Does public/private status affect the level of earnings management in code-law contexts outside the United States? A study based on the Spanish case

This study analyzes the difference in earnings quality between public and private firms in Spain. We go beyond the income-increasing incentives on which the United States debate has been exclusively based and build on previous Belgian results by considering institutional differences and differences in the type of blockholder and by proposing a new income-smoothing methodology.No significant differences are found for income smoothers and increasers except for those included in the Spanish Ibex 35 index, which show lower manipulation levels due to the predominance of supervision over market pressure. Higher levels of income decreasing are found for private companies. We attribute this to the expropriation practiced by public firms through real activities in their relationship with the banks, which leads to a lower need to engage in downwards manipulation.     

Robust Methods for the Analysis of Income Distribution, Inequality and Poverty

Income distribution embeds a large field of research subjects in economics. It is important to study how incomes are distributed among the members of a population in order for example to determine tax policies for redistribution to decrease inequality, or to implement social policies to reduce poverty. The available data come mostly from surveys (and not censuses as it is often believed) and often subject to long debates about their reliability because the sources of errors are numerous. Moreover the forms in which the data are availabe is not always as one would expect, i.e. complete and continuous (microdata) but one also can only have data in a grouped form (in income classes) and/or truncated data where a portion of the original data has been omitted from the sample or simply not recorded.
Because of these data features, it is important to complement classical statistical procedures with robust ones. In tis paper such methods are presented, especially for model selection, model fitting with several types of data, inequality and poverty analysis and ordering tools. The approach is based on the Influence Function (IF) developed by Hampel (1974) and further developed by Hampel, Ronchetti, Rousseeuw & Stahel (1986). It is also shown through the analysis of real UK and Tunisian data, that robust techniques can give another picture of income distribution, inequality or poverty when compared to classical ones.     

Correlated Pollutants, Interregional Redistribution and Labor Attachment in a Federation

We examine the efficiency of federal policies in a federation characterized by decentralized leadership, imperfect labor mobility and transboundary pollution. Selfish regional governments regulate correlated pollutant emissions by choosing pollution tax and abatement levels in anticipation of the center’s redistributive policy. The center’s objective function obeys a proportional equity principle, which implies that its choice of interregional transfer satisfies the equalization of weighted regional welfare levels. Regional and central governments make their choices subject to migration incentives. We show that the subgame perfect equilibrium for the sequential game played by regional and central governments yields socially optimal policies. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Demographic pressure and natural resources conservation

A field survey was carried out in the villages of Nlobesse'e at the Western periphery of the Dja Biosphere Reserve, South Cameroon, to evaluate the various effects that the increase in the local populations exert on the conservation of the natural resources of the reserve. Survey results show that the population was increasing rapidly at 40.00/00 per annum, with 61.54% of the total inhabitants originating from other parts of the country. Despite the rapid population growth, the population of the Kaka and Baka ethnic groups also known as the pigmies who have been noted by ECOFAC (Ecosystème Forestière d'Afrique Centrale) for having a marked negative impact on the conservation of the natural resources (because they depend mostly on the natural resources of the reserve for their livelihood and practice very little or no agriculture) were decreasing at a rate of 6.2%. Probably they sought better hunting, gathering and collecting conditions elsewhere in the reserve. Animal proteins originating from the reserve provide most of the animal proteins consumed by the households and the entire population of Nlobesse'e demands 44.4 kg of “bush meat” per day. It was also noted that the local population practiced very little agriculture in the reserve. Hunting and fishing, activities that have been noted for having a negative influence on the conservation of biodiversity contributed 15.2% and 11.2%, respectively, of the total income of the households. Other sources of income included: wages earned from the agro-plantation that contributed 40.3%, farming 24.2%, commerce 3% and others 4.58%. Merchant middlemen also referred to as “buyam sellam” and individuals with no commercial interest were the two main relay agents responsible for transporting natural resources out of Nlobesse'e. It would have been expected that the increasing population combined to the high incidence of poverty in the region (per capita income of 225 FCFA or $0.3 per day) would have exerted a high sustainability pressure on the conservation of reserve resources. However, this was not the case because of an agro-plantation in the area that provided the local population with the necessary income to buy foodstuff and other needed resources from far away areas. To maintain this trend, it is recommended that other sources of income such as the creation of small-scale enterprises and ecotourism should be encouraged in and around biospheres reserves.     

个人所得税自行纳税申报的现实约束分析

自行纳税申报制度是实行综合个人所得税课税模式的基础,目前在我国还很不完善。本文在利用税收遵从理论、激励理论有关结论的基础上,对我国现行个人所得税制及税收征管制度进行分析,找出了制约个人所得税自行申报的主要原因,并提出相关的政策建议。     

日本贫富差距扩大的原因及趋势分析

进入21世纪以来,日本的贫富差距问题日益突出,并演变成社会广泛关注的焦点问题。日本贫富差距的日益扩大与日本政府所奉行的新自由主义经济政策息息相关。基于对日本贫富差距不断扩大的现状和日本政府及社会的选择倾向分析,我们对未来日本的贫富差距问题的演变趋势可以做出两方面的预测:一是如果日本政府及社会的选择趋向于采取缓和的经济政策,日本的贫富收入差距有逐步缩小的趋势,但彻底解决的可能性不大;二是如果日本政府和社会的选择依然倾向于强化新自由主义经济政策取向,日本的贫富差距问题还有可能趋向进一步恶化,甚至最终可能导致社会的、政治的和经济的危机。     

Segregation,Social Polarization and Immigration in Athens during the 1990s: Theoretical Expectations and Contextual Difference

This article investigates trends in segregation, polarization and inequality in Athens during the 1990s, and focuses on what may seem a paradoxical coexistence of decreasing segregation with increasing social polarization and inequality. To explain this coexistence, the article examines the distinction between social polarization in specific contexts and the dominant assumptions about social polarization, which derive from the global city thesis, and the structure of the city's housing market, which prevented the substantial wave of immigration during the 1990s from intensifying segregation. Arguing for more context awareness, the article does not try to stress the specificity of the Athenian case, but, mainly, to reveal the context‐dependent character of the dominant assumptions about segregation and social polarization and, therefore, to show their limitations.     

当前我国收入分配差距扩大的影响、成因及对策研究

我国居民的收入分配差距正在扩大,而且有继续扩大的趋势,这已经对我国的经济社会发展造成一定的负面影响。因此,必须采取各种有效措施,多管齐下,努力遏制贫富差距进一步扩大的势头,最终实现共同富裕、社会和谐稳定。     

从基尼系数看我国的收入分配

我国经济持续快速增长的进程中,人们的收入保持着快速增长。但各地、不同人群的增长速度有快有慢,人们的贫富差距日益扩大。作为经济学中衡量贫富差距的公认的指标———基尼系数较真实地反映了这一现象。基尼系数的涵义以及应用得到重视,同时,基尼系数在应用中也存在一些不足。重视基尼系数,及时调整收入分配结构是未来我国经济发展的关键。     

Gender Discrimination in Central Europe during the Systemic Transition

In this paper we measure the extent of gender discrimination on Central European labour markets (Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak) during the first years of transition. Using Oaxaca's method and Social Stratification Survey data for 1993, we estimate that discrimination explains about half of the wage gap. Gender discrimination is significantly weaker in Hungary and stronger in Slovakia and Poland, where a large part of discrimination is tied to segregation. More fundamentally, we try to determine the nature of this discrimination; we conclude that discrimination is mainly statistical (both group and individual), but also deliberate, and the labour market is partly inefficient.