信息不对称、管理者内生偏好与上市公司股权融资偏好

一般以为,上市公司的股权融资偏好是由于不合理的成本因素、有缺陷的监管制度和政策与低效的资本市场等原因造成的.本文分析认为,上市公司股权融资偏好产生的基本原因是管理者的内生融资偏好.如果公司绩效影响管理者的财富(或职位、声誉等),管理者的偏好将支配公司的融资决策;对称信息下,管理者将有充分的股权融资偏好.不对称信息下,如果管理者对公司项目(或资产)拥有私人信息,且厌恶风险,管理者将最大限度地使用股权融资,直至达到均衡.最后,本文提出,管理者对股权融资的偏好是内生的,治理目前上市公司股权融资偏好所产生危害的基本思路是"疏",而不是"堵".     

Preference purification and the inner rational agent: a critique of the conventional wisdom of behavioural welfare economics

Neoclassical economics assumes that individuals have stable and context-independent preferences, and uses preference satisfaction as a normative criterion. By calling this assumption into question, behavioural findings cause fundamental problems for normative economics. A common response to these problems is to treat deviations from conventional rational choice theory as mistakes, and to try to reconstruct the preferences that individuals would have acted on, had they reasoned correctly. We argue that this preference purification approach implicitly uses a dualistic model of the human being, in which an inner rational agent is trapped in an outer psychological shell. This model is psychologically and philosophically problematic.     

Addressing the social landscape dimensions: The need for reconciling cross scale assessments for capturing Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES)

This special issue integrates eleven papers focussing on indicators able to convey the multiple expectations that society has concerning agricultural land. As scale issues have been so far overlooked within this research topic, a particular focus of this themed issue is to highlight the need for reconciling assessments across scales. The shared purpose of the contributions is to examine how the multiple societal expectations concerning agrarian landscapes might be incorporated into land use policy at different governance levels.A core set of these papers were presented in the symposium “Linking social indicators across scales”, to the European Congress of the International Association of Landscape Ecology (IALE) in September 2013 in Manchester, UK. This symposium was organized to create the time and space for a discussion on the issues of scale when capturing societal preferences concerning agrarian landscapes. While the landscape scale was specifically addressed by four papers, seven papers examined broader geographic units in addition to up-scaling and downscaling issues.     

The contribution of implicit cognition to the Theory of Reasoned Action Model: a study of food preferences

Abstract

Attitudes are at the heart of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), but problems in defining and measuring attitudes have contributed to typically low ability to predict behaviour. This article investigates the impact of potential disjuncture between evaluations that an individual externally verbalises (explicit attitudes), and evaluations that are internally held and may exist outside of conscious awareness (implicit attitudes), on the predictive ability of TRA. We study consumers’ attitudes towards eating healthy food and subsequent behaviour in a context of socially consensual behaviour. An Implicit Association Test (IAT) is used to measure implicit attitudes, and these scores are contrasted with self-reported explicit attitude scores. Ninety one participants took part in the study. We found, surprisingly, that implicit attitude has no significant effect on behavioural intention. However, a disjuncture between an individual’s implicit and explicit attitudes, reflecting internal psychological conflict, affected behaviour.     

Effects of Label on Consumer Preferences: Focus on Hawaiian Avocado Industry

This study examines market challenges facing a local agriculture industry in a small island setting. Examination of the Hawai‘i local avocado industry indicates labeling can address the product information gap between consumers and producers, improve market share, and increase import substitution by local products. Currently, local avocados occupy only 33% of market share, compared with 67% captured by imports. Consumer preferences among local labeled, local unlabeled, and imported avocados were analyzed using multinomial logistic regression. Statistical results showed that labels influence consumers’ decisions to buy local or imported avocados, and their preferences were also influenced by sociodemographic variables, avocado characteristics, and purchasing behavior. Key market segments to target and policy implications are also discussed.     

Contrasting the attitudes of farmers and the general public regarding the ‘multifunctional’ role of the agricultural sector

Using separate nationally representative surveys, this study compared the views and perspectives of farmers towards agricultural related conservation issues with that of the general public. Results suggest that both the general public and farmers expressed similar levels of concern regarding the environment as a whole. This is an encouraging sign when it comes to environmental protection, as it indicates a certain level of agreement between farmers as the group whose activities largely shape the quality of the rural environment, with the views of the general public who are the major consumers of landscape related environmental public goods. The analysis did, however, reveal important differences in attitudes in relation to certain environmental issues such as the relative importance of maintaining wildlife and habitats and having wild flora and fauna in the countryside. These activities could be seen as in conflict with farmers’ productivist attitudes. We found no significant difference in environmental attitudes between farmers who have participated in voluntary agri-environmental schemes and those who did not. Results also suggest that there is significant heterogeneity in public attitudes towards environmental issues. Specifically, age, income, place of residence and presence of children were all significantly associated with environmental preferences. The study concludes that consideration needs to be given to the different views and perspectives of farmers and the general public in formulating policy aimed at providing an optimal mix of agricultural related environmental public goods and services.     

试谈素质教育中实践能力的培养

素质教育的目的是全面贯彻党的教育方针,提高国民素质,培养学生的创造精神和实践能力。而实践能力是人的能力的重要成分,是学会做事的具体体现,是学生生存发展的需要。教育要注重知行统一,坚持教育教学与生产劳动、社会实践相结合,增强学生解决实际问题的本领和自主探究学习的能力。     

The effect of education on the minimum wage

This research shows for the first time that the level of education has a causal, negative effect on the minimum wage. I use 2SLS, with historical educational data as an instrument for the level of education in 2010, and I find that across the US states a one percentage point greater proportion of college graduates is associated with a real minimum wage that is lower by 1.5%–1.6%. Also, in order to control for state-level omitted variables, I regress the change in the minimum wage on the change in education and I find again a negative, and significantly at the 1% level, effect. Minimum wage is a policy that is chosen by governments according to voters’ preferences. The results of this research imply that when the level of education increases voters prefer a lower minimum wage.     

Behavioral determinants of supply chain integration and coexistence

Economic theory considers physical production characteristics and related property rights as key determinants of the organization of an industry. Yet, we frequently observe coexisting governance modes within industries and firms, even when the transaction attributes of a commodity are homogenous. We test whether risk and time preferences, price expectations, and trust in supply chain types can explain variations and coexistence in governance. Specifically, we experimentally elicit economic preferences of forest managers in the Swiss wood sector. We find that all behavioral dimensions are related to the choice of sales channel. Most importantly, trust and expectations are key determinants in transferring property rights, while risk aversion, patience, and ownership structure explain the existence of plural forms at the firm level.     

Pure jump models for pricing and hedging VIX derivatives

Recent non-parametric statistical analysis of high-frequency VIX data (Todorov and Tauchen, 2011) reveals that VIX dynamics is a pure jump semimartingale with infinite jump activity and infinite variation. To our best knowledge, existing models in the literature for pricing and hedging VIX derivatives do not have these features. This paper fills this gap by developing a novel class of parsimonious pure jump models with such features for VIX based on the additive time change technique proposed in Li et al., 2016a, Li et al., 2016b. We time change the 3/2 diffusion by a class of additive subordinators with infinite activity, yielding pure jump Markov semimartingales with infinite activity and infinite variation. These processes have time and state dependent jumps that are mean reverting and are able to capture stylized features of VIX. Our models take the initial term structure of VIX futures as input and are analytically tractable for pricing VIX futures and European options via eigenfunction expansions. Through calibration exercises, we show that our model is able to achieve excellent fit for the VIX implied volatility surface which typically exhibits very steep skews. Comparison to two other models in terms of calibration reveals that our model performs better both in-sample and out-of-sample. We explain the ability of our model to fit the volatility surface by evaluating the matching of moments implied from market VIX option prices. To hedge VIX options, we develop a dynamic strategy which minimizes instantaneous jump risk at each rebalancing time while controlling transaction cost. Its effectiveness is demonstrated through a simulation study on hedging Bermudan style VIX options.