Search results

This study conducts a logistic regression analysis of the ability of excess cash and short-term bank loans to substitute for each other and a multiple regression analysis of the factors influencing excess cash and short-term bank loans holdings. In addition, a questionnaire is used to survey the views of Taiwan’s corporate financial leaders on the factors influencing these two liquidity resources. The empirical results support a certain level of substitution between the two types of holdings. The regression analysis shows that for companies that would accumulate more excess cash when interest rates are low, have strong corporate performance, have low debt ratios, and whose chairman of the board and chief executive officer (CEO) are not the same person. Companies tend to have more short-term bank loans when corporate performance is poor, debt ratios are high, and the chairman of the board and CEO are the same person, as well as when the degree of the deviation of control is small. We find that factors on financial structure, operating performance, cost of capital and corporate governance have significant influence on the holdings of these two liquidity facilities in regression, whereas the influence factors exclude corporate governance in questionnaire.

Recent academic studies, as well as media reporting, have devoted substantial attention to the ongoing “crisis of democracy.” Democratic “backsliding” of Central and Eastern Europe – sometimes referred to as an effort to establish a new system of “illiberal democracy” – is one of the most visible symptoms of this crisis. This narrative is supported by the quantitative metrics of democratic quality, reflecting professional community views on the appropriate criteria to define and assess democracy. However, once general public views expressed in the survey item of “satisfaction with democracy” are taken into account, the picture changes markedly. This chapter analyzes quantitative metrics reflecting expert community consensus and the general public assessment of the quality of democracy in the 27 EU members over the period 2010–2019. It documents substantial divergence between the perspectives of the experts and the general public – while expert-based indexes portray Central and Eastern European backsliding as the most significant trend in the EU democratic landscape, public opinion identifies a very different set of democracy's successes and failures. As experts and the general public fail to arrive at mutually accepted criteria of democratic performance evaluation, public debate has become futile. Meaningful discussion and systemic corrections have become unlikely, creating conditions easily exploitable by the populists, eager to frame it as an example of “elite” detachment from the “ordinary people”.