Works council ‘disaffection’ and establishment survivability

This article investigates the association between a measure of works council heterogeneity and plant closings in Germany, 2006–2015. Two datasets are used to identify failed establishments, while institutional heterogeneity is captured by management perceptions of the role of the works council in managerial decision making and also by allowing for works council learning. The potential moderating role of sectoral collective bargaining is also examined. We report that works councils per se are not associated with plant closure. Rather, it is establishments with disaffected councils that display higher rates of closure. The latter result does not obtain where such establishments are covered by sectoral agreements; an outcome that is consistent with the literature on the mitigation of rent-seeking behaviour, and one that also receives support from our finding that plants with dissonant councils are more likely than their consensual counterparts to transition into sectoral bargaining coverage. On the other hand, there is only limited evidence of works council learning.     

Political corruption and accounting choices

We examine how political corruption affects firms’ accounting choices. We hypothesize and find that firms headquartered in corrupt districts manipulate earnings downwards, relative to firms headquartered elsewhere. Our finding is robust to alternative corruption measures, alternative discretionary accrual measures, alternative model specifications, the instrumental variable approach and difference-in-differences analyses based on firm relocation and high profile cases. We find that firms headquartered in corrupt districts prefer income-decreasing accounting choices and exhibit higher conservatism. Finally, we find that the effect of corruption on earnings management is more pronounced for geographically concentrated firms, for firms without political connections, for firms in politically sensitive industries, for firms with lower transient institutional investor ownership and for firms with less analyst coverage. In sum, our findings suggest that firms respond to corruption by lowering their accounting earnings.     

基于耗散结构理论的军民企业集成创新系统研究

如何有效推进军民集成创新是我国实施军民融合式发展战略的核心问题之一。根据企业创新能力博弈分析，军民企业选择集成式创新是“竞合”博弈的最优结果。基于耗散结构理论构建军民集成创新结构与功能模型和以军民企业作为创新主体的军民集成创新复杂系统模型，结合定量分析，探讨军民集成创新系统有序演进的基本条件；最后，基于耗散结构理论视角，给出有利于我国军民企业集成创新系统有效运行的几点启示。     

The roles of risk preferences,selection, and uncertain returns on land contracts

Using panel data on a statistically representative sample of Iowa farmland parcels from 1997 to 2017, we analyze the factors determining whether land is farmed by the owner or rented out under a cash rent or crop share contract. The landowner's decision to rent or operate the land depends on the distribution of expected net returns to the land, and so estimates of the factors affecting rental terms will be biased if the sample only includes rental contracts and excludes the owner-operator. Land with higher mean and/or lower variance of expected net returns is most likely to be rented out. Participants in the rental market will include the most risk-averse landowners and the least risk-averse tenants, while the least risk-averse landowners operate their own land. Our empirical results suggest that the rising use of cash rent contracts and declining incidence of owner-operation and crop-share rental contracts is consistent with falling coefficient of variation in expected net returns per acre.