Determinants and implications of crop production loss: An empirical exploration using ordered probit analysis

This study investigates farmers’ perception about the severity of loss for three rice crops, identifies their determinants and explores policy implications based on findings. This research employs an ordered probit model to data collected from 1800 farm households from drought-prone and groundwater depleted areas of Bangladesh. This is the first study of its kind.Severity of rice production loss, while differing across all three rice crops, was higher for rain-fed crops. This was broadly consistent with available independent evidence. Geophysical factors, household characteristics, institutional and market accessibility, and household adaptation strategy were key determinants of crop loss. The impact of these factors was specific to the crop and severity of loss.This study has several policy implications involving market, R & D and institutional support based options. Strengthening support systems for institutional and market accessibility, and science driven climate change adaptation strategy including generation and wider dissemination of drought tolerant rice varieties, and enhancing farmers’ capacity to change rice varieties on a regular basis, constitute key areas for policy intervention.     

一种商用车型A柱结构设计及验证

文章对商用车型A柱结构设计过程进行了分析,分析的内容包括功能设计、截面设计、具体的结构设计,以及制造工艺性设计、CAE分析验证等,经过系统的分析总结,提高了设计效率,缩短了汽车的开发时间。     

Trade credit financing and stock price crash risk

This study investigates the association between trade credit financing and stock price crash risk within China's context. We find that firms using more trade credit financing have significantly lower future stock price crash risk. This negative association is more pronounced for firms with greater information asymmetry and for firms located in less developed financial markets. This finding is robust to the endogeneity concern, alternative measures of stock price crash risk, and the inclusion of other factors identified in prior studies that might affect stock price crash risk. Further evidence suggests that both the monitoring mechanism and the disclosure mechanism drive the documented relation. Our study suggests that access to trade credit can significantly reduce the likelihood of crash risk in a country like China with less developed formal bank financing. Our study also suggests that investors can effectively avoid stock price crash risk by using the trade credit information disclosed in financial statements.     

年轻高管与企业股价崩盘风险：来自“代理冲突观”的证据*

在企业纷纷实施高管年轻化战略的背景下，本文从股价崩盘风险的视角分析和检验了年轻高管风险偏好的经济后果及其作用机理。本文基于“个体认知观”和“代理冲突观”展开理论推演，采用中国沪深A股非金融上市公司的数据，检验发现，年轻高管会显著加剧企业未来的股价崩盘风险，且这种影响主要存在于民营企业，在国有企业并不显著。进一步针对具体作用机制的检验发现，年轻高管在投资决策中选择了更多能迅速提升个人收益的风险性投资项目，但在不能迅速提升个人收益的风险性投资项目上与年长高管没有显著差异。同时，年轻高管对股价崩盘风险的加剧效应仅仅存在于高管在上市公司领取薪酬的样本企业，且更高的独立董事比例能显著抑制年轻高管的股价崩盘风险加剧效应。这表明，年轻高管个体认知层面的风险偏好被其追求个人私利最大化的代理冲突所扭曲，进而为年轻高管风险偏好的“代理冲突观”提供了实证证据。     

税收征管能降低股价暴跌风险吗？

以2003-2011年我国A股上市公司的股价暴跌风险为切入点,本文考察了税收征管在投资者利益保护过程中的治理功能、作用机理和作用边界。本文发现,更强的税收征管力度能够通过促使上市公司及时释放坏消息的方式,显著降低其股价暴跌风险,从而起到投资者利益保护的作用。但进一步的研究也发现,税收征管的上述治理功能只存在于民企及居于市场化程度较高地区的公司中。本文揭示了税收征管对于投资者利益保护的重要作用,强调了其作为外部治理机制的可行性和重要性。     

A fine-scale spatial analytics of the assessment and mapping of buildings and population at different risk levels of urban flood

Nowadays, urban flooding is becoming a severe issue in most of the developing and developed countries. The growth of the urbanization rate is also increasing, and the United Nations (UN) projected that 68 % of the world’s population would live in urban areas by 2050. People tend to migrate from rural to urban areas, which expose them more vulnerable to urban floods. The flood-related damages and deaths are increasing every year globally. Using the Birmingham city, Alabama (AL), USA as the study area, the objective of this research is to assess potential damage risks due to flood exposure of buildings and population in an urban area. Different social and environmental factors influence urban floods in an urban area. This paper considered elevation, slope, flow accumulation, land-use, soil types, and distance from the river as significant influential factors to urban flooding. The flood risk model hence can be developed by using an integrated GIS and cartrographic approach, in which we assessed and assigned weights to these factors and formed a GIS risk assessment model, which shows the level of flood risks in the floodplain areas of Birmingham and quantifies and maps both commercial buildings, home buildings, and populations’ exposed to flooding risks. This study found that the Valley Creek area is the highest flood risk zone in Birmingham, and about 48.85 percent of Valley Creek’s floodplain area will face very high flood risk. The findings further reveal that total number of 5602 people are living in high and very high flood risk zones in Birmingham that approximates 44.04 % of the total population in this floodplain area. The physical vulnerability is also assessed, and findings suggest that the Valley Creek zone has the highest percentage of residential (i.e., 56.14 %) and commercial (i.e., 75.34 %) buildings located in very high flood risk areas. Our study providing a GIS risk assessment approach to locating and mapping the areas, buildings, and populations from the most to the least at risks with a fine spatical scale for urban flood risk management. The numbers of vulnerable buildings and populations within each risk category are quantified and their distributions are mapped. Therefore, revealing population’s and buildings’ risks and their geographic information, this flood risk assessment can help local governments and communities prepare better to take actions against future urban flood events in Birmingham, and this integrated GIS and cartographic analysis for fine flooding assessments can be applied to other urban areas for flood mitigation and risk management.     

A common thread linking the design of guarantee and nonescalating payments of public annuities

Motivated by recent experiences in economies adopting the defined-contribution pension system, we study public annuities in the presence of survival probability heterogeneity. It is found that the difference of annuitization-weighted and unweighted averages of survival probabilities is a useful measure of the severity of adverse selection. We then examine public annuities with a guarantee feature which bundles annuity income and bequeathable wealth components. We show that when the heterogeneity in survival probability is limited, the magnitude of guarantee proportion is irrelevant. On the other hand, an increase in the guarantee proportion mitigates adverse selection when the extent of heterogeneity is sufficiently large, because the share of annuity purchase by retirees with lower (resp., higher) survival probabilities is increased (resp., decreased). We also obtain a similar set of results for public annuities with nonescalating payments. The results have useful implications regarding the design of public annuities.     

资金占用、股价暴跌风险对信息透明度的影响研究

以1999-2014年中国 A 股主板上市公司为研究样本,考量资金占用、股价暴跌风险对信息透明度影响。结果表明：大股东的资金占用程度越高,越容易给公司股价带来暴跌风险;股价发生暴跌后管理层采取相应策略改善形象,提高公司信息透明度。鉴此,投资者应利用大股东资金占用、股价暴跌与信息透明度之间的逻辑关系,构建投资套利组合;同时监管者需加强对大股东资金占用和信息透明度的监管,保护中小投资者利益。     

The Impulse of Stock Market Volatility and the Market Crash of October 1987

This paper employs the technique of variance decomposition and impulse response functions to examine the dynamic nature of stock market volatility relationships among six major countries during the pre, around, and post October 1987 crash period. During the period around the crash, the US stock market volatility explains much better the variations of the stock market volatility of Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the UK. Our findings clearly indicate that the crash originated in the US and then spread to other major stock markets.     

Operating cash flow opacity and stock price crash risk

We examine the relation between operating cash flow (OCF) opacity and stock price crash risk. We find that OCF opacity is positively associated with future stock price crash risk after controlling for accruals opacity and other determinants known to influence crash risk. This finding suggests that OCF opacity facilitates bad news hoarding and enables managerial resource diversion, which in turn increases crash risk. We also find that the positive relation between OCF opacity and crash risk is more pronounced when external monitoring is weak, information asymmetry is high, OCF importance is low, and cost of accruals management is high. Overall, our evidence highlights the severe consequence of OCF opacity in that it boosts crash risk; our study should alert the researchers, investors, and regulators to pay more attention to OCF management.