Implications of the UNCITRAL model law for Australian cross‐border insolvencies

Recent events in international financial markets have focused regulators' and lenders' attention not only on the importance of insolvency laws as an integral part of the regulation of market economies but also on the need to facilitate the administration of multi‐jurisdictional insolvencies. In this context, UNCITRAL has proposed a Model Law on Cross‐border Insolvencies for adoption by its member states. Australia contributed to the relevant UNCITRAL deliberations and is considering possible adoption of the Model Law. This article outlines the Law's main features and its potential impact on current Australian procedures for dealing with cross‐border insolvencies. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Target's organisational form and returns to Australian bidders in cross‐border acquisitions

We present large sample evidence on return performances of Australian acquirers who bid for public and private targets in cross‐border acquisitions. While placing a particular emphasis on the method of payment and the shareholder protection offered by the target country, we analyse the impact of various bid, firm and foreign‐acquisition‐specific characteristics on bidding firms' abnormal returns. We find that Australian investors perceive cross‐border acquisitions as value‐creating exercises regardless of the organisational form of the target acquired. However, bidders for private targets earn higher return when the method of payment is stock and the targets are located in high investor protection countries. We further find that the abnormal returns are conditional to the relative size of the target, bid frequency, target country destination and the preacquisition financial performance of bidding firms.     

Cross‐region and cross‐sector asset allocation with regimes

Cross‐region and cross‐sector asset allocation decisions are one of the most fundamental issues in international equity portfolio management. Equity returns exhibit higher volatilities and correlations, and lower expected returns, in bear markets compared to bull markets. However, static mean–variance analysis fails to capture this salient feature of equity returns. We accommodate the nonlinearity of returns using a regime switching model across both regions and sectors. The regime‐dependent asset allocation potentially adds value to the traditional static mean–variance allocation. In addition, optimal allocation across sectors provide greater benefits compared to international diversification, which is characterized by higher returns, lower risks, lower correlations with the world market and a higher Sharpe ratio.     

Net share issues and the cross‐section of equity returns under a dividend imputation tax system

Despite considerable empirical evidence reporting a negative relationship between net share issuance and subsequent returns, it remains unresolved whether this anomaly is explained by risk or investor irrationality. This study examines the net share issuance anomaly using seasoned equity offerings before and after the introduction of an imputation tax system. We report robust evidence of a negative relationship between net share issuance and returns post‐imputation, but no relationship pre‐imputation. Our results provide evidence to support the international pervasiveness of the net share issuance anomaly, but more importantly suggest that this anomaly may be explained by risk.     

Public and private spending for environmental protection: a cross‐country policy analysis

OECD data are used to investigate public and private environmental expenditures and, although they are more complete and consistent than other datasets, they are still poor. This is important in the context of measuring the benefits of environmental protection, when little is really known about its actual costs. Despite these limitations, this study demonstrates that there has been no shift towards an increasing private sector burden relative to the public sector over time. The paper also finds little evidence to show that environmental expenditures negatively impact on economic growth, although there is inconsistency between the ‘no effects’ finding of the competitiveness literature and the ‘negative effects’ finding of most of the productivity literature. Finally, the elasticity of expenditure with respect to income is found to be 1.2, lower than would be expected if the ‘environmental demand effect’ is significant in explaining the downward slope of the environmental Kuznets curve.     

The effect of cross‐listing on insider trading returns

Holding privileged positions within firms, insiders can acquire excessive private benefits based on their informational advantage. The bonding hypothesis suggests that this can be prevented when a firm is cross‐listed on an exchange with higher regulatory and legal costs compared with its home exchange. When cross‐listed insiders buy and sell shares, the returns earned are lower than in domestic firms. This difference is attributable to the increased shareholder protection in cross‐listed firms that constrains the extraction of private benefits, such that when cross‐listed insiders trade, they trade for non‐informational reasons.     

Capital structure of multinational and domestic corporations – a cross‐country comparison

This study investigates whether the determinants of capital structure between multinational corporations (MCs) and domestic corporations (DCs) vary across Australia, U.S., Japan, U.K. and Malaysia. Results show (i) the debt holding capacity and majority of the explanatory factors vary between DCs and MCs and also across countries; (ii) Australia, Japan, U.K. and Malaysian MCs hold significantly less long‐term debt relative to U.S. firms; (iii) DCs and MCs that operate under an imputation tax system hold significantly less short‐ and long‐term debt; and (iv) DCs and MCs operating under common law have significantly less short‐term debt and significantly higher long‐term debt.     

Re‐imagining Infrastructure*

A senior executive of Booz Allen Hamilton and co‐author of a business bestseller called Megacommunities argues that the United States is locked into an obsolete pattern of dealing with infrastructure investment, even as the country's population growth and technology have raced ahead. Three of America's basic “lifeline” infrastructures—energy, transportation, and water—are nearing the end of their useful operating lives and in desperate need of modernization. U.S. capital spending on infrastructure has been inadequate, amounting to less than 2% of GDP, as compared to 9% in China and 5% in India. But if infrastructure renewal will be costly, money is not the biggest obstacle. History shows that modernizing existing infrastructures tends to be even more challenging than creating new ones because of the drag caused by legacy hardware and the associated human “software.” And so the real problems are conceptual, institutional, and political—problems whose solutions demand transformational vision and leadership that will encourage collaborative participation by both the public and private sectors. What is lacking, then, is an oversight and coordination mechanism that restores government's traditional integrating role without creating either new monopolies or a larger, more centralized government. To that end the author issues four imperatives: First is the need to rethink the form and function of our old infrastructures. Second is the need for design principles that make future infrastructures robust and adaptable as technology advances, funding changes, and the needs of our citizens evolve. Third is the need for leadership that succeeds by convening, integrating, and aligning the interests and actions of all important stakeholders. Fourth and last is the need for a national vision for America's infra‐structure that defines the function and performance of the entire system over its total lifecycle. A new kind of collaboration by different constituencies, which the author refers to as the creation of “megacommunities,” is held up as a way for stakeholders with conflicting interests to cooperate on compelling issues of national importance with a shared set of practices and protocols.     

Capital expenditures and firm performance: evidence from a cross‐sectional analysis of stock returns

Using a simple two‐period model of investment, we show that there should be a nonlinear relation between a firm's investment‐to‐capital ratio and its subsequent stock returns. This prediction finds substantial empirical support. The evidence indicates that the slope of the investment function is negative at low investment levels, close to zero at intermediate investment levels and negative at high investment levels. Our results, which are robust to the use of narrowly‐ and broadly‐defined measures of capital investment, pose a challenge to the hypothesis that the negative cross‐sectional correlation between investment and stock returns is attributable to some sort of overinvestment phenomenon.     

Bad beta good beta,state‐space news decomposition and the cross‐section of stock returns

This study employs an innovative market‐based approach, where return on equity (ROE) is employed as a proxy for cash‐flow news and a state‐space model is used for market news decomposition. We document that the bad beta good beta (BBGB) model of Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004) explains about 30 per cent of the cross‐sectional variations in US stock returns. We also find that the BBGB model adequately explains the size effect leading to its superior performance in this area. Our method controls for the news decomposition method and market news proxies’ bias. We contribute to the literature by providing an alternative easy‐to‐implement and consistent market‐based method for news decomposition.     

CAP Forum on E‐Business: E‐Commerce and Tax Planning: Canadian Experiences*

This paper explores the deployment of e‐commerce by Canadian firms in the global marketplace, with an emphasis on the implications of e‐commerce for tax planning. The business press and various government task forces have discussed challenges raised by e‐commerce for traditional “source‐based” tax systems; however, these discussions have presented little evidence of firms' reliance on e‐commerce for tax‐planning purposes. Similarly, academic research has seldom examined whether firms' decisions to implement e‐commerce are by tax‐planning considerations. It is thus largely unknown whether firms actively consider taxation issues when evaluating e‐commerce, how the factors that have been identified as influencing decisions to implement e‐commerce systems are balanced against tax‐planning considerations, and what barriers might exist in practice to using e‐commerce for tax planning. We choose a qualitative interview‐based approach to explore these issues. Our findings suggest that tax planning is not considered by most of our respondent companies in their decisions to deploy e‐commerce. The companies we interviewed tended to implement e‐commerce over several years, starting with back‐office technologies like enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Accordingly, the ability to perform online sales transactions, which is a key component of using e‐commerce for tax planning, often was not yet in place. One implication of these results is that if concerns over tax revenue losses are realistic, tax policymakers may have some time to refine tax legislation to address the challenges raised by e‐commerce.     

Idiosyncratic volatility and cross‐sectional stock returns in Southeast Asian stock markets

We examine the role of idiosyncratic risk in five ASEAN markets of Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our research was motivated by the findings of Ang et al. (2006, 2009) of a ‘puzzling’ negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility and 1‐month ahead stock returns in developed markets and the suggestion of the ubiquity of these results in other markets. In contrast, we find no evidence of an idiosyncratic volatility puzzle in these Asian stock markets; instead, we document a positive relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and returns in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia and no relationship in the Philippines. The idiosyncratic volatility trading strategy could result in significant trading profits in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and to some extent in Indonesia. Our study underscores the fact that generalizing empirical results obtained in developed stock markets to new and emerging markets could potentially be misleading.     

中国企业"走出去"的现状与前景

在过去的3年中,中国日益增长的对外直接投资引起了广泛的关注.但是,中资企业在对外投资的过程中还面临着诸多的困难和挑战.这里面有些问题来自于国内和国外政府的相关政策,还有些问题是棘手的商业挑战,如商业策略、融资渠道、品牌发展、信息管理和人力资源等.前不久在IFC和商务部投资促进局共同举办的"中国对外投资研讨会"上,来自政府、金融机构以及企业界的代表就上述问题进行了深入地探讨,其中不乏真知灼见.     

房地产市场运行及未来趋势展望

2011年在以限购为主的房地产调控政策作用下,市场需求受到抑制,商品房销售增速明显低于历史同期平均水平。保障性住房全年开工建设任务已经提前完成,受其拉动,房地产开发投资保持高位。当前,保障性住房建设全面展开,以限购为主的调控政策短期不会退出,并呈现向二三线城市扩大的趋势,一些前期房价上涨过快的城市降价促销愈演愈烈,商品房价格回调趋势明显。     

中注协发布2010年会计师事务所综合评价前百家信息

在经过一周公示后,中注协于2010年4月30日正式发布"2010年会计师事务所综合评价前百家信息"(会协[2010]通告4号). 信息显示,前百家事务所2009年业务收入合计为206亿元,较2008年增长了5%.在前百家事务所中,有34家事务所收入超过亿元,比去年的32家增加了2家,其中,有16家事务所收入超过3亿元,行业做大做强成效进一步显现. 信息显示,前百家事务所注册会计师共23124人,较上年增长了17%,占全国注册会计师总数的26%.其中,具有硕士及以上学历的注册会计师共2519人,占前百家事务所注册会计师总人数的11%;前百家事务所共拥有领军人才后备人选165人,占行业领军人才总人数169人的98%.