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Local state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China continue to face government interference in their operations. They are influenced both by the government's "grabbing hand" and by its "helping hand." Our study examines how SOE chairmen with connections to government influence their firm's employment policies and the economic consequences of overstaffing. Using a sample of China's listed local state-owned enterprises, we find that the scale of overstaffing in these SOEs is negatively related to the firms' political connections to government. However, this relationship turns positive when the firm's chairman has a government background. Appointing chairmen who have government backgrounds is a mechanism through which the government can intervene in local SOEs and influence firms' staffing decisions. We also find that in compensation for the expenses of overstaffing, local SOEs receive more government subsidies and bank loans. However, the chairmen themselves do not get increased pay or promotion opportunities for supporting overstaffing. Further analysis indicates that whereas the "grabbing hand" of government does harm to a firm's economic performance, the "helping hand" provides only weak positive effects, and such government intervention actually reduces the efficiency of social resource allocation.

This study introduces a new travel pattern "pandemic-restricted travel" that exists from COVID-19 based on prospect theory. The purpose of this study is to incorporate the motivation to travel and constraint to normal travel to predict tourists' intention to continue visiting other alternative destinations due to COVID-19 restrictions. This study first generated the items of motivation to travel and constraints to normal travel from a focus group interview with 15 travel industry professionals in December 2020 in Zhuhai. Then, an online survey collected data from 416 respondents in the Greater Bay Area of China from January to February 2021. The results of exploratory factor analysis using SPSS identified two factors of motivation to travel (leisure and exploration) and two factors of favourable constraints to normal travel (policy restriction and perceived risk). The results of partial least squares–structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) indicated that these four factors positively influence satisfaction but only leisure and exploration factors positively influence the intention of continuous pandemic-restricted travel. Among the four factors, leisure has the strongest impact on both satisfaction and intention of continue travelling. The results also revealed that satisfaction fully mediates the effects of two constraint factors and partially mediates the effects of two motivation factors on the intention of continuous pandemic-restricted travel. Implications for researchers and governments for pandemic-restricted travel during and in the post-COVID-19 era are then discussed.

ABSTRACTWe collect basic federal tax laws over a 64-year period in order to simulate the historical effective tax rates of median income wage-earning couples. We find that effective income tax rates have decreased over the sample period; however, when payroll taxes are included in our calculations, total tax burdens have increased significantly. Interestingly, this increase in middle-class wage taxation has occurred over an historical period in which total federal tax revenue relative to GDP has remained somewhat constant. This implies that the middle class has borne an increasing relative tax burden in recent years. We hope that our analyses inform both the taxpaying public and policy makers of the historical status of middle-class wage earners.

AbstractThis paper considers the problem of computing E(X−n; X > t) when X is a normal variate having the property that the mean is substantially larger than the standard deviation. An approximation is developed which is determined from the mean, standard deviation, and the cumulative standard normal distribution. Computations comparing the approximate moments with the actual are reported for various values of the relevant parameters. These results are applied to the problem of computing the expected number of shortages in a lead‐time for a single product which exhibits continuous exponential decay.