户籍制度扭曲及放松对经济的影响:理论与实证

户籍制度是我国劳动力流动的主要障碍.那么,当前我国的户籍扭曲程度几何?户籍制度放松对经济又会有怎样的影响?对这些问题的回答将有助于政府评估户籍制度改革的空间和经济效益.文章在Hansen和Prescott(2002)的两部门劳动力流动模型基础上,将工人分为农业和非农户口,引入户籍扭曲因子,构建两部门两类工人的户籍扭曲模型;然后,使用1984?2013年宏观经济数据度量户籍扭曲程度,并对2013年我国户籍制度逐渐放松过程中经济变量的变化进行模拟;最后,文章建立了包含"农业与非农"和"本地与外地"户籍差异的省份异质性户籍扭曲模型.研究表明:(1)经济和户籍制度改革的不同步导致了1984?2013年我国户籍扭曲程度呈现倒"U"形变化,且相较于韩国尚有较大的改善空间;(2)以韩国为参照,若2013年我国户籍制度完全放开,经济达到均衡时,农业部门和非农部门的就业人数将分别下降58.83%和上升26.92%,工资率将分别上升19.44%和下降6.77%,社会增加值将增长15.33%,这说明社会经济效率将得到提升,贫富差距将缩小.文章丰富和完善了户籍扭曲的理论模型,从减少劳动力流动摩擦的视角为政府制定相关政策提供了参考.     

Shareholder Activism and Voluntary Disclosure Initiation: The Case of Political Spending

Demand for disclosures on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues has increased dramatically. Using corporate political spending disclosures as our setting, we conduct a detailed inquiry of 541 political spending‐related shareholder proposals from 2004 to 2012 to highlight the role of shareholder activism as a mechanism to motivate ESG disclosure. Unlike earlier studies, we examine both proposals that went to a vote and proposals that were withdrawn by the activist, allowing us to assess more comprehensively the success of shareholder activism. We find that 20 percent of firms targeted by disclosure proposals begin disclosing in the subsequent year, although implementation rates vary by proposal type—8 percent for proposals subject to a vote versus 56 percent for proposals withdrawn. The sponsor is also important: unions and public pension funds are less likely than other activists to target firms with agency problems and are less successful in having proposals withdrawn, and the implementations they obtain are viewed more negatively by the broader investor base. Our findings highlight shareholder proposals as one mechanism through which investors can successfully express their preferences for corporate disclosure policies. Given activists' long‐standing interest in environmental and social disclosure policies, we believe our findings generalize to a broader set of ESG disclosures.     

INTERNATIONAL RESERVE MANAGEMENT: A DRIFT‐SWITCHING REFLECTED JUMP‐DIFFUSION MODEL

We study the cost of shocks, that is, jump risk, with respect to reserve management when the reserve process is formulated as a drift‐switching jump diffusion with a reflecting barrier at 0. Inspired by the Brownian drift switching model, our model results in a more realistic dynamic behavior of international reserves than the buffer stock model. The new model can capture both the jump behavior in reserve dynamics and the leptokurtic feature of the increment distribution which has a higher peak and two asymmetric heavier tails than the normal distribution. Through the selection of an initial distribution that reflects certain steady state behaviors, the reserve process becomes a regenerative process. This selection enables us to derive a closed‐form expression for the total expected discounted cost of managing reserves, thus helping us to numerically find management strategies that minimize costs. The numerical results show that shocks at the reserve level have a significant effect on reserve management strategies and that model misspecification can result in nonnegligible additional costs.     

Banks’ deferred tax assets during the financial crisis

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - Prior studies have demonstrated that the net deferred tax liabilities of industrial firms are valued by market participants in a manner consistent...     

Machine learning for financial transaction classification across companies using character-level word embeddings of text fields

An important initial step in accounting is mapping financial transfers to the corresponding accounts. We devised machine-learning-based systems that automate this process. They use word embeddings with character-level features to process transaction texts. When considering 473 companies independently, our approach achieved an average top-1 accuracy of 80.50%, outperforming baselines that exclude the transaction texts or rely on a lexical bag-of-words text representation. We extended the approach to generalizes across companies and even across different corporate sectors. After standardization of the account structures and careful feature engineering, a single classifier trained on 44 companies from 28 sectors achieved a test accuracy of more than 80%. When trained on 43 companies and tested on the remaining one, the system achieved an average performance of 64.62%. This rate increased to nearly 70% when considering only the largest sector.     

Communication and Comovement: Evidence from Online Stock Forums

We study investor communication and stock comovement using a novel data set from an active online stock forum in China. We find substantial comovement among the returns of a stock and its “related stocks,” which are frequently discussed in the subforum dedicated to the given stock. Comovement is greater when the discussion of related stocks is more intensive. Further, the effect of communication on comovement is stronger for stocks associated with higher information uncertainty. Codiscussed stocks are more actively traded and experience more correlated trading. A trading strategy that exploits communication‐driven comovement generates abnormal returns. Our findings highlight the impact of investor communication on asset comovement.     

INSURANCE‐INDUCED MORAL HAZARD: A DYNAMIC MODEL OF WITHIN‐YEAR MEDICAL CARE DECISION MAKING UNDER UNCERTAINTY

This study quantifies the moral hazard effect of health insurance on medical expenditure by estimating a dynamic model of within‐year medical care consumption that allows for insurance selection, endogenous health transitions, and individual uncertainty about medical care prices in an environment where insurance has nonlinear cost‐sharing features. The results suggest that moral hazard accounts for 53.1%, on average, of total annual medical expenditure when insured. This estimate is significantly different, and generally larger, than that produced by an alternative model that is representative of the annual medical care decision‐making models commonly found in the literature.     

Unemployment insurance benefits and income smoothing

Labor unemployment insurance reduces unemployment concerns. We argue that these benefits moderate incentives to smooth earnings to reduce employees’ concerns about unemployment risk. Using exogenous variations in unemployment insurance benefits, we find evidence consistent with this argument. We also find that the link between unemployment insurance benefits and income smoothing is stronger when there is higher unemployment risk and when the firm is likely to employ more low-wage workers, who find unemployment insurance benefits especially useful. Our paper contributes to the literature by showing that public policy decisions such as unemployment insurance have significant, albeit probably unintended, externalities on corporate financial reporting.     

Costs and potential funding of expanded public pension coverage in Asia

Public pension burdens in most emerging Asian economies are still relatively small. However, there are a number of reasons to believe that they will increase markedly in the coming years. First, many Asian economies will face rapidly ageing populations, which will raise pension and other old‐age‐related spending dramatically. Second, as economies develop, political pressures to expand the coverage of public pensions and raise pension benefits will likely increase. The first objective of this paper is to identify the potential fiscal burden of public pensions in 23 emerging Asian economies, based on econometric models and forecasts of GDP and demographic trends. Using two different methodologies yields estimated increases in the average share of public pension expenditures in GDP of 1.0 percentage point and 3.6 percentage points by 2030 compared with current levels. We believe the latter estimate is more realistic. The second objective is to recommend policies to provide adequate funding for public pension needs, including enhancing the efficiency of social insurance programs, improving the balance of revenues and expenditures, implementing more explicit fiscal rules and frameworks, and establishing stronger fiscal surveillance at the national and regional levels.