Ownership relations in the presence of cross-shareholding

The direct ownership structure in a sector can be readily obtained from data on shareholding. Due to cross-shareholding, however, the true ownership structure may be hidden by a complex network of indirect relations. In studying the property structure, two important aspects are the size of the relations between primary owners (e.g. individuals) and secondary owners (e.g. companies), and the distance between them. The distance is obtained from the average number of secondary owners via whom the relation runs. As an empirical application, we study the banking sector in the Czech Republic, where also the relation between distance and separation of dividend and control rights is discussed.      

Fiscal cost of demographic transition in Japan

This paper quantifies the fiscal cost of demographic transition that Japan is projected to experience over the next several decades, in a life-cycle model with endogenous saving, consumption, and labor supply in both intensive and extensive margins. Retirement waves of baby-boom generations, combined with a rise in longevity and low fertility rates, raise the old-age dependency ratio to 85% by 2050, the highest among major developed countries, and generate a significant budget imbalance, as the government faces rising costs of public pension and health and long-term care insurance. Preserving the current level of the transfers will require a major increase in taxation. Using consumption taxes to balance the government budget, the tax rate reaches the maximal value of 48% in late 2070s. A pension reform to reduce benefits by 20% results in a peak tax rate of 37%, which can be reduced further to 28% if the retirement age is also gradually raised by 5 years.     

Fertility choice,mortality expectations,and interdependent preferences—An empirical analysis

We investigate the empirical relationship between child mortality and fertility across 46 low and middle income countries. Specifically, we model the effect of mortality expectations and interdependent fertility preferences on fertility. The direct marginal effect of mortality expectations on fertility is larger than zero but less than unity. This implies that a decrease in mortality rates leads to a decrease in children born but to an increase in the number of surviving children and hence the rate of population growth. Taking into account interdependent fertility preferences, whereby an individual's fertility choice affects the fertility decisions of others, the marginal effect of mortality expectations on fertility becomes one. Hence, if we allow for both mortality expectations and the amplifying effect of interdependent fertility preferences, a decrease in child mortality has no net effect on the rate of population growth.     

Cultural Dimensions,Risk Aversion and Corporate Dividend Policy

ABSTRACT

How does risk aversion affect corporate dividend payout? Finance theories have long suggested a relationship between risk aversion and dividends but there is little empirical evidence on the extent of this relationship. In this paper we construct measures of risk based on two cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede (1983, 1991). Using over ten years of data for firms in 14 countries, this study is the first to provide evidence that firms in countries with higher risk aversion exhibit both lower dividend ratios and lower propensity to pay dividends.     

人口转变、人口红利与刘易斯转折点

对于人口转变的阶段性变化从而人口发展动态缺乏一致性认识,以及对于人口红利在二元经济发展中的作用的不同看法,常常导致学者们在经济发展阶段判断上的分歧。本文从理论上尝试揭示人口转变与二元经济发展的一致关系,即两个过程具有共同的起点、相关和相似的阶段特征、甚至重合的变化过程;进而利用人口预测结果等经验材料,论证和检验人口红利逐渐消失和刘易斯转折点到来的判断。本文还指出,保持稳定的经济增长,尽早进入高收入国家的行列,是缩小"未富先老"缺口的关键和唯一途径。为此,本文就挖掘第一次人口红利的潜力、创造第二次人口红利的条件,以及依靠转变发展方式获得新的经济增长源泉提出政策建议。     

Determinants of dividend payout and dividend propensity in an emerging market,Iran: an application of the LASSO

Accurate prediction of dividends is important for market participants such as investors, firm managers, and monitoring authorities, as they can, respectively, invest, manage dividend decisions, and monitor dividend policies more effectively. We identify the most relevant variables for predicting the dividend payout of the firms in an emerging market, Iran, using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO). The advantages of the LASSO include: enhancing the prediction accuracy of the dividend model, improving interpretation of the results, and applicability to high-dimensional data. We obtain several results. First, some fundamental determinants of dividends in the industrialized economies such as market-to-book ratio and current ratio, do not play a role in deciding dividends in Iran. Second, LASSO-selected variables outperform the variables commonly used in the literature in terms of model fit and prediction accuracy. Third, business risk, leverage, return on assets and effective tax rate are the most important predictors of dividend propensity of the Iranian firms. Fourth, if the support vector machine algorithm, an often-used classification method, is combined with LASSO-selected variables, it can better discriminate between dividend-paying and dividend non-paying firms than other methods such as logistic regression and linear discriminant analysis.

Abbreviations: LASSO: Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator; TSE: Tehran Stock Exchange; RMSE: Root Mean Squared Errors; MAE: Mean Absolute Errors; ROC: Receiver Operating Characteristics; GMM: Generalized Method of Moments; MENA: Middle East and North Africa region; AIC: Akaike Information Criterion; BIC: Bayesian Information Criterion; LARS: Least Angel Regression; OLS: Ordinary Least Squares; AUC: Area Under Curve; BS: Brier Score ; OA: Overall Accuracy; LDA: Linear Discriminant Analysis; SVM: Support Vector Machine algorithm; LR: Logistic Regression.     

On the marginal source of investment funds

Under the ‘new view’ of dividend taxation developed by Auerbach (Quarterly Journal of Economics 1979;93:433-446), Bradford (Journal of Public Economics 1981;15:1-22) and King (Public Policy and the Corporation, Chapman & Hall, London, 1977), the marginal source of finance for new investment projects is retained earnings. In this case, the tax advantage of retaining earnings precisely offsets the double taxation of subsequent dividends: taxes on dividends have no impact on the investment incentives of firms using retentions as a marginal source of funds and paying dividends with residual cash flows. We show that the same invariance with respect to dividend taxes may hold under weaker conditions with respect to the source of funds, if the use of funds follows the same pattern. We find evidence that there is significant heterogeneity in our sample of US firms, with some firms exhibiting dividend behavior consistent with this expanded version of the new view, and others exhibiting behavior consistent with the traditional view that retained earnings are not an important marginal source of funds.     

On the interaction between education and social security

This paper uses an overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility choices to analyze the quantitative costs and benefits of subsidizing higher education, paying particular attention to the interaction between such policy and the sustainability of the social security system. The paper focuses on the demographic change as the mechanism that link both policies. It is found that an increase in education subsidies changes the educational composition of the population and lowers average fertility. Lower average fertility and higher life expectancy of educated individuals translates into changes in the age structure of the population that requires an increase in the social security tax rate in order to balance the pension budget. Such process reduces the welfare benefits of this educational policy since the rise in social security taxes lowers the after-tax lifetime earnings of almost all individuals born in the period of the policy reform and over.     

现金股利:缓解代理问题还是大股东剥削——基于最终所有权结构视角的研究

文章以2003年我国沪市的469家上市公司为研究样本,对公司的现金股利政策进行了研究。结果表明:最终控制股东的所有权结构对公司股利政策取向影响显著。当最终控制股东具有高现金流权和低分离系数(控制权/现金流权)的所有权结构时,更倾向于派发现金股利,分配的现金股利比率也更高,支持股利政策的大股东剥削假说;公司选择现金股利的概率,以及派发现金股利比率与公司现金流、成长性没有显著的相关性,不支持派发现金股利是为了缓解公司内部委托代理问题的研究假设。     

双重委托代理下的股利政策研究

我国上市公司股权相对集中或高度集中,存在大股东与经营者、中小股东与大股东之间的双重委托代理关系,大股东利用信息不对称攫取中小股东利益.本文将股利政策作为一个可观测变量引入单层、双重委托代理模型,详细分析了降低代理成本的途径.研究结论认为,在单层和双重委托代理关系下,将股利政策作为一种信息传递机制,写入激励合同,可以降低风险成本和总代理成本.