Canadian Perspectives on the Challenges of Consumer Bankruptcies

Consumer bankruptcies in Canada have become a major legal, economic and social phenomenon. The number of consumer bankruptcies almost tripled between 1985 and 1995 and exceeded 75,000 in 1996. The author examines the causes of the rapidly escalating number of bankruptcies and shows that there is a strong correlation between the number of consumer bankruptcies and the equally rapid growth in the volume of consumer credit. The paper rejects the argument of credit grantors and federal bankruptcy officials that going bankrupt and obtaining a discharge from one's debts has become too easy and that a high percentage of consumer bankrupts could have made a consumer proposal involving a substantial repayment of their debts.The paper also joins issue with the provisions in Bill C-5, a bill amending the federal Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act currently before the Canadian Parliament, and criticizes the proposed amendments involving consumer bankruptcies on the ground that they ignore or misinterpret the available data, much of them generated by the Canadian Government itself.     

Strategic Responses to Competitive Pressure: The Case of Township and Village Enterprises in China

This study assesses the configuration between strategic orientation and industrial environment for Chinese township and village enterprises (TVEs), the organizational form which has played an increasingly important role in Chinese economic development and structural reform. We argue that the complexity, dynamism, and hostility of the industrial environment influence TVE managers' perception of competitive pressure, which in turn affects the firm's strategic orientations such as innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking, and analysis. Our analysis, based on a survey of TVE managers in Tinjin and Jiangsu, demonstrates that complexity and dynamism of industrial competition have a systematically positive impact on TVE's innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking, or analysis. Environmental hostility is not significantly associated with any strategic orientations adopted by Chinese TVEs. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Research on rural-to-urban migration in LDCs: The confusion frontier and why we should pause to rethink afresh

Over 12 years of intensive research in the field of rural-to-urban migration have left the field beset with loss of direction and some serious doubts as to: (1) whether research has really provided practitioners with more specific means of intervention; (2) proper understanding of such intervention, its justification and results; (3) the areas in which the marginal benefit of extra research amounts to zero; (4) those areas in which some consensus has emerged; (5) which problem areas and specific issues merit intensive migration research in the coming years; and (6) whether or not the academic profession has based its migration research effort in the past decade on an inappropriate set of presuppositions or, even worse, on invalid postulates. A few examples of confusion and/or fallacies that render this list more concrete are presented in this paper. These are drawn from the areas of migration and fertility; migration and education; migration and the distribution of income by size; migration and urban unemployment; migration and the politics of economics; migration and policy measures.This paper, then, makes a plea for a major re-evaluation which could and should provide a turning point in academic work and institutional thought. The emphasis is on reformulation of the policy-related presumptions on which research has been based for the past dozen years. Rather than trying to reach a better understanding of the decision-making process generating rural-to-urban migration and its sectoral and overall social implications so as to devise more effective measures to contain/reverse it, the starting point should be an effort to effectively manipulate the phenomenon so as to turn it into a vehicle of national development and personal betterment.     

THE STATISTICS OF LONG-HORIZON REGRESSIONS REVISITED1

This paper compares commonly used approaches for estimating the relation between long-horizon returns and a predetermined variable X₁, such as dividend yields. Specifically, we look at regression of (i) nonoverlapping multiperiod returns on X_t (ii) overlapping multiperiod returns on X_t, (iii) single-period returns on multiperiod X_t, and (iv) single-period returns on X_t and its implied long-horizon regression coefficient. We provide analytical formulae which quantify the efficiency of the estimators used in the various approaches. Using the formulae, as well as Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate that the relative efficiency of the estimators used in the various approaches differs remarkably, depending on the dynamic structure of the regressor. of special interest for financial economists, when the regressors are highly autocorrelated, we find that the regressions (ii) (iii), and (iv) provide only marginal efficiency gains above and beyond the nonoverlapping long-horizon regression.