UNIVERSAL BANKING: The view from Brazil

This note begins with a brief summary of the economic and regulatory history surrounding the Universal Banking debate. Following this introduction, it focuses on the Brazilian regulatory and supervision experience. The Central Bank of Brazil has persistently enhanced prudential regulation and supervision practices in order to cope with the complexity of large financial institutions and financial holding companies. Some features of the Brazilian regulatory framework have contributed to the Brazilian economic and financial performance in recent years, such as: consolidated financial statements, including all financial and non financial subsidiaries; internal structures for risk management; responsibilities for controlling shareholders; unrestricted access to all information by supervisors; and, one of the most important issues, the requirement to foreign firms to constitute stand-alone subsidiaries. Finally, there is a short overview of the G20 financial sector reform agenda (including Basel III accord), specially, regarding the issue of Systemically Important Financial Institutions – SIFIs.     

陈光标慈善何惧高调

陈光标清楚,自己的种种做法和言论给一些富人带来了压力,因此也得罪了一部分富人。但他认为,有压力才有动力,有动力才有行动,有了行动老百姓就能得到帮助     

Charity law reform: implementing the Strategy Unit proposals

This paper discusses the recommendations arising from the Strategy Unit review of charities and the wider voluntary sector in England and Wales and the government's response to these. The proposed reforms will involve an updating of charity law; changes to the regulatory framework governing the sector; and a greater emphasis on improving the accountability, transparency and performance of charities and voluntary organisations. In the main these proposals have been welcomed by the sector. In particular there is a clear recognition of the need to modernise the legal position of charities to reflect changes in society and changing public perceptions of what is, or should be, charitable. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

Charity brands: A qualitative study of current practice

A number of fundraising managers and directors of UK charities were interviewed with the objective of understanding to what extent branding was used in the sector, what development possibilities exist for commercial techniques in charities, and what the constraints may be on such practices. It was found that many charities already use day-to-day brand techniques, (without describing them as ‘branding’), but brand development work was scarce. Charities have a number of objectives competing with fundraising when considering their brand content. They must also satisfy the need to respect issues about how the cause itself is communicated, and possible needs to re-educate the donor community or the public. One commercial practice in particular could be developed further in charity branding: this is the idea of using the personality of the charity itself as something with which donors could associate positively.     

富豪及专家如何看巴比慈善晚宴

从8月底开始,不少中国富豪陆续接到了盖茨和巴菲特慈善晚宴的邀请.他们被通知,盖茨和巴菲特将于9月底在北京举办一场慈善晚宴,消息一出立即引起了社会的广泛关注.     

曹德旺“我想创新一条慈善的路”

“最近一直在忙碌退休事情,年轻的时候做企业,退休后做些调研的工作,为今后企业战略方向做功课,慈善问题免谈……”福耀集团董事长曹德旺对《中国新时代》记者说。     

The productivity effects of stock option schemes: evidence from Finnish panel data

In this study we investigate the productivity effects of employee stock option schemes. We estimate Cobb-Douglas production functions by using new panel data for all Finnish publicly listed firms during 1992–2002. The data enable us to distinguish broad-based option plans, for which all employees are eligible, from those selectively allocated to particular employees. For both type of schemes, our baseline fixed effects estimators consistently find statistically insignificant associations with firm productivity. When endogeneity of production inputs and option-schemes are taken into account we continue to find no evidence of a link with firm productivity. Our main findings are consistent with hypotheses that predict negligible effects of option plans for enterprise performance, such as those based on free riding, psychological expectancy theory, accounting myopia, or rent-seeking. We consider reasons why our empirical findings on the impact of broad-based options differ from those found in earlier studies.     

The structure of decision schemes with cardinal preferences

This paper replacesGibbard’s (Econometrica 45:665-681, 1977) assumption of strict ordinal preferences by themore natural assumption of cardinal preferences on the set pure social alternatives and we also admit indifferences among the alternatives. By following a similar line of reasoning to the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theoremin the deterministic framework, we first show that if a decision scheme satisfies strategy proofness and unanimity, then there is an underlying probabilistic neutrality result which generates an additive coalitional power function. This result is then used to prove that a decision scheme which satisfies strategy proofness and unanimity can be represented as a weak random dictatorship. A weak random dictatorship assigns each individual a chance to be a weak dictator. An individual has weak dictatorial power if the support of the social choice lottery is always a subset of his/her maximal utility set. In contrast to Gibbard’s complete characterization of randomdictatorship, we also demonstrate with an example that strategy proofness and unanimity are sufficient but not necessary conditions for a weak random dictatorship.     

小微企业资金短缺的成因及对策研究

小微企业在国民经济中的作用不可忽视,在当前倡导的“大众创业,万众创新”的时代,将会进一步涌现出许许多多的小微企业。小微企业资金短缺的难题一直困扰着小微企业的发展和国家大政方针的实施,文章从小微企业自身角度出发,分析了造成小微企业资金短缺的原因,提出小微企业要解决资金短缺的问题,应该首先解决好自身内部的问题,从提高自身财...     

Berlin transformations: another view

Books reviewed in this article: Hartmut Häußermann and Andreas Kapphan, Berlin: von der geteilten zur gespaltenen Stadt? Sozialräumlicher Wandel seit 1990 Stefan Krätke and Renate Borst, Berlin: Metropole zwischen Boom und Krise     

Existence of proportional distribution schemes: A note

It is shown that existence of a proportional distribution scheme as discussed by Sobel (1981) is an easy consequence of uniqueness.     

The practical view of employee rights

Advocates of employee rights, relying upon moral and legal perspectives, have used moral appeals and the threat of legal sanctions to persuade managers to act responsibly. Drawing on a behavioral perspective and analyzing interviews and literature about employee complaints, this paper develops the practical view. This view emphasizes employees' perceptions of their rights, as represented by eight broad categories of asserted rights, and the subtle costs that employees can impose when their standards of proper treatment are violated. While important differences between the behavioral, legal, and moral perspectives are identified, a general standards-setting framework is presented that indicates the complementarity of the three perspectives and the advantages of a multidisciplinary combination.     

The first twenty-five years of the European Accounting Association: an American view

Since its emergence at the beginning of the 1990s, numerous companies have adopted the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). This paper tackles two research questions: (1) whether the BSC adds value to companies and (2) if so, how does it contribute to organisational performance. In contrast to previous literature that does not separate these two questions, we rely on an established methodology (Foster and Swenson, 1997) to separate and quantify both the BSC contribution to performance and the way that the contribution is achieved, by applying a unique cause-and-effect scheme to the BSC. Our empirical results are based on survey data collected from 76 business units. They indicate first that the Balanced Scorecard has a positive impact on organisational performance. More specifically, the BSC improves the integration of the management processes and empowers people. Using the Strategy-Focused-Organisation (SFO) model (Kaplan and Norton, 2001), we empirically find that the sources of performance derived from the BSC are primarily of three types: (1) a better translation of the strategy into operational terms, (2) the fact that strategising becomes a continuous process, and (3) the greater alignment of various processes, services, competencies and units of an organisation.     

training in germany: a dissident view

The German system of training is often seen as an example for Britain. Len Shackleton and David Lange, of Westminster University, argue that, in fact, it handicaps the German economy.     

钢制托盘箱:单元化器具发展的新方向——访中集集团物流器材营销部经理程宏达

中国国际海运集装箱（集团）股份有限公司（简称：中集集团）成立于1980年1月，是中国最早的集装箱专业生产厂和最早的中外合资企业之一。自1996年以来，中集集装箱产销量一直保持世界第一。占国际市场份额超过50％，在国际集装箱制造行业居于领导者地位。     

巴比夜宴与中国慈善事业

股神巴菲特和前世界首富比尔·盖茨与中国50名富豪以慈善公益为题促膝谈心的拉斐特城堡夜宴,如今已成为历史.然而,日历上的这一页似乎又让人觉得还没有翻过去.在与中国慈善事业相关的某些场合,围绕着巴比夜宴几乎泛滥成灾的种种话题又会被再次提起.