Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 134-139).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-154). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Murdoch University, 2006. / Thesis submitted to the Division of Arts. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 284-327)

I examine an unintended consequence of countries permitting or requiring a common set of accounting standards for unconsolidated financial reporting. Specifically, I test whether adoption of IFRS facilitates income tax-motivated profit shifting by multinational entities (MNEs). MNEs often justify transfer prices to tax authorities by benchmarking intercompany profit allocations against a range of profit rates reported by economically comparable, independent firms that use similar accounting standards. A larger set of qualifying benchmark firms resulting from IFRS adoption could allow opportunistic managers to support more tax-advantaged transfer prices. I use a database of EU unconsolidated financial and ownership information to identify tax-motivated income shifting over 2001 to 2010. I estimate a statistically and economically significant 17.5 percent tax-motivated change in reported pre-tax profits following affiliate IFRS adoption, relative to no change in income shifting behavior for non-adopters. The magnitude of this effect increases in expansions to the set of potential benchmark firms upon affiliate IFRS adoption. / text

As the principal subsidized home ownership housing scheme in Beijing, the Economical and Suitable Housing Scheme (ESHS) has gone through several different stages in the past three decades. Following the newly developed housing policy framework in 2007, ESHS was endowed with the objective of providing affordable home ownership to low-income urban residents. Despite the rich literature on ESHS in China, relatively little is known about the performance of estates of ESHS in Beijing developed after 2007 under the new regulations. Largely missing from the existing literature is an analytical account of the development of ESHS in Beijing and an in-depth evaluation and explanation of its performance in recent years. This study thus aims to examine and analyze the effectiveness of ESHS since 2007 with the intention of helping to improve the effectiveness of ESHS and to provide useful lessons to other subsidized housing schemes in Beijing. Following the lead of scholars who have studied subsidized housing schemes in other countries and areas, this study built up its own analytical framework appropriate to the Chinese context. To achieve the study goal, the evaluation of the performance of ESHS was conducted in terms of four indicators: housing affordability, housing accessibility, housing availability and housing quality. The investigation of the causes were conducted from the public policy perspective focusing on policy design and policy implementation. To enhance the data base, open-ended interviews with officials at different levels from different government departments and structured questionnaire surveys with residents in ESHS in Beijing had been conducted. This study reveals that the performance of ESHS after 2007 was barely acceptable. Specifically, the housing affordability and housing accessibility and housing quality of ESHS were less than satisfactory. Even though the housing availability of ESHS in quantity terms did not have significant problems, the housing availability in terms of location was highly undesirable. As for housing affordability, it is found that the ESHS was more affordable to urban residents than to suburban residents, the major reason being the higher income enjoyed by the former. Regarding housing accessibility, this study found that the approach to determine the eligibility criteria of ESHS failed to include all the households who could not afford to purchase market housing. In the housing quality domain, it is found that ESHS housing estates in Beijing failed to meet the residents’ daily needs, and suffered from poor housing construction quality and inconvenient locations. In addition to the evaluation of performance, this study also found that besides the strong commitments from the government, policy design commensurate with policy goal and effective policy implementation determines the performance of a subsidized housing scheme. In particular, the formulation of eligibility criteria and the pricing mechanism at the policy design stage, and the conflicting interests of the three levels of government at the implementation stage were most critical. This study further argues that the four dimensions of performance which were inter-connected to each other were all commonly hinged upon the use of land as the main source of subsidy. This study adds to the existing literature on contemporary China by evaluating and explaining the most recent performance of a dominant housing subsidy policy tool in China. By constructing and employing a comprehensive conceptual framework for the analysis, this study offers to the contemporary China literature a sophisticated yet revealing conceptual tool to unveil the intricacies of housing subsidies in the rapidly changing China. / published_or_final_version / Urban Planning and Design / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The purpose of this research was to investigate the association between gross household income during early adolescence and property crime from early adolescence into young adulthood. A truncated version of recent nationally representative sample---the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997-2006)---was married with a set of sociological and developmental theories to explore these processes. Results from Study I indicate that cumulative property crime did not significantly differ by income but did differ by race and gender; parent-adolescent relationship quality significantly differed by income; emotional problems significantly differed by gender; and criminal arrests significantly differed by income, gender, and race. In addition, baseline and change scores for all variables of interest shared substantial variation. Results from Study II indicate that controlling for gender, race, and household structure, gross household income during early adolescence had a significant positive association with cumulative property crime from early adolescence into young adulthood. Parent-adolescent relationship quality (but not emotional problems) helped to explain this association. In general, these mediated processes did not significantly differ by income, gender, or race. Results from Study III indicate that criminal arrests from early adolescence into young adulthood explained a substantial portion of the variance between income and cumulative property crime from early adolescence into young adulthood, and partially mediated the association between income and property crime. Criminal arrests during adolescence also explained a substantial portion of the variance between income and property crime during adulthood, and partially mediated the association between income and property crime during adulthood. For these processes, moderated mediation was occurring. On the one hand, criminal arrests during adolescence generally deterred adults from later engaging in property crime, but this association was only significant higher income adolescents ($25,001- $100,000). On the other hand, criminal arrests during adolescence were associated with higher counts of property crime for those adults who generally engaged in at least one property crime, but this association was only significant for adolescents for lower middle income adolescents ($10,001-$25,000). Implications of these findings and future research are discussed.

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of income inequality on individual creativity. Specifically, it is hypothesized that an individual’s creative performance (via a remote associatives test) is affected negatively in a high income inequality condition. Theoretical research suggests that the mechanism that enables this is self-regulation. As such self-regulation is measured as a mediator in this relationship. Two online-panel experiments were designed and conducted to test these relationships. The results did not show significant results for the mediation relationship. Self-regulation does have a positive relationship with creative performance, and income inequality shows a negative relationship with creativity in some conditions, however there is no relationship between income inequality and self-regulation. This research develops the theoretical background for the relationship between income inequality, self-regulation, and creativity. It also provides some lessons-learned from an experimental mediation design with an independent variable that has multiple categorical variables. / October 2015

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This dissertation investigates the commodity tax and corporate income tax. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction and Chapter 2 consists of a literature review. Chapters 3 and 4 analyze how state governments determine their commodity tax rate and respond to other state and federal government tax rate changes. We construct and estimate the household utility function and the state government objective function, and compute the slope of the reaction functions to evaluate the tax interactions between state governments and between state and federal governments. We find that horizontal tax interactions are very small and that state governments do not change their tax rate even though the neighboring state governments change their tax rates. On the other hand, vertical tax interactions are positive, and if the federal government increases its tax rate, state governments also raise their tax rates to preserve their tax base. Chapter 5 discusses how the corporate income tax affects firm location and exit decisions. We compute and compare three kinds of individual firm-level tax rates and examine the effect of these corporate income taxes on firm location and exit behaviour. We find that each tax rate has a different distribution across provinces and that using a different tax provides a different interpretation of tax effects. In most cases, high corporate income tax rates are found to discourage firm location choice and encourage firm exit decisions. / Thesis (Ph.D, Economics) -- Queen's University, 2011-02-28 15:19:49.8

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