Board Composition in New Zealand: An Agency Perspective

This paper looks at board composition determinants in New Zealand. We document that the proportion of outside board members is inversely related to insider equity ownership supporting the notion that these variables are substitute mechanisms in controlling agency problems. We also find that board composition is directly related to debt, ownership concentration, and profitability and inversely related to growth and firm size. There is evidence that firms with influential CEOs have lower outside board representation. Finally, we document that the passage of the legislation reforming company and securities laws in 1993 was associated with increased outside members on the board.     

Agriculture looks for ‘shoes that fit’: The production responsibility system and its implications

by the end of 1981 problems clearly recognized within the communes included low productivity, the failure to accumulate funds for modern inputs, inefficient and corrupt cadres, hidden unemployment, inability to stimulate growth in other than major crops and disappointingly low levels of peasant incomes in many counties. In north China, peasants in 1980 began to divide up the collective fields on communes into smaller plots for cultivation by households and labour groups. Since then the face of China has been altered — physically, politically and organizationally — by the creation of the ‘responsibility system’ largely outside party control and influence. ‘Document 75’ of September 1980 sanctioning some form of ‘production responsibility system’ was itself overtaken by events, as a bewildering variety of forms emerged, swamping the cadres. Practice was rapidly expanding beyond the theoretical discussions, or pronouncements of officials like Du Runsheng The paper describes each of the many forms of contracting between peasant groups and the State now current in China, with estimates of the relative proportions of the accounting units involved in each type (Table 3). New contradictions are already emerging in the changed rural set-up, partly because farm management problems bear similarities to those that confronted the open-field strip farming of the European Manor, while the incentive to have more hands on family farms contradicts official Chinese population policy.     

Dynamic Interactions Between Private and Public Real Estate Markets: Some International Evidence

This study evaluates long-run relationships and short-run linkages between the private (unsecuritized) and the public (securitized) real estate markets of Australia, Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States. Results indicate the existence of long-run relationships between the public and private real estate markets of each of the countries under consideration. This implies that for all countries, investors would not have realized long-term portfolio diversification benefits from allocating funds in both the private and public real estate markets since these assets are substitutable over the long run. Short-run analyses also reveal significant causal relationships between private and public markets of all countries under consideration. As expected, it was found that price discovery occurred in the public real estate market in that it leads but is not led by its private real estate market counterpart.     

The Relationship Between Inclusive Institutions,Proximate Causes of Growth,and Economic Growth: A Case Study of the Four Mandate Territories of Lebanon,Palestine, Syria,and Trans-Jordan, 1918-1946/1948

I present a comparative historical study of the economic growth in the four mandate territories of Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Trans-Jordan. In all four areas, the ruling western powers, Britain and France, attempted to introduce inclusive economic institutions with a strong emphasis on private property. These institutions advanced economic growth in all four regions, but there were differences in their growth rates. For example, Palestine had the best growth, even though the British were more successful in instituting inclusive institutions in Trans-Jordan. In Palestine, there was also a huge increase in the proximate causes of growth that did not happen in Trans-Jordan. The paper suggests a refined formulation of the relationship between inclusive institutions, proximate causes of growth, and economic growth. Inclusive institutions will generate economic growth, but at a slower pace. If a country is able to enhance its proximate causes of growth, then the joint effect of the proximate causes of growth and inclusive institutions will lead to much quicker growth.