Corporate Financial Performance and the Use of Takeover Defenses

This paper tests the hypothesis that the threat of a contested takeover improves corporate performance. This is done by a cross-sectional analysis of listed Danish firms with and without effective takeover defenses. Takeover defenses adopted by Danish firms mainly consist of dual class voting rights often in combination with foundation ownership. Using simultaneous equation estimation to deal with the problem of causation, the results show that unprotected firms do not outperform protected firms. This suggests that management in unprotected firms are disciplined by other corporate governance mechanisms than the market for corporate control, including the legal protection of shareholders.     

外国直接投资与东道国产业关联演进

在世界经济一体化过程中,外国资本的进入将直接或间接影响到东道国产业结构的改造与升级,出现一些值得经济学界关注的变化,尤其是外国投资与东道国"非均衡"发展的关联性。在中国经济进入重化工业时期,重化工业的扩张也由于本国资源、技术、资金等限制而难以为继。为此,在积极引进外资的同时,要着力培育新型产业。基于日本前期产业升级的经验,中国在产业结构升级的第三阶段,应该转向低资源投入、低污染、高附加值的产业发展即新型工业化之路。     

Prison commitments,crime, and unemployment: A theoretical and empirical specification for the United States, 1933–1985

This paper examines sources for the changing commitment rates to U.S. state prisons (PCR) from 1933 to 1985 using a variety of time-series techniques. Theoretically, it resolves ambiguous interpretations of how crime, unemployment, and imprisonment are related. Hypotheses that crime and punishment are in equilibrium are rejected. Our final specification supports theories integrating institutionally endogenous and socially exogenous causes of prison use and includes feedback effects between crime and punishment. We reached several general conclusions. (1) Changes in PCR are due partly to changes in the levels of unemployment, age composition of the population, and military active-duty rates. (2) Effects of the criminal justice system, captured as autoregressive institutional drift, account for approximately half of the year-to-year fluctuations in the PCR. The contemporaneous prison discharge rate also influences the rate of prison commitments. (3) Neither the specified nor the unspecified institutional effects mediate the effects of other exogenous variables. (4) Under most simultaneous-equation specifications, the crime rate is moderately influenced by the contemporaneous unemployment rate and strongly influenced by prior levels of prison commitments. The preferred simultaneous causal model estimates a modest positive coefficient for the unemployment-crime causal path and a substantial positive coefficient for the unemployment-prison commitment causal path.     

Structural weaknesses and the role of the dominant political party: democratic backsliding in Croatia since EU accession

ABSTRACT

Croatia is regarded as a success story of the EU’s enlargement policy. However, this narrative conflicts with the situation on the ground and with expert surveys, which depict incremental, yet persistent democratic backsliding in recent years. A shift towards illiberal practices, primarily focused on the liberal part of the liberal-democratic nexus, is taking place. This research aims to explore the prevalence and causes for the re-emergence of illiberal practices in Croatia by employing an interpretive method to evidence gathered from media articles and research reports published 2013–2019. The use of illiberal policies by the governing Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in three areas of the political system – the capture of independent agencies, control of the judiciary, and the weakening of independent media – is found to be the driver of democratic backsliding. Causes are found in structural reasons linked to the dominant party. Without either internal power-sharing constraints or external EU conditionality pressure, the HDZ has been able to take advantage of structural weaknesses of the system it built and shaped during the 1990s.     

生活质量评价若干问题探讨

生活质量是人们对生活的全面评价和总结。对其进行评价时 ,必须遵循一定的原则构建有关生活质量的指标体系。城市化低下是影响我国居民生活质量的主要原因所在 ,因此 ,大力发展经济 ,促进城市化建设将成为提高我国人民生活质量的重要推动因素。     

文学作品的四层次结构理论

文学作品的结构层次应该是由语言符号层、意象符号层、意义意蕴层和生命意识层构成的一个有机整体。其中 ,生命意识层是其最深层次。     

European Structural Policy: Bend or Break

This article deals with the consequences for the European Structural Policy (ESP) of the extension of the EU with countries from Central and East Europe. It argues that the allocation mechanism of financial assistance from the structural funds must be changed profoundly in order to gain a balanced system of distributing the available funds. In view of the changing Common Agricultural Policy and international trade policy in the framework of the WTO the European Structural Policy will become gradually more important. In order to compensate for the decreasing price support for agricultural products extension of structural assistance in the near future is inevitable.     

当代中国犯罪观的转变

The view on crimes has progressed from the past monism to the present pluralism. In modern China, the concept of crime is in pluralism. The so-called pluralism here means the many concepts of crime not only co-exist macroscopically within a society, but also microcosmically within a single social member. The pluralism of the concept of crime provides us with a multiangular cognition for the complicated phenomena of crime. As a process of the transformation of the view on crime, it has developed from absolutism to relativism, from scientism to humanism, from conservatism to liberalism, from structuralism to progressivism, and from the pattern of state control to the pattern of social control. Li Weihong is an associate professor of law in China Youth University for Political Sciences, whose research covers science of criminal law, criminal policy and criminology. She published her monograph, named Studies on the Hot Issues of Economic Crime; and co-authored a book, ie. Essentials on Criminal Liability. Moreover, she has released over 40 research articles in Chinese journals, the best of which are titled as On the Crime by Taking Advantage of Credit Cards, The Transformation of the Concept of Crime in Modern China, on the Research Object of Science of Criminal Policy.     

私法内的管制——《劳动合同法》规范结构的初步整理

《劳动合同法》是国家管制贯彻于合同关系始终,亦即管制呈现为结构性介入的调整劳资关系的法律。该法调整劳动合同关系的基本技术形态仍是私法性的,但国家管制借助于这些技术,以强制性规范的方式全面渗透到劳动合同关系的主要方面,并集中落实在对劳动力交易对价以及劳动关系解除成本的控制上,其稳定就业和提高劳动力交易价格的劳工政策目的十分明显。同时,国家通过三方协调机制的设置,在劳动关系持续发展过程中充当着启动并引导"当场交易",维系劳资关系动态平衡的实质作用。     

身高推断的法医人类学研究进展

身高属于个体识别的重要指标之一,历来是法医人类学研究的重点和热点。近几年国内外对于身高推断的研究又有新进展。笔者主要对近六年来国内外学术界发表的相关文献进行查阅,并精选具有代表性的文献进行综述,发现主要有以下新的研究进展和趋势:(1)随着人类平均身高的不断增长,原有身高推断方程有不断更新修正的需要;(2)性别、年龄、人种、地域等因素对身高推断影响大,设计实验研究方案时应考虑加入上述因素;(3)医学影像学技术,特别是CT技术成为近年来法医人类学身高推断研究的新方法。