Consumer durables and risky borrowing: The effects of bankruptcy protection

There exist substantial differences in the generosity of bankruptcy protection across U.S. states. This paper exploits cross-state variation in exemption levels to assess the dual role of durable goods as informal collateral for unsecured debt and self-insurance against bad shocks to earnings. The generosity of bankruptcy protection is found to change both the incentives and the ability of households to accumulate durable wealth. The gains from a high level of insurance are reduced by the effect of tighter credit constraints, so that the net effects of a change in exemption are very small. A more generous bankruptcy regulation reduces net durable wealth in the first half of the life cycle. In addition, the optimal level of exemption is positive but low.     

Insider ownership, ownership concentration and investment performance: An international comparison

This article makes two important contributions to the literature on the incentive effects of insider ownership. First, it presents a clean method for separating the positive wealth effect of insider ownership from the negative entrenchment effect, which can be applied to samples of companies from the US and any other country. Second, it measures the effects of insider ownership using a measure of firm performance, namely a marginal q, which ensures that the causal relationship estimated runs from ownership to performance. The article applies this method to a large sample of publicly listed firms from the Anglo-Saxon and Civil law traditions and confirms that managerial entrenchment has an unambiguous negative effect on firm performance as measured by both Tobin's (average) q and our marginal q, and that the wealth effect of insider ownership is unambiguously positive for both measures. We also test for the effects of ownership concentration for other categories of owners and find that while institutional ownership improves the performance in the USA, financial institutions have a negative impact in other Anglo-Saxon countries and in Europe.     

上市公司信息披露失信行为的经济后果

上市公司信息披露失信行为对股东财富、股票系统性风险以及股票市场波动等都有一定影响。从这三个方面进行研究,定量性评估上市公司信息披露失信行为的经济后果,则能为市场监管与处罚提供依据。研究结果表明,上市公司信息披露失信行为在被揭露的时窗内平均使股东财富损失2．35％,价值平均500多万元;股票的系统性风险也因为上市公司的失信行为而被显著性放大;股票市场的整体波动则随着失信案例的增多而加剧。     

美国反垄断领域的福利转移市场——利益集团对反垄断法目标的异化

反垄断法是美国市场经济的基本法。长期以来,人们一直认为反垄断法的制定与实施都以公共利益为目标追求。而事实上,反垄断法自始至终都受到利益集团的利用与滥用,并因而严重地偏离了公益方向,由阻却市场力量的利器异化为谋取集团私利最大化的工具。     

Evaluating Projects and Assessing Sustainable Development in Imperfect Economies

We are interested in three related questions:(1) How should accounting prices be estimated?(2) How should we evaluate policy change in animperfect economy? (3) How can we check whetherintergenerational well-being will be sustainedalong a projected economic programme? We do notpresume that the economy is convex, nor do weassume that the government optimizes on behalfof its citizens. We show that the same set ofaccounting prices should be used both forpolicy evaluation and for assessing whether ornot intergenerational welfare along a giveneconomic path will be sustained. We also showthat a comprehensive measure of wealth,computed in terms of the accounting prices, canbe used as an index for problems (2) and (3)above. The remainder of the paper is concernedwith rules for estimating the accounting pricesof several specific environmental naturalresources, transacted in a few well knowneconomic institutions.     

Do homeowners achieve more household wealth in the long run?

Despite the public’s faith in homeownership as a vehicle for wealth creation, there are surprisingly few empirical studies of the independent impact of homeownership and its duration on household wealth accumulation. This paper provides the first empirical evidence that homeownership, after controlling for other drivers of wealth accumulation, is positively and significantly associated with wealth accumulation over time. Using the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, it examines the influence of housing tenure choices between 1989 and 2001 on household net wealth levels in 2001 after controlling for initial wealth in 1989, location, income, education, and other family and personal characteristics that might influence the rate of wealth accumulation. Importantly, the models used also control for the tendency of households to accumulate wealth between 1984 and 1989 (five years prior to the studied period). This approach is used to address the possibility that an unobserved variable—the propensity to save or accumulate wealth—may be associated with both the probability and duration of homeownership and the rate of wealth accumulation. All else equal, those who owned homes and owned for longer periods of time had significantly higher household net wealth by 2001. These results are compelling because house price appreciation over the period was near its long-run average while stock gains were above and real rent increases below their long-run averages. Hence, the findings are suggestive of a positive influence of ownership over long periods on net wealth, even during a period when alternative investments produced higher than normal returns and rents grew slowly. This is especially important because the overwhelmingly majority of households do not sell their homes shortly after buying them. In our sample, those who became owners typically owned for 7 years. Furthermore, most households that bought during a period of declining real home values in the early 1990s continued to own their homes for at least eight years and came out well ahead of those who did not own.     

独立董事能否为收购公司股东创造财富——来自中国上市公司并购的证据

国外的实证研究结果表明，独立董事在并购中能给收购公司的股东创造财富。我们依据Harford研究方法，对我国的独立董事进行进一步的划分，并利用沪深A股285家上市公司的并购数据进行实证研究。研究结果表明：在我国设立独立董事并不能有效地为收购公司股东创造财富；但有一些证据显示，在关联方并购交易中，独立董事为收购公司股东创造了财富，尽管统计结果并不显著；在并购交易过程中，收购公司管理层的股权激励效果并不理想。     

劳动价值论中的几个关系式释疑

深化对社会主义社会劳动和劳动价值理论的研究和认识不可不探讨劳动价值论中的几个关系式 ,需要对以下几个等式或不等式释疑 :劳动=价值释疑 ;劳动 /价值≠财富释疑 ;价值量=1/劳动生产力释疑 ;价格=价值、价格≠价值释疑。     

价值、财富与分配"新四说"

目前，学术界在商品价值、社会财富和分配关系的基本理论研究方面仍没有取得共识。为了清晰地使有关价值、财富与分配的各种现象和本质联系都可得到圆满的科学说明，笔者提出“新四说”：各种生产性活劳动创造商品价值——活劳动价值说；全生产要素或经济要素创造社会财富或商品使用价值——全要素财富说；多种产权关系决定按资和按劳等多种分配方式——多产权分配说；按生产要素贡献分配的形式是要素所有者创造价值和财富并据此参与分配，而实质是按生产要素产权分配——按要素贡献的分配形式与实质说(按贡分配形质说)。     

Poverty Traps, Indeterminacy, and the Wealth Distribution

We consider a one-sector growth model in continuous time with a production externality and endogenous labor supply. There is a continuum of households who have identical preferences but differ with respect to their initial wealth. We show that there exist economies such that an indeterminate steady state exists for some wealth distribution but not for others. A second result is that a redistribution of wealth may drive the economy from a steady state with strictly positive output to a poverty trap in which output converges asymptotically to zero. These results indicate that differences in the wealth distribution may be responsible for drastic differences in the long-run standard of living. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D31, D50, O41.