Determinants of smallholder farmers' perceptions of risk in the Eastern Highlands of Ethiopia

This paper reports findings from a study of 178 farm households from two contrasting areas in the Eastern Highlands of Ethiopia. It examines risk perceptions of smallholder farmers under varying contexts. The study utilized both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis. It was hypothesized that human capital and household characteristics and orientation, access to resources, infrastructure, information and environmental factors influence perceptions of risks in different ways. Data reduction for independent variables was done by factor analysis (principal component extraction method). Factor analyses identified factors influencing smallholder farmers' perceptions of sources of risks. Logistic regression analyses were used to study the relationships of identified principal components to perceived frequencies of occurrences and consequences of various sources of risks. Logistic regression analyses revealed that asset endowments, locational settings and livelihood diversification strategies pursued determine smallholders' perceived risks. Key findings from the informal survey point out differentiation in perceptions of causes and sources of risks by different actors.     

奇瑞汽车由单一品牌向多品牌的战略转移

面对国际全球金融危机对汽车产业形成致命打击、汽车产业濒临严峻挑战的形势之下,奇瑞公司逆势而上,做出如此极具风险的战略转移决策,即从2009年起实施单一品牌向多品牌的战略转移。文章试图在对品牌战略理论进行梳理的基础上,就奇瑞实施品牌战略转移的动因进行深层次分析,探讨奇瑞多品牌战略所面临的主要风险,并提出奇瑞多品牌战略的实施构想。     

Linking Ethics and Risk Management in Taxation: Evidence from an Exploratory Study in Ireland and the UK

Ethical dilemmas involving tax issues were identified by members of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants as posing the most difficult ethical problem for them (Finn et al., Journal of Business Ethics 7(8), pp. 607–609, 1988). The KPMG tax shelter fraud case proves that the tax profession has not gone untainted in the age of numerous accounting and corporate scandals, such as the Enron débacle (Sikka and Hampton, Accounting Forum 29(3), 325–343, 2005). High-profile scandals serve to highlight the problems caused by differences in ethical judgement among accountants and tax practitioners and the issue of ethics has been brought publicly to the forefront of the profession. Nevertheless, the nature and dimension of ethical issues in tax practice have been largely unexplored (Erard, Journal of Public Economics 52(2), 163–197, 1993; Marshall et al., Journal of Business Ethics 17(12), 1265–1279, 1998; Frecknall Hughes, Unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Leeds, 2002). This research aims to contribute to the debate on ethics in tax practice by reporting interview data on tax practitioners’ perceptions of ethics in the jurisdictions of Ireland and the United Kingdom and exploring the link or equation of ethics with risk management.     

Corporate Risk Management under Information Asymmetry

This paper examines the financial and operational hedging activities of US pharmaceutical and biotech firms that are subject to a high level of information asymmetry stemming from R&D investments during 2001–2006. We find evidence in support of the information asymmetry hypothesis à la Froot, Scharfstein and Stein (1993) that hedging helps mitigate the under‐investment problem. Specifically, we find that the use of financial derivatives is associated with greater firm value and that the value enhancement is larger for firms subject to greater information asymmetry and better growth opportunities. There is a synergy between financial hedging and operational hedging where the latter is used to counter product development risk. The results are robust with respect to alternative performance measures, industry‐specific growth measures, and the endogeneity problem. Our work is differentiated from existing studies that examined commodity‐based industries without addressing information asymmetry.     

中国富人慈善事业的现状与对策——基于社会交换理论的分析

由于受传统文化、激励机制不完善、相关法律法规滞后的影响,中国的富人慈善事业存在着捐赠量较小、捐赠领域不均衡、慈善载体公信力不足等问题,未充分发挥其在实现社会公平方面的作用。文章利用社会交换理论,分析了从事社会慈善事业给富人自身及其拥有的企业、基金会等带来的内在和外在的收益,并有针对性地对其进一步发展提出了建议。     

论我国体育产业经营中的风险管理与控制

本文根据风险理论结合体育行业特点,对体育产业中所存潜在风险的类型、原因进行了分析,提出了体育产业经营管理中风险的管理与控制机制。旨在对于我国今后体育产业的长足发展提出建设性意义。     

路网环境下危险品运输的风险控制及应急保障机制研究

研究了我国路网环境下交通特点、危险品运输特点及危险品紧急事件的风险特征,剖析了危险品运输的致灾因子,提出了路网环境下危险品运输的风险控制一般模式、技术框架和应急保障机制建议,为我国具有特殊性和复杂性的路网环境下危险品运输安全监管提供可借鉴的思路。     

Does the Welfare State Destroy the Family? Evidence from OECD Member Countries

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on demographic trends in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e., the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show that an expansion in the welfare state increases fertility, marriage, and divorce rates with a quantitatively stronger effect on the marriage rate. We conclude that the welfare state supports family formation in the aggregate. Further, we find that the welfare state decouples marriage and fertility, and therefore alters the organization of the average family.     

The economic benefits of market timing the style allocation of characteristic-based portfolios

Many exchange traded funds track simple characteristic-based equity portfolios such as the market capitalization, the fundamental value or the inverse volatility portfolio. This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence for the economic benefits in exploiting the timing-gains that result from the time-varying relative performance of these characteristic-based portfolios. Under a factor model for expected returns, we show that this dynamic portfolio allocation can be efficient across the low-dimensional set of characteristic-based portfolios. We assess the out-of-sample performance on the S&P 100 universe over the period 1990–2013 and show gains in stability and significant positive risk-adjusted returns for the dynamic style portfolio. We conduct several robustness tests and extensions confirming the benefits of dynamic style allocation across characteristic-based portfolios.     

Career Risk

The author defines asset manager career risk as the risk that asset owners terminate an existing manager due to an extended period of underperformance relative to a benchmark or peer group even though the manager has skill (defined here as positive information ratio). The author shows that myopic loss aversion gives rise to career risk even for skilled asset managers and that the current industry practice of quarterly or annual performance evaluations puts even the most skilled asset managers at risk of undue termination. The author also investigates how a reduction of tracking error leads to a reduction of career risk even though this comes at the expense of lower long-term performance. Finally, the author computes the minimum evaluation period needed to reduce career risk for asset managers of different skill levels.