公司章程和小股东保护——来自累积投票条款的实证检验

本文通过理论分析发现,公司章程是一种非常有效的小股东自我保护机制,小股东可以通过影响公司章程条款的方式来增进自身的福利。以表决权自我救济为例,小股东如果能够通过自主谈判将累积投票条款设置进公司章程,就可以在没有违背多数表决有效原则的情况下,将有限多次的分散投票聚拢为一次性的集中投票,增加所推人选进入董事会的概率,从而使得内部人对公司的控制力相对下降,公司被恶意掏空的可能性也相应变小。实证结果也显示,2003～2008年期间,自主在公司章程中设置累积投票条款的A股公司,发生内部人占用资金的情况显著偏少,实证结果还显示,小股东在公司章程中进行的表决权自我救济,可以在很大程度上替代法律法规的外部救济。高质量披露的财务报告信息,则可以进一步强化这种替代作用。     

IMF治理机制基本框架的演变、困境与变革前景

作为二战后建立起来的最重要的国际金融组织,IMF在维护国际金融稳定方面发挥了重要作用。文章介绍了IMF治理机制的基本框架及演变,分析了其治理结构中存在的问题,如决策权更多地被欧美发达国家所主导,危机处理能力不足等,指出IMF应顺应国际经济金融格局的变化,不断完善机构自身治理,更好地反映发展中国家的权益,提升维护国际金融稳定的能力。     

Approval voting in subset elections

Summary. Approval voting is designed to be “insensitive to numbers” of voters, and likely to elect a Condorcet candidate. However, the result of an election among one group of candidates gives no information about the results of elections among any other groups, even if every voter follows the recommended utility-maximizing strategy, which places strong restrictions on the individual voter's subset ballots. Thus the addition of a single candidate could completely reverse the outcome of an election, or a Condorcet candidate could finish last. Received: November 5, 1998; revised version: November 30, 1998     

Achieving Compliance when Legal Sanctions are Non‐deterrent*

Law backed by non‐deterrent sanctions (mild law) has been hypothesized to achieve compliance because of norm activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild law in the provision of public goods by comparing it to severe law (deterrent sanctions) and no law. The results show that exogenously imposing mild law does not achieve compliance, but compliance is much improved if mild law is endogenously chosen, i.e., self‐imposed. We show that voting for mild law induces expectations of cooperation, and that people tend to comply with the law if they expect many others to do so.     

Public Goods and Minimum Provision Levels: Does the Institutional Formation Affect Cooperation?*

We investigate experimentally the role of institutional formation on the implementation of a binding minimum contribution level to a public good. Groups either face the minimum level exogenously imposed by a central authority, or are allowed to decide for themselves by means of a group vote whether a minimum level should be implemented. We find that a binding minimum contribution level has a positive and substantially significant effect on cooperation. Interestingly, we do not find an additional positive effect of democracy in the context of our experiment; the minimum‐level intervention is as effective when exogenously implemented as when endogenously chosen.     

Capital income taxation under majority voting with aging population

An old person typically has a mixed attitude toward the welfare-state benefits, when they are financed by capital taxes, because her income derives mostly from capital. We develop a majority-voting model which focuses on the effect of aging on this dilemma. Surprisingly, the theory predicts that tax rates on capital income could actually rise as the population ages, even though older individuals would be expected to own more capital than the young and thus vote against higher taxes. We then confront the key prediction of the model with panel data for ten European Union countries, over the period 1970–1996. We investigate the asymmetric effect of aging on the taxation of capital and labor. The implications of the model are shown to be consistent with panel data. JEL no. H0, H5, P1     

Rules for the disposition of tariff revenues and the determination of common external tariffs in customs unions

This paper is about the determination of common external tariffs (CETs) in customs unions (CUs). We first examine how the relationship between preferences over CET levels, technology and the distribution of factor ownership in a CU is conditioned by the rule that determines the disposition of tariff revenues. We then explore how majority voting at the country level translates these preferences into an equilibrium CET. Among other things, we find that, when revenues are partitioned in proportion to members’ imports, tariff preferences may be polarized, the trade patterns of some CU members may be endogenous, and, as a result, their payoff functions may not be single-peaked. This leads to voting outcomes that dramatically differ from those arising under other sharing rules (e.g., the ‘population’ and ‘consumption’ rules) and raises the possibility of a Condorcet paradox.     

Strategic Manipulation in Committees Using the Plurality Rule: Alternative Concepts and Frequency Calculations

This paper suggests an evaluation of the plurality rule according to how much it can be manipulated by individuals. We analyze strategic voting with reference not only to the usual notion of Nash equilibrium but also to some weaknesses of this notion, depending on the assumptions about how the individual agents choose their strategies. We provide two types of results for each concept of equilibrium: First, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for a profile to be an equilibrium when the plurality rule is used; and second, we present formulas giving the exact frequencies of unstable situations in the three-alternative case.     

Public Bad Prevention by Majority Voting on Redistribution – Experimental Evidence

We present an experimental study on voting behavior in groups of seven persons where public bad prevention depends on redistributing income by qualified majority voting. Although a payoff-maximizing voting pattern exists which guarantees a qualified majority – thus maximizing both individual and group payoffs – the qualified majority is failed in 27% (relatively costly public bad), respectively 46% (relatively cheap public bad) of all decisions. Controlling for different degrees of social distance when casting votes (i.e. anonymous versus with identification) we find that social distance matters when stakes are relatively low, inducing less efficient outcomes for the group when voting behavior is revealed. The endogenously determined status of subjects with respect to redistribution (unlucky subjects lose, lucky subjects win) systematically influences subjects' voting strategies and the collective outcomes, such that a higher number of unlucky subjects leads to less efficient outcomes for the group.     

Fundamental dimensions of U.S. trade policy

How many dimensions adequately characterize voting on U.S. trade policy? How are these dimensions to be interpreted? This paper seeks those answers in the context of voting on the landmark 1988 Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act. The paper takes steps beyond the existing literature. First, using a factor analytic approach, the dimension issue is examined to determine whether subsets of roll call votes on trade policy are correlated. A factor-analytic result allows the use of a limited number of votes for this purpose. Second, a structural model with latent variables is used to find what economic and political factors comprise these dimensions. The study yields two main findings. More than one dimension determines voting in the Senate, with the main dimension driven by economic interest, not ideology. Although two dimensions are required to fully account for House voting, one dimension dominates. That dimension is driven primarily by party. Based on reported evidence, and a growing consensus in the congressional studies literature, this finding is attributed to interest-based leadership that evolves in order to solve collective action problems faced by individual legislators.