Are Chinese Acquirers Discriminated against in Cross‐border Mergers and Acquisitions? An Analysis Based on Covered Transactions Filed with CFIUS

This study employs a sample of covered transactions filed with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) of cross‐border mergers and acquisitions targeting American companies based on publicly available news reports and announcements to examine the heterogeneity hypothesis in the CFIUS review process. A comparative analysis of case studies and an empirical analysis of logit regressions are performed. We also explore how CFIUS reviews may have an impact on corporations' future mergers and acquisitions decisions in a panel data model setting. The results show that both unfair treatment in CFIUS review and the deterrent effect of CFIUS interventions have contributed to the recent sharp decline in China's direct investment in the US.     

Financial Globalization and the Increase in the Size of Government: Are They Related?

Open Economies Review - We employ a stochastic growth model to study the impact of international financial liberalization and changes in volatility on the share of government consumption in GDP....     

Are Illegal Drugs Inferior Goods in the US?

Using data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, evidence of income inferiority in illegal drug consumption is presented. This is done by estimation of binary choice probit models with endogenous regressors. The endogeneity of income with regard to drug consumption is considered and the more efficient three-stage least squares procedures have been implemented. In general, the results indicate that accounting for endogeneity improves results on income inferiority with regard to drug consumption. An implication of this study is that some form of income distribution policies towards the poor might be more effective in controlling substance abuse. It also points out the regressive nature of the government’s substance abuse program.

Are capital inflows expansionary or contractionary in the Philippines?

This paper assesses whether gross capital inflows to the Philippines are expansionary or contractionary in view of the model predictions and multi-country empirical analysis of Blanchard, Ostry, Ghosh, and Chamon (BOGC, 2015). We make use of data for the period 1977–2017, and apply both ordinary least squares and vector autoregressive techniques. The results indicate that total gross inflows are expansionary for both output and credit growth. At a more disaggregated level, we find, consistent with BOGC (2015), that non-bond inflows are expansionary. But contrary to BOGC (2015), we find that bond inflows to the Philippines are also expansionary. Using the Philippine case illustrates the importance of country specific factors in characterizing the macroeconomic effects of capital inflows.     

Natural Resources and Decentralization in Nicaragua: Are Local Governments Up to the Job?

Both decentralization and natural resource management literature suggest that natural resources could benefit from the redistribution of centralized management authority. Yet, neither has sufficiently examined the processes already underway in numerous developing countries to decentralize resource management from central to municipal government authorities. This study reviews the role of 21 local governments in forest management in Nicaragua. It finds that most interventions are economically motivated, and that three key factors are needed for local governments to be good resource managers: capacity, incentive and long-term commitment. These three factors are part of a process in which civil society can play a critical role.     

Are ‘Albergo Diffuso’ and community-based tourism the answers to community development in South Africa?

Conventional mass tourism shortcomings have facilitated the origin of alternative forms of tourism such as community-based tourism (CBT). Lately, another form of tourism known as ‘Albergo Diffuso’ (AD) has also been mentioned as a possible strategy to revive depressed specific local contexts, such as townships, villages and small towns. This article’s aim is twofold: first to contextualise the concept of AD in the South African milieu and secondly to investigate the possible relationship and role that CBT and AD could have. In this context, specific characteristics and similarities between CBT and AD are explored. The article’s main contribution concerns the exploration of the AD concept as an alternative form of tourism related to local community development. This is the first time that this concept has been presented in a South African context.     

China and India in World Trade: Are the Asia Giants a Threat to Malaysia?1

Abstract

With higher shares in world merchandise trade and improvements in product quality, China is better positioned than India in the near term for influencing global trade. From the Malaysian perspective, China represents a non-negligible share in Malaysia's trade. The trends in bilateral trade with both Giants however suggest that competition has intensified. Relative to India, China appears to promulgate a more influential role on Malaysia via higher commodity overlap in external markets, greater matched trade that is of vertical differentiation, distinct quality shifts and negative adjustment pressures. Within this broad rubric of trade-induced changes, there is no evidence of skill upgrading for Malaysia in trade expansion with both Giants. This mirrors the lack of product quality improvements and the low levels of export values of high quality varieties in matched trade. Hence trade induced changes from the Giants that have been cited to be favourable from the Malaysian perspective in previous studies, may have been grossly overstated.     

Why Are There Rich and Poor Countries? Symmetry Breaking in the World Economy: A Note

This paper extends K. Matsuyama (1996, Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, 10, 419–439) to allow for the presence of a fixed factor such as land. By assuming that agricultural production is more land-intensive than manufacturing production, we generalized Matsuyama's results on symmetry breaking in the world economy. That is, international trade by causing an agglomeration of economic activities in different countries of the world makes inevitable the coexistence of rich and poor. J. Japan. Int. Econ. June 1999, 13(2), pp. 140–149. Department of Economics, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 02155. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: F12 and O12.     

When Are Audit Firms Sued for Financial Reporting Failures and What Are the Lawsuit Outcomes?

We examine how often audit firms are sued in a large sample of accounting lawsuits that allege financial reporting failures. We find an insignificant relation between the likelihood of auditor litigation and restatements, but the likelihood of auditor litigation is strongly related to the types of alleged accounting deficiencies. We also find that the auditor's type influences the probability of the auditor being sued and the size of the payouts from auditor and nonauditor defendants. In particular, the Big N firms are approximately 7 percent less likely than non–Big N firms to be named as co-defendants, and the auditor's contribution to the plaintiff's payout is significantly larger when a Big N firm is sued. Overall, our findings suggest that auditors are rarely blamed when there are allegations of financial reporting failures, but the types of accounting deficiencies and the auditor's type significantly influence the probability of the audit firm being sued and the outcomes of the lawsuits.     

Are there spillover effects between coastal and noncoastal regions in China?

A major policy debate in China starting in the Mao era and carrying through the Deng area involves the tradeoff between equity and efficiency in regional growth policies. In this paper, we explore whether there are regional growth spillover effects promised by Deng's policy of favoring initial industrial development in coastal provinces. A stated objective of these policies was the spread of coastal provinces' growth inland. We review the theoretical underpinnings of such effects and test for them with panel data for the period 1981–1998. We also test whether any spread effects are equally distributed over inland provinces. We find that spillover effects have not been sufficient to reduce disparities across Chinese provinces in the short run.     

Are the actual and intended sources of financial knowledge the same? Evidence from Japan

The recent prolonged period of low economic growth and low interest rates in Japan demands that Japanese households invest in risky assets to accumulate sufficient retirement savings. In so doing, they acquire financial knowledge on these risky assets, typically from financial experts or salespersons in financial institutions. However, they may not necessarily be content with their current sources of financial knowledge because depending on their stage in the life cycle, they require different types of financial knowledge, usually from a variety of sources. Unfortunately, because of limitations in the data available, few studies have investigated whether the actual and intended sources of financial knowledge are the same. To address this research gap, this paper uses a Japanese household survey from 2010 to 2017, which provides unique information on the actual and intended sources of financial knowledge, and obtains two interesting results. First, a household’s actual sources of financial knowledge typically differ from its intended sources. More specifically, 33 % of households choosing financial institutions and experts and 52 % of households choosing financial institutions as their actual sources have a different intended source. Second, the discrepancy between actual and intended sources appears to relate to household demographic characteristics. Among those households choosing financial institutions and experts as their actual source of financial knowledge, 14 % choosing financial institutions as their intended source tend to have a lower level of financial knowledge and educational attainment. These results suggest that they have some difficulty understanding the advice of financial advisers. Among households choosing financial institutions as their actual source of financial knowledge, 26 % choosing financial institutions and experts as their intended source tend to have a larger amount of financial assets, better financial knowledge, and a preference for investing in risky assets; however, they also tend to be younger. This suggests they might want to obtain financial knowledge from financial experts to purchase risky financial assets as they age. While the study does not provide any causal evidence, the results suggest that understanding the reasons for any discrepancy in the actual and intended sources of financial knowledge may help financial institutions provide better services to these customers.     

Are the degree of trade openness and the degree of wage centralisation negatively correlated?

This paper presents evidence of a negative correlation between the degree of wage centralisation and the degree of trade openness, which is taken as a proxy measures of international trade integration. The sample data cover a macro-panel of 17 OECD countries over the 1975?C2000 period. The results are robust to alternative estimation methods and after controlling for the endogeneity of the degree of openness. This contrasts with the existing empirical evidence, based on cross-country macroeconomic data, suggesting that more open economies have more centralised wage bargaining institutions on average.     

Are intergovernmental transfers in China equalizing?

Since 1994, China's central government has implemented a sequence of fiscal recentralization measures to increase its equalization capacity and reduce regional income disparities. However, the effect of intergovernmental transfers on equalization has been called into question by anecdotal evidence that seems to suggest that transfers from the center are not rule-based and are subject to heavy rent-seeking. Unlike past studies, which have focused on the equalization effects of total fiscal transfers from the center, this paper includes an examination of the equalization effects of different types of transfers because some transfers, which are inherently anti-equalizing, may mask the equalization effects of other types of transfers when they are lumped together to find the “average” effect. Using inequality measures, a decomposition of fiscal disparities, and dynamic panel data models, we find that China's intergovernmental transfer system that was established in 1994 does have some equalizing elements. To a large extent, these elements exist due to the mechanism designed to shrink the tax rebates that bear the legacy of the pre-1994 system; to a small extent, these elements exist due to the rule-based general-purpose transfer whose share in total transfers remains small but has increased since 2002. However, the equalization effects of the largest component of transfers, specific-purpose transfers, are anti-equalizing. They are typically not rule-based and thus subject to political influence. As a result, total transfers also exhibit significant anti-equalization effects.     

Job Satisfaction in the United States: Are Blacks Still More Satisfied?

Despite the substantial literature on the paradox of the happy female worker, research has been sparse in investigating race differences in job satisfaction. The last national level study on racial differences in job satisfaction was done in 1981 when, using national level U.S. data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Mature Men for 1966, 1969 and 1971, Bartel showed that blacks had significantly more job satisfaction and further, that this racial gap had widened during this time. Though the reasons for this gap and its widening were not investigated, it was suggested, in a close parallel to the reason for the contented female worker, that lower expectations, in this case due to discrimination in the labor market, could be a reasonable explanation. Surprisingly, since then, there have been only a handful of studies focused on smaller, specific groups. This paper exploits two U.S. national level data sets, the GSS and the NLSY 1997, to examine the racial gap in job satisfaction. Simple means show that blacks are much less satisfied than whites and moreover, this difference has persisted not only across genders but also across almost four decades. To isolate the pure race effect, a sequential process is adopted by first examining the simple difference in the means of job satisfaction, then, through probit estimation, seeing the impact of individual attributes, finally progressing to incorporation of job attributes. Probit estimates give robust results. Blacks are significantly less satisfied than whites even when income, benefits and occupations are controlled. However, this racial gap is greater in the case of women and younger black men. An exploratory analysis shows that when discrimination is accounted for, the satisfaction gap is further reduced and the race coefficients are rendered insignificant. Estimates with comparison income show that the satisfaction gap is driven by perceived discrimination and not necessarily discrimination as captured by comparison income. This highlights the importance of policy measures to reduce perceptual discrimination.