Producing drama: a comparison of film tax incentives to alternative uses

Incentive packages are popular tools for economic development. However, development projects are often considered in isolation without an analysis of opportunity costs. In this study, we use an intuitive framework for comparing projects and weigh alternate projects against North Carolina’s film incentive programme. The results indicate that there are substantial differences in the economic impact of the projects we consider in this study. Our results suggest that policy decisions by governments and economic development officials should weigh a potential project against alternative uses in order to optimize the use of incentives.     

Agency costs and tax planning when the government is a major Shareholder

In state owned enterprises (SOEs), taxes are a dividend to the controlling shareholder, the state, but a cost to other shareholders. We examine publicly traded firms in China and find significantly lower tax avoidance by SOEs relative to non-SOEs. The differences are pronounced for locally versus centrally-owned SOEs and during the year of SOE term performance evaluations. We link our results to managerial incentives through promotion tests, finding that higher SOE tax rates are associated with higher promotion frequencies of SOE managers. Our results suggest managerial incentives and tax reporting are conditional on the ownership structure of the firm.     

Share pledging,payout policy,and the value of cash holdings

Share pledging for insiders’ personal bank loans is associated with the agency problems of insider risk aversion and stock price crash risk. We examine the relation between insider share pledging and the value of cash holdings using the pledging data of listed firms in Taiwan. We find that the value of cash holdings is lower for pledging firms, especially for those that are relatively more risk averse. Pledging firms that repurchase shares have a higher marginal value of cash than those with other payout methods, likely due to the role of repurchases in reducing the stock price crash risk. Our results show how insiders’ personal financing incentives arising from share pledging would affect the value of cash holdings from the perspective of agency problems and payout policy.     

构建高校预算绩效评价机制的思考

高校预算绩效评价机制,是高校预算绩效管理的重要制度安排。本文探讨构建高校预算绩效评价机制的思路:采取定性指标与定量指标相结合的方法,设计一套基本支出和项目支出绩效评价指标体系,建立以效果为导向、责任与激励相结合的高校预算绩效管理责任制度。     

A SURVEY OF THE ECONOMICS OF PATENT SYSTEMS AND PROCEDURES

The last several decades have seen increases in patenting activity worldwide, as well as growing issues related to patent quality. In response to these quality issues a recent patent literature has emerged, that investigates the behavior and incentives of patent examiners, applicants, and third parties. In this paper, we provide an overview of patent procedures, patent systems and a survey of the new economic literature on patent systems. Both theoretical and empirical papers are considered. Policy implications coming from this literature are presented.     

“一带一路”沿线国家贸易开放与劳动收入份额

基于1990~2014年的跨国数据,实证研究贸易开放对"一带一路"沿线国家劳动收入份额的影响。分析发现,"一带一路"沿线国家的劳动收入份额均值下降了5%以上。采用固定效应模型和工具变量法的实证分析表明,整体上贸易开放抑制了"一带一路"沿线国家的劳动收入份额。进一步将"一带一路"沿线国家按照经济发展水平、要素禀赋、制度环境分组研究发现,贸易开放对高经济发展水平国家、资本密集型国家、资源密集型国家、制度环境良好国家的劳动收入份额具有显著负影响,但是对于低经济发展水平国家、劳动密集型国家、制度环境不佳国家的劳动收入份额具有显著正效应。而向中国贸易开放能够提高"一带一路"沿线国家的劳动收入份额,特别是对低经济发展水平国家的积极影响较强。上述实证结果具有稳健性。在此基础上提出了相应的政策建议。     

The impact of IT-enabled customer service systems on service personalization,customer service perceptions,and hotel performance

Customer service is a critical element of a hotel's strategy and an important lever for differentiation of the hotel's offer. Over the last two decades, information systems have contributed to the transformation of customer interactions, enabling an unprecedented scale and scope of service personalization in the tourism industry. This paper reports the results of a mixed method study in a hotel that offers three contributions to the development and refinement of IT-enabled service personalization theory. It explores the role of signifiers in the design of customer service systems, showing that they significantly increase customer preference elicitation during the learning phase of the service personalization process. It then demonstrates that improved preference elicitation translates into higher customer service evaluations and value perceptions of the hotel. Finally, our study shows that IT-enabled service personalization creates financial benefits for the hotel via revenue share-shift from costly intermediated to direct distribution channels.     

Is corporate payout taxation a long run phenomenon? Evidence from international data

This paper examines whether dividend and capital gains taxation influences corporate payout policy using the country level data of 21 countries in panel versions of time series models. We find that dividend relative to capital gains tax penalty is cointegrated with corporate payouts (dividends and share repurchases) i.e. corporate payout taxation may be a long run phenomenon. Further, the cointegrating vector estimates are largely consistent with the traditional view of dividend taxation whereby the tax penalty discourages dividends, while the estimates give limited support to the premise that firms substitute dividends for share repurchases in response to an increase in dividend tax penalty. Long run causality also operates between the tax penalty and payouts in the error correction models. Additionally, dividend tax appears to be more influential than capital gains tax on dividend payout decisions. Lastly, taxation affects dividends more significantly in countries with high investor protection.     

Limited attention,share repurchases,and takeover risk

We hypothesize that announcing open market share repurchases (OMRs) to counter negative valuation shocks reveals repurchasing firms’ lost growth opportunities or underperforming assets to potential bidders, making them more likely to become takeover targets. This also leads their investors to face higher takeover risk, a systematic risk associated with economic fundamentals that drive takeover waves, as proposed by Cremers et al. (2009). Indeed, we find that repurchasing firms tend to face higher takeover probability in the first few years following their OMR announcements, and that the increase in takeover risk can largely explain their post-announcement long-run abnormal returns documented in the literature. The increase in takeover risk is larger for smaller firms, firms with poorer pre-announcement stock performance, and those attracting more attention of market participants. Our results suggest that OMRs, which are used by many firms to counter undervaluation, could make the firms more sensitive to takeover waves and raise their cost of equity capital.     

Dynamics of judicial service supply chains

Behavioral issues, coupled with temporary capacity imbalances, dictate the characteristics that a service supply chain assumes in the long run. The paper looks at a service chain in which two factors, backlogs and incentives, influence human agent processing times and, hence, service supply chain capacity. The paper finds that servers within the supply chain change their processing speeds in order to maintain a backlog of cases that is acceptable and credible. The backlog must not be too small, so as to avoid the impression that work is scant and there is idleness; but it must not be too large, so as to avoid the impression of laziness. Simultaneously, the paper finds that there are implicit incentives in the formal hierarchy that impinge upon throughput rates at certain stages of the supply chain: agents upstream try not to overwhelm their bosses' stations downstream with excess work. Hence, this paper looks at the effects of perceived backlogs within service supply chains and also at capacity unbalances that stem from such incentives. The study explores these issues in the context of a managerial intervention in a judicial service supply chain. The study identifies the structure of a seemingly unstructured decision execution that leads to the observed outcomes. The research results in a preliminary system dynamics model that suggests several operational steps to overcome bottlenecks and incompetency.