Company Ownership Structure, Legal Compliance and the Probability of Winning an Employment Lawsuit in China

This paper investigates empirically whether firm ownership structures contribute to varying levels of legal compliance, which ultimately influence the likelihood of winning a lawsuit. I hypothesize that private companies are more likely to lose employment lawsuits because the rule of law within the company is rarely established. Using collected 2756 employment judgments decided by district courts in Beijing between 2014 and 2018, I test this hypothesis against three other types of ownership structures in China: state-owned enterprises, wholly foreign-funded companies, and partly foreign-funded companies. The statistical result confirms that private companies are more likely to lose cases, thus supporting the proposed hypothesis. In addition, the company’s scale and the company’s life span also have a significant influence on the employment lawsuit result.

Digital Goods and Digital Platforms

In this study, I analyze the characteristics of consumer attitudes toward digital and non-digital service provision in the platform business and discuss its regulation. Specifically, I employ consumer questionnaires on subscription services and extract comparable objects to examine the interests that end consumers evince in the provision of these goods and services, thereby enabling better distinction between digital and non-digital goods. A logit analysis of consumer attitudes toward digital and non-digital goods shows that low-price appeals are more effective for digital goods than for non-digital goods, and that they are demanded by younger, male, and higher-income consumers based on an online survey conducted in February 2021. In terms of regulatory and research responses, the issue of market dominance needs to be examined in light of business activities based on the characteristics of goods.

The Effects of Tax Penalty on Retained Earnings: Evidence from Quasi-Natural Experiment in South Korea

This paper evaluated how the tax penalty, corporate income feedback tax (CIFT), on retained earnings affected firms’ managerial decisions in South Korea. We focused on how the firms allocated the retained earnings to minimize the additional tax liability. We employed a quasi-natural experiment design resulting from the enactment of the CIFT in 2015 to identify how the tax penalty on earning retention affected investment, dividend, and employment. We took advantage of the eligibility condition of the CIFT to construct a quasi-natural experimental design. Our estimation results show that most firms subject to the CIFT paid out dividends to equity holders to avoid additional tax liabilities despite of modest increase of investment. They did not change wages much. Rather, they decreased wage payment. In sum, the CIFT was not as successful as Korean government wished.

Vicarious Liability Under a Strict Liability Rule

In this article, we extend the model of Newman, H., and D. Wright. 1990. “Strict Liability in a Principal-Agent Model.” International Review of Law and Economics 10: 219–231 and strengthens their result that the strict liability can attain social optimum in a principal-agent relation to the situation in which the court appreciates any contractual terms regarding apportionment of damages between an employer and an employee under vicarious liability rule. Our model also generalizes and extends vicarious liability to the negligence-based liability rule.

Plagiarism as a Culturally-Motivated Crime

The article discusses the possibility of classifying plagiarism as a culturally motivated crime. Creating works, especially written works, is strongly related to culture as well as to knowledge and skills acquired during education. Therefore, plagiarism can be perceived as a culturally-conditioned act, and, thus, differently perceived depending upon the culture with which the artist identifies themselves. The author juxtapose two legal orders, namely of countries where plagiarism is a crime and those where the failure to mark the authorship of a work results from the customs prevailing in their culture, i.e. societies influenced by Confucian philosophy. The research goal is to raise the hypothesis and determine whether the perpetrator of culturally motivated plagiarism can use one of the tools indicated in criminal law, the so-called cultural defense.

Marriage as a Mechanism of Internalizing Externalities: A Case of Smoking

With the view of marriage as a legal institution to internalize externalities, I examine the effect of marriage on smoking. From analyzing the data of Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I found that unmarried individuals are more likely to smoke by 4.9% point than married individuals with stronger impact on females. The long-run impact of marriage also shows that the unmarried individuals smoke more than married individuals but some of its positive impact diminishes within two years. These results on the whole imply that marriage internalizes the negative externalities of smoking and thus leads smokers to reduce smoking.

The Economic Analysis of Volcker Rule

This paper aims to analyze the final regulations of the Volcker Rule in order to assess any lingering concerns related to the administration of the Rule. Despite the problems criticized by many practitioner and scholars, implementing the Volcker Rule has benefits for banks and the overall economy. First, prohibiting proprietary trading activities may make individual institutions and the banking system as a whole safer. Second, the prohibition on banks’ ownership interest in private equity and hedge funds directly addresses a source of bank default risk – the Volcker Rule limits banks’ exposure to risky private equity and venture capital activities, which are activities that contributed to banks’ probability of default during the 2008 financial crisis. Third, heightened compliance standards and documentation requirements will help improve transparency of banking activities and contribute to bank stability.

Reliability of Regulating Artificial Intelligence to Restrain Cartelization: A Libertarian Approach

Competition is building block of any successful economy, while a cartelized economy is against the common good of society. Nowadays, developing artificial intelligence (AI) and its plausibility to foster cartels persuade governments to revitalize their interference in the market and implement new regulations to tackle AI implications. In this sense, as pooling of technologies might enable cartels to impose high prices and violate consumers’ rights, it should be restricted. By contrast, in the libertarian approach, cartels’ impacts are defined by government interference in the market. Accordingly, it is irrational to rely on a monopolized power called government to equilibrate a cartelized market. This article discusses that AI is a part of the market process that should be respected, and a restrictive or protective approach such as the U.S. government Executive Order 13859 is not in line with libertarian thought and can be a ladder to escalate the cartelistic behaviors.