Debt rescheduling and the choice between bonds and loans for LDCs' foreign debt

This paper examines less developed country (LDC) borrowers' choice of financing methods. I devleop and test the hypothesis that ex-ante consideration of rescheduling affects LDC borrowers' choice between bonds and commercial loans. Banks can monitor and distinguish between permanent and temporary shocks, while bondholders cannot. Therefore, debt rescheduling based on the nature of economic shocks is feasible with loan financing. Our empirical findings indicate the debt rescheduling is considered exante in LDC lending. In addition, default risk and contract size affect the choice of financing instruments.     

Orthogonalized factors and systematic risk decomposition

In the context of linear multi-factor models, this study proposes an egalitarian, optimal and unique procedure to find orthogonalized factors, which also facilitates the decomposition of the coefficient of determination. Importantly, the new risk factors may diverge significantly from the original ones. The decomposition of risk allows one to explicitly examine the impact of individual factors on the return variation of risky assets, which provides discriminative power for factor selection. The procedure is experimentally robust even for small samples. Empirically we find that even though, on average, approximately eighty (sixty-five) percent of style (industry) portfolios’ volatility is explained by the market and size factors, other factors such as value, momentum and contrarian still play an important role for certain portfolios. The components of systematic risk, while dynamic over time, generally exhibit negative correlation between market, on one side, and size, value, momentum and contrarian, on the other side.     

Identification of technological structures using patent statistics

This paper studies the use of patent statistics in identifying four aspects of technological structure, namely, the potential knowledge pool, cumulativeness, inter-firm homogeneity in technology levels, and the scope of innovations. The firms are sampled from the chemical (CHEM), the computer (COM) and the electrical and electronic (EE) industries worldwide. Using the proxies defined, we find that (i) the contributions of intra-industry spillover are low, at 12%, 10%, and 9% for the three industries respectively; (ii) they can internalize 15%, 19% and 13% of their previous research efforts respectively; and (iii) a positive relationship between knowledge spillover and technology overlap, and between scope of innovation and number of patents being cited in future.     

Comparison of Important Laws Governing the Macroeconomies of Taiwan and China

This is a comparative study of the important laws governing the macroeconomies of Taiwan and China. The laws are concerned with consumption, investment and fiscal and monetary policies of the government. Following similar studies on China, the present paper focuses on the case of Taiwan. Using annual data from 1961 to 2014 we find that the consumption function satisfies the permanent income hypothesis of Friedman and the investment function satisfies the accelerations principle as in the case of China. Money supply does not affect GDP but government expenditure has a positive effect on consumption and a negative effect on investment. These results are opposite to those obtained for China. Explanations of the differences are given.     

Note on a model of Chinese national income determination

A macroeconomic model of Chow (1985) explaining aggregate consumption by the permanent income hypothesis of Robert Hall and aggregate investment by the accelerations principle was found to fit Chinese annual data from 1952 to 1982 well. This note shows that the same model can successfully explain Chinese annual data from 1978 to 2006.     

Investment and the soft budget constraint in China

This paper examines the incentive effects of the soft budget constraint on the investment behavior of firms in general and on the investment-cash flow sensitivity in particular. To this end, we develop a simple model of moral hazard that takes the soft budget constraint into account. Within this moral hazard environment, we show that investment is positively related to the amount of internal funds. We further show that the presence of the soft budget constraint deteriorates the moral hazard problem, thereby making the investment level less sensitive to the amount of internal funds. This is the case irrespective of whether the soft budget constraint renders the firm more or less liquidity constrained. To test the model's empirical implications, we employ data of China's listed companies for the period from 1997 to 2003. We use the share of state ownership as a proxy for the severity of the soft budget constraint. We find strong evidence that firms with larger shares of state ownership exhibit lower investment-cash flow sensitivities than firms with smaller shares of state ownership.     

Environmental Kuznets Curve: Conclusive Econometric Evidence for CO2

This paper begins with a statistical formulation of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) and discusses the major econometric problems raised in the literature in testing this hypothesis using panel data. A simple t‐test is then presented that avoids these econometric problems. The result from applying the t‐test confirms conclusively the EKC for CO₂ as formulated.     

COMMENT ON "THE IRREDUCIBLE ROLE OF DERIVED MARGINAL UTILITY IN DYNAMIC STOCHASTIC PROGRAMMING"

This comment shows why the Lagrange method can be simpler than dynamic programming in solving dynamic optimization problems.     

Rates of Return to Schooling in China

This study uses data from a 1988 survey of Chinese individuals to estimate rates of return to schooling in China. The Mincer-type rate of return to schooling was estimated at 4.02 percent in the rural areas and 3.29 percent in the urban areas; these are fairly low estimates compared with similar estimates in other countries. The rate of return to schooling for females was significantly higher than that for males in urban areas. In addition, members of the Communist Party in urban areas had significantly lower returns to schooling compared with non-members.     

Examining human resource management outsourcing in Hong Kong

This study explored the state of human resource (HR) outsourcing in the Asian context, a particularly important subject given its rapid proliferation in Europe and North America, the inconsistent and limited evidence from prior research, and its strategic importance to the human resource management (HRM) function. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data and the transaction cost, resource-based, and institutional perspectives, we found that although respondents were generally favourable towards outsourcing, that in practice its adoption and diffusion were in a nascent stage in Hong Kong. Decisions to outsource were, by and large, incremental and experimental and influenced by a range of contextual factors (e.g., availability of in-house expertise, skills and creativity, strategic priorities, legislation (coercive), availability of external service providers, and industry and peer (mimetic) influence). Despite considerable pressure to cut costs, instead of outsourcing in the first instance, firms placed greater emphasis on maximising internal resource utilization (insourcing). Implications for practice and suggestions for future research are also provided.