Selective Trading of Available-for-Sale Securities: Evidence from U.S. Commercial Banks

This paper examines the selective trading of available-for-sale (AFS) securities by U.S. banks after the implementation of fair value accounting under Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 115, Accounting Standards Codification Topic 320. Our findings suggest firms still engage in earnings management through selective selling of AFS securities despite the mandatory disclosure of unrealized security holding gains and losses in their financial statements. Such activities do not appear to be driven by the lack of reliability of the fair value measure. Instead, the degree of earnings management varies significantly with the reporting format of unrealized AFS security holding gains and losses. We find evidence of earnings management among banks that choose to report unrealized holding gains and losses in the statement of shareholders’ equity. By contrast, we find no such evidence among banks disclosing unrealized holding gains and losses in the income statement.     

Informal Property Rights as Relational and Functional: Unravelling the Relational Contract in China's Informal Housing Market

In the face of state-led land grabs, enterprising Chinese peasants have started a revolution in the ambiguous and insecure rural tenure system by developing an extralegal property system known as the small property right (SPR). Using the SPR, peasants are able to capitalize on their property through the sale of houses built on collectively owned land. Little is known, however, about the specific process behind the development of the SPR by the peasants, or how this extralegal property system functions in terms of securing the use and transfer of property without the backing of law. This article aims to clarify the situation through the lenses of the Endogenous Nature of Institutions and Relational Contract Theory, aiming to understand the socially constructed, endogenous and relational nature of the property rights that make SPR functional. Based on an ethnographic investigation of Beijing's largest SPR housing settlement, we show how enterprising peasants develop long-term relational contracts with urban households for the provision of housing services, secured on the basis of the common interests and symbiosis of the two parties and a reputation system that serves to deter defaults. The discretionary treatment of SPR housing by local states serves as a further motivation for the village and the informal homeowners to preserve a stable property arrangement, with such a specific institutional setting being an exemplar of China's pragmatic state entrepreneurialism.     

The effects of slack resource of R&D professionals on firm performance: evidence from traditional manufacturing firms in an emerging economy

Abstract

As an important component of organizational human resource slack (HR slack), the slack of research-and-development (R&D) professionals has been studied by several authors. However, it remains unclear whether and how this small component of general HR slack, i.e. the slack of research-and-development professionals (RHR slack), may affect overall firm performance in an emerging economy without much R&D tradition or pro-R&D institutions. Based on two organizational theories, i.e. institutional theory and the resource-based view of the firm (RBV), we propose competing hypotheses on the relationship between RHR slack and firms’ accounting performance. We also examine whether the relationship between RHR slack and firm performance should be linear or curvilinear. Finally, we also test the relationship between RHR slack and other dimensions of firm performance. Several interesting findings have been obtained. For instance, neither the perspective based on institutional theory nor that based on RBV can fully predict all types of RHR slack-performance relationships, be these relationships linear or curvilinear.     

数字经济下的转换成本对市场竞争的影响分析

转换成本可以通过市场力量和企业的策略性行为对市场竞争产生重要影响,因此成为竞争执法机构竞争评估的重点考察因素,而当前数字经济具有的网络效应和多归属等特征使得转换成本对市场竞争的影响更加复杂。本文首先从经济学角度剖析转换成本的定义、起源与分类,而后考察转换成本与网络效应和多归属之间的关系,最后研究转换成本对市场竞争的影响、系统论述转换成本在数字经济下可能引起的竞争关注。     

新冠疫情对我国农业农村经济的影响及政策建议

2020年1月,新冠疫情突然而至。为了防止疫情扩散,我国采取了交通阻断及人流限制措施,这也为我国农业农村经济发展带来了巨大挑战。2月下旬以来,疫情已经得到初步控制,中低风险地区的农业农村经济也逐步恢复,但是依然存在一些障碍和突出问题。本文就当前存在的突出问题进行分析,并从近期和长远角度提出相关的政策建议。     

亚当·斯密农业发展思想研究

经济学之父亚当·斯密的传世名著《国富论》包含了非常丰富的经济发展思想,在《国富论》中,亚当·斯密重点对制造业、商业等城市经济进行阐述的同时,对农村、农业的发展也提出了自己的见解。虽然这些见解零散地分布在《国富论》的各篇章中,且距今已有二百余年,但是这些看似零碎的见解却包含着博大精深的农业发展思想,对现今我国的农村、农业发展仍然有着很强的指导和借鉴意义。     

新疆农村产业融合发展研究

现运用面板回归模型结合产值贡献度的方法评价了新疆农村产业融合度,结果表明,新疆农业与农产品加工业融合度、农业与农业服务业融合度均较低。通过地理信息可视化表达发现,新疆农村产业融合度且存在明显的区域差异。最后,结合新疆农村产业融合发展所面临的困境,提出了需要完善农业教育服务体系;培育区域特色品牌;加强对各种利益联结方式的监督引导等建议。     

Chinese multinationals on the New Silk Route: Managing political risk by branding the nation

Though Chinese multinational enterprises (CMNEs) have brought investment and opportunities to countries along the Belt and Road Initiative, there has been scepticism regarding the content and context of their investment. On the one hand, infrastructural development contributes to GDP formation and enhances the efficiency of productive inputs where international trade enhances technology and export development, which jointly provides a path to economic growth. On the other hand, critical issues such as debt sustainability and national sovereignty among countries that have gone through the decolonization process mean that CMNEs need to grasp the implication of political risk when investing. This article focuses on South and Southeast Asia, where China has historical socio‐economic relationship, and proposes a nation branding model combining tradition and modernity which can be the way forward for CMNEs to mitigate political risk in relation to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) investment. Nation branding of BRI could be seen as a continuity of China's unfinished business in globalization that has preceded the modern polity; nevertheless, there is a need to communicate a coherent and authentic message that reflects the reality of business operations.     

Exploring the knowledge spillovers of a technology in an entrepreneurial ecosystem—The case of artificial intelligence in Sydney

New knowledge presents opportunities for commercial value and can hence be a critical asset for entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs). In particular, general purpose technologies are major drivers of entrepreneurship. Thus, a nuanced understanding on technological knowledge and its spillovers among actors within an EE is warranted. Using knowledge‐spillover‐based strategic entrepreneurship theory, we propose to observe knowledge spillovers through the assessment of the knowledge bases of a technology in an EE. To do so, this article proposes to use three key sources of knowledge: publications reflecting the emerging knowledge base, patents representing the realized knowledge base, and startups showing the experimental knowledge base. This article uses secondary data sources such as Web of Science and applies the method of bibliometrics to illustrate how an assessment is carried out in practice by evaluating the artificial intelligence (AI) knowledge bases in Sydney from 2000 to 2018. The findings are summarized with an illustration of the evolution of the key actors and their activities over time in order to indicate the key strengths and weaknesses in Sydney's AI knowledge among the different bases. Contrary to expectations from the high potential of knowledge spillovers from a general purpose digital technology such as AI, the article shows that apparent knowledge spillovers are yet highly limited in Sydney. Even though Sydney has a strong emerging knowledge base, the realized knowledge base seems weak and the experimental knowledge base is slowly improving. That observation itself verifies the need to take strategic actions to facilitate knowledge spillovers within EEs. After the implications for theory and policy makers are discussed, suggestions for further studies are proposed.     

基于组织协同系统的创客组织发展稳定性实证分析

创客组织是实现组织协同创新的重要载体。创客位于组织协同系统的核心层，创客入驻创客组织的创新状态决定了协同创新发展状态；创客组织位于组织协同系统的中间层，起组织协调作用，其发展稳定性影响着整个系统；协同组织位于外部层，其参与程度决定了整个系统的组织协同和协同创新吸引能力。基于波动系数计量模型，对240家创客组织的12项评价指标进行分析，结果显示，以高校主导的创客组织衡量指标波动系数为标准，创客组织在整体上处于发展不稳定状态；分类别分析结果表明，高校和科研院所主导的创客组织发展稳定性明显优于企业和个人主导的创客组织。研究结果可以为完善创新政策、促进创客组织稳健发展提供参考。