Why has China’s vertical specialization declined?

Vertical specialization (VS) is quantified by the VS share, which measures the average import content per dollar of exports. A characteristic of China’s export trade is its strong dependence on assembly and processing activities. To take proper account of this, China’s VS shares should explicitly distinguish processing export production from other production. We estimate China’s annual VS shares from 2000 to 2012—the latest year for which a special input–output table is available that makes such an explicit distinction. We find that VS shares increased from 2000 to 2004 and subsequently started to decrease. To explore why it has declined, we introduce a new structural decomposition approach. We find that the decrease of the VS share appears to have been driven mainly by the substitution of imported intermediates by domestic products. This occurred in particular in the production of exports, which implies an upgrading of China’s position in global value chains.     

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。     

Vertical differentiation,product innovation,and dynamic competition

This paper presents an infinite horizon dynamic model in which two firms compete in a market vertically differentiated by the qualities of their products and consumers have heterogeneous preferences for quality. Given the product qualities offered, the firms engage in price competition that segments the market. In each period each firm can spend on product innovation that if successful increases the quality of its product. Three types of Markov perfect equilibria are identified. A running–coasting equilibrium exhibits increasing quality dominance with one firm undertaking innovation and the other coasting to free ride on the innovation by the first firm. The firm that coasts can have the larger dynamic payoff, so quality dominance does not imply payoff dominance. A second is a leap‐frog equilibrium in which the trailing firm undertakes innovation to leap into the lead. The trailing firm never innovates solely to narrow the gap with the leader, so catch up strategies are never used. In the third both firms undertake innovation, but if both have innovation successes, product differentiation remains the same and profits are reduced by the cost of innovation. The rivalry between Intel and AMD in microprocessors for personal computers provides a motivating example.     

审计师行业专长对审计重要性水平的影响——基于股权性质的调节作用研究

审计师行业专长意味着在特定领域较强的专业胜任能力,对于防范审计风险和提高审计质量都有显著影响。围绕审计师行业专长影响审计重要性水平这一主题，结合股权性质的调节作用，选取2016—2018年沪深两市A股上市公司作为研究对象，进行实证检验。结果表明，审计师行业专长对重要性水平有正向影响，如果被审计单位是国有控股上市公司，审计师行业专长与重要性水平的正相关关系更显著。这对审计机构人力资源配置、监管部门完善相关制度及监督工作具有参考价值。     

Does rice farming shape audit quality: Evidence from signing auditors level analysis

This study examines whether signing auditors from rice planting regions affect audit quality. Using a sample of 12,223 firm-year observations from the Chinese stock market over the period of 2004–2015, our findings reveal that signing auditors from rice regions are significantly negatively associated with the likelihood of unclean audit opinions, suggesting that signing auditors with rice culture are more likely to succumb to the managers and hamper independence, and thus are more inclined to issue favorable audit opinions, and eventually impair audit quality. Furthermore, audit firm size and industry expertise attenuate the negative relation between signing auditors with rice culture and audit quality. In addition, above findings are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests using different measures of audit quality and signing auditors from rice cultivating areas and our conclusions still stand after using the Heckman two-step approach, placebo test and differences-in-differences method to address the potential endogeneity problem.     

Organizational Design,Competition, and Financial Exchanges

We investigate the incentives for vertical and horizontal integration in the financial securities service industry. In a model with two exchanges and two central securities depositories (CSDs), we find that decentralized decisions might lead to privately and socially inferior industry equilibria with vertical integration of both CSDs with their respective exchanges. Allowing for horizontal integration of CSDs avoids privately inferior industry equilibria. However, we observe too little horizontal integration from the social perspective. We link our results to recent regulatory and institutional developments such as the emergence of multilateral trading facilities, over-the-counter regulation, and financial harmonization.     

Do seasoned industry specialists provide higher audit quality? A re-examination

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the recent findings in Gaver and Utke (2019) (GU) who find that seasoned industry specialist auditors provide higher audit quality. We first illustrate how the magnitude of residuals from the accruals model can vary significantly by industry, thus highlighting the importance of including industry fixed effects when the dependent variable is discretionary accruals. We next replicate GU’s findings. We first attempt to replicate prior literature after including industry fixed effects in the audit quality (discretionary accruals) models. This is an important control, as the relevant benchmark for a firm with an industry specialist auditor is a peer firm in the same industry with a non-specialist auditor. We find that after including industry fixed effects, there is no association between seasoned industry specialist auditors and discretionary accruals. We also find that the association between industry specialization and discretionary accruals is very sensitive to the way in which the researcher calculates specialization. Our findings are informative for shareholders of public companies who vote on auditor ratification.     

Do vertical spillovers differ by investors’ productivity? Theory and evidence from Vietnam

Developing countries are eager to host foreign direct investment to receive positive technology spillovers to their local firms. However, what types of foreign firms are desirable for the host country to achieve spillovers best? We address this question using firm‐level panel data from Vietnam to investigate whether foreign Asian investors in downstream sectors with different productivity affect the productivity of local Vietnamese firms in upstream sectors differently. Using endogenous structural breaks, we divide Asian investors into low‐, middle‐, and high‐productivity groups. The results suggest that the presence of the middle group has the strongest positive spillover effect. The differential spillover effects can be explained by a simple model with vertical linkages and productivity‐enhancing investment by local suppliers. The theoretical mechanism is also empirically confirmed.     

生产性服务业集聚与全球价值链地位攀升

结合中国工业企业数据和城市经济数据，运用工具变量回归从专业化和多样化层面探讨中国生产性服务业集聚对制造业全球价值链地位的影响。研究发现，从整体上看，不论是专业化还是多样化，生产性服务业集聚均能够显著提升中国制造业的全球价值链地位。分样本检验显示，生产性服务业集聚对全球价值链地位的提升作用主要存在于沿海省份、资本和技术密集型行业以及中小企业。在作用机制方面，生产性服务业专业化集聚主要通过提高创新水平和推动全要素生产率促进全球价值链地位的提升，而多样化集聚则通过加快要素流动和推动全要素生产率来提升全球价值链地位。     

纵向分离能否提高企业全要素生产率?——基于电力产业"厂网分开"的研究

中国电力行业一直延续纵向分离的改革路径，继发电环节从一体化垄断结构中分离之后，2015年新一轮的电力体制改革又提出输配售电业务分离、推进电力市场化交易的目标。不同纵向结构下，电力产业链上下游企业的博弈均衡显示纵向分离改革可提高上游发电环节的竞争性，减少效率损失。进一步基于微观发电企业数据，通过双重差分及倾向得分匹配模型考察“厂网分开”这一准自然实验的效果，研究结果显示，纵向分离改革显著提升了发电企业的效率。现阶段应继续推进输配售分离改革，通过供给侧和需求侧的互动响应使上游发电环节的效率收益纵向传递，提高消费者福利。