Income Distribution and Public Transfers as Social Safety Nets in Korea

Using 5-year balanced household panel data, this paper shows that the inequality of per capita income in Korea aggravated during the financial crisis in 1998. The decomposition analysis of income inequality by factor component shows that the dominant positive effect on the income inequality is by the asset income. Next is the wage income, followed by the other income. Furthermore, this paper shows that social safety net programs were not yet in place during the initial period of the crisis. Public transfers were not effective social safety net devices and did not contribute in decreasing income inequality. Private transfers, on the other hand, were effective devices and narrowed the disparity in household income.

Secured Transactions Under China and US Law

The secured-credit law is key of modern commercial transactions. Under China’s Property Law, some aspects in terms of secured transactions have been improved with comparison to Security Law (1995), but it is considered to be unsatisfactory. The purpose of this article is to examine the very significant problems of China law on secured transactions, including the narrow range of the movable collateral, the lack of centralized registration system and the cumbersome enforcement process. For a reference, this paper takes Article 9 of United States Uniform Commercial Code as a model to compare the differences in Secured Transactions between China and US: Article 9 made it possible for secured transactions to be conducted with maximum flexibility and efficiency. Based on the reference point, this research also tries to find out to what extent it could be imported to China

An analysis of the effects of the probability of informed trading (pin) on corporate diversification discount and CEO pay-performance sensitivity : evidence from China

This thesis includes estimating the probability of informed trading, PIN, developed by Easley, Kiefer and O’Hara (1996, 1997a, 1997b), for a large sample of listed firms in China from 2002 to 2008, and I use PIN to explore two independent research questions in corporate finance. First, the probability of informed trading is applied to explain the discount in value for firms with diversified business operations. Although aiming to increase firm value, the corporate diversification decision usually results in a firm value discount, for a variety of reasons, one of which is the transparency problem. My study directly tests the relation between the information asymmetry revealed from the stock market and the firm value discount due to diversification decision. The results show that the corporate diversification decisions result in a lower firm value in China, mainly because the diversified firms suffer from a higher level of information asymmetry or a lower level of transparency. After controlling for the measure of information asymmetry, the strategy of diversification itself does not reduce firm value. Second, the probability of informed trading is applied to explain the payperformance sensitivity of CEO compensation in Chinese listed firms. The payperformance sensitivity measures the change in managerial compensation based on the change in shareholder wealth. A higher information asymmetry helps and encourages shareholders to spend more on incentivizing the management team. My results show that higher level information asymmetry is associated with higher payperformance sensitivity of CEOs in China. The result also holds if information asymmetry is approximated by analysts’ forecast errors. According to the estimates of PIN in this thesis, Chinese firms are shown to exhibit a higher level of information asymmetry than what has been found in the U.S. market. The thesis ends with a brief discussion of the results and what future research could follow

Current-induced synchronized switching of magnetization

We investigate current-induced magnetization switching for a multilayer structure that allows a reduced switching current while maintaining high thermal stability of the magnetization. The structure consists of a perpendicular polarizer, a perpendicular free-layer, and an additional free-layer having in-plane magnetization. When the current runs perpendicular to the structure, the in-plane free-layer undergoes a precession and supplies an internal rf field to the perpendicular free-layer, resulting in a reduced switching current for one current polarity. For the other polarity, the in-plane free-layer almost saturates perpendicular to the plane and acts as another perpendicular polarizer, which also reduces the switching current.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure

Financial Innovation of the Chinese Financial Markets: New Types of Chattel Pledges

The author examines some of the difficulties relating to chattel pledges in China from a financial innovation perspective. This article finds that: (i) under current Chinese financial practice, legal innovation exists in pledges over bank accounts and dynamic pledges; (ii) the new types of chattel pledge faces difficulties establishment and implement of a pledge; (iii) the numerus clausus principle is called into question and should be relaxed to recognize the new types of chattel pledges by way of a broad interpretation, and party autonomy should be taken into account in the realization of them

Opportunistic Scheduling and Beamforming for MIMO-OFDMA Downlink Systems with Reduced Feedback

Opportunistic scheduling and beamforming schemes with reduced feedback are proposed for MIMO-OFDMA downlink systems. Unlike the conventional beamforming schemes in which beamforming is implemented solely by the base station (BS) in a per-subcarrier fashion, the proposed schemes take advantages of a novel channel decomposition technique to perform beamforming jointly by the BS and the mobile terminal (MT). The resulting beamforming schemes allow the BS to employ only {\em one} beamforming matrix (BFM) to form beams for {\em all} subcarriers while each MT completes the beamforming task for each subcarrier locally. Consequently, for a MIMO-OFDMA system with $Q$ subcarriers, the proposed opportunistic scheduling and beamforming schemes require only one BFM index and $Q$ supportable throughputs to be returned from each MT to the BS, in contrast to $Q$ BFM indices and $Q$ supportable throughputs required by the conventional schemes. The advantage of the proposed schemes becomes more evident when a further feedback reduction is achieved by grouping adjacent subcarriers into exclusive clusters and returning only cluster information from each MT. Theoretical analysis and computer simulation confirm the effectiveness of the proposed reduced-feedback schemes.Comment: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Beijing, May 19-23, 200