Corporate Power and Expansive U.S. Military Policy

Military defense is generally treated in economics texts as a “public good” because the benefits are presumed to be shared by all citizens. However, defense spending by the United States cannot legitimately be classified as a public good, since the primary purpose of those expenditures has been to project power in support of private business interests. Throughout the course of the 20^th century, U.S. military spending has been largely devoted to protecting the overseas assets of multinational corporations that are based in the United States or allied nations. Companies extracting oil, mineral ores, timber, and other raw materials are the primary beneficiaries. The U.S. military provides its services by supporting compliant political leaders in developing countries and by punishing or deposing regimes that threaten the interests of U.S.‐based corporations. The companies involved in this process generally have invested only a small amount of their own capital. Instead, the value of their overseas assets largely derives from the appreciation of oil and other raw materials in situ. Companies bought resource‐rich lands cheaply, as early as the 1930s or 1940s, and then waited for decades to develop them. In order to make a profit on this long‐range strategy, they formed cartels to limit global supply and relied on the U.S. military to help them maintain secure title over a period of decades. Those operations have required suppressing democratic impulses in dozens of nations. The global “sprawl” of extractive companies has been the catalyst of U.S. foreign policy for the past century. The U.S. Department of Defense provides a giant subsidy to companies operating overseas, and the cost is borne by the taxpayers of the United States, not by the corporate beneficiaries. Defining military spending as a “public good” has been a mistake with global ramifications, leading to patriotic support for imperialist behavior.     

美军网络媒体价值透视

美军网站的影响力大,功能性强,在宣传、沟通、服务、监督等方面都发挥着重要的作用,成为美军公共事务活动中的重要部分。根据不同的受众群体,美军网站体现出不同的媒体价值功能。     

A Comparitive Study of the Use of Financial Graphs in the Corporate Annual Reports of Major U.S. and U.K. Companies

The use of graphs to disclose information in corporate annual reports represents a significant dimension in financial disclosure management. Surprisingly, no inter-country comparative analysis of this area of voluntary disclosure has been conducted. This study compares the graphical reporting practices in the 1990 annual reports of 176 leading U.S. and U.K. industrial companies. Ninety-two per cent of U.S. companies use graphs compared with 80% of U.K. companies; the mean number of graphs per company being 13.0 and 7.7, respectively. Sales, an earnings measure, earnings per share and dividends per share are the four most frequently graphed aggregate financial performance variables in both countries. Significant differences in several of the variables graphed are found and explained in terms of environmental factors. In both countries, evidence of graphical information manipulation exists in the form of selectivity, measurement distortion, and presentational enhancement. Moderate evidence supports the hypothesis that U.K. companies are more likely than U.S. companies to adopt interpretative shading. Regulators need to clarify the responsibilities of directors and auditors by setting graphical guidelines.     

内部控制、审计意见与企业价值

以2010-2016年沪深A股非ST类上市公司为研究样本,检验审计意见对未来企业价值的影响,并考察了内部控制质量的中介作用。研究发现,非标准审计意见与非ST类上市公司未来企业价值显著正相关;被出具非标准审计意见的企业,内部控制质量更低;内部控制质量在非标准审计意见对未来企业价值的正相关关系中起到了部分中介作用,即非ST类上市公司在获得非标准审计意见后会通过低质量的内部控制来提高企业价值。进一步分组研究表明公司规模较小、且内部控制存在缺陷的样本的中介作用更为显著,否则不显著。     

美军武器装备质量管理机制研究

武器装备质量是武器装备形成战斗力的关键要素。本文主要从竞争机制、监督机制、评价机制、激励机制四个方面对美军武器装备质量管理机制的主要内容作了分析,以期对我军武器装备质量建设有所启发和借鉴。     

企业社会责任、内部控制与品牌价值

本文通过实证研究的方法来验证企业社会责任、内部控制与企业品牌价值这三者之间的关系及相关的作用机理。采用2013—2017年世界品牌实验室(World Brand Land)发布的《中国500最具品牌价值排行榜》中5年来均上市公司的面板数据进行分析,研究结果发现,企业社会责任与企业品牌价值是一种相互促进互惠互利的关系,而内部控制与二者之间并没有什么显著的关系。     

Analysts' Earnings Forecasts and the Value Relevance of 20-F Reconciliations from non-U.S. to U.S. GAAP

This study extends existing research into the value relevance of reconciliations to U.S. GAAP by examining the role of analysts' earnings forecasts in explaining potential market reactions to the earnings reconciliation. One possible reason why the evidence on the value relevance of the earnings reconciliation is weak is that earnings are forecast by analysts. Their forecasts may pre-empt some of the information content of the earnings reconciliation disclosures. Our findings indicate that analysts' forecasts are value relevant and that they play a pre-emptive role for some firms. For others, however, the earnings reconciliation has information content that is not pre-empted by analysts' forecasts.     

An Analysis of the Value Added by Secondary Schools in England: Is the Value Added Indicator of Any Value?*

This paper argues that the value added score published for all publicly funded secondary schools in England is an unreliable indicator of school performance. A substantial proportion of the between‐school variation in the value added score is accounted for by factors outside the school's control. These factors include several pupil‐related variables such as the proportion of pupils on free school meals, the authorized absence rate of pupils and the proportion of pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds. The value added score is also related to several school characteristics such as the school's admission policy and its subject specialism. The main policy recommendation of this paper is that the value added score should not be used as a performance indicator, but should be used to gain a better understanding of why the value added score varies between schools.     

物流价值和附加值:涵义和衡量

1 引言 现在实业界和学术界普遍认为物流是商业中的一个必要职能,这样产生了一个问题:物流是一个有附加值的运作或者仅是一个成本,这两种说法哪种更富有代表性。文献[1]认为物流具有“分销”的特征并把它看成“一个成本领域”和“单纯一个成本领域”。文献[2]提出物流经理,进而物流本身不增加价值,它指出这样一个看法即时间和地点是基本的并且必须在市场中恰好完成。它推理说如果一个活动是基本的,那么它必须增加价值,最后,他指出会计人员认为大多数物流活动是“没有附加值”的活动。这样就提出了一个问题即:物流的价值是什么?对它进行衡量有益吗?     

U.S. Strategic Trade Policy and the Competitiveness of the U.S. Construction Industry in Developing Country Markets

SUMMARY

U.S. government trade policy increasingly reflects “strategic trade” beliefs that, because competition in markets is imperfect, governments can act strategically to affect trade flows and enhance national welfare. The U.S. National Export Strategy targets the infrastructure sector in twelve developing countries as a strategic opportunity for U.S. construction firms. This paper examines whether U.S. government export promotion initiatives effectively implement strategic trade policy by providing appropriate support to these firms in that target market. It concludes that, within limits, they do.     

Sentiment and the U.S. business cycle

Psychological factors are commonly believed to play a role on cyclical economic fluctuations, but they are typically omitted from state-of-the-art macroeconomic models.This paper introduces “sentiment” in a medium-scale DSGE model of the U.S. economy and tests the empirical contribution of sentiment shocks to business cycle fluctuations.The assumption of rational expectations is relaxed. The paper exploits, instead, observed data on expectations in the estimation. The observed expectations are assumed to be formed from a near-rational learning model. Agents are endowed with a perceived law of motion that resembles the model solution under rational expectations, but they lack knowledge about the solution’s reduced-form coefficients. They attempt to learn those coefficients over time using available time series at each point in the sample and updating their beliefs through constant-gain learning. In each period, however, they may form expectations that fall above or below those implied by the learning model. These deviations capture excesses of optimism and pessimism, which can be quite persistent and which are defined as sentiment in the model. Different sentiment shocks are identified in the empirical analysis: waves of undue optimism and pessimism may refer to expected future consumption, future investment, or future inflationary pressures.The results show that exogenous variations in sentiment are responsible for a sizable (above forty percent) portion of historical U.S. business cycle fluctuations. Sentiment shocks related to investment decisions, which evoke Keynes’ animal spirits, play the largest role. When the model is estimated imposing the rational expectations hypothesis, instead, the role of structural investment-specific and neutral technology shocks significantly expands to capture the omitted contribution of sentiment.     

Corporate bond market interdependence: Credit spread correlation between and within U.S. and Canadian corporate bond markets

This study investigates the correlation and interdependence between and within the U.S. and Canadian corporate bond markets. The empirical framework adopted allows credit spreads to depend on common systematic risk factors derived from structural models and incorporates dynamic conditional correlations (DCC) between spreads. Results show that there is a surprisingly weak correlation between the two markets in normal times. However, during crises, there is a sudden and strong increase in the correlation between U.S. and Canadian credit spreads. The analysis of credit spread correlation within each market also shows an unusual increase in credit spread correlations between sectors and between risk classes in the U.S. during the 2007–2009 global financial crisis. This increase persists over the post-crisis period. By contrast, in Canada, credit spread correlations between sectors remain remarkably stable over time, suggesting an interdependence of credit spreads within the Canadian market.