Agriculture–nutrition linkages with heterogeneous,unobserved returns and costs: Insights from Tajikistan

Agriculture–nutrition linkages (ANLs) have been increasingly investigated in the literature. However, nutritional returns and costs of household agricultural production practices (APPs) in semisubsistence settings are poorly understood. We fill these knowledge gaps using pooled cross-section data sets in Tajikistan, where semisubsistence farming and undernutrition coexist despite relatively good agricultural infrastructure and education systems. Agricultural diversification, yield enhancement, production expansion are positively associated with various nutritional outcomes, particularly in areas with poor food market access. Decomposition exercises suggest that nutritional returns and costs of these APPs vary across households, and the adoption of APPs is driven by the expected nutritional returns. In Tajikistan, improving nutrition through household ANLs requires growing the smallholder agricultural sector in multiple dimensions, including diversification, intensification, and expansion, while also understanding better the pathways of ANLs and addressing bottlenecks at appropriate stages of such pathways.     

The capital market spillover effect of product market advertising: Evidence from stock price synchronicity

We analyze whether product market advertising has a spillover effect on stock price synchronicity by transmitting firm-specific information to the capital market and attracting more investor attention. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2017, we find that firms with greater advertising expenditures have lower stock price synchronicity. The results are robust after we address endogeneity concerns. In accord with our hypothesis that product market advertising increases the amount of firm-level information capitalized into stock prices through the information channel, we find that the impact of advertising on synchronicity is more pronounced for firms with a higher degree of information asymmetry and firms in the consumer-product industry. Further tests show that product market advertising enhances the ability of current period returns to reflect future earnings, and thus rules out that the negative relationship between advertising and synchronicity is driven by noise trading. Our results imply that product market advertising plays an informative role and improves information efficiency in a capital market.     

浅议CPA审计行业专门化问题

随着我国市场经济体制改革的不断完善,CPA审计行业所面临的社会环境也因此而产生了重大的变化。伴随着社会对审计人员的严格要求,审计人员的素质也在不断提高。当然,这对CPA这个行业无疑也产生了深深的影响,同时也对行业的专门化也起到了潜移默化的推动作用。因此在本文中,将会立足于注册会计师审计实务,通过具体分析行业专门化的竞争优势和目前的发展趋势,讨论审计行业专门化可能带来的经济后果,并且与多个上市公司的案例相结合,运用案例分析法、经验总结法、描述分析法等方法合理透彻地剖析出目前CPA审计行业所存在的问题,以及对已经存在的问题作出具体解决方案。     

The Joint Effects of Formal Institutions and Business Characteristics on Interfirm Guanxi in China: A Fuzzy Set Analysis

ABSTRACT

Purpose: This research intends to investigate the effects of formal market institutions on managers’ willingness to use personal networks, such as guanxi in China, for business success.

Methodology: We collect data from a major cellular phone manufacturer and its 277 retailers across China. We employ Fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (FsQCA) to identify necessary conditions and causal recipes (combinations of antecedent conditions) for three elements of guanxi between boundary spanners (i.e., ganqing, information favor, and business support) and a firm’s operational performance.

Findings: We find that formal market institutions are not the sole factor influencing managers’ decisions on exercising guanxi practices and, in turn, achieving interfirm collaboration. We also find that there exists more than one causal recipe leading to each key element of guanxi between boundary spanners. The results also suggest that well-established formal market institutions would never be able to completely eliminate guanxi practices in China.

Originality: This paper is among the first to examine the joint effects of formal market institutions and key characteristics of interfirm relationships on the use of guanxi practices.     

Convex duality and Orlicz spaces in expected utility maximization

In this paper, we report further progress toward a complete theory of state‐independent expected utility maximization with semimartingale price processes for arbitrary utility function. Without any technical assumptions, we establish a surprising Fenchel duality result on conjugate Orlicz spaces, offering a new economic insight into the nature of primal optima and providing a fresh perspective on the classical papers of Kramkov and Schachermayer. The analysis points to an intriguing interplay between no‐arbitrage conditions and standard convex optimization and motivates the study of the fundamental theorem of asset pricing for Orlicz tame strategies.     

No‐arbitrage implies power‐law market impact and rough volatility

Market impact is the link between the volume of a (large) order and the price move during and after the execution of this order. We show that in a quite general framework, under no‐arbitrage assumption, the market impact function can only be of power‐law type. Furthermore, we prove this implies that the macroscopic price is diffusive with rough volatility, with a one‐to‐one correspondence between the exponent of the impact function and the Hurst parameter of the volatility. Hence, we simply explain the universal rough behavior of the volatility as a consequence of the no‐arbitrage property. From a mathematical viewpoint, our study relies, in particular, on new results about hyper‐rough stochastic Volterra equations.     

The international market selection of Chinese SMEs: How institutional influence overrides psychic distance

The purpose of this research is to contribute to the ongoing debate about whether psychic distance still plays a vital role in the internationalisation of SMEs from emerging markets. Drawing on the prior research which suggests the salient impact of institutional factors on internationalisation, we investigate the role of home country institutions in international market selection. Adopting a multi-case methodology, we collected semi-structured interview data from six small and medium-sized manufacturing firms in China. Our findings suggest that while psychic distance is still important in some circumstances, both formal institutions, such as government support, and informal institutions, such as business and political guanxi, enable Chinese SMEs to choose psychically distant markets. Our findings also indicate that informal institutions interact with formal institutions to further influence SMEs’ international market selection. This research contributes to SME internationalisation studies by revealing how formal and informal institutional factors override psychic distance in influencing international market selection.     

终身证券市场禁入的正当性难题及其化解

我国证券监管所采用的终身证券市场禁入，剥夺了行为人参与证券市场的资格或机会，需要接受“正当性”的拷问。基于公共利益理论、利益平衡分析等论证证券市场禁入的正当性，未深入到行为人自身内部寻找正当性根据，均存在一定的局限性。证券市场禁入的正当性基础，应当回归到行为人自身，注重行为人自身“适合”参与证券市场的可期待性。终身证券市场禁入具有鲜明的“惩罚性”，面临着责任追究无边界等正当性难题。化解这一难题的路径是去除证券市场禁入的“惩罚性”，允许被禁入对象“救赎”自己，建立终身证券市场禁入的适时退出程序，明确终身证券市场禁入的退出标准，动态跟踪监测被禁入对象个体情况，适时赋予其参与证券市场的“第二次机会”。     

Measuring extreme risk spillovers across international stock markets: A quantile variance decomposition analysis

This paper proposes a quantile variance decomposition framework for measuring extreme risk spillover effects across international stock markets. The framework extends the spillover index approach suggested by Diebold and Yilmaz (2009) using a quantile regression analysis instead of the ordinary least squares estimation. Thus, the framework provides a new tool for further study into the extreme risk spillover effects. The model is applied to G7 and BRICS stock markets, from which new insights emerged as to the extreme risk spillovers across G7 and BRICS stock markets, and revealed how extreme risk spillover across developed and emerging stock markets. These findings have important implications for market regulators.     

Weekday seasonality of stock returns: The contrary case of China

We document that Chinese stock returns exhibit early-in-the-week effects opposite-signed to those observed worldwide. The period of analysis is 2001–2016. Dominated by individual investors, Chinese stock markets offer unique out-of-sample insight regarding the source of weekday seasonality, ascribed elsewhere to institutional investors’ trading patterns. High returns to the market and to small, speculative stocks early-in-the-week pose a refuter to the mood explanation for the conventional (negative) Monday effect. A battery of tests suggests that the patterns in the Market, SMB, and RMW factors are jointly associated with Chinese individual investors whose demand is tilted towards small, speculative stocks. Our findings point to a potential role of dominant investor type in driving weekday patterns and the RMW premium.