Courts and Firm Investments in Real Property

The legal environment and rule of law are important for business, but existing studies often treat rule of law holistically. This article examines the role of courts, specifically the speed of court decisions, the enforcement of edicts, and the impartiality of decision-making as perceived by firms of various sizes, and the impact this has on firm investments in real property. The article analyzes a panel of 6,300 firms from 27 countries in the period from 2002 to 2009 to find that (i) firm size affects perceptions positively, while (ii) paying bribes affects perceptions negatively. At the same time, (iii) a firm’s connections to the government have no apparent impact. More importantly, while all three components have a positive correlation with the amount firms invest in land and machinery, the speed of courts has the greatest significance and the highest marginal effect. Firms perceiving courts to be quick invest nearly four times as much as the average real property investment. This finding suggests that policymakers should focus on reducing backlogs in the court system, perhaps by encouraging more arbitration or staffing more clerks.     

BERTRAND COMPETITION CAN YIELD HIGHER PRICES THAN MONOPOLY

If we take into account the spatial dimension of markets, prices of incumbent firms may be higher and consumer surplus may be lower with competition than with monopoly. This result obtains unambiguously, even in the supposedly highly competitive case of Bertrand competition. Moreover, we are able to show that consumers of the commodity may be worse off with duopoly, if the distance between the firms' sites is sufficiently large.     

An Empirical Investigation of the True and Fair Override in the United Kingdom

Abstract:  The True and Fair View concept requires companies to depart from GAAP or the law if necessary to present a true and fair view of the corporation's financial affairs. We analyze UK public companies invoking a true and fair override to assess whether overrides are associated with weakened performance, earnings quality and informativeness. We find quantified overrides increase income and equity significantly, and firms that invoke more costly overrides report weaker performance. We also find that firms invoking the most costly overrides have less informative financial statements than control firms, and lower earnings quality. In contrast, firms invoking less costly overrides do not exhibit weaker performance, less informative financial statements or weaker earnings quality. These findings are relevant for the debate on principle- vs. rules-based accounting.     

零售(连锁)企业扩张的基础:基于管理标准化的解析

国外零售巨头在中国的快速扩张和零售行业的拉动作用,使得国内零售企业扩张成为本能的冲动。零售企业连锁发展的基础在于管理标准化,管理标准化的实质是制度化的管理协调。管理标准化具有节约交易成本、强化组织学习能力、增加专用性投资和实现网络化、规模化的作用。     

Risk Sharing and Efficiency Implications of Progressive Pension Arrangements*

This paper aims to quantify the welfare effects of progressive pension arrangements in Germany. Starting from a purely contribution‐related benefit system, we introduce basic allowances for contributions and a flat benefit fraction. Since our overlapping‐generations model takes into account variable labor supply, borrowing constraints as well as stochastic income risk, we can compare the labor supply, the liquidity and the insurance effects of the policy reform. Our simulations indicate that it would be optimal to introduce a flat benefit share of 50 percent and a basic allowance that amounts to 30 percent of average income. Such a reform would yield an aggregate efficiency gain of 3.3 percent of resources.     

Effectiveness and Use of Marketing Activities Covered by the 1990 AICPA-FTC Consent Agreement

Members of the Association of Accounting Marketing Executives evaluated the effectiveness and use of marketing activi- ties covered by the 1990 AICPA-FK consent decree to determine what, if any, impact the decree had on CPA marketing. A slight increase in usage of a few of the activities occurred after the consent decree was signed. Many of the covered activities are viewed as ineffective, yet accountants plan to use more of almost all activities. Demographic differences in attitudes and planned usage are identi- fied.     

河南省物流企业规范化发展建议

分析了物流企业规范化发展的内涵,指出了河南省物流企业规范化发展的现状及存在的问题,最后提出了几点促进河南省物流企业规范化发展的政策建议。     

Multivariate GARCH Volatility Across Major Industry Groups of the Stock Exchange of Thailand

This paper examines the volatility on the time-series relations among the returns of industry group indices in the stock exchange of Thailand. Does volatility of the return series in one industry group indices necessarily lead to volatility in other industry group indices among the sample of eight industry groups？ This research will be valuable to investors utilizing a better understand diversification needed to get good returns. Daily data （2,116 days） are used in this paper covering data for the nine-year period from January 5, 2004, to August 31, 2012. Multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity was tested consisted of： （1） Diagonal VEC Model; （2） Baba Engle Kraft Kroner Models （BEKK Models）; （3） Vector Autoregressive Moving Average GARCH Model （VARMA GARCH Model）; and （4） Constant Conditional Correlation Model （CCC Model）. The findings indicated that the major result shows that, volatility in one industry group necessarily lead to volatility in other industry group indices in the opposite way and in the similar way.     

The Role of Individualism/Collectivism in Critical Classroom Encounters

Abstract

Internationalization raises the issue of whether, and to what extent, the inherent culture of a country may have particular influence on the nature of service interactions, and on education (i.e., student-professor interactions) specifically. Thus the service encounter in the classroom becomes a subject of increasing importance and interest with respect to satisfactory and unsatisfactory outcomes, and also with respect to related behavioral outcomes such as word-of-mouth and repatronage. This paper investigates these issues in classrooms of higher education by utilizing the Individualism-Collectivism dimension of culture in four different samples: China, New Zealand, Poland, and the United States. Differences are identified with respect to the types of critical incidents reported, nature of the outcome, and behavioral responses to those encounters.     

我国建筑施工企业的安全管理体系

建筑行业是危险性较大、事故多发的行业,无论是在发达国家还是在发展中国家,建筑施工中发生事故造成的伤亡人数仅次于矿山而成为第二大职业伤害高发行业。随着我国成为世贸组织成员,建筑施工企业正面临残酷的竞争。国内建筑市场与国际建筑市场的逐步接轨,各种先进的管理模式逐步引入国内各大建筑施工企业。