Suchergebnisse

The author delineates the configuration of the Chinese Buddhist ecology in post-Mao China by focusing on three major types of religious actor found in the ecology. She spells out how the interactions between the internal characteristics of religious groups and external structural conditions have shaped the development patterns of groups in each type. First, the dominant Buddhist temples, which enjoy state recognition, have been beset by the hollowing-out process. Second, the type of Buddhist groups with ambiguous legal status has been growing vigorously in the interstices of the current Chinese socio-political structure but faces uncertainties. An array of actors and forms, including self-appointed monks and the mixed form of Buddhism and popular religion, exist on the fringe of institutional Buddhism and constitute the third type. Within this type, the syncretic sects, receiving censure from both the state and the Buddhist establishment, are forced to operate underground.

Purpose
This paper aims to construct a measure of integration among global banks and examine its impact on bank insolvencies and bank crises.


Design/methodology/approach
The authors apply principal component analysis to measure a bank's degree of integration to the global banking market. Moreover, they test whether bank integration affects bank insolvency risk, in which they treat the equity of individual banks as a call option.


Findings
The authors find that the banking industry has become more globally integrated over the past two decades. At the individual bank level, results indicate that banks with higher integration levels have more assets, more nontraditional banking services and more interbank businesses. Overall, they find that a bank's integration level is negatively associated with insolvency risk, which suggests that greater integration with global markets diversifies a bank's risk. At the country level, banking systems with less integrated big banks, or more integrated smaller banks, are more stable and hence less likely to suffer a banking crisis.


Originality/value
The authors construct a novel measure of integration among global banks and examine its impact on bank insolvencies and bank crises.

Students have always played an important role in defining the politics of China, and their ideological orientation shapes the nature of student politics. Through a survey of students from six elite universities, this study explores the outlook of Chinese youth's political identities and analyzes the factors conditioning their identity formation. The results reveal three trends. First, the majority of these college students either claim themselves to be apolitical or to be liberals. Second, among various channels of political (re)socialization, family plays a weak role, while mass media has a strong influence on students' political orientation. Peking University, the base for nurturing liberals in the 1990s, has now yielded this role to universities specializing in economics and finance, thus suggesting the impact of economic liberalism since the 1990s. Third, gender, education level, academic major, family income, and Communist Party membership are all good indicators of students' political identities. These results are interpreted in the context of student movements and intellectual transition in China over the past four decades. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

Purpose
The exact criteria used by state governors for choosing opportunity zones (OZs) are not publicly available. This paper aims to examine whether state governors selected the most distressed communities, or those with the highest proportions of minorities, as OZs.


Design/methodology/approach
This paper compares the distressed communities chosen as OZs in states throughout the country to an equal number of those eligible distressed communities but not selected. Moreover, this paper uses regression analysis to determine whether the poverty rate, median family income, population, percentage of population that is minority and the percentage of population that is African American are significant explanatory factors in the choice of OZs.


Findings
After describing the tax incentives for investing in OZs, this paper documents that governors did not select many of the most distressed communities, or those with high proportions of minorities, in their individual states.


Originality/value
This paper describes in some detail the way in which investors may generate tax benefits by investing in eligible property or businesses in OZs. It also examines the extent to which the degree of poverty and the percentage of the population that is minority (and African American) were key factors in the selection of OZs. It arises an issue that the chosen communities are not necessarily those most in need of more investment or those heavily populated by minorities, particularly African Americans.