Impact of formalisation of property rights in informal settlements: Evidence from Dar es Salaam city

This paper aims to study the responsiveness of the informal property market and management systems towards the introduction of land registration for informal settlements in Tanzania. City governments are increasingly recognising the need to strengthen legal rights for the urban poor as a means to bring them more effectively into the urban economy and ensure better provision of water, sanitation and other primary services. The research focuses on Tanzania and in particular two case studies within Dar es Salaam. The findings of the work suggest that the introduction of residential licenses whilst potentially assisting in creating legal certainty has not resulted in the financial sector accepting them as full security against loans. Accessing credit by the poor however has not yet been fully realised resulting in some further hurdles for the financial sector to overcome. Finally, and of some significance is the registration of property in the informal settlements has provided the opportunity of formal property transactions within these settlements.     

ENVIRONMENTAL FINANCE: VALUE AND RISK IN AN AGE OF ECOLOGY

Environmental issues are restructuring markets and redirecting capital flows throughout the world. An outline is provided of concerns facing the development of an environmentally responsible or ‘environmental finance’ perspective. It reviews the major ways in which organizations are responding to environmental threats and opportunities in the three major branches of finance — corporate finance, investments and financial institutions — highlighting in particular novel programs and initiatives. In the past, financial concerns have exacerbated the degradation of the natural environment; in the future, they probably hold the key to their preservation.     

企业融资需谨记10大原则

在过去的一年里,由于全球经济衰退的影响,风险投资人们都捂紧了钱袋,对企业而言获得融资变得更加困难.近日,DFJ Gotham Ven-tures公司投资人Mark Davis撰文提醒企业在筹资过程中应该遵循十大法则,这样能大大提高筹资成功率.     

The desired level of market orientation and business unit performance

Existing studies of market orientation have hypothesized that the strength of the market orientation/performance relationship depends on environmental variables such as market turbulence, technological turbulence, and competitive intensity. To date most empirical studies have failed to confirm these hypotheses; however, these studies (1) assumed that performance is a linear function of the achieved level of market orientation and (2) tested whether environmental uncertainty moderates this relationship. A complementary explanation for the impact of environmental variables on a firm’s market orientation arises from studies of organizational behavior that link the need for coordination and control to environmental uncertainty and organizational strategy. Building on this perspective, the authors argue that (1) environmental uncertainty influences the desired level of market orientation and (2) the gap between the desired and achieved levels of market orientation influence business unit performance. The authors test these hypotheses with data collected from multiple respondents in 308 US firms. The data analysis confirms that the desired level of market orientation is a function of market turbulence, competitive intensity, technological turbulence, and innovation strategy. In addition, the desired level of market orientation positively influences the achieved level. Finally, when the achieved level of market orientation is less than the desired level, business unit performance is a negative function of the gap between the desired and achieved levels of market orientation.

Information Disclosure as Environmental Regulation: A Theoretical Analysis

Governments around the world are beginning to embrace a new form of environmental regulation – mandatory disclosure of information. While information disclosure programs appear to have an impact on subsequent firm behavior – often resulting in lower levels of pollution – little is known about the costs and benefits of these programs and whether or not they enhance social welfare. This paper presents a simple bargaining model where mandatory information disclosure is used to overcome a lack of information on the part of the public. We characterize the conditions under which information disclosure will lead to a reduction in emissions, and ultimately, the conditions under which it will enhance social welfare. Several extensions of the model are briefly explored, including the effect of two sources of pollution – only one of which is subject to information disclosure. This paper was prepared while V. Santhakumar was a Visiting Scholar at the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies, Vanderbilt University.     

The asymmetric relationship between executive earnings management and compensation: a panel threshold regression approach

Prior research shows that chief executive officers (CEOs) are rewarded for their earnings management. We re-examine this issue using a panel threshold regression approach, which allows the effect of earnings management on the CEO compensation to change across the level of earnings management and CEO compensation. Our results show that the effect of CEOs’ discretionary accounting choices on their compensation is not homogeneous across various degrees of earnings management and compensation. In particular, for firms with moderate (inordinate) levels of earnings management and CEO compensation, earnings management is rewarded (penalized).