Did China avoid the ‘Asian flu’? The contagion effect test with dynamic correlation coefficients

Many economists believe that China avoided the so-called Asian flu due to its strong balance of payments position and substantial foreign reserves. This study introduces an improved method for testing financial-crisis contagion and shows that crisis-contagion effects were significant among Thailand and the Chinese economic area (i.e. China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) stock markets during the Asian financial crisis. The main contribution of this study is its use of a two-step procedure to identify the crisis dates for testing for contagion and data pertaining to a growing triangular economic area during the Asian financial crisis. This result suggests that if investors ignore the economic and financial information within regional markets, they will face an increase in uncertainty vis-à-vis investment returns.     

Product market power,industry structure,and corporate earnings management

This is the first study to establish a link between product market power of firms and the degree of earnings management. We hypothesize and document a significant and robust association between (a) a firm’s product market pricing power and its degree of earnings management, and (b) industry competitiveness and the degree of earnings management in the industry. Our study reveals that firms with inferior product market pricing power engage in greater discretionary earnings accruals, adding a new dimension to our understanding of the transparency and informativeness of firms’ financial statements. These findings are mirrored at the industry level where we document that more competitive industries are associated with greater earnings manipulation. The empirical evidence has direct implication on the informativeness and earnings quality of firms based on their product market power and competitiveness.     

基于行业金融的城市商业银行运营模式研究

创新金融服务方式,大力加强金融扶持中小微企业是国家为振兴和壮大实体经济的既定金融政策导向.中小型城市商业银行作为服务中小微企业客户的主要力量,既面临着严峻竞争形势,也迎来了发展的重要机遇.本文以行业金融为着眼点,探索了其以中小型城市商业银行为运行载体的运营模式,包括银行组织架构、业务模式和绩效考核模式,以期为努力突破生存与发展瓶颈的城商行找到一个经营模式转型创新的突破口.     

Transaction costs in an illiquid order‐driven market

Transaction costs in many international equity markets are much larger than those in the USA. This raises questions such as what trade size these reported trading costs relate to and whether investors can reduce trading costs by timing their trades. We show, using data from the order‐driven New Zealand market, that transaction costs are frequently lower for larger trades, particularly in small stocks, and investors are able to reduce costs by timing their transactions. While investors who require immediate execution incur transaction costs that are much higher than reported average costs, patient investors can trade at much better rates.     

The role of the seller’s stock performance in the market reaction to divestiture announcements

Divestitures have the potential to create shareholder value. However, the extent of the market reaction should depend on the likelihood of finding more valuable uses for the divested assets or the ability on the part of the seller to eliminate negative synergies. We hypothesize that strong performers have less scope to achieve substantial improvements compared to poorly performing firms. Using the seller’s stock return in excess of the market return in the 1-year and 2-year periods preceding the divestiture announcement to expose the divesting firm’s inefficient use of its assets, we show that the market reaction to divestiture announcements is significantly higher for underperforming firms. The difference in abnormal returns can be as high as 4 %. In contrast, none of the accounting-based variables that have been used in previous studies are found to be significantly related to the announcement returns. These results suggest that the firm’s stock performance is a more useful indicator of the wealth effect associated with divestitures.     

Public Enterprise Privatization: A General Equilibrium Analysis

This paper develops a general equilibrium model to examine the short‐run and long‐run optimal privatization policies. By assuming that all firms are public firms initially, the paper focuses on how the degree of product differentiation γ and the average efficiency of the industry influence the determination of the optimal privatization policy. The paper shows that privatization decreases the more efficient firms' outputs while increases the less efficient firms' outputs in the short run, and reduces all firms' outputs in the long run. The paper also shows that the larger is γ and the smaller is the number of firms, the more privatized will be the public firm in the short run. Moreover, as γ or the entry barrier f_E is sufficiently small, full privatization is the best policy in the long run. On the contrary, as γ and f_E are large enough, partial privatization is optimal.     

Do trade agreements increase Vietnam's exports to RCEP markets?

The paper reviews recent developments in trade relations between Vietnam and members of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement, and analyses the impacts on Vietnam's exports of tariff reductions in RCEP trading partners. The margin of tariff preferences is adopted as a proxy for the degree of trade liberalisation and a gravity model is used to assess the impacts of the tariff preferences under the AFTA and ASEAN+1 FTAs on Vietnam's major exports. The results show that the effects of tariff preferences differ between the types of preferences and products. The FTA tariff preferences do not exert a stimulating effect on the export of agricultural products but they have positive effects on several manufacturing exports such as garments and footwear.     

Who Controls the Controller? People Reaction to Social Control Agent's Decisions about Organizational Misconduct

Social control agents (SCAs) discipline organizations and draw the line between appropriate organizational behaviour and misconduct. While prior research focuses on the SCA-organization relationship, we theorize how a key audience (people) interacts with an SCA depending on its decisions to sanction or not organizational misconduct. Building on sociological and organizational research on social norms and their enforcement, we expect that people are more likely to agree with an SCA that sanctions a behaviour that violates rule-based as opposed to value-based norms. Violations of rule-based norms generate more agreement because such norms are less ambiguous and ascertaining when they are violated is easier to establish. As people agree more with SCA decisions to sanction rule-based violations, we expect that the propensity of people to resort to the SCA increases. We find support for our hypotheses with a survey, a series of experiments, and the analysis of complete data on complaints by UK citizens to the Advertising Standards Authority – the UK SCA on advertising – over the period 2007–10. Our paper contributes to research in organizational misconduct by showing how SCAs are both an evaluating entity and an evaluated one and by shedding light on how people co-determine what an acceptable or unacceptable behaviour is. Our paper uniquely links macro- and micro-level studies on corporate misconduct, putting centre stage that SCA's authority essentially depends on a key audience's agreement with the SCAs' underlying norms that underpin their decisions.     

Is foreign direct investment productive? A case study of the regions of Vietnam

By making use of a recently released dataset that covers a large number of manufacturing firms over the period 2000–2005, this paper examines the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) and FDI generated spillovers on total factor productivity (TFP) in eight regions of Vietnam. Unlike most existing studies, this paper focuses on the impact of spillovers that take place through both horizontal and vertical linkages. The results presented in this paper suggest that the impact of FDI spillovers on TFP varies considerably across regions. FDI spillovers generate a strong positive impact on TFP through backward linkages only in Red River Delta, South Central Coast, South East and Mekong River Delta while in other regions the impact is negative and mostly insignificant. The paper also examines the impact of the absorptive capacity on TFP growth in each of the eight geographical regions.