Using firm fixed-effects regression and data from Vietnamʼs Enterprise Censuses, this study aims to test the female underperformance hypothesis. Our findings decisively undermine these hypotheses. Female-managed firms are smaller than male-managed ones. However, once observed variables and firm fixed-effects are controlled for, female-managed firms have higher revenues and return on assets and capital than male-managed firms. Female-managed firms are more likely to employ female workers and provide more jobs with social insurance. Compared with male-managed firms, moreover, female-managed firms have a higher tax payment rate as well as a higher tax payment amounts.

The relative income hypothesis predicts that an individualʼs level of happiness decreases in othersʼ income. We examine its empirical relevance in South Korea using large survey data from the Korea Welfare Panel Study. We find evidence that higher peer income is strongly correlated with life satisfaction, but its effect on suicidal ideation is modest and largely insignificant. We also find that the effect of peer income is highly heterogeneous; those who consider themselves relatively poorer seem to be more strongly (and adversely) affected by their relative disadvantage than those relatively richer are (positively) affected by their relative advantage.

The income gaps between Korea and her two richer neighbors, Japan and Taiwan in 1935, estimated by the Maddison Project using the backward projection method from 1990, are significantly different from the results based on directly comparing the price levels of 1935. We explore the sources of error in the estimation of PPP using GDP deflators. We find that the errors from the conceptual differences between PPP and GDP deflators are not large or systematically biased; the majority of errors come from the inconsistency of the two data sets, and the selection of the benchmark year. We estimate the GDP per capita of East Asian countries without incongruities, using information from all benchmark years available.

Uniform pricing in the motion-picture industry is puzzling in light of the potential profitability of prices that vary with demand characteristics. Considering a model a la Hotelling in which moviegoers form their beliefs about movie quality through pricing schemes to which an exhibitor commits, we characterize the conditions under which committing to uniform pricing is more profitable than committing to variable pricing. Some extensions of the model are discussed as well.

We explain why 'frivolous suits (FS)' occur particularly under complete information. Existing analyses such as the 'traditional' and the 'early-defense-cost' models are not fully robust in that they either drop the plaintiff's withdrawal option or rely on a restrictive assumption that the defendant loses immediately unless he early defends himself at high cost. We pursue a more generalized explanation. We offer an infinite-period litigation model with uncertainty which reflects the reality more consistently. We then show that FS can occur as a subgame perfect equilibrium since the defendant over the pre-trial stage may settle with FS to save future time and/or trial costs. We further demonstrate that FS can occur even under the British rule of fee shifting.

We tried to develop a two sector model to investigate the role of state sector on the urban income inequality in China.We showed that the state sector in the coastal provinces rather than the state sector in the interior provinces plays an important role in the income inequality in urban China.The findings of empirical analysis imply that the income inequality for urban households in China is mainly related to the coastal provinces with relatively higher return to capital, capital intensity, and thus capital income in the state sector.The Chinese government should redirect their policy that emphasizes the role of large enterprises in the state sector and subsidizes the capital in the capital-intensive state sector.The main reason for shifting from emphasizing the capital-intensive state sector to the labor-intensive private sector is to reduce inequality in the urban China.

This paper studies the effects of the diffusion of a General Purpose Technology (GPT) that spreads first within the developed North country of its origin, and then to a developing South country. In the developed general equilibrium growth model, each final good can be produced by one of two technologies. Each technology is characterized by a specific labor complemented by a specific set of intermediate goods, which are enhanced periodically by Schumpeterian R&D activities. When quality reaches a threshold level, a GPT arises in one of the technologies and spreads first to the other technology within the North. Then, it propagates to the South, following a similar sequence. Since diffusion is not even, neither intra- nor inter-country, the GPT produces successive changes in the direction of technological knowledge and in inter- and intra-country wage inequality. Through this mechanism the different observed paths of wage inequality can be accommodated.

The structure of the present global capitalist world, which is composed of various sets of capitalist systems, can be clearly explained and described with the mathematical concept of 'measure' instead of the conventional term of 'value'. The history of the commodity world is that of the irreversible order of three measures: use-measure, exchange-measure and temporal exchange-measure. According to that order, sets of capitalist systems have 'grown' up to the present day. This process of capitalist 'growth' is a transformation process from the realeconomic world or space-time of use-measure to the rational space of null sets dominated by money. It may foretell the destiny of mankind's economic activities and the vicissitudes of human civilization.

We compare the costs oftwo regulatory policies about the entry ofnew firms. We consider an incumbent firm that has more information about the market demand than the regulator and can use this advantage to persuade the regulator to make entry more difficult. With the first regulatory policy the regulator uses the incumbent price pre-regulation to get information about the demand. With the second regulatory policy the regulator designs a mechanism to motivate the incumbent firm to price truthfully. We conclude that for a wide range ofsituations, social welfare is strictly higher with the more active regulatory policy.

In this paper, I critically examine how geographers and other social scientists have developed complementary research programs for economistic studies of finance by drawing on new relational concepts such as networks and embeddedness and opening up new research frontiers. In so doing, I investigate how global financial spaces have been conceptualized in mainstream finance literature and how economic concepts have been applied to studies of finance. Drawing on these discussions, I suggest that we need to undertake an alternative research of financial space that pays more attention to relational power dynamics among financial firms and the macroeconomic impacts of financial flows on regional economies.