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Service-oriented architectures (SOA), and in particular Web services, have quickly become a popular paradigm to develop distributed applications. Nowadays, more and more organizations shift their core business to the Web services platform within which various interactions between the autonomous services occur. One of the widely accepted standards in the Web services platform is Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS, or BPEL for short). BPEL defines a language to integrate Web services by creating composite Web services in the form of business processes following the service orchestration paradigm, and it enables organizations to focus on core competence and mission-critical operations while outsource every-thing else to reduce costs and time to market. However BPEL is deficient in privacy issues. The facts are: (1) service requestors' personal information is fundamental to enable business processes (e.g., the mortgage approval business process); (2) privacy concerns have become one of the most important issues in Information Technology and has received increasing attention from organizations, consumers and legislators; (3) most organizations have recognized that dealing correctly and honestly with customers' privacy concerns can have beneficial returns for their businesses, not only in terms of being compliant with laws and regulations but also in terms of reputation and potential business opportunities. If not addressed properly, privacy concerns may become an impediment to the widespread adoption of BPEL. Privacy issues have many aspects, the privacy concerns of potential service requestor (i.e., client) and the privacy concerns of service provider (i.e., organization) are two of them. Service requestor specifies his/her privacy concerns as privacy preference, while service provider defines and publishes its privacy policy to specify its privacy promises. Before requestor accesses certain service, he/she likes to know whether the service provider will respect his/her privacy preference. ...

AbstractManuscript typeEmpiricalResearch question/issueEstate tax planning has always been a primary concern of large shareholders when arranging the controlling shareholding structure of family firms. This paper provides evidence on the effect of a drastic change in estate tax on the shareholding structure of family‐controlled firms in Taiwan, as well as the impact of these changes on the firms' corporate value. We examine a 2008 policy change in Taiwan that substantially reduced the estate tax from a maximum rate of 50% to a single tax rate of 10%.Research findings/insightsWe analyze a 12‐year period from 2002 to 2014 looking at data of family‐controlled, listed companies with IPOs prior to 2001. The empirical results reveal a reduced motivation among controlling families to circumvent estate tax through altering the shareholding structure after the law change. The results also reveal a positive impact on firm value as a result of the reduction in the tax burden of controlling families. These findings contribute to the family firm and tax literature and provide insight into the effects of tax policy change on the controlling structure of family firms and the consequent benefits on firm value.Theoretical/academic implicationsTo the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first empirical study that establishes a significant relationship between estate tax and tax‐avoidance behaviors reflected in the change of the shareholding structure of a family firm. Many research topics linking estate tax with other corporate governance issues in family firms are here unexplored.Practitioner/policy implicationsFor the policymaker, this study highlights the increase of firm value due to a reduction in the estate tax rate. Moreover, a tax‐friendly environment can help the controlling family commit themselves to the proper management of the firm instead of expending effort on tax minimization to safeguard their wealth.

Prior empirical evidence supports the wealth expropriation hypothesis that weak corporate governance induced by certain types of ownership structures and board composition tends to result in minority interest expropriation. This in turn reduces corporate value. However, it is still unclear whether corporate financial distress is related to these corporate governance characteristics. To answer this question, we adopt three variables to proxy for corporate governance risk, namely, the percentage of directors occupied by the controlling shareholder, the percentage the controlling shareholders shareholding pledged for bank loans (pledge ratio), and the deviation in control away from the cash flow rights. Binary logistic regressions are then fitted to generate dichotomous prediction models. Taiwanese listed firms, characterised by a high degree of ownership concentration, similar to that in most countries, are used as our empirical samples. The evidence suggests that the three variables mentioned above are positively related to the risk for financial distress in the following year. Generally speaking, firms with weak corporate governance are vulnerable to economic downturns and the probability of falling into financial distress increases.

ABSTRACT
We examine the influence of different layers of auditor industry specialization on client firms' investment efficiency. We differentiate between industry specialization at the firm and partner levels, and joint specialization (i.e., at both firm and partner levels combined). Using observations from Taiwan between 1998 and 2017, we observe a positive association between joint specialization and client investment efficiency. Specialization at the firm or partner levels alone does not improve investment efficiency. In addition, client firm performance is positively associated with joint specialization. Auditors charge a premium for the firm- and joint-level specialization.
Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.
JEL Classifications: M40; M42.

In this paper, we investigate how insiders' personal incentives and the timeliness of information revelation are related to the timing of their sales. We use a unique data set of 7,678 insider sales of listed firms in Taiwan, where insider sales exceeding 10,000 shares must be reported to the regulatory entity on an ex-ante basis so that the price pattern before announcement remains independent from insider sales and therefore closely captures insiders' timing. We find evidence from insiders' timing that the cumulative abnormal returns monotonically increase up to the announcement of insider sales, and decrease thereafter. Moreover, insiders' timing and profitability are closely related to their personal incentives, as manifested in lower cash flow rights, a higher pledge ratio of holding shares for bank loans, higher control-cash flow deviation, and the condition that insiders simultaneously serve in managerial posts. Furthermore, the timeliness of information revelation affects insiders' timing in the sense that optimistic news is revealed before the announcement whereas a decrease in earnings is revealed after the execution of insider sales. Finally, the interactions between the personal incentives of insiders and the timeliness of information revelation also have an effect on their timing and profitability.

In a private placement, the identity of the block purchaser has attracted much attention, while the characteristics of the issuing firm are sparsely noted. We hypothesize that the market concerns about the coupling between the issuing firm and the new block investor. Our empirical findings from a sample of 213 private equity placements in Taiwan indicate that the announcement effect of good-governance firms is significantly higher than that of bad-governance firms. Moreover, the induction of outside block investor further punctuates the coupling effect: the coupling between good-governance (poor-governance) firms and outside block investors yields even higher (lower) returns. Finally, the coupling effect remains significant in explaining the long-run performance of private-equity-placement firms.

The polypeptide hormone atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) plays vital roles in maintaining blood volume and arterial blood pressure. The recognition of clinical benefits of ANP both in healthy and diseased heart identifies ANP as a potential candidate for therapeutic strategy in the treatment of heart disease. ANP is synthesized and stored in cardiac myocytes and it is released through the exocytosis of ANP granules both constitutively and in response to stimuli. It is well known that mechanical stretch is the predominant stimulus for ANP secretion. However, the mechanistic link between mechanical stimuli and exocytosis of ANP vesicles in single atrial myocyte has not yet been demonstrated. Over the last decade, compelling evidence suggested that stretch-activated ion channels might function as mechanosensors. We showed previously that direct stretch of single atrial myocyte using two micro-electrodes activated a non-selective cation channel (SAC). So far it is not known whether activation of SAC is involved in stretch-induced ANP secretion. The present article aims to give an overview of the mechanism of mechanical stretch-stimulated ANP secretion and describes an innovative technique to detect ANP secretion from isolated rat atrial myocytes with high time-resolution. Combined with capacitance measurement and patch-clamp technique in conjunction with in situ ANP bioassay, we were able to demonstrate that SAC in rat atrial myocytes acts as a mechanosensor to transduce stretch signals into the ANP secretion pathway. ; This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOEHRD) (KRF-2005- 003-E00014) and project grant from Garfield Western Trust to Y.H.Z. Y.H.Z. is funded by the British Heart Foundation.

This study analyzes price-volume relation for Taiwanese listed firms that are added to or deleted from the MSCI free indices in the sampling period from May 17, 1999 to May 21, 2001. Additions to the indices found a positive abnormal return of 3.9% in the run-up window from the announcement day up to one day before the change was implemented. This was followed by a significant reversal on the change day. The deleted firms exhibit an even stronger announcement effect, with a significant abnormal return of -9.1% in the run-up, followed by a reversal of 1.6% on the change day. Even when reversals occurred on the change day, the abnormal returns in the post-announcement window are positive for additions and negative for deletions. The results support the price-pressure and long-run downward-sloping-demand hypothesis and are inconsistent with the efficient market hypothesis. The abnormal trading volume for deletions is negative following the announcement, contradicting the findings of Lynch and Mendenhall (1997). This difference is due to the innate of the Taiwanese stock market, in which no dedicated market makers accommodate block trading. Moreover, the regression results confirm a positive volume-return relation before and a negative relation on and after the change day. Finally, the QFII net buy (sell) the added (deleted) stocks up to ten days after the change was implemented, while the Securities Investment Trusts and Securities dealers, having a shorter frame net, buy the added stocks up to two days after the effective change. Individual investors reversing position on the change day are responsible for the price reversal on the change day.

The average abnormal return of Taiwanese family-controlled grouping (1.60 percent) is significantly higher than that of individually listed companies (0.03 percent) in December. Within the same family-controlled grouping, the average abnormal return in December is also higher than that of the rest of the months (-0.13 percent) in the sampling periods 1992 through 1997. We cautiously set five joint criteria to define the anomaly in December that pertains only to the family-controlled grouping. The empirical results supported our argument by which the ornamenting motive of the family-controlled grouping is to account for the anomaly. For illustration, we further identify company size, losses from currency translation and bad debt, cash flow, and the gain from selling long-term investment which can effectively contrast the willingness and capability of family-controlled grouping to engage in the year-end earning management.