The impact of privatization on efficiency and profitability

Over the past three decades, China has undergone tremendous economic and social change as a consequence of the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy. This paper examines a key feature of this transition – the privatization of the state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) – through both a theoretical model and empirical analysis. Using newly collected primary data from a variety of sources, we study how privatization of listed SOEs affects employment, wages, profits and other aspects of economic performance at the firm level. Our major finding is that privatization results in substantial downsizing of employment, increased labour productivity and rising profitability.     

A NOTE ON PRICING OF PRODUCT QUALITY FOR STATUS CONCERNS

The paper analyses the optimal pricing of the product quality scheme when concerns for relative standing exist among consumers. We demonstrate that if the proportion of high‐value consumers is over (respectively, under) 1/2 of the total consumers, a firm has an incentive to select a large (respectively, small) quality gap among products. Therefore, there exists a cut‐off level for status concerns, which eliminates quality differences, and the firm assigns the same quality to all the consumers. These results indicate that consumers’ qualities will reflect distortions at the top and bottom. Accordingly, the firm's profit depends on which consumer category is larger.     

TIME‐CONSISTENT AND MARKET‐CONSISTENT EVALUATIONS

We consider evaluation methods for payoffs with an inherent financial risk as encountered for instance for portfolios held by pension funds and insurance companies. Pricing such payoffs in a way consistent to market prices typically involves combining actuarial techniques with methods from mathematical finance. We propose to extend standard actuarial principles by a new market‐consistent evaluation procedure which we call “two‐step market evaluation.” This procedure preserves the structure of standard evaluation techniques and has many other appealing properties. We give a complete axiomatic characterization for two‐step market evaluations. We show further that in a dynamic setting with continuous stock prices every evaluation which is time‐consistent and market‐consistent is a two‐step market evaluation. We also give characterization results and examples in terms of g‐expectations in a Brownian‐Poisson setting.     

Tax avoidance and ex ante cost of capital

This study examines the association between tax avoidance and ex ante cost of equity capital. Based on prior research, we develop two proxies for investors’ expectations of tax avoidance and explore whether deviations from those expectations result in higher ex ante cost of equity capital. We find that the ex ante cost of equity capital increases with tax avoidance that is either below or above investor expectations and that the increase is larger for tax avoidance that exceeds investors’ expectations. We then examine whether firms that alter their future tax avoidance exhibit a lowering of their ex ante cost of equity capital and find that tax avoidance decreases (increases) from the prior year for firms that were above (below) investors’ expectations in the prior year. These results are consistent with the trade‐off suggested by the Scholes and Wolfson framework and reinforce the notion that balancing tax benefits and non‐tax costs is an important feature of firms’ tax planning.     

The Unintended Consequences of the Frequency of PCAOB Inspection

After more than 50 years of self‐regulation of the US auditing profession, the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) as a quasi‐governmental entity with statutory authority to inspect accounting firms that audit public clients. The frequency of this inspection is annual or triennial, based upon the number of public clients the firm audits. We examine the effects of these two levels of inspection frequency on financial reporting quality and audit fees for clients of small and midsize public accounting firms. Our findings provide evidence of significantly higher audit quality and audit fees for clients of annually inspected firms relative to clients of triennially inspected firms. These findings are robust to auditor‐client alignment analyses, propensity score matching, time‐series analyses, examination of firms that have changed from triennial to annual inspection, and particular examination of firms with inspection deficiencies. Overall, our study suggests that the two‐tier frequency system of PCAOB inspection may have also resulted in two‐tier audit quality and audit fee systems for small and midsize public accounting firms, with more frequent inspection leading to more rigorous and informed auditor decisions. We discuss the implications of our results for the Board and the profession at large.     

A saddlepoint approximation to the distribution of the sum of independent non‐identically uniform random variables

Calculating the probability of the corresponding significance point is important for finite sample sizes. However, it is difficult to evaluate this probability when the sample sizes are moderate to large. Under these circumstances, consideration of a more accurate approximation for the distribution function is extremely important. Herein, we performed a saddlepoint approximation in the upper tails for the distribution of the sum of independent non‐identically uniform random variables under finite sample sizes. Saddlepoint approximation results were compared with those for a normal approximation. Additionally, the order of errors of the saddlepoint approximation was derived. © 2014 The Authors. Statistica Neerlandica © 2014 VVS.     

Development by Decree: The Limits of ‘Authoritarian Modernization’ in the Russian Federation

The apparent success of state‐managed market economies has challenged the conventional wisdom that liberal democracy is the norm around which all capitalist countries tend to converge. If the link between democracy and development is more tenuous than we often think, the authoritarian variety of capitalism is not without its own problems, especially with respect to political legitimacy, innovation and regional development. This article explores these issues through the prism of ‘authoritarian modernization’ in Russia. We argue that this strategy is unlikely to succeed, even in its own terms, because (1) the political system fails to create favourable institutional conditions for modernization; (2) the economic system is beset by deeply embedded structural problems; and (3) the regional policy apparatus is torn between the goals of spatial equalization and spatial agglomeration. The article focuses on the Skolkovo Innovation Centre, the main symbol of Russian modernization, to demonstrate the territorial repertoire of the mega‐project, a state‐sponsored development strategy to create innovation clusters from above because they cannot emerge from below.     

EXTREME VALUE THEORY IN FINANCE: A SURVEY

Extreme value theory is concerned with the study of the asymptotic distribution of extreme events, that is to say events which are rare in frequency and huge in magnitude with respect to the majority of observations. Statistical methods derived from it have been employed increasingly in finance, especially for risk measurement. This paper surveys some of those main applications, namely for testing different distributional assumptions for the data, for Value‐at‐Risk and Expected Shortfall calculations, for asset allocation under safety‐first type constraints, and for the study of contagion and dependence across markets under conditions of stress.     

PRICING DERIVATIVES ON MULTISCALE DIFFUSIONS: AN EIGENFUNCTION EXPANSION APPROACH

Using tools from spectral analysis, singular and regular perturbation theory, we develop a systematic method for analytically computing the approximate price of a large class of derivative‐assets. The payoff of the derivative‐assets may be path‐dependent. In addition, the process underlying the derivatives may exhibit killing (i.e., jump to default) as well as combined local/nonlocal stochastic volatility. The nonlocal component of volatility may be multiscale, in the sense that it may be driven by one fast‐varying and one slow‐varying factor. The flexibility of our modeling framework is contrasted by the simplicity of our method. We reduce the derivative pricing problem to that of solving a single eigenvalue equation. Once the eigenvalue equation is solved, the approximate price of a derivative can be calculated formulaically. To illustrate our method, we calculate the approximate price of three derivative‐assets: a vanilla option on a defaultable stock, a path‐dependent option on a nondefaultable stock, and a bond in a short‐rate model.