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美國聯邦儲備局（聯邦儲備銀行）11月2日議息會議後宣布，將基準利率維持在5.25厘至5.5厘不變，雖然符合市場預期，但水準仍處於22年來高點。 主席鮑威爾表示，對於下個月的會議尚未做出具體決定。

Sharing economy platforms are pressed to rapidly grow user bases at the early stage by aggressively targeting potential users through competitive actions. Due to the volatile nature of the sharing economy and its disruption to industry norms, these platforms encounter legitimacy challenges that impede user base growth. This paper integrates competitive repertoire and institutional legitimacy theories to develop a research model that explains early-stage user base development in the sharing economy. We posit that the early-stage user base is associated with structural characteristics of the competitive repertoire, whose effects are moderated by a platform's socio-political legitimation efforts that address stakeholders’ regulatory and normative concerns. Using a comprehensive sample of 4644 monthly observations of 129 sharing economy platforms in China, we find that the volume of two context-specific competitive actions, offering economic incentives and staging high-visibility events, along with competitive repertoire complexity, are positively related to the platform's early-stage user base. We also identify a significant negative relationship between repertoire differentiation and user base. Direct relationships are moderated by socio-political legitimation, however, such that legitimation weakens the positive impact of context-specific action volume but enhances those of repertoire complexity and differentiation. Managerial and practical implications are discussed in light of the findings.

Born with a curious mind, Dr. Tingting Fan craves to explore and explain human behaviours with scientific models. Joining us in December 2021, she is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing.

This paper studies how minimum wage policies affect capital investment using the industrial census of manufacturing firms in China, where minimum wage policies vary across counties. Exploiting minimum wage policy discontinuities at county borders, we find that minimum wages increase capital investment. The investment response to minimum wages is stronger for firms that are labor-intensive, that have more room for technological improvement, and that cannot sufficiently pass on labor costs to consumers. A natural experiment based on county jurisdictional changes further assures the causal relationship.

The extant research has often examined the work-related experiences of corporate executives, but their off-the-job activities could be just as insightful. This study employs a novel proxy for the risky hobbies of chief executive officers (CEOs)—CEOs’ hobby of piloting a private aircraft—and investigates its effect on credit stakeholders’ evaluation of the firms led by the CEOs as reflected in bank loan contracting. Using a longitudinal data set on CEOs of large United States-listed firms across multiple industries between 1993 and 2010, we obtain strong evidence that bank loans to firms steered by CEOs who fly private jets as a hobby tend to incur a higher cost of debt, to be secured, to have more covenants, and to be syndicated. These effects are mainly driven by banks, which perceive such firms as having a higher default risk. These relationships become stronger when the CEO is more important to the firm and/or can exercise stronger control over decision making. Supplemented by field interviews, our results are also robust to various endogeneity checks using different experimental designs, the Heckman two-stage model, a propensity score-matching approach, a difference-in-differences test, and the impact threshold of confounding variables.

Passively managed index funds now hold over 30% of U.S. equity fund assets; this shift raises fundamental questions about monitoring and governance. We show that, relative to active funds, index funds are less effective monitors: (a) they are less likely to vote against firm management on contentious governance issues; (b) there is no evidence they engage effectively publicly or privately; and (c) they promote less board independence and worse pay-performance sensitivity at their portfolio companies. Overall, the rise of index funds decreases the alignment of incentives between beneficial owners and firm management and shifts control from investors to managers.