Individual Large Shareholders,Earnings Management,and Capital‐Market Consequences

Using a large hand‐collected sample of all blockholders (ownership ≥ 5%) of S&P 1500 firms for the years 2002–2009, we first document significant individual blockholder effects on earnings management (accrual‐based earnings management, real earnings management, and restatements). This association is driven primarily by these large shareholders influencing rather than selecting firms’ financial reporting practices. Second, the market's reaction to earnings announcements suggests that investors recognize the heterogeneity in blockholders’ influence on earnings management. The results highlight the highly individualized effects of blockholders and a mechanism through which shareholders impact reported earnings.     

Wealth effects and agency costs

We analyze how the agent's initial wealth affects the principal's expected profits in the standard principal–agent model with moral hazard.We show that if the principal prefers a poorer agent for all specifications of action sets, probability distributions, and disutility of effort, then the agent's utility of income must exhibit a coefficient of absolute prudence less than three times the coefficient of absolute risk aversion for all levels of income, thus strengthening the sufficiency result of Thiele and Wambach (1999). Also, we prove that there is no condition on the agent's utility of income alone that will make the principal prefer richer agents. Moreover, we show that, for an interesting class of problems, the principal prefers a relatively poorer agent if agent's wealth is sufficiently large. Finally, we discuss how alternative ways of modeling the agent's outside option affects the principal's preferences for agent's wealth.     

Assessing impact of regulatory risk on shareholders’ wealth

Research indicates that regulatory risk increases required return on investment by investors and causes underinvestment in industries with high sunk costs. The effects of regulatory changes may be measured by estimating the abnormal returns associated with the event. The results may suggest to regulators what should be encouraged or avoided. This article utilizes a fixed effects regression to examine abnormal returns from changes in Philippine nationalization regulations. The results are consistent with extant literature. Supreme Court decisions, which increased uncertainty and regulatory risk, produced negative abnormal returns. The initial release of draft implementing rules did not produce statistically significant effects, but a succeeding draft favouring liberalization, produced positive abnormal returns.     

Tracking Can Be More Equitable Than Mixing

Parents and policy‐makers often wonder whether and how the choice of a tracked or mixed educational system affects the equality of opportunity. I answer this question by analyzing the influence of peers on future educational results. I define an equal opportunity policy as one that maximizes the average lifetime income of the worst‐off type of individuals in society (i.e., students from disadvantaged backgrounds). I find that tracking maximizes average lifetime income if the opportunity cost of college attendance is sufficiently high.     

Neighborhood Effects and Regional Poverty Traps in Rural China

The present paper investigates how neighborhood effects are connected to chronic poverty. We examine a large sample of groups of households and find that neighborhood effects are significant in a majority of groups, especially in the poorest groups. People living in poor communities tend to suffer from poverty over time. It is of theoretical and empirical importance to explore how neighborhood effects are interrelated with chronic poverty and the channels through which this occurs. Unlike other econometric analyses, we establish a multilevel econometric model to show that： （i） it is difficult for an individual living in a neighborhood with a high proportion of agricultural labor, low education levels, and poor transport and telecommunication infrastructure to escape from poverty traps; （ii） neighborhood effects dominate in poor communities; and （iii） although poverty is affected by group-level factors, individual factors still play a dominant role in regards to escaping poverty when income surpasses a threshold level Therefore, policy priority should be given to providing social protection and public services, especially in poor rural areas.     

Party Discipline and Environmental Policy: The Role of “Smoke‐filled Back Rooms”*

We adopt the view that greater party discipline induces legislators to commit to promised policies after being elected. We then develop the hypothesis that the effect of party discipline on the stringency of environmental policy is conditional on the degree of government corruption. Our empirical work suggests that greater party discipline results in more stringent environmental policies when the level of corruption is relatively low, but in weaker policies when the level of corruption is comparatively high.     

The Primacy of Space in Politics: Bargaining Rights,Freedom and Power in an İstanbul Neighborhood

This article explores and theorizes the ways in which urban space and political contestations are mapped onto each other. The ethnography illustrates the multifaceted transformations in a notoriously secularist neighborhood of ?stanbul, Te?vikiye, as it first turns into a high‐consumption locality in the post‐1980s, then into a high‐conflict urban space in the new millennium on the arrival of Muslim high‐spenders, particularly headscarved women. Aiming to fill the gap left by the absence of spatial analysis from political science and political sociology, I argue that the urban neighborhood becomes central for political contestation when both government and opposition fail to protect and secure liberties and rights. Now that devout Muslims are integrated into highly contested urban sites and share bourgeois lifestyles, ordinary people act in defense of their ‘sphere’ of freedom and privacy. This new territoriality is largely symptomatic of increasing fears of losing freedom, privacy and social status. This spatial defensiveness is reinforced by people's decreasing trust in, and increasing demands from, the state for the protection and security of their rights and liberties. My overarching argument is that exclusive attention to the bipolar clash between devout Muslims and secularists under the rubric of ‘neighborhood wars’ obscures multipolar conflicts around the discontents stemming from authoritarianism and democratization.     

Fisher Ideal Indexes in the National Income and Product Accounts

The mastery of the spreadsheet technique has become almost universal in economics departments. The authors explain, step-by-step, how the spreadsheet can be used as an instructional aid to teach basic microeconomic concepts.     

Inflation Triggers in Transition Economies: Their Evolution and Specific Features

Analysis of thirty inflation episodes in sixteen European transition economies, using the probit panel model with fixed effects, uncovers inflation triggers that overlap with those obtained in either developing or developed countries or both. However, we found some transition-specific features. Thus, the relative contribution of the triggers evolves as transition progresses, such that the early dominance of the output gap, the fiscal deficit, and elections are subsequently subdued by a rise in food and oil prices, the exchange rate regime, and the current account deficit. The last two triggers could be linked to deep financial integration in Europe and the consequent large flow of capital toward European transition economies in the 2000s, a phenomenon not observed in any other part of the world. In addition, the exchange rate regime as an inflation starter in transitional Europe may be due to its convergence with developed Europe and the resulting real appreciation of currency.     

高铁开通与城市创新研究综述

高铁网络的建设大大提高了中国铁路运输的效率,缩短了不同城市之间的时空距离,使居民在不同城市工作和消费成为可能。同时高铁服务通过加速人口和要素在区域间的流动,对城市之间的空间联系和城市社会经济的发展产生了重要的影响。高铁在影响经济格局的同时也深刻影响了区域的创新格局,现通过梳理相关文献,整理归纳了高铁开通对城市创新的影响及其作用机制,并对现有的实证研究方法进行总结。在此基础上提出目前存在的问题,为后续的研究指明方向。