Diversification Discount or Premium? New Evidence from the Business Information Tracking Series

I use the Business Information Tracking Series (BITS), a new census database that covers the whole U.S. economy at the establishment level, to examine whether the finding of a diversification discount is an artifact of segment data. BITS data allow me to construct business units that are more consistently and objectively defined than segments, and thus more comparable across firms. Using these data on a sample that yields a discount according to segment data, I find a diversification premium. The premium is robust to variations in the sample, business unit definition, and measures of excess value and diversification.     

Use of derivatives in public sector organizations

The present paper develops and tests a model explaining public sector derivative use in terms of budget discrepancy minimization. The model is different from private sector models. Private sector models do not readily translate into the public sector, which typically faces different objectives. Hypotheses are developed and tested using logistic regression over a sample of Australian Commonwealth public sector organizations. It is found that public sector organization derivative use is positively correlated with liabilities and size consistent with the hypotheses concerning budget discrepancy management.     

Distortions Resulting from Residential Land Use Controls in Metropolitan Areas

Residential land use controls in metropolitan areas are intended to and typically do restrict housing supply and inevitably raise housing prices. This paper estimates the effects of metropolitan area land use controls on housing prices, employing a remarkable data set compiled by Gyourko, Saiz and Summers. We embed the estimates in a four equation model that estimates the effects of the resulting high housing prices on metropolitan population, real incomes and employment.     

土地利用变化及生态系统服务价值响应

本文采用土地利用动态度、土地利用综合指数这两个定量化模型,对2003-2010年内蒙古包头市达茂旗的土地利用变化及由土地利用变化所引起的生态系统服务价值的变化进行了分析.结果表明,达茂旗土地利用结构变化显著,总体的土地利用程度逐年降低,生态系统服务价值也随着当地经济的发展逐渐下降.因此,今后达茂旗的发展一定要提高土地利用效率,注重生态环境质量,合理规划土地利用结构,从而实现土地资源可持续利用和生态、社会、经济的可持续发展.     

The Use of Foreign Accounting Data in UK Financial Institutions

Globalisation of securities markets has caused many members of the investment community to use foreign accounting data. This paper examines how this foreign data is used by some London-based participants in the market. Areas for examination are established after looking at the extensive published research on the use of domestic accounting data and the small amount of published research in an international context. Twenty-one market participants were interviewed, although four of these were treated as a pilot, so that most findings were based on 17 interviewees working for six institutions. If this sample is representative, our findings suggest that market participants are inexpert in accounting; sector experts see international accounting differences as a hindrance but country experts do not; participants use foreign accounting data for analysis but very few adjust it (although fund managers think that analysts do); there is some avoidance of countries or sectors for accounting reasons; and there is very little knowledge of international accounting differences.     

Roads, Land Use, and Deforestation: A Spatial Model Applied to Belize

Rural roads promote economic development, but they also facilitatedeforestation. To explore this tradeoff, this article developsa spatially explicit model of land use and estimates probabilitiesof alternative land uses as a function of land characteristicsand distance to market using a multinomial logit specificationof this model. Controls are incorporated for the endogeneityof road placement. The model is applied to data for southern Belize, an area experiencingrapid expansion of both subsistence and commercial agriculture,using geographic information system (GIS) techniques to selectsample points at 1-kilometer intervals. Market access, landquality, and tenure status affect the probability of agriculturalland use synergistically, having differential effects on thelikelihood of commercial versus semisubsistence farming. Theresults suggest that road building in areas with agriculturallypoor soils and low population densities may be a "lose-lose"proposition, causing habitat fragmentation and providing loweconomic returns.     

Combining Census and Survey Data to Trace the Spatial Dimensions of Poverty: A Case Study of Ecuador

Poverty maps provide information on the spatial distributionof living standards. They are an important tool for policymakers,who rely on them to allocate transfers and inform policy design.Poverty maps are also an important tool for researchers, whouse them to investigate the relationship between distributionwithin a country and growth or other economic, environmental,or social outcomes. A major impediment to the development ofpoverty maps has been that needed data on income or consumptiontypically are available only from relatively small surveys.Census data have the required sample size but generally do nothave the required information. This article uses the case ofEcuador to demonstrate how sample survey data can be combinedwith census data to yield predicted poverty rates for the populationcovered by the census. These poverty rates are found to be preciselymeasured, even at fairly disaggregated levels. However, beyonda certain level of spatial disaggregation, standard errors riserapidly.     

Land Values, Land Use, and the First Chicago Zoning Ordinance

This article examines whether the pattern of urban land use should have been regulated by local government in the 1920s, the decade in which many cities adopted their first zoning ordinances. The study is based on the assumption that land values are influenced by the mix of land use on the block. Conditions for land-value maximization are derived, and the circumstances under which land-use zoning can increase land values are discussed. Empirical land-value and land-use functions are estimated for Chicago in 1921, two years before the first Chicago zoning ordinance was adopted. The empirical results for land values imply that the land-use zoning system adopted in 1923 could not have brought about a general increase in land values. The empirical results for land use document the regularities in the use of land prior to the introduction of zoning.     

浅议城市房地产税中土地使用权的计税依据

城市房地产税的计税依据是企业账载的房屋原值,土地使用权是房屋价值的重要组成部分。由于土地和房屋的使用年限不同,并且存在道路、绿化等独立于房屋之外的土地,如何在时间和空间上界定城市房地产税中土地使用权的计税依据,本文结合税法及企业会计制度的现行规定,根据城市房地产税的立法精神,对此问题进行了阐述。     

National Transaction-based Land Price Indices

Using data on a large sample of land transactions, this paper develops quarterly national land price indices for residential, commercial, and industrial land use categories over the 20?years period from 1991 to 2009. We find significant differences in variability across land uses, with residential exhibiting the most volatility. Our particular interest in this paper is to compare intertemporal land prices with other prominant real estate indices. In all cases, the transaction-based land price indices leads the other indices.     

Model Selection and Averaging in Financial Risk Management

Simulated asset returns are used in many areas of actuarial science. For example, life insurers use them to price annuities, life insurance, and investment guarantees. The quality of those simulations has come under increased scrutiny during the current financial crisis. When simulating the asset price process, properly choosing which model or models to use, and accounting for the uncertainty in that choice, is essential. We investigate how best to choose a model from a flexible set of models. In our regime-switching models the individual regimes are not constrained to be from the same distributional family. Even with larger sample sizes, the standard model-selection methods (AIC, BIC, and DIC) incorrectly identify the models far too often. Rather than trying to identify the best model and limiting the simulation to a single distribution, we show that the simulations can be made more realistic by explicitly modeling the uncertainty in the model-selection process. Specifically, we consider a parallel model-selection method that provides the posterior probabilities of each model being the best, enabling model averaging and providing deeper insights into the relationships between the models. The value of the method is demonstrated through a simulation study, and the method is then applied to total return data from the S&P 500.     

Temporal Aggregation in Repeated Sales Models

Over the years, repeated sales models have come to wide and even commercial use. However, considering the subset of dwellings sold twice entail several challenges. Small sample problems constitute a special concern in repeated sales models, since sample sizes tend to be smaller than hedonic methods based on all transactions in a given period of time. Moreover, a cluster of observations in one time period does not only influence the index corresponding to that particular time period, but all other estimated indexes. A simulation approach is used to study the interplay between sample size and temporal aggregation. The analysis shows that serious mis-measurements may occur even in cases where the statistical diagnostic tools like R ² and t-values and empiric standard deviations indicate good explanatory power. However, the risk of serious biases driven by sparse data sets tends to be small, even if the actual estimated price curve show signs of under-smoothing. Mis-measured curves have unstable estimates with respect to temporal aggregation. Two repeated models, one with a slightly finer time partition achieved by adding one more time dummy, used on the same sample can alter the index estimate at a given time with as much at 10–15%. The simulations reveal that varying temporal aggregation is a powerful diagnostic tool and should be employed routinely. The last part of the paper shows that choosing an appropriate temporal aggregation involves more than merely a balance between under-smoothing and over-smoothing. Efficiency questions tend to be better addressed by a higher temporal aggregation, than a good overall estimation of the price curve alone calls for.      

Delegating Eminent Domain Powers to Private Firms: Land Use and Efficiency Implications

Many private common carriers or regulated utilities have eminent domain powers in the U.S. The rationale resembles that for local governments; lower cost of assembling land for long distance electric transmission, gas and oil products pipelines, etc. Recent court cases raise questions about whether eminent domain allows firms to use inefficiently long indirect land corridors, inefficiently wide corridors, or higher value land when lower value land is available as an alternative? Despite the incentive to over-use capital under rate-of-return regulation, it turns out that the firm adopts an excessive land corridor width only to the extent that corridor width is tied to capital usage. For route selection, rate-of-return regulated firms follow the same Pareto rule that would be followed by an efficiency-oriented government when designating which land to take for a transmission route by eminent domain.     

The Investment Incentive Effects of Land Use Regulations

This paper provides an overview and synthesis of the results from recent studies of how different types of land use regulations affect land development incentives. The presentation is nontechnical and focuses on uncovering general principles for the dynamic effects of such policies. It explains why the risk of regulation leads to faster development of unregulated land and how the effect on structural densities reflects the underlying pattern of growth in the demand for land by competing uses. It also discusses how the general pattern of timing and density responses for regulated property reflect the same growth patterns in demand.     

Taxes and Fees as Forms of Land Use Regulation

In this article I expand on Turnbull’s presentation by highlighting two important aspects of regulations and their effects on land use. First, I summarize what we know about the dynamic effects of property taxation and discuss alternative tax regimes and their implications for land use. Second, I analyze the role of development impact fees and consider ways in which this new financing method may be rationalized.     

Speculation and price bubbles in the Korean and Japanese real estate markets

This article investigates the possibility of speculation having caused the prices of land and housing to deviate from their given long-run equilibrium levels in Korea and Japan. We modeled speculation by incorporating the expected future price into the demand equation. The existence of growing rational bubbles was tested on Korean and Japanese data using the standard econometric technique for estimating linear rational expectations models. Our analysis of the Korean annual data suggests that a growing rationale bubble existed during the 1974–1989 period, nominal or real. Estimation results of the same model using Japanese annual data also confirmed the existence of a bubble in land price. Contrary to our analysis of land price data, the evidence of the bubble was much less obvious in Korean annual housing price data. We therefore estimated the model using quarterly data and found that the existence of a bubble could not be established in housing prices. This finding was also consistent with the trend of the rent-to-value ratio series in apartment units. Our results need to be taken with caution because our approach suffers from the common econometric problem of possible mis-specification of the model and because of the small size of the sample.     

Risk informed decision making in land use planning

The objective of the paper is to present a multicriteria decision methodology for supporting decisions about patterns of land development in the vicinity of major hazard installations. The proposed methodology is based on the paradigm of Multicriteria Decision Analysis and aims at integrating the results of risk analysis of major hazard installations with models for land use planning. The methodology possesses two main features: it is interactive and it does not require assessment of value tradeoffs prior to assessing the most preferred land use pattern. The latter is achieved by determining the efficient set of land use patterns by means of a dynamic programming-based algorithm. The proposed methodology and the use of the efficient set of solutions in supporting land use planning decisions are demonstrated through an application. Four criteria are used in the application, three referring to risk and one to the benefits of alternative land use patterns, although the methodology can accept any number of decision criteria as well as various types of land development. A computerized decision support system has been developed to implement the proposed methodology.     

Performance of information criteria for selection of Hawkes process models of financial data

We test three common information criteria (IC) for selecting the order of a Hawkes process with an intensity kernel that can be expressed as a mixture of exponential terms. These processes find application in high-frequency financial data modelling. The information criteria are Akaike’s information criterion, the Bayesian information criterion and the Hannan–Quinn criterion. Since we work with simulated data, we are able to measure the performance of model selection by the success rate of the IC in selecting the model that was used to generate the data. In particular, we are interested in the relation between correct model selection and underlying sample size. The analysis includes realistic sample sizes and parameter sets from recent literature where parameters were estimated using empirical financial intra-day data. We compare our results to theoretical predictions and similar empirical findings on the asymptotic distribution of model selection for consistent and inconsistent IC.     

The Share Investment Decision Process and Information Use: An Exploratory Case Study

This paper describes the use of accounting and other information in the share investment decision process of an institutional investor. The study was conducted within the context of an organisation's everyday working environment. The focus was on qualitative data and analysis of a case study rather than on quantitative data and general tendency analysis of a random sample. It is concluded that the significance of the annual report as an information source changes over the period of one year. It varies from serving as a primary information source to serving in a confirmatory role. Furthermore, the annual report also acts as a stimulus for identifying specific questions rather than merely as a source of information in response to prior questions.     

The Effect of Corporate Governance on the Use of Enterprise Risk Management: Evidence From Canada

This article examines the use of enterprise risk management (ERM) by companies in Canada, the characteristics that are associated with the use of ERM, what obstacles companies face in implementing ERM, and what role, if any, corporate governance guidelines have played in the decision to adopt ERM. We obtained our data from the responses to a mail survey sent to Canadian Risk and Insurance Management Society members as well as telephone interviews with 19 of the respondents. The results indicate that 31 percent of the sample had adopted ERM and that reasons for adopting ERM include the influence of the risk manager (61 percent), encouragement from the board of directors (51 percent), and compliance with Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE) guidelines (37 percent). The major deterrents to ERM were an organizational structure that discourages ERM and an overall resistance to change. Although only about one‐third of companies indicated that they had adopted an ERM approach, evidence was clear that a larger portion of the sample was moving in that direction, as indicated by what changes they had observed in their companies in the past three years. These include the development of company‐wide guidelines for risk management (45 percent), an increased awareness of nonoperational risks by operational risk management personnel and an increased awareness of operational risks by nonoperational risk management personnel (49 percent), more coordination with different areas responsible for risk management (64 percent), and more involvement and interaction in the decision making of other departments. Contrary to what we expected, there was not a significant difference between firms that are listed on the TSE versus those that are not in terms of the propensity to use ERM. However, the fact that 37 percent of firms indicated that the TSE guidelines were influential in their decision to adopt ERM provides some evidence that the guidelines are influencing companies’ risk management strategies.