Crop Insurance as a Strategy for Adapting to Climate Change

Financial insurance for extreme events can play an important role in hedging against the implications of climate change. This paper combines a comprehensive estimation strategy and a unique panel dataset to study the role of financial insurance in farmers' welfare under uncertainty. Data are drawn from a large Italian farm panel dataset. We find that (i) demand for insurance products is likely to increase in response to climatic conditions, and (ii) that the use of insurance reduces the extent of risk exposure. We also find that farms growing more crops are less likely to adopt the insurance scheme. This confirms what is found in the theoretical literature. Crop diversification can be a substitute for financial insurance in hedging against the impact of risk exposure on welfare.     

事务所多元化经营与生产效率——基于事务所的平衡面板数据

本文运用2006年至2010年45家事务所的平衡面板数据,基于Malmquist生产效率指数计算事务所的动态生产效率,并进而针对事务所多元化经营与生产效率的内在关联展开分析.研究发现,由于纯技术效率变化的增长幅度较小,注册会计师行业生产效率提升的主要驱动因素是技术水平进步和规模效率进步;执行多元化经营的事务所相比于仍然仅专注提供传统审计业务的事务所,获得了更大的技术进步、更高的规模效率改善,以及更高的生产效率进步;进一步区分不同类型事务所,本土大型事务所的“先动者”没有获取更大的生产效率进步,及相应分解项的改善,本土事务所的“早期从众者”则不仅获得了更高的生产效率进步,也获取了更大的技术进步和更高的规模效率改善.     

多元化理论与现代企业战略思想的演进

多元化理论研究与现代企业战略思想的演进和发展有着极为密切的关系。本文通过对一些多元化经典理论文献的回溯和评析,试图明晰多元化理论与现代企业战略思想发展、演进的脉络。     

THE REVOLUTION WITHIN: ICT AND THE SHIFTING KNOWLEDGE BASE OF THE WORLD'S LARGEST COMPANIES

This empirical article analyses the importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) in the technological diversification trend among the world's largest manufacturing firms during the 1980s and 1990s. The objective of the research is twofold: first, to emphasise the emerging differences among technologies when companies from different industries patent outside their traditional technological capabilities; secondly, to investigate whether the tendency among large companies from all industries to patent in ICT is distinctive when compared with the tendency to patent in other technologies. We find that technological diversification in large companies has clearly occurred in ICTs. Non-ICT specialist industries increasingly develop, rather than just utilise, the cluster of ICT-related technologies. We conclude that the development of corporate capabilities in the key technologies of the emerging ICT paradigm is more widespread than previously emphasised in the literature. One implication of this observation is that technological diversification and the information revolution may be related phenomena.     

Capitalism, profits and innovation in the new techno-economic paradigm

Innovative profits (of the kind conceptualized by Schumpeter) are today being increasingly created through international corporate networks for technological development. Such profits through innovation are encouraged by newer more flexible organizational forms, and further encouraged (unlike in the conventional perspective on profits and on the incentive to innovate) by knowledge flows between firms. Our empirical evidence, based on US patent data, shows that multinational companies are currently more likely to develop abroad technologies which are less science-based, and less dependent upon tacit knowledge. However, within the science-based industries firms may generate abroad some technologies which are heavily dependent on tacit knowledge, but normally in fields that lie outside their own core technological competencies. We find some evidence of a convergence in corporate technological diversification across large firms, facilitated by the now common spread in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) as an integrator of formerly separate technological systems. This has led smaller firms to diversify, but giant firms to consolidate activity around those technologies that have become most interrelated.     

Do insurance activities enhance the performance of financial services holding companies?

Stiroh and Rumble (2006) and Yeager et al. (2007) have argued that extension of banks into nonbanking activities produces no diversification benefits for financial services holding companies (FSHCs) eligible to consolidate banking and insurance products. We investigate the effect of aggregate nonbank activities, as well as two main areas of insurance business, namely agency and underwriting enterprise, on the risk-adjusted performance of FSHCs. Our sample includes a quarterly panel data of FSHCs over the period 2003–2011. We find that the effect of FSHCs’ entry into agency insurance activities on their risk-adjusted returns is dependent on their size; it is positive for FSHCs in the top quartile of our sample (assets greater than $4.495 billions), but negative for smaller and mid-size FSHCs. The effect of underwriting insurance activities on risk-adjusted returns is generally negative or statistically insignificant, except for some of the largest-size firms.     

A behavioral analysis of investor diversification

This paper studies the link between individual investors’ portfolio diversification levels and various personal traits that proxy informational advantages and overconfidence. The analysis is based on objective data from the largest Turkish brokerage house tracking 59,951 individual investors’ accounts with a total of 3,248,654 million transactions over the period 2008–2010. Wealthier, highly educated, older investors working in the finance sector and those trading relatively often show higher diversification levels possibly because they are better equipped to obtain and process information. Finance professionals, married investors, and those placing high-volume orders through investment centers show poorer diversification possibly as a reflection of overconfidence. Our analysis reveals important nonlinear effects, implying that the marginal impact of overconfidence on diversification is not uniform across investors but varies according to the investor's information gathering and processing abilities.     

实用型本科口译人才培养的对策研究

我国口译教学中存在课时少、练习量不足、课程开设与教学内容不合理等问题。为满足社会对多层次口译人才的需要,必须改革现有英语专业课程设置模式,使口译人才培养向多元化方向发展。     

Home-field advantage or a matter of ambiguity aversion? Local bias among German individual investors

This paper investigates whether familiarity induced by ambiguity aversion can help explaining the local bias phenomenon among individual investors. Using geographic closeness as a proxy for investor familiarity, we find that investors pull out of (unfamiliar) remote stocks and pour into (familiar) local stocks during times of increased market uncertainty. Moreover, the magnitude of this ‘flight to familiarity’ increases in the spread of an investor's ambiguity (about expected returns) between local and remote stocks. Our results prove robust to a number of alternative explanations of local bias. Specifically, we rule out a ‘home-field advantage’, where investors are able to translate information advantages about nearby companies into excess returns on their local stockholdings. We conclude that individual investors’ local bias is induced by ambiguity aversion in the portfolio selection process rather than a trading strategy based on superior information about local companies.     

民营企业的政治资源与民营企业多元化投资——以中国民营企业500强为例

This paper argues that the political resources owned by Chinese private enterprises affect their diversification strategy under the context of China’s transitional economy. Based on the sample of top 500 private enterprises in 2004 in China, we find the following empirical evidence: First, political resources owned by private enterprises are positively and significantly related to their degree of diversification. Second, the possibility for private enterprises to diversify their business by entering industries under government regulation is positively related to their political resources. Third, the possibility of related diversification for private enterprise is negatively related to its political resources. Translated and revised from Zhongguo Gongye Jingji 中国工业经济 (China Industrial Economy ), 2008, (4): 5–14