公积金：内地要向香港学习

为解决人口急剧老龄化问题，保障大多数人的退休生活，香港特区政府自2000年12月起正式推行强积金（强制性公积金）计划。强积金是以职业为基础的退休保障计划，除豁免人士外，凡年龄在侣岁至65岁之间的雇员和自雇人士都必须参加强积金。强积金计划推行时间虽然不长，但其效果非常明显，目前已覆盖了86％的香港就业人士。在强积金投资上，香港特区政府对投资范围、投资比例及投资工具等都作了详细的规定，保证了基金的稳健运营。由于人们可以灵活地选择其养老金账户的投资方式，近年来，强积金的总资产净值每年增长超过三成，截至去年底已滚存至1200亿港元。     

Tariff and Quota Equivalence in Vertically Related Markets

This paper re‐examines the issue of tariff and quota equivalence by introducing an upstream market into the Hwang and Mai (1988 ) model, and then allowing the two downstream firms to cross‐haul within each other's market. We assume the upstream monopolist can select either a two‐part or a one‐part tariff pricing strategy. It is found that if the upstream firm adopts a two‐part (one‐part) tariff pricing strategy, then the market price of the final good under a tariff will be higher (lower) than that under an equivalent quota; that is, the quota is set at the import level under the tariff regime. This result stands in stark contrast to the prior findings of both Hwang and Mai (1988 ) and Fung (1989 ). Moreover, if the quota rent is set as being equal to the tariff revenue, the social welfare under a tariff will necessarily be lower than that under an equivalent quota.     

Has SOX Enhanced Non–Big 4 Auditors' Ability to Deal with Client Pressure?

We investigate whether non–Big 4 auditors have enhanced their ability to resist client pressure over accrual reporting following the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX). Regressing abnormal accruals on proxies for economic bonding, we find that changes in the association, defined as (Post–Pre), are significantly negative, implying an improvement in auditor independence after SOX. Among non–Big 4 auditors, only Tier 3 auditors compromised reporting objectivity before SOX, but neither Tier 2 nor Tier 3 auditors yielded to client pressure after SOX. Evidence that these two groups of non–Big 4 auditors differ in the way they cope with client pressure in a loose regulatory regime highlights the importance of assessing the efficacy of SOX separately for subsets of auditors and contributes to an understanding of the underresearched, but inherently important, segment of the audit market served by non–Big 4 auditors. Further analysis indicates that the low pre‐SOX audit quality observed in the full sample is driven by non–PCAOB registrants.     

Evidence on the contrarian trading in foreign exchange markets

This paper investigates the existence and price impacts of contrarian behavior in the foreign exchange markets. By utilizing a nonlinear behavioral model where the chartists and fundamentalists coexist, evidence obtained from two sample periods significantly supports the existence of contrarian trading in the British pound, the Japanese yen and the German mark markets. The contrarian trading can only partially offset the price impacts of trend-followers, therefore the price impact of the chartists as a whole is destabilizing. The ability that the contrarians can counterbalance the extrapolation of the trend-followers differs across markets. Traders in the BP market have the highest tendency to contrarian strategy, which in turn contributes to the least deviations of the BP exchange rates departing from its PPP fundamentals. The fundamentalists' confidence in trade fades during large misalignments, which make the mean reversion function of the fundamentalists weak under the circumstances. We find the magnitudes of interventions will be affected by the price impacts of contrarians and their abilities on market stabilization.     

Does Accrual Management Impair the Performance of Earnings‐Based Valuation Models?

This study examines how accrual manipulations affect firm valuation in the years surrounding the passage of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX). We compare the absolute percentage pricing errors of RIM and DCF valuation models for a group of US firms suspected to have engaged in accrual manipulations to avoid a small loss or a small earnings decline vs. ‘Normal’ firms matched on industry, year and size. We find that RIM can better estimate intrinsic value than DCF for the matched Normal firms in the pre‐SOX period, but not so for accrual manipulators, and that SOX mitigates the harmful effect of accrual manipulations, completely eliminating the difference in RIM's accuracy advantage over DCF between Normal firms and accrual manipulators. As a further analysis, we redefine Suspect firms as real‐activity manipulators and find a significant across‐group difference in accuracy wedge in both sample periods, implying that SOX has prompted firms to favor real‐activity manipulations over accrual manipulations.     

Joint estimation of technical efficiency and production risk for multi-output banks under a panel data cost frontier model

This article generalizes production risk from a single output production function to a multiple output cost frontier, which is able to examine input-oriented technical efficiencies and production risk simultaneously in the context of a panel data. Furthermore, the joint confidence interval estimates for technical efficiencies are constructed by means of multiple comparisons with the best approach. Whether taking production risk into account or not offers quite dissimilar implications in terms of the average technical efficiency measure and the identification of multiple efficient banks achieving the optimal cost frontier. It is suggested that inferences drawn on the basis of the confidence intervals of technical efficiency provide much more fruitful and insightful information than the point estimation alone. Bank specific risk parameters are found to be highly and positively correlated with fixed-effect estimates, implying that the more risk-averse a bank is, the more technically efficient it will be.

Structural changes in heterogeneous panels with endogenous regressors

This paper extends Pesaran's (Econometrica, 2006, 74, 967–1012) common correlated effects (CCE) by allowing for endogenous regressors in large heterogeneous panels with unknown common structural changes in slopes and error factor structure. Since endogenous regressors and structural breaks are often encountered in empirical studies with large panels, this extension makes Pesaran's CCE approach empirically more appealing. In addition to allowing for slope heterogeneity and cross‐sectional dependence, we find that Pesaran's CCE approach is also valid when dealing with unobservable factors in the presence of endogenous regressors and structural changes in slopes and error factor loadings. This is supported by Monte Carlo experiments.     

The Reciprocal Relations of Pressure,Work/Family Interference,and Role Satisfaction: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study in Taiwan

The aim of this longitudinal study was to explore reciprocal relationships between work/family pressure, work/family interference, and work/family satisfaction among Taiwanese employees (N = 310). All study variables were assessed three times. We found that within the work domain, earlier work pressure caused later work‐to‐family conflict (WFC), while earlier WFC reduced later job satisfaction. We also found that earlier WFC caused later work pressure, while earlier job satisfaction reduced later WFC. Similarly, we found that within the family domain, earlier family pressure caused later family‐to‐work conflict (FWC), while earlier FWC reduced later family satisfaction. We also found that earlier FWC caused later family pressure. In addition, family pressure and family satisfaction had reciprocal relationships over time. Together these longitudinal and reciprocal relations strongly support our hypothesized feedback loops linking pressure, work and family conflict, and role satisfaction, within each of the work and family domains. We made specific suggestions on breaking these vicious cycles to effectively manage both the work and family roles.     

The uncertainty challenge of contingent collaboration

Contingent knowledge workers will play an increasingly important role in organisational success as workers transition in and out of project‐based innovation teams with more frequency. Our research finds that collaborators in the contingent, high‐skill workforce face uncertainty challenges to their work that are unique from the independent, contingent professionals more often studied. The article proposes a theoretical framework of uncertainty to guide us in understanding collaborative contingent knowledge workers’ work experience. Interviews with postdoctoral researchers reveal four findings about the influence of these highly uncertain work environments on collaborative contingent knowledge workers – collaboration isolation, frustrated independence, performance anxiety and internalised blame. Perhaps most concerning is that the workers internalise the negative impacts as personal failings instead of recognising them as consequences of a poorly designed work environment. This study argues for the need to manage and mitigate different sources of uncertainty to avoid creating an unnecessary burden on contingent knowledge workers, and to enable a sustainable, contingent knowledge workforce.     

Does microtherm boost pharmaceutical companies’ market capitalization returns?

The purpose of this study was to survey the relationship between the temperature factors and market capitalization returns of pharmaceutical companies by analysing both the daily and weekly frequency data in Taiwan. The threshold regression model with the GJR-GARCH process was applied for examination in this study; we found that pharmaceutical companies’ market capitalization returns could be boosted after exposure to extremely low temperatures for a period of time. Besides, the delayed effect of cold weather is demonstrated to exist. This phenomenon can be illustrated by epidemiological evidence-related mental factors, not by traditional behavioural finance. Moreover, lower weekly average temperatures are beneficial for investors to gain weekly pharmaceutical companies’ market capitalization returns. We are of the opinion that our findings offer an insightful suggestion for investors to buy pharmaceutical stocks at an opportune moment.