国外住房保障制度比较研究

分析了美国、英国、德国、日本、韩国、新加坡等国家城市中低收入者住房保障体系的主要特色。重点分析了美国从供需两方面进行补贴的保障模式、英国的混合产权补贴方式、日本的住房保障三大支柱,同时,还比较了德国、韩国和新加坡三国住房保障体系的差异。概括出这些国家城市中低收入者住房保障体系的主要特征和存在的矛盾,即从补贴卖方到补贴买方的转变,根据发展阶段确定需要补贴的卖方以及以需求补贴为主导的特色补贴模式。最后,对国外城市中低收入者住房保障体系进行了评价,指出了公房建设与国民经济发展、政府与民间团体以及政府与城市中低收入者之间存在的三大矛盾。     

Extending Institutional Analysis through Theoretical Triangulation: Regulation and Activity-Based Costing in Portuguese Telecommunications

Abstract

This paper examines why a Portuguese telecommunications company – Marconi – adopted activity-based costing (ABC). The focus lies in new institutional sociology (NIS), particularly the institutional change model of Dillard et al. (Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 17(4), pp. 506–542, 2004), supplemented by theoretical triangulation involving economic, labour process and actor network theories to enrich observations and extend theory. Why Marconi adopted ABC lay in a complex, interrelated chain of institutions, including the parent company, management consultants, national and European Union regulators, financial markets and consumer associations during market liberalization. ABC was a means and symbol of improved competitiveness and efficiency but its diffusion and adoption also involved mimetic, coercive and normative factors. In regulated environments external legitimacy and efficiency were intertwined and demonstrating efficiency using accounting symbols is problematic. The results confirm criticisms of early NIS research for dichotomizing economic and institutional pressures, assuming private organizations are exempt from institutional pressures and neglecting internal organizational dynamics. The Dillard et al. model accommodated many features of institutionalization but needed extension to incorporate the public interest, the role of boundary spanners across social levels and how intra-organizational factors and properties of the technology derived following translation and praxis play a part.     

The management strategies of public service employers in Europe

This article examines the reform of public services management in Europe drawing on material from Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. It considers the limitations of interpreting changing public service employment relations in terms of a convergence towards the new public management and outlines an alternative interpretation of these reforms.     

Privatizing Museum Services In Uk Local Authorities

This article investigates the extent to which ‘privatization’ has taken place in museum services provided by local authorities in Britain. Three aspects of privatization are examined: change in the legal status of museums to charitable trusts; contracting-in and buying-in private service providers for specific work; and market- and marketing-orientation. All of these have a resonance in new public management in general and are of increasing significance to the international museum community. In the empirical site chosen for this article, privatization has progressed in varying degrees in relation to the three areas concerned, but overall only to a limited extent despite central government's pressure promoting this policy. Reasons suggested for this gap between the political context and the findings are the distinctiveness in the institutional arrangement of policy and the nature of the service. A good understanding of a polrcy arena along these llnes is needed for effective policy application.     

狭义无权代理合同法律效果探析

现行民事立法对狭义无权代理未被追认的法律效果设有明文,由无权代理人对相对人承担(民事)责任,但立法对无权代理人究竟承担何种性质与内容的责任却语焉不详,导致人民法院在民事审判实务中见解各异,判决理由与结果时有冲突,影响司法统一。本文拟借鉴德国、日本、中国台湾等大陆法系国家或地区典型的立法例及法学理论,对无权代理合同未被追认之效力、责任性质及内容进行梳理,并提出本文的思考与建议。     

International Convergence of Accounting Practices: Choosing between IAS and US GAAP

This study examines reporting practices of a sample of foreign listed and domestic‐only listed companies from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan and Australia to determine the extent to which companies voluntarily use “international” standards. Two types of use of non‐national standards in the consolidated accounts presented to the public are considered: adoption of “international” standards instead of national standards, and supplementary use where “international” standards are used in conjunction with national standards. “International” standards are defined as US GAAP or IAS (now IFRS). The study tests for a preference for either set of standards and considers the relationship of choice of regime with firm attributes. The results show significant voluntary use of “international” standards in all five countries and among foreign listed and domestic‐only listed companies. Companies using “international” standards are likely to be larger, have more foreign revenue and to be listed on one or more foreign stock exchanges. US GAAP is the predominant choice, but IAS are used by many firms in Germany and some in Japan. Firms listed in the United States' regulated markets (NYSE and NASDAQ) are more likely to choose US GAAP, but companies traded in the OTC market often select IAS. The study demonstrates for managers and regulators that there is considerable support for “international” standards, and that choice of IAS or US GAAP relates to specific firm characteristics which differ according to a firm's country of origin. Most use of “international” standards reflects individual countries' institutional frameworks, confirming the key role of national regulators and standard setters in assisting companies to achieve more comparable international reporting.     

The Valuation-relevance of Earnings and Cash Flows: an International Perspective

We investigate which variable, earnings or cash flows, provides greater information for equity valuation within the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Japan. We regress returns on earnings and cash flow metrics. We generally find earnings developed in three Anglo-Saxon countries—where capital is traditionally raised in public markets and reporting rules are unencumbered by taxation requirements—to have greater explanatory power for stock returns than cash flow metrics. Conversely, in two non-Anglo-Saxon countries—where capital is traditionally raised from private sources—earnings are generally not superior to cash flows for equity valuation, except in Japan, non-consolidated sample. While sensitivity analyses generally support the conclusions of our primary tests, in some of the additional analyses, earnings were superior to cash flows for samples from all countries. As expected, in all countries earnings have incremental information content over cash flows in explaining returns. Collectively, our findings provide two contributions. First, we generalize the findings of prior US research by showing that earnings are more important than cash flows for equity valuation in other Anglo-Saxon countries. Second and more importantly, our findings demonstrate that the superiority of earnings over cash flows is not universal. Rather, it depends on the national reporting regime and attendant institutional factors.     

On the dynamic response of a firm to an employment subsidy with a fmd threshold

During the last two decades, policy-makers have included employment subsidies among the tools of stabilization policy. Employment subsidy programs have been introduced in Japan, Great Britain, Europe and the United States. There has been some concern, however, about the effectiveness of such programs. In this paper, we analyze how a profit-maximizing firm will respond to a marginal subsidy program with a fixed threshold, focusing on the role of inventories. We show that, in some cases, the firm may have an incentive to manipulate inventories in a way that increases its profits but lowers the cost effectiveness of the program.     

Job satisfaction in aging workforces: an analysis of the USA,Japan and Germany

In light of the dramatically aging workforces in many industrialized countries, age diversity management will become a major challenge in human resource management. To successfully handle an age-diverse workforce, it is crucial to understand how employees of different ages can be motivated. This paper analyzes age's moderating role in the relationship between situational job characteristics and job satisfaction. To control for the potential influence of the cultural and institutional context, we use data from the USA, Japan and Germany. Findings show that older employees' job satisfaction is driven by different factors than younger employees: older employees put more emphasis on good relationships with colleagues, while income, advancement opportunities, job security and having an interesting job are less important. However, these effects are mostly nation-dependent, which underlines the importance of conducting cross-cultural or cross-national aging research.     

Towards the entrepreneurial university: the principal-agent problem

The purpose of the paper is to explore how an individualized incentive system could increase professors’ motivation to contribute to the university’s mission to become entrepreneurial in transition countries. The paper proposes a conceptual analysis that draws on the principal-agent problem to examine incentives that may stimulate institutional change. It considers the framework of a university becoming entrepreneurial and assumes that the principal is dean while the agent is a professor. It contributes to the national innovation system literature by providing new insights about the institutional change in transition countries. The contribution is threefold: it distinguishes between an ordinary and an entrepreneurial university, it explains relationship between micro and meso levels in the process of institutional change towards entrepreneurial university, it refines knowledge on individualized incentive system acting as a motivation for professors to contribute to university becoming entrepreneurial. The paper challenges studies that dismiss the micro level role of human agency in institutional change. The conceptual arguments have important managerial implications for all public and private institutions.

     

Assessing the Italian tax courts system by weighted three-way log-ratio analysis

Deciding on what should be the most suitable reforms of a national judicial system, whether this means reorganising a courts' structure or offering incetives to judges, requires more empirical evidence. The efficiency of the public judicial system is important to any functioning democracy as it affects several aspects of citizens’ life. As a consequence, new statistical methodologies are required for further valuable insights into the issues that affect the effectiveness of a judicial system.The current study attempts to fill this gap by introducing a new statistical method to investigate the heterogeneity among Italian judicial courts. Here we propose a generalisation of log-ratio analysis for the analysis of the association between the variables of a three-way contingency table. Our focus of this investigation will be on the tax court system of the Italian judicial system.Log-ratio analysis presents many advantages, two of which are the computation and the visual representation of the odds ratios on which the analysis is based. For three-way tables, a conditional odds ratio reflects the likelihood that an event (say tax disputes) will take place in a particular geographical area (say North Italy) instead of an another (say South Italy) given a specific condition (type of justice court).Interestingly, the three-way log-ratio analysis presented in this paper allows one to visually describe these conditional odds-ratios in terms of point distances in a biplot between the types of justice court located in different geographical areas of Italy.     

Managed Floating as a Monetary Policy Strategy

Although there seems to be a broad consensus among economists that purely floating or completely fixed exchange rates (the so-called corner solutions) are the only viable alternatives of exchange rate management, many countries do not behave according to this paradigm and adopt a strategy within the broad spectrum of exchange rate regimes that is limited by the two corner solutions. Many of these intermediate regimes are characterized by significant foreign exchange market interventions and a certain degree of exchange rate flexibility with non-preannounced exchange rate targets. While academic research in this area usually concentrates on some specific aspects of intermediate regimes (such as the effectiveness of interventions or institutional aspects), managed floating has rarely been analyzed as a comprehensive monetary policy strategy. In this paper, we present a monetary policy framework in which central banks simultaneously use the exchange rate and the interest rate as operating targets of monetary policy. We explain the mechanics of foreign exchange market interventions and sterilization and we explain why a central bank has an interest of controlling simultaneously the two operating targets. We derive the monetary policy rules for the two operating targets from a simple open economy macro model in which the uncovered interest parity condition and the monetary conditions index play a central role.     

Books in Review

Book reviewed in this article:
DISCOVERY, CAPITALISM AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE Israel M. Kirzner.
MANAGEMENT AND HIGHER EDUCATION SINCE 1940: The Influence of America and Japan on West Germany, Great Britain and France Robert R. Locke.     

Institutional Regime,Opportunity Space and Organizational Path Constitution: Case Studies of the Conversion of Military Firms in China

This study examines organizational path constitution from an institutional regime view. The research setting is the conversion of military firms to the civilian market in China since the country's economic reform in 1978. We begin with a questionnaire survey to better understand the situation and context of military conversion, and then conducted an embedded multiple‐case study method that shows how different patterns of organizational path constitution arise from a process of change efforts, change outcomes and opportunity space. Our context further allows us to examine how heterogeneous locally‐based institutional regimes affect the opportunity space of embedded organizations, enabling or constraining their change actions. The overall contribution is a theoretical model that reveals the relations between heterogeneous institutional regimes, opportunity spaces and organizational path constitution. Our findings have implications for the path dependence literature.     

The intensification of work in Europe

Across many European countries, the 1990s have witnessed an intensification of labour effort. Using data from The European Survey on Working Conditions (ESWCs), we find that Britain has experienced the fastest rise in work effort, while in western Germany, Denmark and Greece there has been very little effort intensification. Effort is higher in jobs that use computers more frequently, and, with the exception of Britain, higher in private sector than public sector jobs. Effort has increased faster in countries where trade union density has declined the most. However, there remains a significant shift in effort that is not accounted for by available explanatory variables.     

Spin-offs to stock markets as a complementary form of entrepreneurship: Contrasting US,UK and Japanese experiences

This study explores the impact of the national institutional environment on the listing of firms on stock exchanges in Japan, the US, and the UK. In particular, the study compares the incidence of: (1) independent firm initial public offerings (IPOs); and (2) the subsidiaries of established corporations being spun-off to stock markets. An empirical analysis is conducted on a sample of 9118 IPOs extracted from the Securities Data Company New Issue Database. The results show that Japan and the UK are more active in incubating new innovative ventures within large corporations and spinning them to the stock markets than their general entrepreneurial activity would suggest. These results direct our attention to different forms of industrial renewal in different institutional environments.     

城市郊区化模式比较与我国的选择——以英美澳日等国为例

英美澳日四个发达国家分布在文化背景不同的四个大陆,其城市化进程的模式不完全相同,尤其是后城市化阶段表现出的特点更加鲜明.对比分析发现,四个国家的城市化进程中在政府政策、城乡关系、不同规模的城市所起的作用等诸多方面存在着差别,英澳日等国的政府在投资、规划以及法律建设等方面的介入发挥着重要作用,而美国则是市场机制起主导作用的城市化模式.发达国家取得的这些经验对于我国的城市发展有非常重要的借鉴意义.     

Managing implementation processes

Abstract

In order to improve financial decision making in local governments in Germany, accrual output-based budgeting is being introduced. As the dynamics of implementation processes are often neglected, we research the shift from established rules and procedures to the application of accrual accounting, especially how public managers deal with new financial management systems and how their expectations are fulfilled. Based on a dynamic capability approach, six case studies in German municipalities are conducted. In a comparative analysis we focus on the dynamics of implementation processes. The findings emphasize that the application of accrual accounting is dependent on strategic orientations of top managers, involvement of middle managers and the capability to develop new structural routines in managing change.     

WORD OUTLOOK

As the world economy enters the 1990% a significant reorientation of growth and demand is taking place amongst the major economies. The desynchronuation of the economic cycle, which occurred last year as the US economy slowed down while Europe and Japan continued to advance rapidly, is likely to be taken a stage further. Europe, in particular West Germany, is expected to continue to grow quickly in the run-up to the completion of the single EC market in 1992 and as a result of the opening of eastern Europe. Japan and the Asian NICs, adapting with an unprecedented programmed of industrial re-tooling to their new circumstances, are already set on an accelerated growth path. In contrast, the US appears to be in for a period of sluggish growth, as the Fed attempts to press down on inflation without causing a recession. As a result we expect US output growth of only 2 per cent a year over the next few years compared with a sustainable 3 per cent in Germany and 4 per cent in Japan. Despite these differences in growth, US inflation performance lags behind that in Germany and Japan and, partly because of the sue of existing IPD flows, little progress is like& on reducing current account imbalances.     

Democracy and adaptation to economic and technological change: Is the British political system capable of adjusting?

Political systems provide the framework for organizational and technological change. Democratic systems are in some respects more open to economic and social adjustment than non-democratic systems; but the conflicting demands of entrenched interests and competition among parties for votes themselves create obstacles to adaptation.Britain's political system is the most stable in Western Europe, but it is also (after Italy) the one which is showing most signs of strain. How far is political stability a source of strength or of weakness under conditions of rapid economic and technological change? What aspects of Britain's current political difficulties are common to all democracies (as Sam Brittan argued in a classic study), or to all European social welfare economies, and what aspects are peculiar to our system alone? After five years of the most self-consciously radical government which Britain has had since 1945, how successful has our current government been in promoting economic and social change, while resisting any changes in our political system?It is argued that there has been a negative interaction between repeated efforts to transform Britain's industrial structure, and industrial relations, for example, and the obstacles to change posed by a restricted and centralised political system. Other illustrations of the interaction between political structure and policy output are taken from the evolution of Britain's relations with the European Community, from the management of industrial collaboration with other governments, and from attempts to reform the finances of local government. Britain's experience is compared and contrasted with those of the United States, France, Germany and Japan.