Suchergebnisse

After 40 years of economic ascendancy, China's environmental challenges and public awareness of them have swelled substantially. Both concern mutual funds that invest in publicly traded Chinese firms, many of which have shown questionable environmental responsibility. This study investigates whether mutual fund ownership of Chinese corporations influences firms' disclosures of environmental responsibility by empirical methodologies. Annual data for 25,188 firm-year observations of corporations trading as A-shares in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2007–2019 revealed that ownership by mutual funds, and especially by leading funds, correlates strongly and positively with environmental disclosures. These results imply that mutual funds were activist investors that influenced sampled firms to disclose their environmental responsibility during the period 2007–2019. We also examine environmental reporting and mutual fund stock ownership in relation to security analyst coverage, whether sampled firms are government-owned, and periods before and after the implementation of China's New Environmental Protection Law. Results are heterogeneous with respect to all three considerations. Our findings are significant for regulators, investors, and corporate managers.

Abstract
We analyse monetary policy in a model where temporary shocks can permanently scar the economy's productive capacity. Workers lose skill while unemployed and are costly to retrain, generating multiple steady-state unemployment rates. Following a large shock, unless monetary policy acts aggressively and quickly enough to prevent a significant rise in unemployment, hiring falls to a point where the economy recovers slowly at best—at worst, it falls into a permanent unemployment trap. Monetary policy can only avoid these outcomes if it commits in a timely manner to more accommodative policy in the future. Timely commitment is essential as the effectiveness of monetary policy is state dependent: once the recession has left substantial scars, monetary policy cannot speed up a slow recovery, or escape from an unemployment trap.

In this study we explored caregivers' self-efficacy for managing people aged 65 and over with dementia behavior disturbance (DBD) and examined factors associated with the perception of care burden. A purposive sample of 162 community-dwelling people aged 65 and over with dementia and
162 primary family caregivers in Taiwan participated. The results revealed that frequency of DBD, caregivers' female gender, caregivers' level of education, relationship with care recipient, hours of care, and caregiver's self-efficacy in managing DBD were significantly correlated to the care
burden, and explained up to 36.1% of the variance. Moreover, self-efficacy of DBD management in relation to inappropriate sexual behaviors, aggressive behaviors, general aimlessness, and lack of cooperation significantly contributed to the caregivers' perception of care burden. Healthcare
professionals could use these results to design appropriate interventions to alleviate the care burden.

Successful telecare services require technical and operational stability and should meet users' needs. In this study our aim was to explore the telecare services commonly used by Taiwanese aged 60 and over (mean age of participants = 65 ± 4.5 years) and how both user satisfaction
and trust of the families directly influence continued use intention. A survey was conducted with 120 people living in the community in Eastern Taiwan, 60 of whom were elderly people who had received telecare over a 2-year period, and 60 of the telecare users' family members. The findings
revealed that among this group of older adult users telecare continued use intention was significantly associated with their level of satisfaction (p < .01) and their family members' trust (p < .01) of these services. These results should assist medical institutions in
understanding the experiences of older adults using telecare and in providing future services that better comply with clients' requirements.

This paper extends the currency crisis models in Obstfeld [Obstfeld, M., 1994. The logic of currency crises. Cahiers Economiques et Monetaries], [Obstfeld, M., 1996. Models of currency crises with self- fulfilling features. European Economic Review 40, 1037-1047] by modeling both the government's side and speculators' side and introducing uncertainty about each party's payoff. We argue that a speculative attack (defense) can be well modeled as a war of attrition between the government and speculators under asymmetric information. We then solve for a pure strategy, weakly perfect, Bayesian rational expectation equilibrium in which each party's time until concession depends on her benefits from winning and her costs of fighting. Using this model, we are able to explain important facts of currency crises. First, the model shows that failed defenses (attacks) can be ex-ante rational for governments (speculators). Second, the model predicts systematic variations in the durations of defenses. Finally, we also show that currency crises can be self- fulfilling in the sense that there exist multiple rational expectation equilibria in our model. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]