we find the following results. First, smaller, younger, highly leveraged, and nongrowing firms are likely to have no successor. Second, firms with an elderly manager are more likely to exit and default if they have no successors, and this is particularly the case during the global financial crisis around 2009. This result suggests that these firms have less incentive to repay debts because they are not going concerns. As a result of the high probability of default, the annual change in bank borrowing is low if firms with an elderly manager have no successor. Third, the annual change of bank borrowing is lower for firms with no successor during the crisis and post-crisis periods, implying that banks reduce lending to these firms because of their high risk.     

Knowledge capital,CEO power,and firm value: Evidence from the IT industry

Disruptive innovation dramatically changes the demand of a product market in the information technology (IT) industry. In response to the impact of disruptive innovation, IT firms that may be eliminated from the competitive race actively develop innovative products and adjust their operating strategies to strengthen their survivability in the fiercely competitive market. Thus, this study explores the factors that affect firm value in the IT industry under the impact of disruptive innovation. The empirical results reveal that knowledge capital and CEO power play crucial roles in explaining firm value. IT firms with powerful CEOs and increased knowledge capital have high firm values. The effects of knowledge capital and CEO power on firm value are especially significant for founder and duality CEO firms. Furthermore, the influence of CEO power is more prominent in periods of financial crisis.     

金融发展、企业创新与经济增长

本文通过在一般均衡模型中引入银行部门,考察了金融发展对企业创新和经济增长的影响。基于模型的理论分析表明,在均衡状态下,金融发展可以提高经济中储蓄向投资转化的效率、缓解信息不对称,有效降低了研发部门的外部融资成本,从而促进企业增加研发投入,并推动经济实现更高速的增长。在此基础上,本文以中国31个省份2008—2016年的面板数据对上述结论进行了实证检验,相关结果表明:(1)金融发展对企业研发投入具有显著的促进效应;(2)在工业化程度、外商投资水平较高的地区以及政府支出水平较低、人才资源相对短缺的地区,金融发展的促进作用更加明显;(3)企业研发创新可以有效推动经济增长,且在金融支持实体经济中发挥了重要的中介作用。本文的理论和实证分析揭示了“金融发展—企业创新—经济增长”的内生性传导机理及其在中国的体现,从而为金融支持创新型经济增长的改革逻辑奠定了初步的理论和经验基础。     

Does board gender diversity influence firm profitability? A control function approach

We investigate the relation between board gender diversity and firm profitability using the control function (CF) approach recently suggested by Wooldridge (2015). The CF method takes account of the problem of endogenous explanatory variables that have potential to bias the results. Using a sample of firms that made up the S&P 500 over the period 2004–2015, we find that the presence of women on corporate boards (measured either by the percentage of female directors on corporate boards or the Blau index of heterogeneity) has a positive and significant (at the 1% level) effect on firm profitability (measured by the return on assets). We compare our results to more traditional approaches (such as pooled OLS or the fixed-effects model). Through this study, we shed light on the effect of women on corporate boards on firm performance, as it is still a controversial issue (Post and Byron, 2015).     

The relationship between people's activities and values with the protection level and biodiversity

We investigated how people's recreational activities, values, and land use preferences are related to the protection level, biodiversity and cultural heritage values of nature-based tourism areas in northern Finland. We assessed peoples' opinions using a public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) and analyzed the data together with spatial biodiversity and cultural heritage data from the same area. Associations between the PPGIS place markings with the protection level and biodiversity values were quite low, and for the cultural heritage sites they were altogether missing. Negative preferences were often marked in areas with high numbers of sites rated as pleasant and they overlapped with each other, indicating conflicting preferences. Since most activities are not noticeably related to the protection level or biodiversity values of a site they can be planned so as to protect the biodiversity of the area.