Can Direct Payments Facilitate Agricultural Commercialisation: Evidence from a Transition Country

We investigate the impact of direct payments on agricultural commercialisation in Kosovo. Kosovo is one of the poorest countries in Europe but, with European assistance, provides substantial funds to support agriculture, made up of many small and often semi‐subsistence farms. Thus, the effect of this support is a central policy issue. Identifying the effect of direct payments on market participation faces endogeneity issues arising from the possible simultaneous determination of participation in support programmes and market participation. In order to achieve proper identification of the endogenous direct payments, we use a strategy of targeted identification search that employs several different methodological approaches. We find that direct payments for fruit and vegetables, and those for cereals and oilseeds have a positive effect on market participation. However, we cannot identify any definite effect of livestock payments.     

机构交叉持股对企业价值的影响

基于2007-2018年中国A股上市公司数据,本文考察了机构交叉持股对企业价值的影响及其作用机制。研究发现,机构交叉持股显著提高了企业价值,在考虑内生性问题和替换主要变量后结论依然较为稳健。交叉持股机构投资者能够成为更加积极的监督者,主动参与公司治理,缓解代理问题,同时促进同行业企业间产品市场协作,改善企业的产品市场表现,进而提升企业价值。此外,相比其他类型的投资者,长期、独立以及稳定型的交叉持股机构投资者对企业价值的促进作用更显著,进一步印证了监督治理渠道的作用。机构交叉持股推动产品市场协作,主要是通过提高企业创新能力和营业利润率。本文结论证实了机构交叉持股的正向协同效应,对完善中国资本市场制度体系和促进企业可持续发展具有重要意义。     

湖北省优化营商环境分析与优化研究

良好的营商环境对提升区域综合竞争力具有重大意义。本文采用近年湖北省营商环境相关数据,运用主成分分析法运算得分,从经贸环境、社会环境、基础设施、生态环境、服务环境等湖北营商环境指标,揭示相关政策措施对湖北省营商环境的促进作用,以期为相关部门完善优化营商环境政策,提升湖北省营商环境提供参考。     

The impact of COVID-19 on the stock market crash risk in China

This study investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the stock market crash risk in China. For this purpose, we first estimated the conditional skewness of the return distribution from a GARCH with skewness (GARCH-S) model as the proxy for the equity market crash risk of the Shanghai Stock Exchange. We then constructed a fear index for COVID-19 using data from the Baidu Index. Based on the findings, conditional skewness reacts negatively to daily growth in total confirmed cases, indicating that the pandemic increases stock market crash risk. Moreover, the fear sentiment exacerbates such risk, especially with regard to the impact of COVID-19. In other words, when the fear sentiment is high, the stock market crash risk is more strongly affected by the pandemic. Our evidence is robust for the number of daily deaths and global cases.     

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.