Uncovering asset stripping during China's privatization

This paper empirically studies the occurrence and extent of asset stripping via undervaluing public assets during the mass privatization of state-owned and collectively owned enterprises in China. Using three waves of a national survey of private firms, we provide evidence that state-owned and collectively owned assets were substantially underpriced, indicating the presence of corruption during privatization. Further analysis shows that the extent of underpricing is more severe in regions with less market competition or weaker property rights protection, and more pronounced for intangible assets such as intellectual property rights and land use rights. When comparing firm efficiency between privatized firms and de novo private firms, we find that the former group continues to enjoy considerable preferential treatments, yet significantly underperforms the latter, possibly due to continued government control and intervention. Finally, we provide evidence that insider privatization is an important source of corruption during the privatization process.     

Assessing the role of components of life satisfaction

Factors affecting subjective well-being and their gross effect measurement have been widely studied. However, how people derive utility from these factors has not been fully explored. This article provides a way to decompose the gross effect of major determinants on life satisfaction into direct and indirect effects and make inference for the latter. Because the indirect effect is nonlinear in parameters associated with different models in an equation system, it creates a problem in estimating the standard error. Besides, the categorical nature in survey data further introduces bias to the covariance estimation even asymptotically. To address these issues without knowing the form of heteroskedasticity under the null hypothesis, we propose to extend the wild bootstrap procedure in this particular context. Its robustness against various data properties is validated via several simulation experiments. Using three recent waves of World Values Survey, we find that the relative importance of life control has significantly increased recently, and endowing citizens with the right to enjoy their freedoms and liberties is a more effective policy in raising life satisfaction than promoting national income.     

Toward a Typology of Family Firm Corporate Entrepreneurship

Family involvement in business creates idiosyncrasies in firm behavior that promote long‐term, often transgenerational, strategic logics that ostensibly align with the motivations and outcomes of corporate entrepreneurship. Interestingly, extant research provides only minimal insight into the heterogeneous nature of corporate entrepreneurship orientations pursued by family firms. To better understand this heterogeneity, we develop a typology of corporate entrepreneurship in family firms providing a reconciliatory approach to this literary diversity and suggest that the varied corporate entrepreneurship orientations of family firms are impacted by the duality of a family's distinct intention to pursue transgenerational succession and capabilities to acquire external knowledge.     

Costs and potential funding of expanded public pension coverage in Asia

Public pension burdens in most emerging Asian economies are still relatively small. However, there are a number of reasons to believe that they will increase markedly in the coming years. First, many Asian economies will face rapidly ageing populations, which will raise pension and other old‐age‐related spending dramatically. Second, as economies develop, political pressures to expand the coverage of public pensions and raise pension benefits will likely increase. The first objective of this paper is to identify the potential fiscal burden of public pensions in 23 emerging Asian economies, based on econometric models and forecasts of GDP and demographic trends. Using two different methodologies yields estimated increases in the average share of public pension expenditures in GDP of 1.0 percentage point and 3.6 percentage points by 2030 compared with current levels. We believe the latter estimate is more realistic. The second objective is to recommend policies to provide adequate funding for public pension needs, including enhancing the efficiency of social insurance programs, improving the balance of revenues and expenditures, implementing more explicit fiscal rules and frameworks, and establishing stronger fiscal surveillance at the national and regional levels.     

Can interfirm trust improve firms' cooperation on environmental innovation? The moderating role of environmental hostility

Based on the logic of “trust‐behavior,” we examined the relationship between interfirm cognitive trust, emotional trust, and firms' cooperation on environmental innovation, as well as the moderating role of environmental hostility on the relationship between two dimensions of interfirm trust and cooperation on environmental innovation. Data for the study were collected from 216 firms in China. The results indicated that both interfirm cognitive trust and emotional trust were positively correlated to firms' cooperation on environmental innovation, and the effect of emotional trust on firms' cooperation on environmental innovation was negatively moderated by environmental hostility. Finally, the results were discussed and future directions put forward.     

Exploring the Nexus Between Work-to-Family Conflict,Material Rewards Parenting and Adolescent Materialism: Evidence from Chinese Dual-Career Families

Journal of Business Ethics - As a social issue of widespread concern, work-to-family conflict has been found to adversely affect employees’ work and family lives. The current research linked...     

The intertemporal risk-Return relation,investor behavior,and technical trading profits: evidence from the G-7 countries

The intertemporal risk-return relation and investor behavior are both important pricing factors that jointly determine the expected market risk premium. Using the price adjustment process as a control variable, we find that the intertemporal risk-return relation is positive conditional on bad market news, but is non-positive conditional on good market news. This implies that good (bad) market news weakens (strengthens) the positive risk-return relation. The pattern in the distortion of the risk-return relation is consistent with short-term mispricing in which investors overvalue (undervalue) the stock market in reaction to good (bad) market news. We also show that ignoring the price adjustment process in the estimation of the risk-return relation leads to model misspecification and induces an upward (downward) bias in estimates of the relative risk aversion parameter conditional on good (bad) news. Our model of the asymmetric risk-return relation along with the price adjustment process is capable of generating the return dynamics that is attributable to technical trading profits. We suggest that the profitability of technical trading rules is not a violation of market efficiency, but a consequence of trading rules exploiting the asymmetric effect of price changes on the risk-return relation, along with the persistence property of price changes.     

Rank-based Tests for Cross-sectional Dependence in Large (N,T) Fixed Effects Panel Data Models

Most existing methods for testing cross-sectional dependence in fixed effects panel data models are actually conducting tests for cross-sectional uncorrelation, which are not robust to departures of normality of the error distributions as well as nonlinear cross-sectional dependence. To this end, we construct two rank-based tests for (static and dynamic) fixed effects panel data models, based on two very popular rank correlations, that is, Kendall's tau and Bergsma–Dassios’ τ*, respectively, and derive their asymptotic distributions under the null hypothesis. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate applicability of these rank-based tests in large (N,T) case, and also the robustness to departures of normality of the error distributions and nonlinear cross-sectional dependence.     

Contradictions of the Climate-Friendly City: New Perspectives on Eco-Gentrification and Housing Justice

As local governments and corporations promote ‘climate friendliness’, and a low-carbon lifestyle becomes increasingly desirable, more middle- and upper-income urban residents are choosing to live near public transit, on bike- and pedestrian-friendly streets, and in higher-density mixed-use areas. This rejection of classical forms of suburbanization has, in part, increased property values in neighborhoods offering these amenities, displacing lower-income, often non-white, residents. Increased prevalence of creative and technology workers appears to accelerate this trend. We argue that a significant and understudied socio-environmental contradiction also occurs where the actual environmental outcomes of neighborhood transformation may not be what we expect. New research on greenhouse gas emissions shows that more affluent residents have much larger carbon footprints because of their consumption, even when reductions in transportation or building energy emissions are included. We describe an area in Seattle, Washington, the location of Amazon's headquarters, experiencing this contradiction and show a distinct convergence of city investments in low-carbon infrastructure, significant rises in housing prices and decreases in lower-income and non-white residents. We conclude with a discussion of a range of issues that require more attention by scholars interested in housing justice and/or urban sustainability.