网购市场鱼龙混杂现象的经济学解释：基于二维不对称信息的视角

网络购物市场存在商品鱼龙混杂的典型现象：高价格的商品不一定高质量，低价格的商品也不一定低质量，表现出明显的信息不对称特征。文章基于网络购物市场所存在的两个维度不对称信息的特征事实，即厂商在产品质量与产品生产成本两个方面拥有私有信息，通过构建二维不对称信息的分析框架，从市场均衡的视角首次解释了上述现象的经济机理。分析表明，由于二维不对称信息的存在，消费者和厂商决策的互动过程使得市场上产品价格与质量不再具有单调递增关系，从而网络购物市场可能出现鱼龙混杂的市场均衡，文章证明了这一均衡在合理的条件下是存在的。文章通过比较静态分析考察了市场环境的变化如何影响商品质量的价格信号显示效率以及消费者购买行为，并考察了网络购物行业商家披露信息、消费者对于商家的反馈评分机制和保证退货等手段对于消除商品鱼龙混杂现象的有效性，为进一步规范发展我国网络购物行业提供了参考。     

Heterogeneity of Funds and Information Disclosure: Evidence

Institutional investors, especially public funds, play an important role in governing listed firms as they grow in Chinese stock markets. We classify each fund as “dedicated,” “transient,” or “mixed,” according to the concentration, turnover, and profit sensitivity of their stock holdings. We find that listed firms with more shares held by dedicated funds have a higher disclosure quality, while firms with more shares held by transient funds have a lower disclosure quality. These findings are consistent in different model settings. In addition, dedicated funds improve the disclosure quality of non-state-owned enterprises more than state-owned enterprises. Dedicated funds can benefit from the lower debt-financing cost and higher stock liquidity of firms with better disclosure quality.     

The synergistic effect of insurance and banking sector activities on economic growth in Africa

It is widely understood that the insurance and banking sectors of every economy perform some functions in driving economic growth. What is not yet well documented is whether their roles are complimentary or substitutive. With the aid of the dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation technique, this paper evaluates the synergistic effect of both sectors on economic growth in a panel of 10 African countries that are responsible for most of the activities in the continent’s financial sector. The insurance-banking-growth nexus was also examined through bootstrap panel causality tests. The results show that the life insurance market and the banking sector, as well as the non-life insurance market and the banking sector, are complimentary. We find that, overall, the relationship between the insurance and banking sectors in Africa is a complimentary one and that their synergistic impact on economic growth is positive. The feedback hypothesis was also confirmed in the relationship between the insurance sector and economic growth and between the banking sector and economic growth.     

Incentives to move up: Effects of pay gaps between levels on employee performance

Employees of a certain rank are motivated by the pay gap between them and the levels above (upward comparison), and the pay gap between them and the levels below (downward comparison). In some cases, employees face multiple upward comparisons such as immediate and subsequent upward comparisons. We hypothesise that upward comparison matters more than downward comparison, and in the case of multiple upward comparisons, the immediate one matters more than the subsequent ones. We also hypothesise that the pay gap effect resulting from the upward/downward comparison ought to be non‐linear in that performance increases with pay gap size at a decreasing rate. The results from two empirical studies, namely, a longitudinal field study and a laboratory experiment, largely support our hypotheses.     

Technology‐push,market‐demand and the missing safety‐pull: a case study of American Airlines Flight 587

Through a critical case study of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, this paper draws upon ‘the Social Shaping of Technology’ (SST) approach to offer a reconceptualisation of the technology‐push and market‐demand model for High‐Reliably Organisations (HROs), providing support for a third factor, called here a ‘safety‐pull’. A safety‐pull is defined as organisationally supported reflexivity in which technology innovators and frontline operators collaborate to consider the potential implications of adopting new technologies in HROs and the complex ways this change may impact human operators' work performance, often in risky and unanticipated ways. In contrast to accidents occurring solely as the result of individual operator error, analysing the safety‐pull provides a way to tease out the wide range of factors that can contribute to HRO failures and offers a new SST perspective through which to examine high‐risk operations.     

Applications of Statistics in the Field of General Insurance: An Overview

This is an expository paper on applications of statistics in the field of general insurance, also called non‐life insurance. Unlike life insurance where advanced statistical techniques have long been part of financial mathematics and actuarial applications, their use is only relatively recent in non‐life insurance. The business model of insurance companies, especially those active in non‐life insurance, has seen dramatic changes over the last 15 years. The aim of this paper is to convince the readers that especially today non‐life insurance is not only an exciting ground to apply existing modern statistical tools but also a fertile environment for new and challenging statistical developments. The activities of an insurance company can be viewed as an industrial process where data management and data analysis play a key role. That is why a fundamental understanding of data‐related issues (such as data quality, variability, analysis and correct interpretation) is so essential to the insurance business. These are exactly the tasks where professional statisticians excel. Also, a better understanding of the field of general insurance by statisticians will promote fruitful exchanges between actuaries and statisticians, thereby helping to bring actuarial and statistical professional societies closer to each other. Selected examples are used to cover the essential aspects of general insurance, and all of them are based on the author's experience. The paper concludes with some remarks on the role of statisticians working in general insurance.     

Does Accrual Management Impair the Performance of Earnings‐Based Valuation Models?

This study examines how accrual manipulations affect firm valuation in the years surrounding the passage of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX). We compare the absolute percentage pricing errors of RIM and DCF valuation models for a group of US firms suspected to have engaged in accrual manipulations to avoid a small loss or a small earnings decline vs. ‘Normal’ firms matched on industry, year and size. We find that RIM can better estimate intrinsic value than DCF for the matched Normal firms in the pre‐SOX period, but not so for accrual manipulators, and that SOX mitigates the harmful effect of accrual manipulations, completely eliminating the difference in RIM's accuracy advantage over DCF between Normal firms and accrual manipulators. As a further analysis, we redefine Suspect firms as real‐activity manipulators and find a significant across‐group difference in accuracy wedge in both sample periods, implying that SOX has prompted firms to favor real‐activity manipulations over accrual manipulations.     

Positive welfare effects of trade barriers in a dynamic partial equilibrium model

We develop a simple two-region, cobweb-type dynamic partial equilibrium model to demonstrate the existence of optimal, possibly non-zero, trade barriers. A pure comparative statics analysis of our model suggests that a reduction of trade barriers, modeled as small but positive import tariffs, always enhances welfare. However, taking a dynamic perspective reveals that nonlinear trade interactions between two regions may generate endogenous price fluctuations which can hamper welfare. Finally, we allow special interest groups, such as consumers or producers from these two regions, to lobby for a particular level of trade barriers. Our model predicts that time-varying trade barriers may be another channel for market instability.     

The effect of host country Internet infrastructure on foreign expansion of Korean MNCs

This study examines the effect of host country Internet infrastructure on a multinational corporation (MNC) foreign expansion. Using Heckman’s selection model on a sample of 2589 subsidiaries of 487 Korean MNCs between 1990 and 2011, we find that host country Internet infrastructure is important in MNC expansion decisions. In addition, we find that a well-developed Internet infrastructure within a host country leads to more investments from MNCs producing consumer over industrial goods and is more attractive to domestic market followers than market leaders. We find that the host country’s Internet infrastructure is important for an MNC foreign expansion decision, suggesting that efficient communication within an MNC is critical in coordinating globalized MNC subsidiary operations.