我国环境规制现状及作用于经济增长的机制

资源耗竭和环境污染已经成为制约当前中国经济进一步增长的重要因素。如何正确处理经济发展、资源与环境的关系,走出一条兼顾发展经济和环境保护的可持续发展之路,成为社会关注的热点。文章利用2000到2012年的环境规制和经济增长的相关数据,使用回归分析和格兰杰因果关系检验,分析了我国环境规制作用于经济增长的机制。研究结果表明,我国环境规制并不是通过促进技术进步而是通过费用型环境规制促进产业结构调整和投资型环境规制拉动投资来促进经济增长。     

我国互联网金融运行中存在的不足及完善建议

随着“互联网金融时代”的来临,我国互联网金融进入了发展的高峰期。然而,在其实际运行中,存在着诸多的不足,主要体现在互联网金融监管主体监管缺失、互联网金融经营主体信息披露和信息保护不健全、互联网金融系统自身应用技术的不完善三个方面,这些不足严重阻碍了互联网金融的健康有序发展。因此,有必要健全互联网金融监管体系,完善信息披露、保护制度,加强互联网金融消费者权益保护,构建互联网金融信息技术安全制度,有针对性地完善互联网金融运行过程中存在的不足。     

Mutual monitoring and corporate governance

Mutual monitoring in a well-structured authority system can mitigate the agency problem. I empirically examine whether the number two executive in a firm, if given authority, incentive, and channels for communication and influence, is able to monitor and constrain the potentially self-interested CEO. I find strong evidence that: (1) measures of the presence and extent of mutual monitoring from the No. 2 executive are positively related to future firm value (Tobin’s Q); (2) the beneficial effect is more pronounced for firms with stronger incentives for the No. 2 to monitor and with higher information asymmetry between the boards and the CEOs; and (3) mutual monitoring is a substitute for other governance mechanisms. The results suggest that mutual monitoring provides important checks and balances on CEO power.     

Payday loans and consumer financial health

The annualized interest rate for a payday loan often exceeds 10 times that of a typical credit card, yet this market grew immensely in the 1990s and 2000s, elevating concerns about the risk payday loans pose to consumers and whether payday lenders target minority neighborhoods. This paper employs individual credit record data, and Census data on payday lender store locations, to assess these concerns. Taking advantage of several state law changes since 2006 and, following previous work, within-state-year differences in access arising from proximity to states that allow payday loans, I find little to no effect of payday loans on credit scores, new delinquencies, or the likelihood of overdrawing credit lines. The analysis also indicates that neighborhood racial composition has little influence on payday lender store locations conditional on income, wealth and demographic characteristics.     

Optimal investment of an insurer with regime-switching and risk constraint

We investigate an optimal investment problem of an insurance company in the presence of risk constraint and regime-switching using a game theoretic approach. A dynamic risk constraint is considered where we constrain the uncertainty aversion to the ‘true’ model for financial risk at a given level. We describe the surplus of an insurance company using a general jump process, namely, a Markov-modulated random measure. The insurance company invests the surplus in a risky financial asset whose dynamics are modeled by a regime-switching geometric Brownian motion. To incorporate model uncertainty, we consider a robust approach, where a family of probability measures is cosidered and the insurance company maximizes the expected utility of terminal wealth in the ‘worst-case’ probability scenario. The optimal investment problem is then formulated as a constrained two-player, zero-sum, stochastic differential game between the insurance company and the market. Different from the other works in the literature, our technique is to transform the problem into a deterministic differential game first, in order to obtain the optimal strategy of the game problem explicitly.     

再谈环境保护税设置——基于两类竞争制造企业环保技术创新策略的演化博弈

利用演化博弈模型分析处在竞争的两类制造企业(在位企业和进入企业)的环保技术创新策略问题,考量以环境保护税为主体的环保规制如何科学设置才能更好地促进制造业企业的环保创新.研究发现:创新效应和市场需求均影响企业创新策略演化的均衡结果,并在两阶段博弈分析的基础上,得出市场需求和创新效应共同作用下两类制造企业的生产策略选择方案.因此,环境保护税的改革与实施应注意掌握好时点,税率的设置应充分考虑不同行业环保创新效应和产品市场需求,进行区别化的、动态的税率设置,并加大其他税种对环境保护税的支持.     

Employment protection legislation and R&D investment

This paper examines how employment protection legislation influences corporate R&D investment. With a sample of 113,228 observations across 23 OECD countries from 2001 to 2018, I document that firms in strong employment protection legislation have lower R&D expenditure and investment efficiency. In addition, I find that the effect of employment protection on R&D expenditure is stronger in financially constrained firms but the effect of employment protection on R&D investment efficiency is stronger in financially unconstrained firms.     

Employment protection and leverage adjustment speed: Evidence from China

Stricter employment protection may affect capital structure adjustment speed in two ways. First, it may increase the cost of capital and decrease the leverage adjustment speed. Second, it increases financing needs and capital adjustment speed. Using China's 2008 Labor Contract Law as a natural experiment and the PSM-DID methodology, we find that the latter effect dominates the former. Specifically, stricter employment protection increases leverage adjustment speed, and this effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned firms and firms with larger leverage deviations. Furthermore, transmission channel tests show that employment protection increases firms’ substitution of labor with capital, driving up investment and financing needs. Finally, the increased leverage adjustment speed induced by enhanced employment protection is beneficial to firm performance.     

I Feel Your Pain: The Effect of Regulator as a Minority Shareholder on Merger and Acquisition Performance

We examine the effect of a regulator-led advocate for minority shareholders on merger and acquisition (M&A) performance in China. In recent years, the China Securities Regulatory Commission established the China Securities Investor Services Center (CSISC), which began its ownership of 100 shares of public firms in 2016. The CSISC advocates for the interests of minority shareholders proactively. Focusing on abnormal stock returns in M&A announcements, we find that acquirers that have the CSISC as a shareholder (CSISC acquirers) exhibit higher positive abnormal stock returns than non-CSISC acquirers. Cross-sectional analysis suggests that the core results are mainly driven by firms with severe agency problems and weak external/internal monitoring, and those not controlled by the state. In addition, we find that CSISC acquirers have better long-term performance and encounter more M&A failures than non-CSISC acquirers. Our findings indicate that although the CSISC only holds 100 shares of listed companies, it plays an effective role in monitoring and driving firms to make appropriate M&A decisions.