Climate-resilient practices and welfare impacts on rice-cultivating households in Vietnam: Does joint adoption of multiple practices matter?

Farmers have a long history of adjusting their production practices in response to changing production conditions. Using a multinomial endogenous treatment effects model that accounts for observable and unobservable heterogeneity, this study investigates the adoption and welfare impacts of climate-resilient practices on Vietnamese rice-cultivating households. We found evidence of clear and positive welfare impacts from the adoption of canal irrigation (CI) and the joint adoption of agricultural conservation practices (CP) and CI as the main adaptation strategies to increase water stress. More importantly, although farmers with access to CI systems obtained the highest returns, the joint adoption of multiple practices still had substantially high adoption rates and significantly positive effects on rice yield, rice revenue and household income. Our findings indicate that farms' and farmers' characteristics, market information and climatic conditions are generally the main factors driving rice farmers' decisions to adopt climate-resilient technologies, both individually and jointly. Follow-up policy interventions should focus on improving CI systems and promoting the joint adoption of climate-resilient technologies to improve rice farmers' well-being and enhance their resilience capacity to cope with incoming climatic uncertainty.     

长三角一体化科创产业融合发展体系研究

长江三角洲区域一体化发展作为国家战略，亟需尽快完善区域协同创新体系，勇当科技产业创新开路先锋，力争成为全国重要的创新策源地。其中，如何通过创新链和产业链的深度有效融合，加快实现创新科技成果的产业化，汇聚产学研的创新力量，从根本上消除科技经济“两张皮”的问题，是长三角区域夯实自身核心竞争力，代表国家参与国际竞争与合作的有效路径。因此，本文首先就长三角区域各个城市科创产业融合发展情况进行分析。接着以集成电路产业为例，聚焦集成电路产业的科创产业融合态势，对产业基础和优势进行概述，就其产业链的薄弱点进行梳理，同时围绕产业链中的问题，以及今后产业与科技创新发展有效融合的着力点提出建议。最后，针对长三角区域整体科创产业融合发展提出相应的路径模式。     

How does the insurer's mobile application sales strategy perform?

While the impact of an Internet-based sales strategy on sales performance has been well studied, there is little academic research that examines the impact of a mobile application (MA) sales strategy on the sales performance of insurers. Using a unique data set for term life insurance policies from a Chinese life insurer, we study the impact of implementing this strategy on insurance purchases. We find a significant growth in the insurance purchase quantity and somewhat lower growth in premiums received from new policies. This paper determines that this is due to improved channel accessibility and the cost reduction of the MA channel. Although sales of traditional distribution channels are cannibalized in the short term by the MA distribution strategy, this substitution effect does not persist in the long run. In addition, we find that this strategy reduces impulsive purchases.     

Determinants of Taiwan's outward investment in Southeast Asia: Economic factors and institutional issues

This paper investigates the economic and institutional determinants of Taiwan's outward direct investment in six Southeast Asian countries from 1998 to 2017, applying the panel ARDL–Pooled Mean Group estimation. We specially examine the effects of institutional quality with five dimensions inclusively, using the Worldwide Governance Indicators. The results show the locational economic factors are the primary determinants in the long run. The tight and historic trading relation with Southeast Asia has a long-run positive effect. On the contrary, the institutional quality of the host countries has strong positive effects in both the long run and short run. Further, the paper displays the dynamics of this investment in the last 20 years. These results are important for Taiwan and Southeast Asia policy-makers in setting up the short-run and long-run policies to sustain their diversified economic growth.     

The dark side of strengthened minority voting power: An innovation perspective

Based on the 2014 regulatory reforms aimed at strengthening the protection of legitimate rights and interests of minority investors in China, we investigate minority shareholders’ short-termism and how minority voting impacts firm innovation. We find that the 2014 reforms effectively motivate minority shareholders to attend shareholder meetings and greatly enhance their voting influence. We also find that enhanced minority voting power after the reforms lowers the number of firms’ patent applications, and this effect is more pronounced for the firms that see the greatest increase in shareholder attendance at shareholder meetings. Moreover, enhanced minority voting power boosts executive turnover-performance sensitivity, thereby undermining firm innovation. Finally, we show that different types of minority shareholders have distinct impacts on firm innovation, depending on their investment horizons. The negative effect of minority voting power is more pronounced for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than for non-SOEs.     

Do foreign institutional investors monitor opportunistic managerial behaviour? Evidence from real earnings management

Employing a large sample of 13,860 firms in 41 economies from 2000 to 2017, we document that the ownership by foreign institutional investors (FIIs) is negatively associated with firms' real earnings management (REM) but unrelated to their accrual earnings management (AEM). We adopt a few identification strategies to tackle the endogeneity issues, including firm- and year-fixed effects regression, two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression, and difference-in-differences (DiD) estimation based on the passage of the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (JGTRRA). In addition, we show that the role of FIIs in curbing REM is achieved through the expertise channel and the monitoring channel. These results suggest that when facing disadvantages in curbing AEM, FIIs make the most of their monitoring strengths by curbing firms' REM, where they have both incentives and capabilities to monitor. Overall, this study highlights the important role of FIIs in monitoring opportunistic managerial behaviour.     

On the marginal cost of public funds: the implications of charitable giving and warm glow

This paper highlights the important impact of charitable giving and warm glow on the identification of the marginal cost of public funds (MCF). We employ the warm glow model of charitable giving to describe taxpayer behaviour, whereas we employ the standard model to evaluate social welfare. We first identify the impact theoretically. Then we conduct simulations to quantify its size numerically. The results of our numerical simulations show that the standard model underestimates the magnitude of MCF by at least 10 per cent. Our work suggests that adopting a non-welfarist social welfare function can make a significant difference to the identification of MCF.     

我国经济、金融和科技的非均衡发展分析

对我国经济、金融和科技的互动机制进行了理论分析。建立联立方程模型,利用1994—2010年我国经济、金融、科技的有关时间序列数据,运用多元回归方法对我国经济、金融和科技三者间的关系进行实证分析。结果显示:我国经济、金融、科技三者呈非均衡发展,经济发展速度明显快于金融和科技的发展速度;这种非均衡发展状态大大降低了整体经济的资源配置效率。最后提出调整这种非均衡状态、使经济发展的速度及总量达到最优的建议。