Profit sharing and monitoring in partnerships

We consider partnerships among risk-averse professionals endowed with (i) a risky and personally-costly production technology and (ii) a personally-costly monitoring technology providing contractible noisy signals about partners’ productive efforts. Partners shirk both production and monitoring tasks because efforts are unobservable. We characterize optimal partnership size, profit shares and incentive payments when every partner performs the same tasks, and show that medium-sized partnerships are dominated by either smaller or larger partnerships. Prohibiting some partners from monitoring increases the incentives for others to monitor. We illustrate how task assignments and incentives interact, leading to improvements in partner welfare.     

英语阅读中词语意义的推断论略

对于提高学生的阅读能力,过去大多是重视语法与结构并对句子进行分析,而忽略了词语的真正意义的快速理解.如果词语的意义能掌握好且推断能力强,这对读者来说既省时又省力.我国加入WTO以后,各国科技贸易等的交流越来越广,英语中涉及到大量的特色语言,但有的在字典里未必能查到其真正含义,因此对词语的意义进行科学的推断便显得尤为重要.     

Pursuing Sustainable Development： A Comment on China as the Largest Foreign Investment Recipient

This paper examines the role of foreign investment in China with particular focus on its implications for environment. It shows that most of investments generate both positive and negative effects on China＇s environment. Many of these projects are located in the so-called pollution-intensive industries. This paper tries to elaborate the existing greater environmental implications by the foreign investments. It is concluded that only by honestly evaluating the environmental and social impact of liberalizing trade and investment can China determine whether expand or contract foreign capital utilization for further development.     

房地产企业经理人激励机制选择——基于需求层次理论的分析

随着我国工业化和城市化步伐的不断加快,房地产业已成为我国国民经济的主要支柱行业之一。房地产业的特殊性决定了房地产企业经营中对经营者具有强烈的依赖性。本文综述了经理人激励的相关理论和管理理论的主要理论,调查了房地产业企业经理人现有激励状况与激励偏好,并就房地产业企业经理人激励现状和改进做出分析。依据基于马斯洛的需要层次理论的分析,本研究认为,采取“经理人持股”方式,结合其他激励方式,可以有效的满足经理人的主要需求,有利于企业核心竞争力的培育和发展。     

Dynamic Effects of Information Disclosure on Investment Efficiency

This paper studies how information disclosure affects investment efficiency and investor welfare in a dynamic setting in which a firm makes sequential investments to adjust its capital stock over time. We show that the effects of accounting disclosures on investment efficiency and investor welfare crucially depend on whether such disclosures convey information about the firm's future capital stock (i.e., balance sheet) or about its future operating cash flows (i.e., earnings). Specifically, investment efficiency and investor welfare unambiguously increase in the precision of disclosures that convey information about the future capital stock, since such disclosures mitigate the current owners' incentives to underinvest. In contrast, when accounting reports provide information about future cash flows, the firm can have incentives to either under‐ or overinvest depending on the precision of accounting reports and the expected growth in demand. For such disclosures, investment efficiency and investor welfare are maximized by an intermediate level of precision. The two types of accounting disclosures act as substitutes in that the precision of capital stock disclosures that maximizes investment efficiency (and investor welfare) decreases as cash flow disclosures become more informative and vice versa.     

企业财务决策同伴效应研究述评与展望

传统企业财务理论大多假设企业最优财务决策只与其自身特征或自身决策相关,而独立于其他企业的决策行为。近年来,国外学者将社会学领域中的同伴效应引入企业财务决策行为研究框架,为企业财务决策开辟了新的研究视角。本文首先从理论上介绍能够解释财务决策同伴效应的三种交互机制,并从"企业财务决策是否具有同伴效应"与"财务决策同伴效应产生机制"两个方面对现有实证研究成果进行系统梳理,接着详细介绍了同伴效应模型与识别条件、存在的内生性问题以及解决对策,最后结合现有研究现状与趋势指出未来研究方向,以期为国内学者开展企业财务决策同伴效应研究起到抛砖引玉的作用。     

Impact of China's Outward Foreign Direct Investment on Its Regional Economic Growth

This paper investigates the impact of China's outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) on its economic growth. By using a provincial‐level panel dataset and applying fixed‐effects and instrumental variable regression techniques, the study finds that both OFDI from provincial firms and OFDI from state‐owned enterprises have a positive impact on China's provincial economic growth. The positive impact of OFDI on provincial economic growth may be the result of reverse knowledge spillovers from OFDI to the home provincial economy through demonstration and imitation, labor movement, and backward and forward industrial linkages, thus increasing the productivity and the efficiency of home firms and promoting the growth of the home economy.     

Popular Support for Climate Change Mitigation: Evidence from a General Population Mail Survey

Using a sample of 1,651 US households, we explore some determinants of willingness to pay (WTP) for climate change mitigation programs. Our mail survey had a relatively low response rate, so we first use several additional data sources to build a detailed sample selection model. This model uses features of the survey instrument, measures of geographic vulnerability to climate change, seasonality, the political mix in the county, attributes of the address or addressee, and a set of factor scores from an extensive factor analysis of all census tracts in the US. We estimate this model jointly with a model to explain climate policy preferences as a function of the domestic and international distribution of policy costs as well as the climate change impacts that each respondent believes will occur under a policy of business-as-usual. Despite statistically significant patterns of nonresponse, selectivity effects are minimal in this case. WTP for climate change mitigation is greater when the domestic incidence of mitigation costs is borne mostly through higher energy taxes. It is also greater when costs are understood to be shared internationally with other groups of countries, rather than being borne mostly by a country group including the US. People are generally more willing to pay for climate change mitigation if they believe that the harm caused by climate change impacts will be substantial, rather than just moderate. The assistance of former UCLA undergraduate students Ivka Adam, Tashi Ghale, Michelle Gogolewski, Vilija Gulbinas, and Lindy Olsson was essential to survey development and administration. This paper is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9818875 to UCLA, with additional support from the Raymond F. Mikesell Foundation at the University of Oregon. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of either the National Science Foundation or ICF International.     

江苏苏南地区环境库茨涅茨曲线实证研究

EKC假说是指在经济发展早期环境质量逐渐恶化,经济发展到一定水平后,环境质量会逐渐改善,即环境压力和经济增长之间呈倒U形关系。文章以苏南地区1986—2004年经济发展和环境面板数据为基础,建立了苏南地区经济发展和工业污染排放的计量模型,以此来分析苏南地区经济增长与环境污染的演替轨迹。结果表明苏南地区环境污染与经济增长之间呈现N型波动EKC特征,工业污染排放量随着人均GDP的快速提高而波浪式地不断恶化,而不同于以往的经典理论中倒U型的形状。苏南地区依然处于污染排放量的增长期,如何抓住机遇,调整产业结构,加大环保投入,转变经济增长方式,平稳地实现转折,实现环境和经济的双赢是苏南地区可持续发展和率先实现全面小康的首要问题。     

跨国公司离岸服务的工资效应研究

文章运用理论模型研究基于成本节约和技术进步动因的跨国公司离岸服务如何通过生产力效应、相对价格效应和劳动力供给效应三条渠道影响母国和东道国劳动力的工资水平。文章认为不同类型的离岸服务对母国和东道国不同技能水平劳动力的工资水平会产生不同的影响。