Suchergebnisse

"Expanded dissemination of legal information during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) transformed Chinese law, judicial authority, and popular legal consciousness. This volume combines methodologies from the study of print culture and legal history to compare different official and commercial editions of the Qing Code, popular handbooks for amateur legal practitioners, and manuals for community legal lectures. It challenges the prevalent assumption that the Qing government monopolized the production and circulation of legal information and that local officials and the common people had little legal knowledge. During the Qing, most legal books were commercially published and available to anyone who could afford to buy them. Commercial publishers thus had greater power and influence in producing authoritative legal texts-including The Great Qing Code-than did official publishers. These publishers extended the circulation of legal texts and enhanced the judicial authority of unofficial legal commentaries by making them more broadly available in convenient formats. Law was no longer privileged knowledge monopolized by the imperial state and high elites. Accurate legal information was widely available through text and oral channels in the Qing, and both officials and commoners had ready access to it. The flourishing trade in commercial legal imprints contributed to the formation of a new legal culture, with features that included the free flow of accurate legal information, the rise of nonofficial legal experts, a large law-savvy population, and a high litigation rate in local society"--

This paper investigates the determinants of public pension plan risk-taking behavior using the percentage of total plan assets invested in the equity markets and the pension asset beta as measures of investment risk. We find that government accounting standards strongly affect public fund investment risk, as higher return assumptions (used to discount pension liabilities) are associated with higher equity allocation and beta. Unlike private pension plans, public funds undertake more risk if they are underfunded and have lower investment returns in the previous years, consistent with the risk transfer hypothesis. Furthermore, pension funds in states facing financial constraints allocate more assets to equity and have higher pension asset betas. There also appears to be a herding effect in that a change in CalPERS portfolio beta or equity allocation is mimicked by other pension funds. Finally, the results offer mild support of a public union effect.

AbstractMultichannel strategies are widely observed in practice. In some jurisdictions, the previously tax‐free online channel is now required to remit sales tax. Motivated by policy evolution and sales‐tax practices, we build analytical models to study the effects of sales tax on multichannel strategies and social welfare (which is defined as the overall surplus minus the negative external impact). We find that retailers prefer the online‐and‐offline channel to others when the product value is low relative to the consumer channel preference. If the offline sales tax rate is sufficiently high, the offline channel may simply function as the showroom. We also explore the optimal sales tax rate(t) that can maximize social welfare. We recognize that sales tax not only directly affects social welfare by influencing the optimal price (and service) decisions in the supply chain, but also indirectly affects social welfare through retailers' channel choice. In particular, imposing an online sales tax for low value products on small retailers only to transfer revenue from the retailers to the government; it is ineffective in increasing social welfare. We advise governments to develop sales tax policies based on consideration of channel type, product category, and the fit between the channel and product. Whereas an online tax free or a uniform tax rate fits low value products, setting different tax rates for different channels can be admissible for high value products. Counterintuitively, we also find that consumer showrooming may increase social welfare, as it reduces product returns (and the corresponding environmental impacts).