The incentives for tax planning

We use a proprietary data set with detailed executive compensation information to examine the relationship between the incentives of the tax director and GAAP and cash effective tax rates, the book-tax gap, and measures of tax aggressiveness. We find that the incentive compensation of the tax director exhibits a strong negative relationship with the GAAP effective tax rate, but little relationship with the other tax attributes. We interpret these results as indicating that tax directors are provided with incentives to reduce the level of tax expense reported in the financial statements.     

Do independent directors cause improvements in firm transparency?

Although recent research documents a positive relation between corporate transparency and the proportion of independent directors, the direction of causality is unclear. We examine a regulatory shock that substantially increased board independence for some firms, and find that information asymmetry, and to some extent management disclosure and financial intermediation, changed at firms affected by this shock. We also examine whether these effects vary as a function of management entrenchment, information processing costs, and required changes to audit committee independence. Our results suggest that firms can alter their corporate transparency to suit the informational demands of a particular board structure.     

When should households be compensated for land-use restrictions? A decision-making framework for Chinese forest policy

Competing uses of land mean that regulations aimed at environmental conservation often conflict with the land-use rights of rural households. Several reports suggest that this has occurred with the introduction of the Natural Forest Protection Programme (NFPP) in China, one of the world's largest logging ban programmes. This paper investigates whether households should be compensated for infringements on property rights, drawing on institutional economics literature on regulation. We distinguish between cases where regulation solves local collective action problems and increases the welfare of those affected, and those where regulation involves a redistribution of rights from one group to another. We apply this to the NFPP by estimating the net welfare impacts, using household level stated preference data with econometric techniques that explicitly account for zero and negative values of the dependent variable. We find that the ban on logging does not affect the net welfare of the affected forest communities. This indicates that the losses resulting from the restrictions on property rights are offset by the benefits from restrictions on other local households. We also find evidence that a partial reduction in logging would be welfare increasing, indicating that the NFPP is to some extent addressing local collective action problems in forest areas. Broader implications for the question of compensating for infringement of property rights as the result of regulatory interventions in contexts of institutional imperfections are also drawn.     

Culturally responsive relational reflexive ethics in research: the three rs

In this article, the authors define ethics, discuss why researchers should care about ethics, and briefly review the history of ethics and the surrounding contemporary debate as related to research, the development of research ethics codes, research ethics legislation, and the formation of the human subjects research review boards in the West with an emphasis on the United States’ Institutional Review Board. They then explicate the difference between minimalist ethical codes, which all respected researchers must adhere to, and an aspirational ethical stance. Culturally Responsive Relational Reflexive Ethics (CRRRE) is then advanced as a viable aspirational ethical stance for the research community. Finally, the authors draw on their own research for examples of ethical dilemmas involving ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and power that CRRRE has helped illuminate.     

The Politics of Japan–China Trade and the Role of the World Trade System

The large and rapidly growing trade relationship between Japan and China has occurred against a backdrop of political tensions. This study measures performance of the trade relationship, benchmarking it against other trade flows worldwide, and examines the impact of the politics on bilateral trade performance. To do this, a frontier gravity model is estimated using core determinants of trade. This gives a benchmark against which to measure trade performance, explained using resistances to trade. While the economic relationship is not independent from the politics, an important conclusion is that trade has not been diminished or disturbed by politics to a significant extent. China’s commitment to the global trading system from the mid‐1980s and its accession to the WTO in 2001 has meant that tensions in the political relationship with Japan from time to time have not derailed, but rather have increasingly come to be dominated, by the economic relationship.     

Methods for Generating Longitudinally Correlated Binary Data

The analysis of longitudinally correlated binary data has attracted considerable attention of late. Since the estimation of parameters in models for such data is based on asymptotic theory, it is necessary to investigate the small‐sample properties of estimators by simulation. In this paper, we review the mechanisms that have been proposed for generating longitudinally correlated binary data. We compare and contrast these models with regard to various features, including computational efficiency, flexibility and the range restrictions that they impose on the longitudinal association parameters. Some extensions to the data generation mechanism originally suggested by Kanter (1975) are proposed.     

Organisational practices and the post‐retirement employment experience of older workers

This study compared people aged 50 to 65 who had retired and returned to work (n = 90), who remained in their career jobs (n = 198), and who retired and remained out of the workforce (n = 321). The significant differences between post‐retirement and career employment were associated with the HR practices within organisations and were not related to the characteristics of the organisations in which post‐retirement and career jobs were found. The HR practices were rated as especially important in influencing the decision of retirees to return to work. The findings suggest that people in post‐retirement jobs are drawn to organisations that provide HR practices tailored to the needs and desires of older workers. The results also indicate that if employers expect to address labour shortages by encouraging retirees back into the workforce, they are going to have to implement those HR practices that are important to this group.