CO‐OP OPEN MEMBERSHIP: ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL EFFECTS

This paper aims to analyze the objectives pursued by cooperatives upon opening doors to new members and how this affects business activity and financial indicators. Surprisingly, the results show that accepting new partners makes no positive impact on the return on assets, but it does make a variable impact on financial indicators according to the type of cooperative. Distinguishing between agricultural and worker co‐ops, we conduct a cross‐sectional study of a sample of Galician cooperatives to find whether they apply this principle the same way regardless of membership size. Our results corroborate that cooperatives apply the principle differently. This not only allows us to extract other relevant information from accounting for cooperatives, but it also permits other agents like financial entities to obtain indicators that reflect the true company image more adequately.     

Small is big in ICT: The impact of R&D on productivity

We examine the contribution of R&D to firm productivity in a large panel of European firms and study its variation with the age, size, and sub-sector of firms. We find that R&D capital in ICT firms has a larger effect on revenue when compared to non-ICT firms. At the firm level, our results suggest that, surprisingly, smaller and older ICT firms benefit the most from R&D. Small but mature ICT firms are likely to dominate market niches, and small size may enable them to be flexible and adaptable which helps them respond to technological opportunities to develop innovative products and services. This has important implications for public policy based upon firm age.     

人口规模与城市轨道交通的治堵效应

利用高德地图发布的道路交通拥堵延时指数大数据,结合断点回归方法,对全国省会城市2015年10月至2018年9月新开通的40多条轨道交通线路进行了分析。结果显示:轨道交通虽能缓解城市道路交通的拥堵状况,但效果并不明显,存在着异质性影响;常住人口在600万至900万人的城市新增轨道交通的治堵效应显著,不足600万人及超过900万人的城市,治堵效应不显著。进一步研究发现,造成治堵效应异质性及总体不显著的原因在于,地方政府兴建轨道交通的决策机制造成了站点布局、通车里程与出行总需求之间的错配。     

Infrastructure Disruption in ‘Silicon Savannah’: Exploring the Idea of the Creative Class and their Relation to Quality of Place in Nairobi,Kenya

Debates around urbanization, infrastructure disruption and the creative class rarely appear alongside each other in research on African cities. This article connects these different narratives, which are currently exerting their influence on the future direction of these cities. The economic value of the creative class is that their work centres on innovation—a quality seen as essential to ‘new-economy’ urban growth. Quality of place (that which makes ‘New York New York’) is said to attract the creative class to certain cities, as lifestyle amenities are valued as much as employment opportunities. Nairobi is an example of an African city currently attracting both Kenyan and expatriate creative class workers, particularly in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector. In this article we take Richard Florida's creative class theory as a departure point to offer insights into why this group chooses to live in Nairobi and to describe Nairobi's quality of place, with a particular focus on infrastructure disruption. The case study reveals that Nairobi's quality of place differs fundamentally from the normative attributes prescribed by creative class theory and, in some instances, it is considered to be highly frustrating and unattractive.     

Date of birth and selective schooling: Some lessons from the 1944 education reforms in England and Wales

We compare the probabilities of selective (grammar) school entry in England and Wales before and after the 1944 Education Act. The Act had direct and indirect influences on the costs of grammar education and on entry-exam coverage, design and marking methodology. Post-1944, grammar school entry among children born in the middle of the school year improved considerably. We argue that age-adjusted group standardized testing was an important contributory factor. The youngest pupils remained significantly disadvantaged. We produce evidence that this is consistent with the practice of streaming (tracking) junior school children at age 7 into classes delineated by average ability.     

Population size and the size of government

We examine the effect of population size on government size for a panel of 130 countries for the period between 1970 and 2014. We show that previous analyses of the nexus between population size and government size are incorrectly specified and fail to consider the influence of cross-sectional dependence, non-stationarity and cointegration. Using a panel time-series approach that adequately accounts for these issues, we find that population size has a positive long-run effect on government size. This finding suggests that effects of population size that increase government size (primarily due to the costs of heterogeneity, congestion, crime and conflict) dominate effects that reduce government size (primarily due to scale economies).     

Trade openness,internet finance development and banking sector development in China

This paper investigates the impact of trade openness on Internet finance development in China. Using a unique panel data set for 29 Chinese provinces, we find that trade openness has a positive impact on Internet finance development and is a leading indicator of Internet finance development. Further analyses show that higher trade openness is associated with faster Internet finance development in wealthier provinces. Moreover, we investigate the effect of Internet finance development on the banking sector development. The empirical results suggest that Internet finance development has a positive effect on the banking sector size and efficiency.     

Signing auditors’ foreign experience and audit pricing

This study investigates whether signing auditors who have foreign experience affect audit fees. Using a sample of 20,712 firm-year observations from the Chinese stock market during the period of 2007–2017, this paper finds that signing auditors’ foreign education experience is significantly positively associated with audit fees, suggesting that signing auditors with foreign education experience can earn audit fee premiums. Furthermore, audit firm size reinforces the positive relation between signing auditors with foreign education experience and audit fees. In addition, above findings are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests using alternative measures of audit fees and signing auditors with foreign education experience and our conclusions are still stand after using the PSM, Heckman two-step approach, Placebo test and differences-in-differences method to address the potential endogeneity problem.