Development in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Statistics at the Australian Bureau of Statistics

This paper outlines the ICT statistical developments that the ABS has undertaken over recent years. These developments have been on both the supply side (ICT industry) and the demand side (use of IT by sector). The content of ABS ICT surveys has changed significantly over the last few years and are expected to develop further in line with industry changes and emerging policy needs.
Recent developments in household collections have been the inclusion of IT use questions in the 2001 Census of Population and Housing and in various ABS social surveys such as Children's Participation in Culture and Leisure Activities. Annual business IT use surveys are now conducted and include topics such as Internet commerce and IT security. Biennial ICT industry surveys are conducted to provide data on ICT production, imports and exports, ICT industry employment, performance and structure information. An Internet activity survey is run every six months and provides regional Internet access details and infrastructure details on Internet service providers.
A major development for 2002–03 will be the compilation of an ICT satellite account. ABS intends to produce an ICT Information Development Plan to guide its future statistical development work in the ICT field.     

Rural taxation and government regulation in China

This paper places the problem of Chinese rural taxation in the context of government regulation and seeks to present an integrated theoretical framework of Chinese rural development in the past two decades. Our theoretical framework reconciles the seemingly contradictory facts that the average level of rural taxation relative to rural net income did not increase quickly from 1990, but rural taxation became a very serious problem in this period. Our findings suggest that this is in large part due to increases in rural income disparity from 1990 and uneven tax distribution among different income groups. We argue that differentiated enforcement of government regulations such as grain procurement and birth control play an important role in the rural taxation problem, and more generally, the problem of local government expansion and rising rural income disparity. The empirical findings support our hypotheses.     

The government revenue and government expenditure nexus: empirical evidence from nine Asian countries

The nexus between government revenue and government expenditure has been an important topic in public economics. In this paper, we investigate evidence for cointegration and causality between government revenue and government expenditure for nine Asian countries. We use the recently developed bounds testing approach to cointegration and the conventional F-test to examine Granger causality. Our empirical results suggest that for three out of the nine countries government revenue and government expenditure are cointegrated. Our results on the direction of causation are mixed: (a) for Indonesia, Singapore, Sri Lanka in the short-run and for Nepal in both the short- and long-run we find support for the tax-and-spend hypothesis; (b) Indonesia and Sri Lanka are in conformity with the spend-and-tax hypothesis in the long-run; and (c) for other countries there is evidence of neutrality.     

Bankruptcy laws and debt renegotiation

This paper analyzes the effect of the toughness of bankruptcy law on the number of liquidations in a simple model of borrowing and lending with asymmetric information, where the creditor cannot credibly commit to liquidate the firm if the default occurs. In our setting we consider a bankruptcy law to be a one-dimensional variable that influences creditor's expectation value of collateral. We find that there is an interval of the bankruptcy law, where the number of liquidations decreases in the toughness of the bankruptcy law. We also find that if the liquidation costs are high, softer bankruptcy law is preferred.     

Free cash flow, debt-monitoring and managers' LIFO/FIFO policy choice

This paper explores the explanatory power of Jensen's free cash flow hypothesis in managers' choice of LIFO versus FIFO. The association between FCF, and choice of inventory methods is based on the assumption that there is a potential conflict of interest between managers and shareholders when LIFO is the tax minimization method and that non-value-maximizing managers of firms with the FCF problem have incentives to choose FIFO, an income increasing method, in order to increase their compensation. However, since debt can act as a monitoring device and mitigate the agency problems of FCF, managers of firms with high FCF and high debt are less likely to choose FIFO than managers of firms with high FCF and low debt. The evidence is consistent with this expectation.     

债务重组的会计问题研究

本文根据新会计制度的规定,就债务重组的基本原理五种债务重组方式的会计处理事项分别作了说明,并对中外关于债务重组的处理方法进行了比较,找出了其中的差异。为了寻找更为完善的对债务重组的会计处理方法,本文对新会计制度关于债务重组的某些不足之处进行了讨论,提出了相应的意见和建议。     

新公共管理理念与政府财务报告的完善

新公共管理是目前世界各国政府公共管理改革的方向,信息透明性是建立新公共管理模式的基础。本文根据新公共管理的特点结合我国政府公共财政管理改革的实际,针对目前我国政府财务报告中存在的问题,提出了相应的改进建议。     

上市公司资本结构微观决定因素分析

我国上市公司资本结构的突出特点是偏好股权资本,内源融资和债权融资的比重偏低,这有悖于经典的资本结构理论。本文分析了决定上市公司资本结构的微观因素,并提出了优化上市公司资本结构的建议。     

利率风险与债务期限结构的正反馈效应分析

本文在总结以前学者有关债务期限结构分析的基础上,提出了债务期限结构与利率波动之间可能存在正反馈机制。通过对经筛选的我国上市企业面板数据的实证分析,发现银行间同业拆借利率可以较好地反映企业债务期限结构的变化。而分行业的实证分析则表明,利率波动加剧会使绝大多数行业的短期债务比例降低,呈现显著负相关关系。但现阶段我国的利率形成受企业债务期限结构变化的影响不明显,长短期的面板Granger因果检验无法通过。最后,本文从利率风险及利率期限结构的角度对我国上市公司特殊的债务结构给出了新的解释。     

Short sellers and insider trading profitability: A natural experiment

We examine the impact of short sellers on insider trading profitability using a natural experiment of a pilot program which relaxed short-selling constraints for randomly selected pilot stocks. We find that pilot firms experienced a significant decrease in insider trading profitability during the pilot program. The results are more pronounced for the pilot firms with poor information quality, and for the pilot firms without corporate restrictions on insider trading. Our evidence suggests that short sellers serve an important market disciplinary role by reducing insider trading profitability.