The Political Dynamics of Corporate Tax Avoidance: The Chinese Experience

In China's political selection system, officials capable of growing local economies are reward-ed with promotions. Eager to demonstrate economic achievements, newly appointed local lead-ers may raise tax revenues to expand fiscal expenditures on infrastructure projects. Against this backdrop, we study how political appointments influence local firms' tax planning. Based on a sample of locally administered state-owned enterprises (SOEs), we find firms decrease their tax avoidance after new leaders take office. The political-turnover effect on these firms' tax positions is more evident when the incoming leaders have more political clout over SOE managers, the incentives to divert resources are stronger, or politician-manager networks are present, and subsides following the launch of the anticorruption campaign. Furthermore, firms with higher post-turnover tax payments subsequently receive more government contracts or subsidies. Overall, our findings suggest political incentives shape the tax-planning activities of SOE managers in a "two-way favor exchange" manner.

Media Capture Through Favor Exchange

We use data from Hungary to establish two results about the relationship between the government and the media. (i) We document large advertising favors from the government to connected media, and large corruption coverage favors from connected media to the government. Our empirical strategy exploits sharp reallocations around changes in media ownership and other events to rule out market‐based explanations. (ii) Under the assumptions of a structural model, we distinguish between owner ideology and favor exchange as the mechanism driving favors. We estimate our model exploiting within‐owner changes in coverage for identification and find that both mechanisms are important. These results imply that targeted government advertising can meaningfully influence content. Counterfactuals show that targeted advertising can also influence owner ideology, by making media ownership more profitable to pro‐government connected investors. Our results are consistent with qualitative evidence from many democracies and suggest that government advertising affects media content worldwide.

What research for what training in psychotherapy? Some methodological issues and a proposal

To define boundaries and links between research and training in psychotherapy we have to establish what kind of research is needed for this purpose. For defining psychotherapy as a science some basic epistemological premises should be affirmed and specific methods have to be devised, using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, diachronic and longitudinal perspectives, cumulative and meta-analytic strategies, focusing both the techniques used in the therapies and the relationship between the therapist subject and the client subject as a core mean for produce change. What should be evaluated in this research process, what methods and techniques of assessment should be preferred, what analyses of data are suitable: these are the main issues addressed in the article, as they are useful for planning the training of a therapist as a researcher, regardless of the privileged theoretical and technical approach. Science and practice have to be connected, since they both allow the monitoring of what occurs within the confines of the therapy and favor exchange among psychotherapists from differing theoretical approaches, which also increases their external visibility in the scientific community and in a wider social context. The goal of fostering scientific attitudes in the psychotherapists needs a specific training, to acquire a research mindedness also out of the academic laboratories. A cooperation among scientific associations and institutions is proposed to reach these objectives necessary for psychotherapists’ trainings including competencies in evaluating and sharing the scientific aspects of their work.

Efficient partnership formation in networks

We analyze the formation of partnerships in social networks. Players need favors at random times and ask their neighbors in the network to form exclusive long‐term partnerships that guarantee reciprocal favor exchange. Refusing to provide a favor results in the automatic removal of the underlying link. Players agree to provide the first favor in a partnership only if they otherwise face the risk of eventual isolation. In equilibrium, players essential for realizing every maximum matching can avoid this risk and enjoy higher payoffs than inessential players. Although the search for partners is decentralized and reflects local partnership opportunities, the strength of essential players drives efficient partnership formation in every network. Equilibrium behavior is determined by the classification of nodes in the Gallai–Edmonds decomposition of the underlying network.

A Third Musketeer on the ER: MOSPD2 is a Novel VAP-related Receptor for FFAT Motifs

Interorganelle membrane contact sites are subcellular structures that favor exchange and communication inside the cell. Such microdomains are built by molecular bridges that create a physical connection between two distinct organelles. The field of contact sites is now flourishing with discoveries of new tethering molecules. In that context, we identified by an unbiased proteomic approach a novel scaffold protein named MOtile SPerm Domain-containing protein 2 (MOSPD2). MOSPD2 is an endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-resident protein that is able to interact with several organelle-bound proteins that possess a small motif, named FFAT (two phenylalanines in an acidic tract). Consequently, we showed that MOSPD2 and its protein partners build contacts between the ER and endosomes, mitochondria, or Golgi. These findings highlight a new way for docking organelles on the ER.

Helping in Organizations: A Review and Directions for Future Research

Helping has long been a central component of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and yet our knowledge of the full spectrum of helping processes in organizations is limited. Most helping research in the OCB literature has focused on individuals’ tendencies to help across situations, including antecedents and outcomes of those general tendencies. Integrating across a number of related literatures on such topics as prosocial behavior, help seeking, feedback/advice seeking, and favor exchange, this chapter presents an integrative framework of helping processes organized around the key decisions of whether to seek help and whether to help when asked, as well as whether to offer help and whether to accept offered help. An exploration of the factors associated with these decisions identifies a number of topics that have not received full attention in the OCB literature, which can be studied across various types of help and levels of analysis.

Effect of direct and indirect voice training in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology students

PURPOSE: To verify the effect of two approaches of vocal training in Speech Language Pathology and Audiology students, a direct and an indirect approach.METHODS: Participants were 25 female Speech Language Pathology and Audiology students divided into two groups: direct training with vocal exercises, DTG (n=13); and indirect training with vocal orientations, ITG (n=12). The training sessions were conducted by the same speech language pathologist in six weekly sessions of 30 minutes. Both groups underwent multidimensional voice assessment, pre- and post-training: vocal self-assessment; Vocal Symptoms Scale (VSS); auditory perceptual analysis of sustained vowel and connected speech; acoustic analysis of voice through the Vocal Range Profile (VRP) and Speech Range Profile (SRP); and Group Climate Questionnaire, only at the end of training.RESULTS: The DTG showed changes in auditory perceptual analysis of vowel, which was less diverted after training; and expansion of the voice range in the VRP and SRP, which proves best vocal performance. However, the ITG showed no changes in any of the parameters evaluated. In Group Climate, the ITG obtained the highest conflict score in comparison to the DTG, probably because the indirect approach did not favor exchange in the group and did not allow a better quality interaction.CONCLUSION: The direct approach provided greater benefits to students than the indirect approach, with significant change in voice quality, and can serve as inspiration to Speech Language Pathology and Audiology courses to prevent dysphonia.