Unintended Consequences of Lockdowns: Evidence from Domestic Helpers in Urban China

This paper addresses the reactions of domestic helpers to the Wuhan (Hubei Province) lockdown that began on January 23, 2020. We use a novel dataset containing the information of over 40,000 Chinese domestic helpers registered on a leading professional website from November 2019 to June 2020. The results indicate a declining pattern of short-term labor supply of domestic helpers across 11 major Chinese cities, which shows an increase in the expected monthly wage of domestic helpers in these cities. More importantly, using a difference-in-difference (DID) model, this paper provides some evidence on the existence of labor market discrimination against domestic helpers born in Hubei Province due to employers’ fear of infection.     

General equilibrium trade modelling with Canada–US transportation costs

Transportation costs are an important topic in international trade, but seldom have researchers paid attention to general equilibrium trade modelling with transportation costs and explored their relevant effects. This paper uses numerical general equilibrium trade model structures to simulate the impacts of transportation costs on welfare and trade for a Canada–US country pair case. We compare two groups of model structures: Armington assumption models and homogeneous goods models. Within these two groups of models, we also compare balanced trade structures to trade imbalance structures and production function transportation costs to iceberg transportation costs. Armington goods models generate more absolute welfare gains from transportation cost elimination than homogeneous goods models. Welfare gains under balanced trade structures are larger in production function transportation cost scenarios than in iceberg transportation cost scenarios, but under trade imbalance structures, welfare gains are greater under iceberg transportation cost scenarios. Canada's welfare gains in the iceberg transportation cost scenario are significantly larger than gains in the production function transportation cost scenario. On trade effects, homogeneous goods models generate more export and import gains, balanced trade structures have more trade variations, and iceberg transportation costs generate more trade effects.     

跨学科视角下政府资产负债表编制研究——概念比较及协调策略

政府资产与负债核算涉及国民经济核算、政府财政统计、政府会计等不同学科领域,作为政府资产、负债记录载体的政府资产负债表也具有不同的学科属性与特征.研究分别从微观、中观与宏观三个不同层次构建了政府资产负债表跨学科协调框架,并分析了政府资产负债表跨学科协调的意义.研究还由表及里地剖析了不同学科视角下政府资产负债表的编制逻辑及概念体系,在此基础上结合国民经济核算体系、政府财政统计手册与国际公共部门会计准则等国际规范,系统地比较了不同核算体系下政府资产负债表在核算目标、核算主体、要素定义、计量方法与列报格式等核心概念上的差异.研究最后在深化国家治理体系改革的时代背景下,设计了我国政府资产负债表跨学科协调方案与策略,以期为我国国家资产负债表、政府财政统计报告及政府财务报告编制与改革提供跨学科理论与技术支持.     

Institutional Ownership and Private Equity Placements: Evidence from Chinese Listed Firms

This paper examines the impact of institutional ownership on the performance of private equity placements (PEPs) for listed firms in China. We find that the presence of institutional investors can alleviate the information asymmetries between listed firms and the market. The market reaction to PEP announcements is significantly smaller if there is a higher portion of institutional shareholdings. Long‐term firm operational performance after PEPs is positively correlated with institutional shareholdings. Moreover, we find that the relationship between institutional shareholdings and PEP performance is mainly driven by nonlisted corporate investors and mutual funds. Finally, the relationship between PEP performance and institutional shareholdings is stronger in smaller PEP issuers.     

Does religiosity enhance the quality of management earnings forecasts?

This study investigates whether firms located in areas with higher levels of religiosity disclose higher-quality management earnings forecasts than do other firms. Using a US sample of 4,655 firm-year observations over the period 2001 to 2014, we find that firms headquartered in counties with higher proportions of religious adherents issue earnings forecasts that are less optimistically biased and that the effect of religiosity is concentrated in firms with weak monitoring mechanisms. We also find that religiosity mitigates pessimistic bias in management earnings forecasts, but only for those issued by firms operating in low litigation industries. This result suggests that when the litigation risk is high, both ethicality and risk aversion are at work and their competing effects likely offset each other. Additionally, we document that forecasts issued by firms in more religious areas trigger stronger stock price reactions than those issued by other firms and that the effect is limited to forecasts containing optimistic bias. Overall, our results show that religiosity enhances the quality of management earnings forecasts, but the effect varies based on different conditions.     

Does China’s emissions trading system foster corporate green innovation? Evidence from regulating listed companies

Carbon emissions trading system is expected to be both efficient and flexible in carbon reduction through green innovation. As the world’s largest CO₂ emitter, China has launched the emissions trading system (CN-ETS) since 2013 in 7 pilot areas and vowed to build a nation-wide system in the second half of 2017. This study provides preliminary evidence on the impact of the CN-ETS on green innovation and the moderating role of market competition on this relationship at the firm level. Based on data of regulating listed companies in seven pilots, the results show that CN-ETS is significantly positively correlated with green innovation, and market competition weakens the positive relationship, indicating that CN-ETS is effective in the aspect of green innovation, and the effect would be better in less competitive markets.     

Weighted utility optimization of the participating endowment contract

ABSTRACT

In a participating endowment contract, the special loss compensation and profit sharing mechanism leads to heterogeneous benchmarks to distinguish the gain and loss for the policyholder's and the insurance company's S-shaped utilities. Because of the intense competition among the insurance companies and the requirement of the regulators, the benefits of the policyholders should be considered. As such, choosing the weighted utility of the two counterparts as the optimization objective is a rational setting. This setting induces a non-HARA (hyperbolic absolute risk aversion) and non-concave objective utility whose exact concavity and convexity are unknown. The difficulties not only come from this highly non-concave optimization problem, but also exist in the implicit integration of the optimum when solving the expected utilities of the two counterparts. We originally design an identification method to establish two categories of concave envelopes to solve the optimization problem, and propose an innovative numerical integration by substitution technique to deal with the implicit integration problem. The numerical simulation results recognize the existence of Pareto improvement of the two counterparts, which shows that the utilities of the policyholder and the insurance company can be simultaneously improved by switching into the weighted objective and appropriately amending the contract.     

排斥、替代与互补:政府市场格局的动态优化

实践和理论表明,国家发展的过程是国家依据"国民收益最大化原则",使"政府-市场"关系格局不断优化的动态组合过程.理论上"政府-市场"组合效应可以借助坐标系划分为"双失灵"、"单失灵"和"双有效"三类状况.其中,"双有效"区和"双失灵"是传统理论关注较少的区域,对前者的分析有利于细化把握政府和市场间的配合关系;"双失灵"区域的发现和多种组合的分析则不但利于寻找有的放矢的治理措施,有利益拓展市场疆域,同时,也是"多中心论"产生的内在动因.     

国外反补贴:案例、警示与对策

2004年加拿大曾连续三次对我国发起了反补贴调查,2006年11月美国也对外宣布对我国的出口产品发起首例的反补贴调查。对此,我们到底应该怎么来看?本文不避浅陋,仅就此谈一些我们的看法,以参与这方面问题的讨论。