Doing more and doing better are two different entities: Different patterns of family control and environmental performance

Family firms bear two types of agency costs, including type I and type II agency problems, in corporate environmental practices: (1) Outside executives at family firms hesitate to engage in environmental strategies, which can lead to drops in profits; (2) Controlling families employ opportunistically environmental management to achieve their interests. We argue that a primary cause for the agency problems lies on ineffective internal corporate governance at family firms, which can cause loss of managerial (or power) balance between outside executives and family executives. Our findings show that family firms with ownership and strategic control (FSC), which family executives and outside executives monitor and constrain each other, can achieve the highest environmental performance. Moreover, external controls, including product market competition and provincial environmental regulations, substitute effective internal control of FSC. The environmental performance premium of FSC is more prevalent when the production market competition is lower. Family firms with ownership, operational, and strategic control (FOSC) can achieve higher environmental performance within a province with more stringent environmental regulations.     

Does local government competition aggravate haze pollution? A new perspective of factor market distortion

Haze pollution has become a new threat to China's sustainable development, but it may be that local government behaviour can play an important role in the prevention and control of pollutants. A dynamic spatial autoregressive (SAR) model is used to study the relationship between local government competition and haze pollution. To further explore the indirect impact of factor market distortion on haze pollution and control potential endogeneity problems, a newly developed intermediary effect model that incorporates the characteristics of the generalized method of moments (GMM) is utilized to explore how factor market distortion indirectly affects haze pollution. The research results show that regional haze pollution in China is characterized by significant spatial correlation, and local government competition has a positive impact on haze pollution; that is, local government competition exacerbates haze pollution. In general, local government competition not only directly leads to an increase in haze pollution but also further intensifies it by distorting the local factor market, and the intermediary role of factor market distortion is approximately 7.04%. The results of the regional inspection found that competition among local governments in the eastern region did not lead to haze pollution, and distortion of the factor market did not exist as an intermediary effect. However, both direct and intermediary effects are significant in the central and western regions. Therefore, an official performance appraisal system that includes ecological constraints should be established to guide the benign transformation of local government competition, and an environmental management mechanism must be developed for joint prevention and control to reduce haze pollution. In addition, the free flow of factors and marketization are equally important.     

Labor productivity forecasts based on a Beveridge–Nelson filter: Is there statistical evidence for a slowdown?

In this paper, I assess the evidence for a structural break in labor productivity growth in the years before the Great Recession with the use of out-of-sample forecasting exercises for the years 2010 to 2019 and the recently developed Beveridge–Nelson filter. Models based on a Beveridge–Nelson filter with no structural breaks outperform those allowing for a structural break, and there is statistically significant evidence that they outperform the random walk, though all models were too optimistic about labor productivity growth. Recently developed statistical tests do point to the presence of a structural break before the Great Recession, but uncertainty about the data-generating process for labor productivity growth or the timing and magnitude of the break may be too great to be helpful in forecast preparation.     

Noise traders,firm-specific uncertainty and technical trading effectiveness

This is the first study to document evidence of technical trading effectiveness at firm level in the Chinese A-share market by investigating the relationship between excess profits of technical trading rules and firm-specific characteristics. Our results reveal that firms with higher excess profits from technical trading have more noise traders and higher institutional ownership and that those firms tend to be growth firms with lower liquidity and higher firm-specific uncertainty. Further analysis shows that the profitability of technical trading rules is unsustainable and the excess profits of the highest technical trading profit quintile portfolio disappear in the following year.     

Should sequels differ from original movies in pre-launch advertising schedule? Lessons from consumers' online search activity

Sequels have become a profitable strategy in the U.S. motion picture industry because of their strong name recognition. However, while the established positioning of a sequel may help insulate it from competing firms' advertising messages, its familiarity may cause moviegoers to be more easily satiated with advertising from the sequel. Therefore, this study examines how sequels differ from original concept movies in terms of their ad effectiveness. We focus our analysis on pre-launch periods, given these periods' importance in shaping the financial outcomes of motion pictures. We consider the weekly online search volume of a movie as a measure of consumer interest in it, and thus as an intermediate response to pre-launch advertising. We then develop a model that assumes ad effectiveness can decline, due to copy and repetition wearout, and increase, due to forgetting, over time. We find that copy wearout is greater for original movies, while repetition wearout and forgetting are greater for sequels. These findings suggest that sequels should allocate more in early pre-launch periods and less immediately before release, relative to originals, to maximize pre-launch consumer interest.     

Co-movement in Stock Prices in Emerging Economies: The Case of the Caricom Region

The Grand Anse Declaration of 1989 recognised the need for financial integration within the emerging economies that comprise the CARICOM region, as a way of furthering the wider process of economic integration and, indeed, economic development in that region. Using co-movement as a measure of financial integration, this paper investigates the co-movement in stock prices among the Barbados, the Jamaica and the Trinidad and Tobago Stock Exchanges, the three major exchanges within the CARICOM region. It also examines how integrated these exchanges are with the New York Stock Exchange. The GARCH-Copula methodology and, to a lesser extent, estimated correlation coefficients, are used to attain this objective. There appears to be co-movement in stock prices and returns within the CARICOM stock markets and significant dependence structures between the returns of the three CARICOM stock markets. However, there is considerably less evidence of integration between the CARICOM markets and the New York Stock Exchange.     

The importance of consumer multihoming (joint purchases) for market performance: Mergers and entry in media markets

Consumer “multihoming” (watching two TV channels, or buying two news magazines) has surprisingly important effects on market equilibrium and performance in (two‐sided) media markets. We show this by introducing consumer multihoming and advertising finance into the classic circle model of product differentiation. When consumers multihome (attend more than one platform), media platforms can charge only incremental value prices to advertisers. Entry or merger leaves consumer prices unchanged under consumer multihoming, but leaves advertiser prices unchanged under single‐homing: Multihoming flips the side of the market on which platforms compete. In contrast to standard circle results, equilibrium product variety can be insufficient under multihoming.     

工资对个人劳动供给的非线性影响：部门市场化程度差异视角

从市场经济体制的建立到经济社会高质量发展，我国不同部门市场化程度有所差异，劳动供给的部门异质性随之体现。基于中国劳动力动态调查数据，结合汉森门槛回归模型和劳动供给模型，依托部门市场化程度的差异性，文章探讨了工资对劳动力个人供给的非线性影响及其部门异质性。主要得出以下研究结论：第一，我国市场部门与公共部门劳动力的个人劳动供给有所差异。第二，工资与个人劳动供给呈现非线性关系并且存在部门异质性。实证分析结果显示，工资对个人劳动供给的影响存在三个"突变点"，工资门槛均使得工资"激励效应"加强并呈现逐步增加的趋势。第三，劳动供给的工资门槛存在性别、城乡和行业异质性。第四，随着年龄增长、人力资本积累，个人劳动时间供给趋于降低，签署书面劳工合同使得市场部门劳动力工作时间显著增加，而政治面貌显著影响公共部门劳动供给。总体来看，无论是市场部门还是公共部门，我国劳动力个人供给曲线均未"向后弯曲"，国民经济高质量发展、改善收入分配格局、提升居民幸福感等议题需持续关注。     

Capital market integration in ASEAN: A non-stationary panel data analysis

Motivated by the establishment of ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) at the end of 2015, we examine saving-investment relationship in various subgroups of ASEAN to assess their capital market integration. The results from second generation panel unit-root and cointegration tests that account for cross-sectional dependence as well as estimates of long-run saving-retention rate provide some evidence of market integration in ASEAN. The analysis of short-run dynamics suggests that capital mobility in ASEAN during 1980–2014 appears similar to that in OECD countries during 1970–1999. More importantly, across different panel estimators and subgroups of membership, there is considerable heterogeneity among the member countries. The saving-investment association is very weak, thereby implying very high capital mobility, in more developed members such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei; the association is very strong, implying very low capital mobility, for much less developed members such as Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. The results call for renewed effort to develop capital markets in less developed nations and integrate them with the rest of the membership in ASEAN. In this paper, we also address several major shortcomings of the original Feldstein-Horioka framework.