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.     

Do pensions foster education? An empirical perspective

The paper examines the effect of population ageing on public education spending. On the one hand, ageing is expected to have a negative effect on education, as an increasing number of retirees results in ‘intergenerational conflict’ and, hence, the condemnation of education expenditure. On the other hand, ageing, in combination with pay-as-you-go pension systems, offers incentives for the working-age generation to invest in the public education of the young in order to ‘reap’ the benefits (that is, higher income tax/contributions) of their greater future productivity. Empirical evidence derived from the application of a fixed effects approach to panel data for OECD countries shows that the increasing share of elderly people has a non-linear effect on education spending. This indicates a certain degree of intergenerational conflict. Nevertheless, we find that future population ageing, which reinforces the mechanism linking public education and pensions, reflects positively on education expenditure. Furthermore, by disaggregating total education expenditure by educational levels, we observe that this effect is led by levels of non-compulsory education, probably as a reflection of the direct connection to labor productivity.     

中国生殖健康产业的需求与市场

根据生殖健康的内容 ,将生殖健康产业划分为两大市场和 7类产品。通过对人口、购买力和购买欲望发展趋势的分析 ,提出中国生殖健康产业市场需求潜力巨大的预测。在培育生殖健康产业的过程中 ,产业发展要素的协调、市场化的策略与步骤、多方面合作的机制是政府目前需要优先考虑的三大问题     

专业化管理的家族企业——新加坡的华人企业

通过考察大量口迷历史记录、个人访谈、文献研究及有关新加坡经济、社会的评论，研究了亚洲金融危机（以下简称危机）前后新加坡华人企业变化及其发展的持续性，表明危机前，这些大型企业由家族制管理变为专业化管理；危机后，其变化趋势有两种，一种由于面临着西方企业日益激烈的竞争，在政府密切关注下，同时也因缺乏有能力、有管理家族企业意愿的后代，家族制度已松散；另一种由于没有政府的直接管制，在危机后消极的市场形势下，为谋求生存，任用有能力的家族后代充分发挥优势，维持着传统的家族制。本文分别从市场、制度（包括文化和政府）及一些主要大公司的领导者行为分析，推导一个路径清晰、条脉分明的管理变化模式，同时提出进一步的研究方向——专业化管理家族企业的结构及政府的角色。     

Operations of a Pension Fund after the Asian Crisis: The Thai Experience*

During and after the Asian crisis, institutional investors and pension funds in Asian financial markets have been confronted with a number of difficulties effecting their performance and the way they carry out their role within the national pension system. We analyze these problems by comparing the actual investment policy of an institutional investor with an optimal investment strategy derived from the insights of modern portfolio theory. We also analyze whether the organizational set‐up of a pension fund allows it to adequately perform its role within the pension system. As an example, we examine the operations of the Thai Government Pension Fund (GPF). We find that allowing international investments and reducing restrictions on equity investments while lowering the implicit requirements for investments in government debt would allow the GPF to further diversify its investment risk and to increase its risk‐adjusted return. We also show that some changes in the governance structure of the GPF would lower the occurrence of conflicts of interest for the management and increase the efficiency of the GPF operations.     

Government Deficit, Public Investment, and Public Capital in the Transition to an Aging Japan

This paper examines the effects of government deficits, public investment, and public capital on welfare in the transition to an aging Japan by applying a simulated general equilibrium growth model. One of the main results of this paper is that targeting only high economic growth would mislead us as to economic policies, and that a policy to reduce future government deficits is most preferable for almost all generations, even though a cut in future deficits must be followed by a decrease in public investment, thus a decrease in public capital in the future. J. Japan. Int. Econ., December 2002, 16(4), pp. 462–491. Faculty of Economics, Shiga University, Japan; and Management School, Imperial College, United Kingdom. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: H55, H54, H62, C68, J10.     

Consistency of UK Pension Fund Investment Performance

Transition matrix techniques are used to relate the past and present performance of pension fund portfolios. In particular, funds are ranked to study the tendency of portfolios to remain in the same quartile of the ranking as they were in the previous period. For raw returns, funds in both of the top quartiles are found to be more likely to remain in the same quartile than would be expected by chance. This result can be taken as limited evidence for the consistency of performance. Similar systemic effects are observed on a risk-adjusted basis. There appears to be clear evidence that some fund managers can offer a degree of consistent good performance.     

Boundedly complete families which are not complete

Summary Completeness of a family of probability distributions implies its bounded completeness but not conversely. An example of a family which is boundedly complete but not complete was presented by Lehmann and Scheffe [5]. This appears to be the only such example quoted in the statistical literature. The purpose of this note is to provide further examples of this type. It is shown that any given family of power series distributions can be used to construct a class containing infinitely many boundedly complete, but not complete, families. Furthermore, it is shown that the family of continuous distributions , is boundedly complete, but not complete, whereU denotes the uniform distribution on [a, b] and {P _ϑ,ϑ ∈ IR}, is a translation family generated by a distributionP ₀ with mean value zero, which is continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure.     

养老基金筹集模式的实证分析

当前的养老制度改革是关注的焦点。本文首先将从介绍现存的筹集模式入手,试图换个角度来思考在人口老龄化背景下的我国养老金基金制度,实证分析模式选择对于缴费率等的影响,并基于此,讨论未来改革的方向。     

企业年金入市对我国资本市场的影响

本文主要论述了企业年金入市时我国资本市场的影响,包括:为资本市场的发展提供长期而稳定的资金来源、促进 资本市场的稳定以及整合各类金融机构。