Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

Money and business firms are central to short-term nominal gross domestic product (GDP) growth (as opposed to nominal GDP as a flow). Money is defined as the activation of purchasing power of an item/items on a balance sheet, flowing from the buyer of a real, GDP-affecting, product to its seller. Starting from accounting identities such as the equation of exchange, a method is developed that connects sectoral buyers to aggregate expenditure (AE) growth and sellers to aggregate income (AI) growth. The main finding, using National Accounts data for Sweden, US, UK, Japan and Germany over the 1994–2020 period, is that business firms drive short-term nominal GDP growth. Their median contribution to the yearly nominal growth is 105–128%, leaving the remaining sectors to contribute negatively to growth in net terms. This means that business firms finance growth by borrowing or drawing down on assets whereas the remaining sectors are net savers. Tying the real economy variable of net lending (NL) (+)/net borrowing (NB) (–) to its financial counterpart, net financial investments (NFIs), makes it possible to define money explicitly, here applied to Swedish business firms. They primarily use three items on the liability side of the balance sheet to finance expenditure growth: debt securities, loans and trade credit.

The study examines an old but unique event from a new perspective and provides important insights to the financial literature. The result suggests that the competition from the later-launched iShares funds can improve pricing efficiency but decrease liquidity of the corresponding existing country funds. Furthermore, these effects are more profound for emerging country funds than for developed country funds.

Purpose: Classify the characteristics of taxpayers in paying tax compliance based on financial performance, leverage, and tax reporting and analyze the relationship between financial performance and leverage on tax reporting and tax compliance companies.

Design/method: This research was conducted at the Office of the Foreign Investment Tax Service in the Six Regional Offices of the DJP Jakarta, especially the Directorate General of Taxes (KPP PMA ENAM). The population in this study were corporate taxpayers registered at KPP PMA ENAM 2015–2018, namely 750 taxpayers. Sampling using the purposive method obtained as many as 660 companies. Cluster analysis and cross-tabulation were used as analysis methods in this study.

Findings: In particular, corporate tax reporting depends on financial performance, but only on high-level corporate clusters that depend on leverage as well. While in the low company cluster (Cluster 1) tax compliance is influenced by these three variables, in the medium cluster (Cluster 2) tax compliance does not depend on these three variables, while in the high cluster (Cluster 3) tax compliance is only influenced by leverage.

Originality: The cluster analysis method and the cross-tabulation method are used to analyze the effect of the financial performance and leverage variables on the tax reporting and tax compliance variables.

This study examines the association between firms’ tax avoidance and long-term investments. We find that tax avoidance firms make greater investment than nontax avoidance firms, and that the positive association between tax avoidance and investments holds both for firms that are financially constrained, and therefore ex-ante likely to underinvest, and for financially unconstrained firms that are ex-ante more likely to overinvest. Our results further show that CEO equity incentives and governance strength exert an incremental effect on investment decisions of tax avoidance firms. In additional analyses, we demonstrate that tax avoidance firms’ investments are associated with improved future firm performance especially when those firms are ex-ante more likely to underinvest. For tax avoidance firms that are ex-ante more likely to overinvest, current investments are associated with declined future firm performance. Tax avoidance firms have higher (lower) investment efficiency in terms of improved (declined) operating profitability in the post-investment period when they have lower (higher) CEO equity incentives and stronger (weaker) governance. Overall, our results shed light on efficiency in utilizing the available cash through tax avoidance in long-term investments that might create shareholder value for a group of financially constrained firms but diminish shareholder value for another group of financially unconstrained firms.

The synchronized relationship between financial and fundamental prices has been topical for years now. It seems that option pricing theory has not been used to disentangle that relationship between two prices during merger and acquisition (M&A) activities. This paper uses Put-Call parity theorem to explore the divergence of financial and fundamental prices in any firm during the acquisition process. The results illustrate that price differentials are persistent; moreover, the differentials are caused by the exponential factor. Despite the fact that some principles are drawn from the real estate investment trust (REIT) literature, the results have wider implications for industries with similar traits to REITs.

This paper examines 781 proposals sponsored by minority shareholders of Chinese listed companies since the Company Law was revised in 2005, which made proposals more accessible to smaller shareholders. I find that the shareholder structure is essential for minority shareholders to target a company. When the controlling ownership is smaller and minority ownership is relatively larger, a company is more likely to be targeted by minority shareholders’ proposals (MSPs). There is also evidence that minority shareholders target poor performers, but that only happens when the shareholder structure is optimal for minority shareholders to initiate activism. Power, in the form of ownership and identity, dominates the probability of activism behavior. The passage of MSPs heavily depends on whether the proposal is friendly to the management, the identity of the sponsor, and the issues involved. Being targeted by MSPs are often followed by forced top management turnover, but there are no performance improvements in the medium term. Minority shareholders’ activism is more of a game of power.

This paper investigates the impact of state ownership on the efficiency-equality tradeoff in a mixed economy with both state and nonstate sectors. Using overall capital productivity as an efficiency proxy and state output share as an inequality proxy, we identify the efficiency threshold of state capital share that splits the efficiency-equality relationship between a tradeoff and nontradeoff. When state capital share is greater than the threshold (as evidenced in the case of China), lowering state capital share improves efficiency and reduces inequality. Furthermore, our simulation results suggest that the threshold is sensitive to capital shares in output of the both sectors. A broad scope for mutual gains in efficiency and equality exists by raising the capital share in nonstate output and lowering the capital share in state output.