Affirmative Action and Corporate Compliance in South Korea

Abstract

The Affirmative Action Act was introduced in South Korea in 2006 to increase female employment and correct discriminatory hiring practices. Using the combined data sets of survey and the Act's implementation plan, this paper provides logit estimation results to examine empirically how political perceptions or attitudes of firms influence corporate noncompliance with the Act. According to a corporate personnel manager survey, affirmative action was initially pursued as a campaign pledge by the liberal party (the Korea Democratic Party) to attract women's votes, and took on a looser shape as the government compromised with the business sector after an election. A weak enforcement structure ultimately diluted the effects of the Act. A logit analysis indicates that noncompliance is more probable in companies that perceive affirmative action as part of a design to achieve political goals, and compliance is more probable in companies that feel it is likely to improve corporate management.     

Discrimination in Scientific Review: A Natural Field Experiment on Blind versus Non‐Blind Reviews*

Using papers submitted to an international conference on economics held in Sweden in 2008, we analyze how gender, as well as other characteristics of the authors and reviewers, affects the grading of these papers by the reviewers. Correcting for other variables, including the country and research field, as well as the academic level of the author, we focus on the difference in grades between blind and non‐blind review treatments. We find that non‐blind reviewing has little effect, and there is no significant evidence of gender discrimination. Furthermore, we do not find any significant difference between the average grading by female and male reviewers.     

Race,Affirmative Action,and Women's Employment in US Highway Construction

This paper analyzes employment hours, supplemented by interview data, from large highway construction sites in Boston, Los Angeles, and Oakland in the 1980s and 1990s. This study suggests that affirmative action positively affects the employment of women in construction and where there is more pressure, there are strongr results. Second, white women and women of color tend to work in trades that reflect the existing racial hierarchies among men. Therefore race as well as gender should be reflected in the design and measurement of the impacts of employment programs. Community organizing, advocacy for women and men of color, judicial oversight and positive efforts by unions and employers are still critical to bridging the gap between policy intentions and outcomes.     

盈余管理计量方法评述与展望

盈余管理的实证计量方法包括总体应计利润法、具体应计利润法、真实盈余管理计量以及盈余分布法,但是完美的计量方法并不存在。本文通过对各种计量方法的研究现状与优缺点的综合梳理,提出修正总体应计利润法的模型、扩大具体应计利润法的运用、夯实盈余分布法的基础、审慎线下项目的计量、拓展盈余管理的计量方法以及创新盈余管理的研究主题等若干建议。     

A Remark on Voters' Rationality in a Model of Representative Democracy

Voting games are characterized by the emergence of dominated strategies, that would be iteratively deleted by rational players. In this note we show, via an example, how applying iterated dominance restricts the set of equilibrium outcomes in Besley and Coate's (1997) citizen-candidate model of representative democracy.     

Beliefs and Pareto Efficient Sets: A Remark

We show that, in a two-period economy with uncertainty in the second period, if an allocation is Pareto optimal for a given set of beliefs and remains optimal when these beliefs are changed, then the set of optimal allocations of the two economies must actually coincide. We identify equivalence classes of beliefs, giving rise to the same set of Pareto optimal allocations. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D51, D61.     

Gender,Class, and Caste Schisms in Affirmative Action Policies: The Curious Case of India's Women's Reservation Bill

Following the introduction of economic liberalization policies in 1991, India has registered steady gains in terms of conventional economic indices such as external trade, investment inflows, and foreign exchange reserves. However, globalization has also caused the feminization of poverty. To counter this trend of marginalization of women, it is necessary to address the gender imbalance in decision-making positions. A Constitutional Amendment Bill seeking 33 percent reservation for women in parliament and state legislatures has, however, been scuttled by three successive governments since 1996, even while each party swears by its commitment to gender equity. The reasons for this curious schism showcase a classic example of gender-class-caste alignments and divisions, under political compulsions. This paper examines this ongoing gender-caste-class imbroglio, in the context of Indian affirmative action policies (economic, social, political), which have generated "backlash" reactions.     

The Problem of Optimum Income Taxation: A Remark on Its Monotonicity Constraint

We apply a generalized version of Brito and Oakland's (1977) approach to deal with monotonicity constraints in the nonlinear taxation problem of Mirrlees (1971) . This allows removing some analytical weaknesses in the derivation of the necessary conditions that characterize the optimal income tax, impossible to handle with the type of variation used for the proof in Mirrlees (1969) . The qualitative properties of the tax are thus restored provided the candidate consumption functions are restricted to be twice differentiable, except on countably many points, with no corners near the intervals where they show a strictly concave shape.     

TURNPIKE PROPERTIES OF A MONEY‐IN‐THE‐UTILITY‐FUNCTION MODEL*

This study establishes the global stability of a long‐run stationary state in a money‐in‐the‐utility‐function model. The major finding is that the constant money supply rule results in a stable allocation and price system if consumers discount their future utilities sufficiently weakly. Nominal and real interest rates will be in the neighbourhood of the inverse of the consumers’ discount factor β^‐1.     

STOCK‐BOND CO‐MOVEMENTS AND FLIGHT‐TO‐QUALITY IN G7 COUNTRIES: A TIME‐FREQUENCY ANALYSIS

This paper examines co‐movement between stock returns and changes in 10‐year government bond yields as well as flight‐to‐quality behaviour in G7 countries. We conduct the wavelet squared coherence analysis to explore the dynamics in both time and frequency domain. Our results provide evidence of positive co‐movements, which vary over time and across investment horizon. The higher co‐movement is found to be more concentrated in the lower frequency bands. We further analyse the dynamic nature of the scale‐dependent wavelet correlations and find that the correlations are highly volatile and significantly increase across different time scales during the episodes of equity market turbulence. The increase in correlations reflects flights from stocks to safer bond investments as a result of dramatic changes in investor sentiment and risk aversion at times of market stress.     

A Pass‐Through Revival

It has been found that the pass‐through of the exchange rate and import prices to domestic prices has weakened over time. The most recent research, however, shows that this trend may have been reversed. Recent studies have applied various time series methods to the Japanese data, and estimated responses of domestic prices to the exchange rate and import prices in different time periods. Those studies have found signs that pass‐through has made an impressive comeback since the early 2000s. This paper reviews the most recent evidence and discusses its policy implications. I argue that the exchange rate has likely regained its status as an important transmission mechanism of monetary policy to domestic prices.     

COMPARATIVE STATICS OF A MONOPOLISTIC FIRM FACING RATE‐OF‐RETURN AND COMMAND‐AND‐CONTROL POLLUTION CONSTRAINTS

The intrinsic comparative statics properties of a general rate‐of‐return regulated, profit‐maximizing model of a monopolist facing a command‐and‐control pollution constraint are derived. Recent advances in the theory of comparative statics are used to derive the basic comparative statics of the model, which are contained in an observable negative semi‐definite matrix and possess the form of Slutsky‐like expressions. We consider several command‐and‐control pollution constraints that are commonly implemented in practice, and conclude that the intrinsic comparative statics properties of the model are qualitatively invariant to the type of command‐and‐control pollution constraint imposed. We compare our results with those extant, and find that several basic results from the standard A–J model no longer hold in our model.     

A Note on α‐Gini Measures

This note provides a characterization of α‐Gini inequality measures. These measures generalize the standard Gini index by including one sensitivity parameter α, which captures different value judgments. The α‐Gini measures are shown to be weakly decomposable and unit consistent. Weak decomposition provides within‐group and between‐group inequalities. Unit consistency keeps unchanged the ranking of two income distributions when the income units vary. It is shown that the α‐Gini measures are relevant with either “leftist” or“rightist” views.     

浅议现阶段我国风险投资公司的整合

介绍了我国风险投资公司资金规模的基本情况，指出风险投资公司单个资金规模偏小是制约我国风险投资业进一步发展的重要原因之一。提出对现阶段国有风险投资公司进行整合的必要性，并对整合的方案进行了探讨。     

R&D AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN A CASH‐IN‐ADVANCE ECONOMY

R&D investment has well‐known liquidity problems, with potentially important consequences. In this study, we analyze the effects of monetary policy on economic growth and social welfare in a Schumpeterian growth model with cash‐in‐advance (CIA) constraints on R&D investment, consumption, and manufacturing. Our main results can be summarized as follows. Under the CIA constraints on R&D and consumption (the CIA constraint on manufacturing), an increase in the nominal interest rate decreases (increases) R&D and economic growth. We also analyze the optimality of Friedman rule and find that Friedman rule can be suboptimal due to a unique feature of the Schumpeterian model.     

A Comparison of Multiple‐Unit All‐Pay and Winner‐Pay Auctions Under Incomplete Information*

This article examines the properties of independent‐private‐value all‐pay and winner‐pay auctions when there are multiple units sold. We study bidding behavior, efficiency, and revenue in a set of 23 experimental sessions. Our data show that the all‐pay auction and the winner‐pay auction are empirically revenue equivalent, though both yield higher revenue than the risk neutral Bayesian equilibrium. Our evidence also suggests that the winner‐pay auction is more likely to lead to a Pareto‐efficient allocation than the all‐pay auction.     

集体行动的个体异质效应研究

在古诺-纳什均衡分析框架下,本文研究了个体异质性对集体行动效率的影响.研究结果表明:个体差异度(偏好差异、供给技术差异以及资源禀赋差异)的扩大有利于公共产品供给量的增加,但搭便车问题却随差异扩大而恶化了.相比而言,个体异质性对于搭便车的负面效应要远远大于对供给量的正面效应;同时,个体异质性也使集体行动呈现出负面的集团规模效应.现实中存在许多支持上述假说的经验证据.     

CROSS‐BORDER M&As AND FIRM VALUE: A COMPARISON OF CHINA‐ AND US‐JAPAN M&As

We examine the effect of M&As conducted by U.S. and Chinese bidders (US‐Japan and China‐Japan M&As) on the stock prices of Japanese targets. We find that both types of M&As tend to increase the stock prices of the Japanese targets and that market reactions are significantly greater for US‐Japan M&As than for China‐Japan M&As. Additionally, capital participation produces greater market reactions to China‐Japan M&As than other structures, while acquisition produces this effect in US‐Japan M&As. Our results are consistent with previous research indicating that market reactions increase for bidders operating in a developed country with high‐quality institutions and corporate governance. (JEL G32, G34)