Tax avoidance, corporate transparency, and firm value

textTax avoidance that reduces transfers from shareholders to the government is traditionally viewed as value enhancing to shareholders. The agency perspective of tax avoidance, however, suggests that opportunistic managers may exploit the obfuscatory nature of tax avoidance to mask rent extraction. To shed light on these conflicting views, I use a self-constructed opacity index and multiple measures of tax avoidance to examine how corporate transparency relates to tax avoidance. I find that more transparent firms, which potentially have less severe agency problems, avoid more tax relative to their opaque counterparts. This result suggests that in a large section of the economy, tax avoidance is mainly engaged in by managers to enhance shareholder wealth. Further, I find that investors place a value premium on tax avoidance, but the price premium decreases with corporate opacity. This is consistent with the notion that corporate transparency facilitates the monitoring of managerial actions and thus alleviates outside investors’ concern with the hidden agency costs associated with tax avoidance.Accountin

Comparative Research on China and Taiwan’s Legal Systems: From the View of the Agent Right of Daily Household Matters

The agent right of household matters is one of an important aspect of personal rights and also a personal interest that cannot be ignored. As early as in late Qing dynasty, Chinese legal workers had paid attention on the agent right of household matters. Related legislations can be found in Civil Law Draft of Qing Dynasty (Family Chapter) and the Civil Law Draft of the Republic of China. Due to the social traditions at that time, these laws just stipulated wife’s agent right but not the husband’s. Until in the 1930 Civil Law issued by Nanking National Government, the provisions governing spouses’ rights were transplanted from foreign civil laws and the system of agent right of household matters was first time established. However, because China followed Soviet’s legal mode after the founding of the state, the agent right of household matters was replaced by marital property regime. Ever since that time Taiwan and Chinese mainland’s legal provisions on this right differs. The main aim of this paper is to provide some useful research for settling continuous disputes in modern society through comparative study on China and Taiwan’s agent right of household matters legislation emphasis, subjects, limitations, and burdens

An architecture for context-aware applications

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

Optimal Immediately-Decodable Inter-session Network Coding (IDNC) Schemes for Two Unicast Sessions with Hard Deadline Constraints

In this paper, we study inter-session network coding for sending two unicast sessions over an unreliable wireless channel. Each unicast session transmits a stored video file, whose packets have hard sequential deadline constraints. We first characterize the capacity region (with inter-session network coding) for the transmission rates of the two unicast sessions under heterogeneous channel conditions and heterogeneous deadline constraints. We then develop immediately-decodable network coding (IDNC) schemes for controlling packet transmissions for the unicast sessions subject to hard deadline constraints. In contrast to our prior work that focuses on a single multicast session with homogeneous channel conditions and deadline constraints, the design and performance analysis of the IDNC scheme is much more complicated for unicast-sessions because of the asymmetry due to heterogeneous channel conditions and heterogeneous deadlines. Nonetheless, we establish the optimality of the proposed IDNC scheme when the file sizes are sufficiently large

A survey of system level power management schemes in the dark-silicon era for many-core architectures

Power consumption in Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology has escalated to a point that only a fractional part of many-core chips can be powered-on at a time. Fortunately, this fraction can be increased at the expense of performance through the dark-silicon solution. However, with many-core integration set to be heading towards its thousands, power consumption and temperature increases per time, meaning the number of active nodes must be reduced drastically. Therefore, optimized techniques are demanded for continuous advancement in technology. Existing efforts try to overcome this challenge by activating nodes from different parts of the chip at the expense of communication latency. Other efforts on the other hand employ run-time power management techniques to manage the power performance of the cores trading-off performance for power. We found out that, for a significant amount of power to saved and high temperature to be avoided, focus should be on reducing the power consumption of all the on-chip components. Especially, the memory hierarchy and the interconnect. Power consumption can be minimized by, reducing the size of high leakage power dissipating elements, turning-off idle resources and integrating power saving materials