The Wealth Effect of Domestic Joint Ventures: Evidence from Taiwan

This study presents important international evidence by examining the wealth effect of domestic joint ventures by Taiwanese firms. In opposite to United States evidence, we find that announcements of domestic joint ventures by Taiwanese firms are, on average, associated with significantly negative abnormal stock returns. We also find that the stock market response to announced domestic joint ventures is significantly positively related to the announcing firms' investment opportunities, size of investment and debt ratio, and is significantly negatively related to the business relatedness variable. In contrast, free cash flow, firm size, relative firm size and managerial ownership are found to have no significant power in explaining the market response. Our results support the investment opportunities, synergy and complementarity hypotheses as well as a broad interpretation of the free cash flow hypothesis, but reject the absolute size, relative size and alignment-of-interests hypotheses. This study makes valuable contributions to the literature by providing the first direct evidence on the role of investment opportunities, synergy and alignment-of-interests in explaining the wealth effect of domestic joint ventures     

On optimality in intergenerational risk sharing

Summary. This paper defines and studies optimality in a dynamic stochastic economy with finitely lived agents, and investigates the optimality properties of an equilibrium with or without sequentially complete markets. Various Pareto optimality concepts are considered, including interim and ex ante optimality. We show that, at an equilibrium with a productive asset (land) and sequentially complete markets, the intervention of a government may be justified, but only to improve risk sharing between generations. If markets are incomplete, constrained interim optimality is investigated in two-period lived OLG economies. We extend the optimality properties of an equilibrium with land and give conditions under which introducing a pay-as-you-go system at an equilibrium would not lead to any Pareto improvement. Received: October 5, 1998; revised version: April 3, 2001     

中国家电物流:步入发展快车道

尽管只有短短20余年的发展史，中国家电业所取得的成绩却令世人瞩目。目前，中国已名符其实地成了世界家电第一人国，是当之无愧的“家电世界工厂”，国际市场80％的家电产品均来自中国，世界市场80％的知名家电品牌也都“MADE IN CHINA”，家电业已成了中国发展最迅猛，市场化最早，市场化程度最高，     

Länger leben — Siechtum und Pflege ohne Grenzen?

At present, our society and its social security system are not prepared to cope with the challenges resulting from the continuous increase of life expectancy. The traditional concept of disease has to be modified for serving the special needs of the elderly. The optimistic compression of disease theory is an intriguing model, but lacks prove by available data. The anti-aging boom diverts the focus from the social and financial burden that will be unevitably caused by long-term care in the future. If there will not be an — up to now unforeseeable — breakthrough in research, particularly dementia will have an enormous impact on social cost which is often underestimated.     

Efficient Liability Rules: Complete Characterization

Received May, 18, 2000; revised version received March, 19, 2001     

银企关系与会计信息稳健性——中国资本市场的经验证据

本文以Watts（2003）的契约理论为基础，分析股东与债权人之间利益冲突对会计信息稳健性的影响。虽然会计信息稳健性有助于保护债权人的利益，但是如果股东可以作为公司的债权人，则投资者对会计信息稳健性的需求下降。本文采用Basu（1997）模型分析了2004年中国上市公司会计信息稳健性，发现国家控制的上市公司的会计信息稳健性程度较低，而民营控制的上市公司会计信息稳健性程度较高，但是股东特征对会计信息稳健性的影响，随着银行在公司中利益的增加而趋于一致。     

Cardinality-based equality of opportunities

We study possible rankings of opportunity profiles. An opportunity profile is a list of opportunity sets, one for each agent in the society. We compare profiles on the basis of the notion of “equality of opportunities”. Our main results show the necessary and sufficient conditions for this comparison to be made using exclusively the information provided by two cardinal measures: the number of common alternatives in all sets of a given profile and the difference between the number of alternatives in the individual sets. We also show that, under additional axioms, we can combine these criteria only in a weighted procedure or in some lexicographic refinements of a weighted procedure.