Credit risk, trade credit and finance: evidence from Taiwanese manufacturing firms

Trade credit does not use collateral and the hard-to-enforce contracts depend on trust and reputation. Taiwan is a small open economy and suffers more information asymmetry problems than a country with more domestic trade. Exploring this situation, this paper collects data for Taiwanese traded manufacturing firms and links this to the credit-risk index, called the TCRI, to test whether a firm's trade credit will decrease following an increase in its credit-risk index after controlling other factors. The main findings are as follows. First, TCRI adversely affects trade credit, measured as accounts payable relative to short-term debt, and the effect is larger for the small firms. Second, short-term bank loans relative to short-term debt increase with credit risk. Taiwanese banks offer more short-term credit to traded firms who experience a deterioration in their TCRI rating, a higher issuing cost of commercial paper and less access to trade credit.Credit rating, Trade credit, Short-term bank loan, Panel data

Stackelberg Game for Distributed Time Scheduling in RF-Powered Backscatter Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we study the transmission strategy adaptation problem in an RF-powered cognitive radio network, in which hybrid secondary users are able to switch between the harvest-then-transmit mode and the ambient backscatter mode for their communication with the secondary gateway. In the network, a monetary incentive is introduced for managing the interference caused by the secondary transmission with imperfect channel sensing. The sensing-pricing-transmitting process of the secondary gateway and the transmitters is modeled as a single-leader-multi-follower Stackelberg game. Furthermore, the follower sub-game among the secondary transmitters is modeled as a generalized Nash equilibrium problem with shared constraints. Based on our theoretical discoveries regarding the properties of equilibria in the follower sub-game and the Stackelberg game, we propose a distributed, iterative strategy searching scheme that guarantees the convergence to the Stackelberg equilibrium. The numerical simulations show that the proposed hybrid transmission scheme always outperforms the schemes with fixed transmission modes. Furthermore, the simulations reveal that the adopted hybrid scheme is able to achieve a higher throughput than the sum of the throughput obtained from the schemes with fixed transmission modes

Race, Dignity, and Commerce

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Suitable Targets ? Parallels and Connections Between Hate Crimes and Driving While Black

This Essay seeks to show that there is less to some of these apparent differences than meets the eye. While hate crimes may tend to be less routine and more violent than discriminatory traffic stops, closer examination of each shows the need to complicate our understanding of both. The work of social scientists who have studied bias-motivated violence and of legal scholars who have studied racial profiling- prominent among them my fellow panelist, Professor David A. Harris- reveals striking similarities and connections between the two practices. In particular, both hate crimes and racial profiling tend to be condemned only at the extremes, in situations where they appear to be irrational and excessive, but overlooked in cases where they seem logical or are expected. The tendency to see only the most extreme cases as problematic, however, fails to recognize that neither practice is as marginal as it might seem. Both forms of discrimination are strongly influenced by a social context that has designated certain social groups as the accepted or suitable targets for ill treatment. They both reflect especially strongly the myth that certain groups are prone to criminality or deviance. In turn, the perpetration of both practices also reinforces both the suitable target designation and myth of criminal propensity by influencing the perceptions and behavior of both members and nonmembers of vulnerable groups

Race as Proxy: Situational Racism and Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes

In our society, race can act as a proxy for a long list of characteristics, qualities, and statuses. For people of color, the most powerful of these associations have too often been negative, and have carried with them correspondingly negative consequences. We often link color with undesirable personal qualities such as laziness, incompetence, and hostility, as well as disfavored political viewpoints such as lack of patriotism or disloyalty to the United States. Race even acts as a proxy for susceptibility to some diseases. Medical professionals so often diagnose schizophrenia in blacks, for example, that the association has come full circle, and the diagnosis now acts as a proxy for race. The association with perhaps the most far-reaching effects is that of race as a proxy for criminality and deviance, an association that not only carries into the criminal justice system through practices such as racial profiling in law enforcement, but also has implications for how people of color are treated in contexts as mundane as retail transactions and as consequential as health care. The use of race as a proxy for criminality even supports the converse notion that people of color are suitable targets for crime. The DePaul Law Review chose an apt phrase in titling this Symposium Race as Proxy, for the word proxy captures the offhand, unthinking, default manner in which race often influences decision making. Accordingly, the term also highlights a basic problem with which legal standards have, so far, not come to terms. Despite the wealth of antidiscrimination laws that would seem to prohibit the use of race as a proxy in a wide range of contexts, much race-based decision making escapes legal sanction. Recent legal scholarship has been particularly critical of the prevailing model of intentional discrimination. Scholars have pointed out the inadequacy of individual adjudication under that model to account for the largest share of modern-day discrimination by illuminating the complex and subtle means by which race has come to carry its significant and pernicious associations. This Article makes the case for institutional change as a means of disrupting the processes by which we come to expect and accept the current state of affairs, adopting as our default the notion that much of the differential treatment of people of color is acceptable and appropriate. It argues for lessening our emphasis on individual wrongdoers and increasing our attention to the context in which individuals operate

Reframing Hate

The concept and naming of “hate crime,” and the adoption of special laws to address it, provoked controversy and raised fundamental questions when they were introduced in the 1980s. In the decades since, neither hate crime itself nor those hotly debated questions have abated. To the contrary, hate crime has increased in recent years—although the prominent target groups have shifted over time—and the debate over hate crime laws has reignited as well. The still-open questions range from the philosophical to the doctrinal to the pragmatic: What justifies the enhanced punishment that hate crime laws impose based on the perpetrator’s motivation? Does that enhanced punishment infringe on the perpetrator’s rights to freedom of belief and expression? How can we know or prove a perpetrator’s motivation? And, most practical of all: Do hate crime laws work? This Essay proposes that we reframe our understanding of what we label as hate crimes. It argues that those crimes are not necessarily the acts of hate-filled extremists motivated by deeply held, fringe beliefs, but instead often reflect the broader, even mainstream, social environment that has marked some social groups as the expected or even acceptable targets for crime and violence. In turn, hate crimes themselves influence the social environment by reinforcing recognizable patterns of discrimination. The Essay maintains that we should broaden our understanding of the motivations for and effects of hate crimes and draws connections between hate crimes and seemingly disparate phenomena that have recently captured the nation’s attention