Termination Clauses in Long-Term Contracts

Many long-term contracts incorporate a termination clause. This paper argues that when agents have hidden information, such a clause has a beneficial incentive effect—it enables a principal to screen agents' private information at a lower cost. In a two-period model, this paper characterizes the optimal long-term contract with a termination clause, which specifies that the principal will switch agents in the second period when the first-period cost is high. The analysis delineates how the optimality of this clause depends on the intertemporal cost correlation structure, on the limits to agents' liability, and on the principal's degree of commitment.     

Analysts' Forecasts: Low-Balling,Market Efficiency,and Insider Trading

The phenomenon of low-balling reported in the financial press involves downward biased projections of earnings by managers or analysts, thereby artificially lowering market expectations and creating a positive earnings surprise when actual earnings are announced. This study reports that the stock market does respond to such surprises relative to analysts' reported forecasts. Further, the proportion of insider buy-transactions in the period prior to the earnings forecast is significantly higher for the sample with high positive earnings surprise than for the control sample with zero forecast errors. The study cannot distinguish whether managers or analysts are the source of the low-balling and therefore makes no statement on the legality of such insider trades.     

Testing of the rational expectations and structural neutrality hypotheses

In this paper we examine the tests of the new classical rational expectations and structural neutrality hypotheses undertaken by Leiderman (1980) using a model of money growth and unemployment for the United States developed by Barro (1977). Employing the data used in the studies by Barro and Leiderman we are able to construct an alternative model of money growth and unemployment against which the Barro-Leiderman model is rejected along with the joint hypothesis of rational expectations and structural neutrality.     

《说文解字》含“皃”字释义语研究

《说文解字》的体例通常包括解释字义和分析字形,其中解释字义的部分称为释义语。通过分析研究,我们发现在《说文解字》中存在着包含＂皃＂字的这一类特殊的释义语。含＂皃＂字释义语在分布的部首方面具有规律性,其语法结构分类具有多样性,同时在与含＂也＂字释义语的比较中,体现出了自身的特殊性。     

美国经验对优化我国农村创业融资环境的启示

我国农村地区掀起了一轮新的创新创业的热潮,但融资难严重制约了农村创业企业的数量和质量发展.美国自20世纪60年代开始致力于中小企业发展的若干做法,特别是改善中小企业融资困境的经验非常值得我们学习和借鉴.因此,应建立健全有利于农村创业融资的法律法规,大力发展农村金融机构,加快金融创新步伐,进一步完善中小企业信用担保体系,明确政府职责,充分发挥市场机制的作用.     

Should tweets differ for B2B and B2C? An analysis of Fortune 500 companies' Twitter communications

Business-to-business (B2B) marketers hesitate to embrace social media as a marketing tool, unlike their business-to-consumer (B2C) counterparts, and they struggle to implement successful social media strategies due to their limited understanding of the phenomenon. Drawing on communication and word-of-mouth theories, the authors investigate how marketers use Twitter differently across contexts and predict key factors likely to influence the message strategies used in each. A longitudinal content analysis and logistic regression support the assessment of a sample of more than 7000 tweets by Fortune 500 companies. Marketers in B2B and B2C settings exhibit significant differences in their branding and selling strategies; their use of message appeals; and the use of cues, links, and hashtags to support information searches. Whereas B2B marketers tend to use more emotional than functional appeals in their tweets, neither B2C nor B2B marketers have adopted “hard sell” message strategies.     

浅谈图书馆电子阅览室的创新管理

近几年来,随着我国科学技术发展脚步的不断加快,越来越多的先进设备被应用到图书馆电子阅览室中,在增加阅览室服务功能的基础上,也给图书馆电子阅览室的管理带来了挑战。这里主要对我国目前图书馆电子阅览室管理中存在的问题进行分析,并在此基础上结合电子阅览室的发展前景,提出对图书馆电子阅览室管理的改善建设,以此来将图书馆电子阅览室的作用最大限度的发挥出来。