Regional and National Perspectives of China's Integration into the WTO: A CGE Inquiry with Emphasis on the Agricultural Sector

China's integration in the World Trade Organization (WTO) is already on its fast track. Understanding the complexity of China's dynamic adjustment resulting from its membership in the WTO and the differential regional impacts within China is very important and poses crucial challenge in evaluating its impacts. In this study, we make an attempt to incorporate seven regional commodity-detailed models into a dis-aggregated multi-sector and multi-region China Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) framework. This framework has allowed us to evaluate the impacts of China's integration into the WTO at both national and regional levels and analyze the inter-linkages between China's provincial agricultural markets. Using the framework and assumptions about factor mobility, we assess the impacts on China's agricultural and non-agricultural sectors (regionally and nationally) by reduction of its trade policy distortions, such as tariffs rate changes and quantitative restrictions. We also evaluate the structural changes on China's national and regional production and trade as China implements its commitments and moves into the WTO.     

Domestic tourism as a development factor

Archer, Brian H., “Domestic Tourism as a Development Factor”, Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. V, No. 1, January/March 1978, pp. 126–141. Domestic tourism brings about an intermingling of people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds and also a considerable redistribution of spending power. Although this paper concentrates mainly upon the economic effects created by the growth of domestic tourism and is illustrated by reference to some recent case studies, attention is also drawn to the favorable and unfavorable political, social, cultural, moral, environmental and conservational aspects of domestic tourism. The paper concludes by discussing some ways in which domestic tourism can provide an impetus to further economic growth in the holiday regions and also how domestic tourism may assist in solving some of the problems facing a country's international tourism.     

Small firms and the value of improvements in corporate governance mechanisms

Since 2002, many firms have been required to alter their board of directors and committees to increase management monitoring. Kinney and McDaniel (1989) and Chhaochharia and Grinstein (2007) provide empirical evidence suggesting that investments in corporate governance may differ based on firm size, and that under-investing in monitoring may be more pronounced in smaller firms. To further test whether the benefits of recent changes in companies' governance mechanisms accrue to smaller firms that have underinvested in governance, we examine the stock market reaction to changes in board structure over the twenty-four months following the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act. We construct a new composite measure of board structure and regress buy-and-hold abnormal returns on changes that occur in the Board Structure Index, finding that improvements in corporate governance quality result in economically significant abnormal returns accruing only to the smaller firms with weak initial board structures.     

Investment Professionals' Ability to Detect Deception: Accuracy,Bias and Metacognitive Realism

In the first empirical study on the topic, the authors examined the ability of investment professionals to distinguish between truthful and deceptive statements. A random sample of 154 investment professionals made judgments about a series of truthful and deceptive statements, some of which involved financial fraud. Investment professionals' lie detection accuracy was poor; participants performed no better than would be expected by chance. Accuracy in identifying lies about financial fraud was especially poor. Further, participants displayed poor metacognitive realism when assessing their own performance. The theoretical and practical implications for lie detection in the financial industry are discussed.