a b s t r a c tChina introduced employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) in 1992 purely as an employee incentive scheme. The government initiated the policy experiment on ESOPs as part of China's reform of its state-owned enterprises, and it was abruptly terminated 2 years after initiation. This policy experiment resulted in an exogenous sample of ESOPs that allows us to provide the first evidence from Chinese firms on the performance-ESOP relation. After examining a variety of performance measures, including ROA, ROE, Tobin's q, and productivity, we find little difference in performance between ESOP firms and non-ESOP firms.

The goal of this paper is to extend the modified Hestenes-Stiefel method to solve large-scale nonlinear monotone equations. The method is presented by combining the hyperplane projection method (Solodov, M.V.; Svaiter, B.F. A globally convergent inexact Newton method for systems of monotone equations, in: M. Fukushima, L. Qi (Eds.)Reformulation: Nonsmooth, Piecewise Smooth, Semismooth and Smoothing Methods, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1998, 355-369) and the modified Hestenes-Stiefel method in Dai and Wen (Dai, Z.; Wen, F. Global convergence of a modified Hestenes-Stiefel nonlinear conjugate gradient method with Armijo line search. Numer Algor. 2012, 59, 79-93). In addition, we propose a new line search for the derivative-free method. Global convergence of the proposed method is established if the system of nonlinear equations are Lipschitz continuous and monotone. Preliminary numerical results are given to test the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Underpinned by rising hydrocarbon revenues, the stock markets of the six GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries have demonstrated significant integration over the past decade. This paper studies the dependence patterns of the bivariate distribution of returns across seven GCC stock markets over the period 2004-2013 using copula models. The results of the marginal models indicate strong volatility persistence in all the seven equity markets. The results from the copula models indicate that the conditional dependence across all 21 pairs of equity markets' returns is not strictly symmetric in that the lower tail dependence is significantly greater that the upper tail dependence. The stock markets of Abu Dhabi and Dubai appear as the primary source of asymmetric dependence across the different equity market pairs.

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