The Economics of Charities: Revised Theory and New Evidence

Can economic principles be applied to the behaviour of charities? Professor Edwin West of the Universities of Carleton and Emory, claims that charities are susceptible to the same type of analysis as companies - but with important differences.     

Two estimators for the apt model when factors are measured

Non-linear SUR and ITSUR techniques are proposed for the estimation of the APT and the CAPM when the factors are observed. These techniques estimate all of the parameters of the model simultaneously and directly impose the model's non-linear parameter restrictions.     

换个思维看未来

不要绝望!尽管证券和抵押贷款市场负面消息不断,但政府领导和立法委员已经采取了措施,世界经济正朝着比电视和其他媒体所描绘的更好的方向迈进.     

Business ethics,Corporate Good Citizenship and the Corporate Social Policy Process: A view from the United States

Within the American context, the term Corporate Good Citizenship, a rather vague and somewhat dated notion, bears little relationship to the concept of Business Ethics. Whereas the latter refers to systematic reflection on the moral significance of the institutions, policies and behavior of business actors in the normal course of their business operations, the former is a subset of the broader notion of Corporate Social Responsibility and denotes, generally, discretionary, possibly altruistic, non-business relationships between business organizations and diverse community stakeholders. A newer concept, the Corporate Social Policy Process, which focuses on the institutionalization within business organizations of processes facilitating individual and organizational reflection and choice regarding the moral significance of personal and organizational action together with a consideration of the likely consequences of such action, provides analytical linkages between Business Ethics and Corporate Good Citizenship which can be useful to business scholars and operating managers alike. Specific aspects of Corporate Good Citizenship, including corporate community involvements, are examined and particular attention is paid to current trends in corporate donations, including an increasing emphasis on strategic philanthropy which explicitly mixes practical and benevolent motives in company giving policies and practices.Edwin M. Epstein is Professor of Business Administration at the University of California at Berkeley. A former chair of the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management, he has lectured and published extensively in the field of Business and Public Policy with a particular emphasis on the Social Role of the Corporation in the United States and other Advanced Industrial Societies.Bryan W. Husted, Esq., a doctoral student in the Business and Public Policy Program at the Berkeley Business School, University of California at Berkeley, rendered useful research assistance and Mary Ann Huisman for the Program in Business and Social Policy, Center For Research in Management, Berkeley Business School, University of California at Berkeley, provided helpful technical services which I gratefully acknowledge.     

Gender preference and transfers from parents to children: an inter-regional comparison

This paper examines whether parents exhibit gender preference in the allocation of family resources to their adult children. Gender preference is defined in the context of an altruistic model for inter-vivos transfer from parents to children extended to include educational investment. Data from the Health and Retirement Study (United States) and the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing are used to show that the degree of gender preference differs across these culturally distinct regions. Among Korean families, empirical results point to male preference as sons receive larger inter-vivos transfers and attain higher levels of education compared with daughters. In contrast, the evidence pertaining to gender preference among American families points to daughter preference as inter-vivos transfers and educational investment is generally higher among female adult children.     

贷款买房九诫

不管你打算买一栋别墅,还是一套公寓,操作之前可做如下准备. 储备首付款 买房计划提上日程,就要开始筹备首付款.首付款筹备得越多,还款压力就越小.可及早考虑把存款和一些保守型基金转入相对激进的投资账户,当然,这要承担一定风险,包括利息损失和赎回费用.如果你不够专业,最好寻求优秀理财顾问的帮助.     

‘The Re Tea Corporation principle and junior creditors’ rights to participate in a scheme of arrangement – a view from Singapore'

This paper examines the application of the principle derived from Re Tea Corporation's case in recent schemes of arrangement to break negotiation deadlocks between senior and junior creditors of a financially distressed company. This paper argues against an overly technical application of the principle in Re Tea Corporation's case which might work injustice towards junior creditors by effectively shutting them out of a restructuring. This paper further explores how the holdout problem, which led to the formulation of the Re Tea Corporation principle in the first place, could be addressed while balancing the competing interests of junior claimants in a scheme of arrangement. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Two-stage flowshop earliness and tardiness machine scheduling involving a common due window

This paper studies a non-preemptive two-stage flowshop scheduling problem to minimize the earliness and tardiness under the environment of a common due window. The window size and the window location are considered to be given parameters. The just-in-time problem exists naturally and has many practical applications. The problem is shown to be NP-complete in the strong sense. We develop a branch and bound algorithm and a heuristic to solve the problem. We conduct the computational experiments to test the performances of the algorithms. A strong lower bound is derived for the branch and bound algorithm that can efficiently solve 15 jobs problem for about 5 minutes. The heuristic is shown to be efficient and effective, which can solve the problem of 150 jobs for about 20 seconds and provide near-optimal solution. We justify that the heuristic is an excellent solution approach for large problem instances. We also show that four special cases are either polynomial solvable or NP-complete in the ordinary sense.