Corporate Governance and returns on information technology investment: evidence from an emerging market

Prior studies have reported mixed findings on the impact of corporate information technology (IT) investment on firm performance. This study investigates the effect of corporate governance, an important management control mechanism, on the relation between IT investment and firm performance in the Taiwanese electronics industry. Specifically, we explore board independence and foreign ownership, which have increasingly become salient factors concerning corporate governance in emerging markets. We address their roles across firms of different sizes and in industries where degrees of competitiveness run a wide gamut. Our results show a positive moderating effect of board independence on the IT investment‐firm performance relation, especially when competition intensifies. Furthermore, we find that the greater the foreign ownership in small firms, the more positive the IT investment‐firm performance relation, suggesting that foreign investors may bring IT expertise to help small firms reap the benefits of using IT. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The sensitivity of efficiency scores to input and other choices in stochastic frontier analysis: an empirical investigation

Journal of Productivity Analysis - Productivity and efficiency analysis have gained substantial attention in many industries over the last two decades, and stochastic frontier analysis has been one...     

Measuring economic freedom: an alternative functional specification and subsequent ranking

ABSTRACT

The widely cited Economic Freedom of the World index is an aggregate measure of economic freedom calculated by using a simple arithmetic mean of scores over five sub-dimensions: (1) size of government, (2) legal structure and security of property rights, (3) access to sound money, (4) freedom to trade internationally and (5) regulation of credit, labour and business. The use of a simple arithmetic mean implicitly assumes that the different sub-dimensions are ‘perfect substitutes’. To explore the implications of this assumption, we compute an aggregate economic freedom score and ordinal ranking of countries, by taking a geometric mean of the five sub-dimensions. For this alternative specification, the marginal impact of each sub-dimension on the aggregate score is no longer independent of the other sub-dimension scores. Consequently, countries with inconsistent levels of economic freedom across sub-dimensions are ‘punished’ to a greater degree than are countries with less variability across sub-dimensions. Our alternative specification results in considerable movement in terms of country rankings. The geometric mean measure does not appear to explain economic growth as well as the arithmetic mean measure.     

Multi-country tests for the oscillator model with slowly varying coefficients

This paper applies Ramsey's (1992) forced oscillator model discovered with US data to Canada, Japan, UK, Belgium, France, Germany, and Italy. We also examine the aggregate production index for consumer goods in the US. Thus, the model is applied to and the results checked against data that were not involved in the discovery of the model in the original paper. The adequacy of the model is evaluated and international comparisons are made. The similarity of the estimates for all of the data sets examined suggest that the model may be widely applicable for consumer goods production indices, although France and Italy provide partial exceptions to this statement.     

Combining Household Income and Expenditure Data in Policy Simulations

The analysis of the distributional impact of fiscal policy proposals often requires information on household expenditures and incomes. It is unusual to have one data source with information on both and this problem is generally overcome with statistical matching of independent data sources. In this paper Grade Correspondence Analysis (GCA) is investigated as a tool to improve the matching process. GCA draws out the relationships between the common variables to enable the sample to be partitioned into more homogeneous groups, prior to matching. An evaluation is conducted using the UK Family Expenditure Survey, which is unusual in containing both income and expenditure at a detailed level of disaggregation. Imputed expenditures are compared with actual expenditures through the use of indirect tax simulations. The most successful methods are then employed to enhance data from the Family Resources Survey and the synthetic dataset is used as a microsimulation model database.     

Perception of medical practitioners on the importance of medical tourism services

This study (a) investigates the perception of medical practitioners regarding medical tourism, and (b) examines the differences in the perception of medical practitioners regarding the importance of the services involved. The hypotheses are focused on a series of comparisons of medical institutions that “are or are not involved in medical tourism.” The results showed that (i) professionalism of treatment is recognized as the most important factor regardless of the nature and value of the medical treatment provided while a patient travels; and that (ii) there are no significant differences in surgery, treatment, examination, in-hospital and patient room costs.