Confounding and collinearity in regression analysis: a cautionary tale and an alternative procedure,illustrated by studies of British voting behaviour

Quality & Quantity - Many ecological- and individual-level analyses of voting behaviour use multiple regressions with a considerable number of independent variables but few discussions of their...     

Can investors time their exposure to private equity?

Private equity performance, both for buyouts and venture capital, has been highly cyclical: periods of high fundraising have been followed by periods of low performance. Despite this seemingly predictable variation, we find modest gains, at best, to pursuing realistic, investable strategies that time capital commitments to private equity. This occurs, in part, because investors can only time their commitments to funds; they cannot time when commitments are called or when investments are exited. There is a high degree of time-series correlation in net cash flows even across commitment strategies that allocate capital in a very different manner over time.     

Contracting and Reporting Conservatism around a Change in Fiduciary Duties*

We exploit an influential 1991 Delaware court ruling to examine simultaneously two types of conservatism that play important roles in resolving creditor–owner agency conflicts: contracting conservatism and reporting conservatism. The ruling expanded managerial fiduciary duties in favor of creditors for Delaware-incorporated firms in the vicinity of insolvency. In those firms, following the ruling, debt contracts are less likely to include conservative adjustments to accounting numbers used for covenant compliance (i.e., contracting conservatism decreases), while public financial reporting becomes more conservative (i.e., reporting conservatism increases). The decrease in contracting conservatism is concentrated in firms that exhibit a greater increase in reporting conservatism, suggesting that reporting conservatism is more cost-effective in resolving agency conflicts. In addition, the substitution effect is more pronounced in firms facing greater business uncertainty and firms with greater board independence.     

Who benefits from partial tax coordination?

In this paper, we investigate whether partial tax coordination is beneficial to countries within and outside a tax union, in which countries are supposed to compete in taxes and infrastructure. Our results demonstrate that a subgroup of countries agreeing on a common tax rate can harm both member and nonmember states. This is in contrast to the classical findings that partial tax harmonisation is Pareto improving. When a minimum tax rate is imposed within a tax union, we demonstrate that it does not necessarily improve the welfare of the member countries. Moreover, both the high‐tax and low‐tax countries can be worse off. This conclusion is at odds with the classical result that a high‐tax country benefits from the imposition of a lower tax bound.     

Testing the asymmetric effects of exchange rate pass‐through in BRICS countries: Does the state of the economy matter?

This paper investigates not only the question of whether there is exchange rate pass‐through (ERPT) but also the extent to which the pass‐through is asymmetric or state‐dependent in the BRICS countries. Using monthly data from 1999:M1 to 2019:M12 and non‐linear smooth transition vector autoregressive (STVAR) model, our results provide evidence of period‐specific ERPT between the upper and lower regime periods, governed by the selected transition variables. The results further suggest that the pass‐through of exchange rate is higher when the economy is experiencing large appreciations and expansions as well as large depreciations and recessions. Theimplication for these findings is that ERPT is strongly affected by the state of the economy.     

An Ethical Inquiry of the Effect of Cockpit Automation on the Responsibilities of Airline Pilots: Dissonance or Meaningful Control?

Journal of Business Ethics - Airline pilots are attributed ultimate responsibility and final authority over their aircraft to ensure the safety and well-being of all its occupants. Yet, with the...     

Using a dual-frame design to improve phone surveys on political attitudes: developing a weighting strategy for limited external information in Hong Kong

Quality & Quantity - In recent years, rapid increases in mobile phone ownership and decreases in landline users have led to potential biases in landline phone survey estimations. Mobile-only...