What Drives TBL Reporting: Good Governance or Threat to Legitimacy?

This paper provides two complementary explanations for the adoption of triple bottom line (TBL) reporting by Australian companies. The first explanation is that companies adopt TBL reporting to legitimise their relationship with society because of adverse publicity from the media. The second explanation is that TBL reporting is adopted because of the company's desire to achieve high‐quality reporting and transparency inferred by strong corporate governance. Companies with TBL reporting had significantly more adverse media coverage before implementing TBL reporting than non‐TBL companies. TBL reporting is also significantly and positively related to the existence of an environmental or sustainable development committee and the frequency of meetings of the audit committee.     

A State‐Price Volatility Index for China's Stock Market

This study derives a volatility index for China's stock market with similar properties to the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index (the ‘VIX’). A long‐term benchmark of historic volatility expectations is here presented for China from 1996 to 2011, called the ‘China‐ State‐Price Volatility (SPV)’. Construction of this index involves the use of SPV methodology, using implied volatility calculated from options on the Hang Seng China Enterprise Index (HSCEI). Historic open–high–low–close volatility on the Shanghai Composite Index (SHCI) is also used to extend the benchmark prior to the availability of HSCEI options data. The China‐SPV successfully forecasts realised volatility for the Shanghai Stock Exchange. It also serves as a ‘fear gauge’ in that it monitors daily movements of the SHCI in the same way that the VIX monitors the S&P 500 index (Whaley, 2009). The China‐SPV evidences an increasing relation with the US market in terms of the dynamic correlation of levels and changes with the VIX since 2004.     

Interviewers,Interviewer Continuity,and Panel Survey Nonresponse

It is widely known that in practice, different interviewers have different response rates, though there has been no systematic examination of whether this is because of differences among interviewers or differences among those areas allocated to the interviewers (area effects), or both. Furthermore, the conventional wisdom in survey research suggests that it is advisable to have the same interviewers return to the same respondents in order to maintain good response rates in longitudinal surveys, though once again there has been very little documented experimental research to support this. This paper makes use of the interpenetrated sample design experiment in Wave 2 of the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) (i) to explore the effects of interviewers' background characteristics and years of experience on response rates, (ii) to identify and estimate the differential effects of interviewers on response rates and compare the magnitudes of area and interviewer effects, and (iii) to investigate the impact of interviewer continuity. The analysis is facilitated by the use of cross-classified multilevel modelling. The paper also looks at the issue of interviewer continuity qualitatively, through the impressions of the interviewers themselves.     

Information-eliciting compensation schemes

This paper examines the implications of the ‘residence’ approach to taxing foreign source income such as employed by the United States. It is argued that, because the repatriation of earnings to the home country investor and not the earnings themselves are typically the source of tax liability, the foreign source income tax should affect foreign investment differently depending on the required transfers of funds within the firm.One implication of viewing the tax in this way is that in order to maximize after-tax profits, a firm should finance its foreign investment out of foreign earnings to the greatest extent possible. That is, a firm's required foreign return jumps at the point at which desired foreign investment just exhausts foreign earnings. This allows us to draw a distinction between ‘mature’ foreign operations, which are at any point in time financed at the margin by investing earnings (and perhaps also pay dividends to their parent firm in the home country), and ‘immature’ foreign affiliates, which rely on funding from their parents (and should not be paying dividends). It is noted that survey evidence on multinational firm behavior is consistent with this distinction. Direct investment data indicate that mature foreign operations probably account for nearly 90 percent of U.S. foreign direct investment.The discussion then turns to investment incentives. It is shown that the home country's rate of tax on foreign source income and the presence or absence of a foreign tax credit should be irrelevant to a mature foreign operations's investment and dividend decisions. This conclusion, which conflicts sharply with the conventional wisdom, follows because the home country tax acts as an unavoidable cost. New firms' investment decisions are, on the other hand, influenced by home country taxes.     

Intersectoral wage linkages: the case of Sweden

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether wage-setting in certain sectors of the Swedish economy affects wage-setting in other sectors. The theoretical background is the Scandinavian model of inflation, which states that wage-setting in the sectors exposed to international competition lead wage-setting in the sheltered sectors of the economy. The Johansen maximum likelihood cointegration approach is applied to quarterly data on Swedish sector wages for the period 1980:1–2002:2. Different vector error correction (VEC) models are created, based on assumptions as to which sectors are exposed to international competition and which are not. Granger causality tests are then carried out in the different restricted/unrestricted VEC models to test for sector wage leadership. The Granger causality tests provide strong evidence for the presence of intersectoral wage causality, but no evidence of a wage-leading role for the internationally exposed manufacturing sector.      

Cuba,Trade Dependency and the GATT/WTO System

Cuba sought economic independence from the U.S. and its reliance on sugar exports after its 1959 revolution, but subsequently developed new dependency relationships. In the meantime, Cuba remained inside the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), despite conducting most of its trade outside it. This paper explores the political economy of Cuba’s participation in the GATT and later the World Trade Organization (WTO). Documents show that Cuba sought to use its participation to gain new markets and influence in the developing world. While Cuba has gained little economically from its participation, in recent years it has diversified its exports and trade partners, and its trade interests now align more closely with WTO rules. Economic reforms will be necessary in order for Cuba to benefit.     

Co-movement in Stock Prices in Emerging Economies: The Case of the Caricom Region

The Grand Anse Declaration of 1989 recognised the need for financial integration within the emerging economies that comprise the CARICOM region, as a way of furthering the wider process of economic integration and, indeed, economic development in that region. Using co-movement as a measure of financial integration, this paper investigates the co-movement in stock prices among the Barbados, the Jamaica and the Trinidad and Tobago Stock Exchanges, the three major exchanges within the CARICOM region. It also examines how integrated these exchanges are with the New York Stock Exchange. The GARCH-Copula methodology and, to a lesser extent, estimated correlation coefficients, are used to attain this objective. There appears to be co-movement in stock prices and returns within the CARICOM stock markets and significant dependence structures between the returns of the three CARICOM stock markets. However, there is considerably less evidence of integration between the CARICOM markets and the New York Stock Exchange.     

Two estimators for the apt model when factors are measured

Non-linear SUR and ITSUR techniques are proposed for the estimation of the APT and the CAPM when the factors are observed. These techniques estimate all of the parameters of the model simultaneously and directly impose the model's non-linear parameter restrictions.