ES Risks and Shareholder Voice He, Yazhou Ellen; Kahraman, Bige; Lowry, Michelle
The Review of financial studies,
12/2023, Letnik:
36, Številka:
12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Abstract
We examine whether shareholder votes in environmental and social (ES) proposals are informative about firms’ ES risks. ES proposals are unique in that they nearly always fail. We examine ...whether mutual funds’ support for these failed proposals contains information about the ES risks that firms face. Higher support in failed ES proposals predicts subsequent ES incidents and the effects of these incidents on shareholder value. Examining the detailed records of fund votes, we find that agency frictions between a group of shareholders contribute to proposal failure.
Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online
We measure the effects of firm policies on racial pay differences in Brazil. Non-Whites are less likely to be hired by high-wage firms, explaining about 20 percent of the racial wage gap for both ...genders. Firm-specific pay premiums for non-Whites are also compressed relative to Whites, contributing another 5 percent for that gap. A counterfactual analysis reveals that about two-thirds of the underrepresentation of non-Whites at higher-wage firms is explained by race-neutral skill-based sorting. Non-skill-based sorting and differential wage setting are largest for college-educated workers, suggesting that the allocative costs of discriminatory hiring and pay policies may be relatively large in Brazil.
Abstract
Market power of intermediaries contributes to the low incomes of farmers in India. I study the role of spatial competition between intermediaries in determining the prices that farmers ...receive in India by focusing on a law that restricts farmers to selling their goods to intermediaries in their own state. I show that the discontinuities in market power generated by the law translate into discontinuities in prices. Increasing spatial competition by one standard deviation causes prices received by farmers to increase by 6.4%. I propose and estimate a quantitative spatial model of bargaining and trade to shed light on spatial and aggregate implications. Estimates from the structural model suggest that removing the interstate trade restriction in India would increase competition between intermediaries. Thereby average farmer prices and their output would increase by at least 11% and 7%, respectively. The value of the national crop output would increase by at least 18%. However, there are distributional consequences as well, as some farmers stand to lose due to increased local production.
The g′r′i′ colors of seven likely and potential contact binaries in the Kuiper Belt were acquired with the Magellan-Baade telescope and combined with colors from the literature to understand contact ...binary surfaces. The likely and potential contact binaries discovered in the dynamically cold classical population display very red/ultra-red colors. Such colors are common in this sub-population and imply that the cold classical contact binaries were formed in situ. The likely contact binaries found in several mean motion resonances with Neptune have colors from moderately to ultra-red, suggesting different formation regions. Among the nine contact binaries discovered in resonances, five have very red/ultra-red colors and four have moderately red surfaces. Based on the very red/ultra-red colors and low to moderate inclinations of the contact binaries in resonances, these contact binaries are possibly escaped dynamically cold classicals that are now trapped in resonances. Moderately red surfaces are common in diverse sub-populations of the Kuiper Belt, thus pinpointing their origin is difficult though they are most likely captured objects that formed in the giant planet area. Finally, for the contact binary population we report an anti-correlation between inclination and g′-r′, as noticed in the rest of this belt. We also find hints of trends between eccentricity, perihelion distance, rotational period, and g′-r′, but as we are still dealing with a limited sample, additional data are required to confirm them.
Species trees provide insight into basic biology, including the mechanisms of evolution and how it modifies biomolecular function and structure, biodiversity and co-evolution between genes and ...species. Yet, gene trees often differ from species trees, creating challenges to species tree estimation. One of the most frequent causes for conflicting topologies between gene trees and species trees is incomplete lineage sorting (ILS), which is modelled by the multi-species coalescent. While many methods have been developed to estimate species trees from multiple genes, some which have statistical guarantees under the multi-species coalescent model, existing methods are too computationally intensive for use with genome-scale analyses or have been shown to have poor accuracy under some realistic conditions.
We present ASTRAL, a fast method for estimating species trees from multiple genes. ASTRAL is statistically consistent, can run on datasets with thousands of genes and has outstanding accuracy-improving on MP-EST and the population tree from BUCKy, two statistically consistent leading coalescent-based methods. ASTRAL is often more accurate than concatenation using maximum likelihood, except when ILS levels are low or there are too few gene trees.
ASTRAL is available in open source form at https://github.com/smirarab/ASTRAL/. Datasets studied in this article are available at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/phylo/datasets/astral.
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Retired households, especially those with high lifetime income, decumulate their wealth very slowly, and many die leaving large estates. The three leading explanations for the "retirement savings ...puzzle" are the desire to insure against uncertain lifespans and medical expenses, the desire to leave bequests to one's heirs, and the desire to remain in one's own home. We discuss the empirical strategies used to differentiate these motivations, most of which go beyond wealth to exploit additional features of the data. The literature suggests that all the motivations are present, but has yet to reach a consensus about their relative importance.
We investigated molecular evolution and spatiotemporal dynamics of atypical Legionella pneumophila serogroup 1 sequence type 1905 and determined its long-term persistence and linkage to human disease ...in dispersed locations, far beyond the large 2014 outbreak epicenter in Portugal. Our finding highlights the need for public health interventions to prevent further disease spread.
The European Union's (EU) environmental legislation establishes common measures to prevent the entry and spread of invasive non-native species and to minimize their impacts. However, species that are ...native to at least 1 member state but non-native and potentially invasive in others (NPIS) are in limbo because they are neither legally regulated at the EU level nor in most member states. We used the Communication and Information Resource Centre for Administrations, Businesses and Citizens (CIRCABC) raw data on NPISs (317 taxa) to analyze their distribution across the EU and identify which biogeographical regions are the main sources of invasions. We additionally evaluated the conservation challenge posed by NPISs that are threatened in within their native ranges. We performed a pairwise analysis summarizing the number of species that are native to a given member state but non-native to another and vice versa. While distribution patterns of NPISs varied across taxa groups, overall, southern and central EU countries were both donors and recipients of NPISs. Eastern countries were mainly a source, and western and northern countries mostly received NPISs . Around 27 % of NPISs were threatened in some of their EU native ranges, which is a challenge for conservation and management because some of them have serious negative effects on European biodiversity, but hitherto remain outside the scope of the EU regulation of invasive non-native species. This highlights an unresolved paradox because efforts to manage species as invasive conflict with efforts to protect them as threatened within the same territory. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Two neighboring countries in the southeastern region of Europe, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH), belong to the same geotectonic units of the Dinarides and to the Pannonian Basin, which ...influence relief types, lithology, and types of slope movements, i.e., landslides. The Dinarides are a mountain chain with a northwest-southeast direction that span from Slovenia through Croatia, BIH and Montenegro to Albania. The Pannonian Basin is situated within the Alpine, Carpathian, and Dinaric mountain belts at the boundary between Central and Southeastern Europe. The paper describes the general geological and geomorphological conditions in the Dinarides and the European Pannonian Basin in Croatia and BIH that are preparatory causal factors for landslides in the following environments: the hills of the Istrian Peninsula and Rječina River Valley; hills, low- and mid-altitude mountains in the Dinarides; and lowlands and hills in the Pannonian Basin. Landslide types, dimensions, and activities in the described areas are related to natural conditions primarily influenced by tectonic evolution and by recent anthropogenic processes, e.g., urbanization. More detailed descriptions are provided for the following selected phenomena, which are interesting because of the associated damage and potential risk: translational block landslide Brus and erosion phenomena on the Istrian Penninsula; relict and historical large, deep-seated landslides in the Rječina River Valley, including the recently reactivated Grohovo and Valići Landslides; catastrophic landslides triggered by precipitation during Cyclone Tamara in BIH (2014) (the Mačkovac-Šerići Landslide, Mjestova Ravan Landslide, Kosova Landslide, and Lukavica Landslide); and a large, deep-seated landslide in urban area of Zagreb, the Kostanjek Landslide. Recent rainfall triggering conditions of landslides in Croatia (2013) and BIH (2014) are also specified to emphasize the landslide risk and necessity of landslide risk management. The conclusions of the paper also note historical and potential damage due to landslide reactivations together with the spatial distribution of landslide-prone areas, which requires landslide mapping in the form of landslide inventory, susceptibility, hazard, and risk maps.
Abstract
Despite the fact that research and development (R&D) activities are carried out in most countries in public research institutes such as universities and public research organizations, there ...have been few studies that attempted to estimate the economic impact of such public investment in R&D. In this paper, we analyze the relations between total factor productivity (TFP) and public and private R&D as well as gross domestic product for a set of 17 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries using a vector-error-correction model. We find that for the period 1975–2014, investment in public R&D has had a clearly positive effect on TFP growth in the majority of countries analyzed. In simulations allowing for a permanent positive shock to public R&D, we observe a strong dynamic complementarity between the public and private (domestic) stocks of R&D for several countries. In countries where this complementarity is strong, the TFP effect of extra public R&D investments is also strong. A discriminant analysis shows that in countries with high complementarity between private and public R&D, the share of foreign funding of R&D performed in the business sector combined with a high business R&D intensity tends to be low. At the same time, the share of basic R&D in business R&D combined with a higher public R&D intensity tends to be higher in countries with strong complementarity.
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