The choice between civil service and entrepreneurship in the presence of credit rationing

This article examines the role of opportunities to be civil servants in determining both an individual’s ability to borrow to be an entrepreneur and his career choices that are related to the endowment of wealth. It is assumed that the civil servants are hired to produce the public goods or services that benefit all the entrepreneurs hiring workers to produce private goods. In considering the case where the position of a civil servant is randomly up for grabs without rent-seeking, it is known that the effect of a rise in the number of civil servants to be hired on an individual’s ability to borrow is mainly based on the improved efficiency and a rise in the wage due to an increase in the demand for workers. When the position of a civil servant is secured through rent-seeking, it is found that an improvement in the financial environment will lower the cost of rent-seeking if the welfare of the civil servant is not too high.     

Good deeds earn chits? Evidence from philanthropic family controlled firms

This study examines whether charitable family controlled firms have lower default risk. Using Taiwan data that provide clear information about firms’ benevolent intention and avoid endogeneity issue of risk and charitable activities, we show that charitable family controlled firms have lower default risk, which is proxied by value-at-risk and expected shortfall measures. Our finding shows that charitable activities bring benefits of lower risk to shareholders. This study also provides various channels that can lower default risk for the charitable firms. That is, these firms appear to have higher credit ratings, engage less in earnings management, and have higher worker productivity. This study argues that the benevolent mindset of decision makers at firms help lower default risk.     

Optimal access regulation with downstream competition

We analyze the setting of access prices for a bottleneck facility where the facility owner also competes in the deregulated downstream market. We consider a continuum of market structures from Cournot to Bertrand. These market structures are fully characterized by a single parameter representing the intensity of competition. We first show how the efficient component pricing rule should be modified as the downstream competitive intensity changes. We then analyse the optimal access price where a regulator trades off production efficiency and pro-competitive effects to maximize total surplus.     

Foreign direct investment,input prices,and host country welfare

This paper analyzes a multinational firm’s foreign direct investment decision, through either greenfield investment or cross‐border merger and acquisition, into a host country with an input monopoly that adopts either uniform pricing or discriminatory pricing. The optimal foreign entry mode could differ under each pricing policy. Under Cournot competition, firms’ technological gap and the initial local market structure are critical to the choice of foreign entry mode, whereas product substitutability is important under Bertrand competition. In the presence of foreign entry, this paper also examines the welfare effects of input price discrimination for the host country.     

Corporate governance in Taiwan: The nonmonotonic relationship between family ownership and dividend policy

This study considers an important aspect of corporate governance: the relationship between cash flow rights and dividend payout policy of listed family firms in Taiwan, an economy characterized by a predominance of family-controlled firms. Dividend payout levels are important because they are crucial to governing the firm and managing its investments. The empirical results show that at a low level of controlling families’ cash flow rights, the threat to lose control at any time makes controlling families claim more in dividends. This yields a positive relationship between dividend payout and the cash flow rights of controlling families at this level. Meanwhile, at a moderate level of controlling families’ cash flow rights, the entrenchment effect becomes more robust and creates a negative relationship with dividend payout. Finally, at the very highest level of controlling families’ cash flow rights, excessive firm-specific risk again helps to again create a positive relationship. This nonmonotonic relationship between controlling family cash flow rights and dividend payout also holds for financially mature firms that have a high earned to contributed capital mix.     

Using structural equation modeling to predict cabin safety outcomes among Taiwanese airlines

The aim of the study was to examine the relationship between safety culture (e.g. management commitment, various work environment factors) and flight attendant safety performance (e.g. rule compliance, crewmember involvement and participation, accident investigation, injury incidence). A comprehensive questionnaire was derived from the Loughborough University “Safety Climate Assessment Toolkit” and several similar surveys. Additional items were designed for an airline cabin work environment. The questionnaire was distributed to four major Taiwanese national airlines and achieved a valid response rate of 84.65%. Structural equation modeling was used to test a hypothesized model concerning safety culture and cabin safety performance. A variety of fit indices confirmed the overall model fit but not all of the paths in the model were statistically significant. The findings show that safety culture was a predictor of cabin safety outcomes. The results indicated that high management commitment was significantly related to high crewmember participation, and that safe cabin work environment was significantly related to crewmember’s individual behavior. However, the findings showed no relationship between management commitment and injury incidence which means injury incidence might not be predicted by management commitment.     

Price discovery in Taiwan's foreign exchange market

This paper investigates the dynamics of price adjustments and the price discovery roles of two markets on Taiwan's foreign exchange, TFI and CFE. Results from the multivariate threshold model indicate prices are integrated nonlinearly. The roles of price discovery are asymmetric, depending on the size and sign of the price discrepancies between the two markets. In the lower regime of discrepancies, each market employs information from its counterpart and reacts to each other with different adjustment speeds. When the discrepancy is in the upper regime, CFE's role of price discovery is characterized by its exogenous behavior within the error-correction process.     

Radionuclide esophageal transit test: Detection of esophageal dysmotility and reflux in noncardiac chest pain

Thirty-one patients with substernal chest pain but with normal coronary angiographic findings and 25 normal volunteers were included in our study. Esophageal motility—including esophageal mean transit time (MTT), residual fraction (RF), and retrograde index (RI) of the two groups—were evaluated by the radionuclide esophageal transit test. The results showed that among patients with noncardiac chest pain (NCP), 48% have a longer MTT, 39% have a higher RF, and 58% have a higher RI than normal volunteers. We found that esophageal disorders are a common source of noncardiac chest pain, and that radionuclide esophageal transit test is a simple noninvasive screening method to detect esophageal dysmotility or gastroesophageal reflux in such cases.