Effect of public programs on family size,child education and health

"A bulk of public resources in developing countries is devoted to the subvention of population control and health investments. The effects of these programs have been evaluated in this study with household and community data from Bangladesh. The results suggest that subsidy on family planning and secondary school would be most effective in the achievement of harmonious goals of reducing fertility and mortality and fostering investments in child education."     

Analysis of rural activity spaces and transport disadvantage using a multi-method approach

Current knowledge about the relationship between transport disadvantage and activity space size is limited to urban areas, and as a result, very little is known about this link in a rural context. In addition, although research has identified transport disadvantaged groups based on their size of activity space, these studies have, however, not empirically explained such differences and the result is often a poor identification of the problems facing disadvantaged groups. Research has shown that transport disadvantage varies over time. The static nature of analysis using the activity space concept in previous research studies has lacked the ability to identify transport disadvantage in time. Activity space is a dynamic concept; and therefore possesses a great potential in capturing temporal variations in behaviour and access opportunities. This research derives measures of the size and fullness of activity spaces for 157 individuals for weekdays, weekends, and for a week using weekly activity-travel diary data from three case study areas located in rural Northern Ireland. Four focus groups were also conducted in order to triangulate quantitative findings and to explain the differences between different socio-spatial groups. The findings of this research show that despite having a smaller sized activity space, individuals were not disadvantaged because they were able to access their required activities locally. Car-ownership was found to be an important life line in rural areas. Temporal disaggregation of the data reveals that this is true only on weekends due to a lack of public transport services. In addition, despite activity spaces being at a similar size, the fullness of activity spaces of low-income individuals was found to be significantly lower compared to their high-income counterparts. Focus group data shows that financial constraint, poor connections both between public transport services and between transport routes and opportunities forced individuals to participate in activities located along the main transport corridors.     

An Investigation into the Potential Adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards in the United States: Implications and Implementation

International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) have been adopted by most of the G20 countries. Given the broad worldwide acceptance of IFRS and significance of attaining comparability to facilitate free flow of capital, the US standard setter, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) made a commitment to jointly work with the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) to explore the possibilities of convergence of US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) with IFRS. In 2007, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) eliminated the requirement that foreign companies listed on the US stock exchanges reconcile their IFRS‐based financial statements with the US GAAP. In the same year the US SEC issued a concept release to the public requesting comments on a proposal to allow US issuers to prepare financial statements in accordance with IFRS. Following these initiatives by the FASB and SEC, the aim of the present study is to investigate the implications of a potential full adoption of IFRS by the US. The present study details the challenges and benefits of adoption and outlines the steps required for a successful outcome of this process.     

Political corruption shielding and corporate acquisitions

Corruption includes rent‐seeking behavior by public officials (e.g., lavish in‐kind benefits and monetary kickbacks for contracts/permits/regulatory leniency, improper political contributions/support, etc.) that can negatively affect firm valuations, performances, and strategic choices. Shielding strategies are used to diminish rent‐seeking attractiveness of firms. Acquisitions provide a better channel than cash or leverage for assessing the wealth effects of shielding strategies. We find that the mean 3‐day announcement returns for acquirers for a large sample of U.S. domestic acquisitions between 1990 and 2014 is significantly lower for firms headquartered in relatively higher corruption states. Our results survive an array of robustness tests.     

Bank systemic risk: An analysis of the sovereign rating ceiling policy and rating downgrades

We investigate the impact that the sovereign ceiling policy has on financial stability. In the event of a sovereign rating downgrade, we find that the rating agencies' sovereign ceiling policy leads to a disproportionate downgrade of the most creditworthy financial institutions in the economy and results in increased systemic risk. This asymmetric variation in bank ratings also impairs equity growth that further exacerbates bank insolvency. Our results are robust to several matching techniques, such as propensity score matching and entropy balancing, falsification tests, subsample analyses, alternative empirical proxies and model specifications.     

The audit expectation gap： A review of the contributing factors

The audit expectation gap is critical to the auditing profession because the greater the unfulfilled expectations from the public, the lower is the credibility, earning potential and prestige associated with the work of auditors. The aim of this paper is to uncover the causes of an audit expectation gap. It is revealed that the existence of an audit expectation gap is due to complicated nature of an audit function; conflicting role of auditors; retrospective evaluation of auditors＇ performance; time lag in responding to changing expectation; and self-regulation process of the auditing profession.     

Differential Impacts of Foreign Capital and Remittance Inflows on Domestic Savings in Developing Countries: A Dynamic Heterogeneous Panel Analysis

The study examines the role of foreign capital and remittance inflows in the domestic savings of 63 developing countries for 1971–2010, paying attention to likely differential effects of FDI, portfolio investment, foreign aid and remittances. The conventional homogeneous panel estimates suggest that foreign aid and remittance flows have a significant negative impact on domestic savings. However, these techniques ignore cross‐section dependence and parameter heterogeneity properties and hence yield biased and inconsistent estimates. When we allow for parameter heterogeneity and cross‐sectional dependence by employing Pesaran's ( 2006 ) Common Correlated Effects Mean Group estimator technique, only remittances crowd out savings.     

Modeling and forecasting trading volume index: GARCH versus TGARCH approach

Volatility has been described as an indicator of uncertainty which has implications for investment decisions, risk management as well as monetary policy. This paper investigates the pattern of volatility in the daily trading volume index of Hong Kong stock exchange. The empirical evidence provided in this paper suggests that TGARCH specification is superior to GARCH specification. This is particularly important when one is dealing with the case of asymmetric information that captures the leverage effect of the volatile stock market.     

A critical appraisal of the social entrepreneurship paradigm in an international setting: a proposed conceptual framework

The concept of entrepreneurship embedded in the backdrop of business has been increasingly applied to the context of addressing social problems and sustainability challenges. Known as ‘social entrepreneurship’ the topic has garnered the heightened attention of researchers in recent years. As a nascent stream of research social entrepreneurship is still in the early stages of development. Recent evidence suggests a growing body of scholarly research in this field; however, its conceptualisation remains obscure as it is predominantly dictated by definitional arguments. Consequently, the literature is still anecdotal in trying to unveil different dimensions of social entrepreneurship and its potential benefits that might help to battle sustainability challenges. To bridge the existing gap in social entrepreneurship research this study adopts an inductive content analysis approach. Accordingly, a sizeable number of prior studies were extracted from five major databases from 1991 to date. Findings from the prior studies were synthesised in a systematic manner to draw valid conclusions. Based on the findings drawn from prior literature the study also proposes a conceptual framework and prompts further empirical research. The implications of the study are two-fold: academic and practical. The academic implication is primarily to contribute to the relatively uncultivated area of social entrepreneurship literature. The practical implications of the study are potentially instrumental for social entrepreneurs and policy-makers who are involved in social wealth creation. Moreover, the practical implication of the study is deemed to be very significant given the rising impetus of sustainability issues, where it is believed that entrepreneurs can play a vital role in this regard.