美国黄金期货与黄金现货互动关系的实证研究

文章通过建立误差修正模型（ Error Correction ModeL,ECM）和基于持有成本理论的误差修正模型（ Error Correction ModeL Cost of Carry,ECM-CoC）,对美国黄金市场的期货与现货市场在金融危机前后的互动关系进行了实证分析。结果表明：在2007年金融危机前美国黄金期货市场引导黄金现货市场,期货市场的价格发现功能得以实现;在金融风暴后美国黄金现货和期货市场存在双向引导关系;美国黄金期货市场和现货市场之间存在长期均衡关系,期货市场和现货市场均存在误差修正机制,美国现货市场价格恢复均衡的调整速度高于黄金期货市场。     

Market Making Contracts,Firm Value,and the IPO Decision

We examine the effects of secondary market liquidity on firm value and the IPO decision. Competitive aftermarket liquidity provision is associated with reduced welfare and a discounted secondary market price that can dissuade IPOs. The competitive market fails in particular for firms or at times when uncertainty regarding fundamental value and asymmetric information are large in combination. In these cases, firm value and welfare are improved by a contract where the firm engages a designated market maker to enhance liquidity. Such contracts represent a market solution to a market imperfection, particularly for small, growth firms.     

Do switching costs make markets more or less competitive? The case of 800‐number portability

Do switching costs reduce or intensify price competition if firms charge the same price to existing and new consumers? I study 800‐number portability to determine how switching costs affect price competition under a single price regime. AT&T and MCI reduced their toll‐free services prices in response to portability, implying that reduced switching costs increased competition. Despite rapid market growth, gains from higher prices to “locked‐in” consumers exceeded the incentives to capture new consumers. Prices on larger contracts dropped more, consistent with greater lock‐in for larger users. Price changes between portability's announcement and implementation are consistent with rational expectations.     

Competition and the cost of debt

This paper empirically shows that the cost of bank debt is systematically higher for firms that operate in competitive product markets. Using various proxies for product market competition, and reductions of import tariff rates to capture exogenous changes to a firm's competitive environment, I find that competition has a significantly positive effect on the cost of bank debt. Moreover, the analysis reveals that the effect of competition is greater in industries in which small firms face financially strong rivals, in industries with intense strategic interactions between firms, and in illiquid industries. Overall, these findings suggest that banks price financial contracts by taking into account the risk that arises from product market competition.     

公共服务合同外包中的交易成本及其控制

公共服务合同外包作为一项交易,不可避免地存在不少交易成本变量,公共服务合同外包不一定能降低交易成本、公共服务合同外包中存在不确定性成本、公共服务合同外包难以合理界定交易成本等都是这些变量的体现。基于这些交易成本变量,大胆而细致地选择公共服务合同外包,建立公共服务合同外包风险防范机制,建立较为公平、合理的风险分担机制,提高政府对公共服务合同外包的控制能力等应是降低公共服务合同外包交易成本的可行路径。     

Public Disclosure of Forward Contracts and Revelation of Proprietary Information

Financial executives of firms engaged in forward contracting have raised concerns that mandated disclosure of those contracts would reveal proprietary information to rival firms. This paper considers the basis for those concerns in the framework of a duopoly in which one privately informed producer enters the forward market prior to production. In choosing its forward position, the firm considers the effects of that position on the forward price and second stage product market competition with its rival. Two regimes are considered: mandated disclosure and no disclosure. Under the former, the contracting firm faces a tension between exploiting its information advantage in the forward market and attempting to influence the production decision of its rival. On average, in equilibrium, the contracting firm gains a first-mover advantage, but at the cost of revealing its private information to its rival and extracting less expected gains from uninformed forward market participants. In contrast, with no disclosure, the contracting firm cannot influence rival firm beliefs, but extracts more expected gains from its private information in both the forward and product markets. On balance, the contracting firm prefers no disclosure. Moreover, parameterizations exist such that the rival also prefers that regime. These findings explain the opposition of respondents to draft proposals of Statement of Financial Standards No. 133.     

Why and How UK Firms Hedge

This paper attempts to differentiate among the theories of hedging by using disclosures in the annual reports of 400 UK companies and data collected via a survey. I find, unlike many previous US studies, strong evidence linking the decision to hedge and the expected costs of financial distress. The tests show that this is mainly because my definition of hedging includes all hedgers and not just derivative users. However, when the tests employ the same hedging definition as previous US studies, financial distress cost factors still appear to be more important for this sample than samples of US firms. Therefore, a secondary explanation for the strong financial distress results might be due to differences in the bankruptcy codes in the two countries, which result in higher expected costs of financial distress for UK firms. The paper also examines the determinants of the choice of hedging method distinguishing between non‐derivative and derivatives hedging. My evidence shows that larger firms, firms with more cash, firms with a greater probability of financial distress, firms with exports or imports and firms with more short‐term debt are more likely to hedge with derivatives. Thus, differences in opportunities, in incentives for reducing risk and in the types of financial price exposure play an important role in how firms hedge their risks.     

The ownership of ratings

We identify the optimal contract between a rating agency and a firm and the circumstances under which simple ownership contracts implement this optimal solution. We assume that the decision to obtain a rating is endogenous and the price of a rating is a strategic variable. Clients hiding their ratings can be an equilibrium only if they are ex ante uncertain of their quality and if the hiring decision is not observable. For some distribution functions, a competitive rating market is necessary for this result to obtain. In this context, competition between rating intermediaries will lead to less information in equilibrium.     

Analytics Underlying the Metallgesellschaft Hedge: Short Term Futures in a Multi-Period Environment

In a highly publicized example, a marketing and refining subsidiary of Metallgesellschaft controlled short term derivative positions reportedly equivalent to 160 million barrels of oil, 80 times the daily output of Kuwait. Presumably, the short term positions were taken to hedge oil contracts to customers over an extended period. This paper develops the analytics underlying the hedging of long term flow commitments with short term futures contracts. Its contributions includes the determination of minimum variance hedging paths for multiperiod flow portfolios and the evaluation of both period-by-period and end-of-horizon volatilities under various hedging schemes. The analysis allows for basis risk, non-zero cost-of-carry, and spot diffusion processes that have a non-zero market price of risk. The results are developed in the context of an efficient market and standard equilibrium pricing models.     

Colluding through suppliers

This article investigates downstream firms’ ability to collude in a repeated game of competition between supply chains. We show that downstream firms with buyer power can collude more easily in the output market if they also collude on their input supply contracts. More specifically, an implicit agreement on input supply contracts with above‐cost wholesale prices and negative fixed fees (that is, slotting fees) facilitates collusion on downstream prices. Banning information exchange about wholesale prices decreases the scope for collusion. Moreover, high downstream prices are more difficult to sustain if upstream rather than downstream firms make contract offers.     

Geopolitical risk and corporate payout policy

In this study, we examine the effects of geopolitical risk on corporate payout policy. Exploiting a news-based index of geopolitical risk, we find that firms adopt a more conservative payout policy by reducing share repurchases in response to greater geopolitical risk, whereas the effects of geopolitical risk on cash dividends are insignificant. Further analysis suggests that cash flow uncertainty and financial distress risk are two potential channels through which geopolitical risk affects corporate payout policy. We also show that the effects of geopolitical risk on share repurchase are more pronounced for firms with greater exposure to product market competition and those facing higher threats of financial distress. Overall, our study emphasizes the implications of geopolitical risk for corporate payout choice.     

Institutional investor horizon and stock price synchronicity: Do product market competition and analyst coverage matter?

This paper provides new insights into the relation between institutional investment horizon and stock price synchronicity and investigates whether this relationship depends on the intensity of product market competition and analyst coverage. Based on a sample of French listed companies, we find that long-term (short-term) institutional investors are associated with lower (higher) stock price synchronicity. The results also show that the negative effect of long-term institutional investors is more accentuated for firms in less competitive markets and with high analyst coverage. An additional analysis shows that the synchronicity reduction effect does not vary during the financial crisis. Overall, these findings suggest that unlike their short-term counterparts, long term investors reduce asymmetric information and help disseminate firm-specific information into stock prices.     

Redacted Disclosure

In this paper we investigate a firm's decision to redact proprietary information from its material contract filings. Information redaction results when the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) grants a firm's request to withhold information from investors in its material contract filings, presumably because the information is proprietary. We hypothesize that when firms redact information, measures of adverse selection deteriorate. That is, the redaction of proprietary information from material contracts should be associated with: a larger adverse selection component of the bid‐ask spread, reductions in market depth, and lower market turnover. In addition, we conjecture that the decision to redact depends on whether the firm plans on raising capital, the competitiveness of the firm's industry, and the performance of the firm. Overall the results of our analysis generally support our predictions. We find that when firms redact information, contemporaneous measures of the adverse selection component of the bid‐ask spread rise, and market depth and share turnover deteriorate; this suggests an increase in adverse selection. We also find firms are less likely to redact when they issue long‐term debt and are more likely to redact when they are in a competitive industry or experience losses.     

Monitoring Financial Distress in a High-Stress Financial World: The Role of Option Prices as Bank Risk Metrics

The current financial crisis offers a unique opportunity to investigate the leading properties of market indicators in a stressed environment and their usefulness from a banking supervision perspective. One pool of relevant information that has been little explored in the empirical literature is the market for bank’s exchange-traded option contracts. In this paper, we first extract implied volatility indicators from the prices of option contracts on financial firms’ equity. We then examine empirically their ability to predict financial distress by applying survival analysis techniques to a sample of large US financial firms. We find that market indicators extracted from option prices significantly explain the survival time of troubled financial firms and do a better job in predicting financial distress than other time-varying covariates typically included in bank failure models. Overall, both accounting information and option prices contain useful information of subsequent financial problems and, more importantly, their combination produces good forecasts in a high-stress financial world.     

Price uncertainty and vertical integration: an examination of petrochemical firms

The petrochemical industry employs assets subject to temporal and site specificity. The OPEC oil price shocks of the 1970s made it difficult to write contracts covering business dealings in the industry. I use this production and economic setting as a natural experiment to test transaction cost theory. In support of the theory, I find that input price uncertainty in the 1970s positively affected the extent of vertical integration by firms into input stages. Moreover, the positive reaction of vertical integration to price uncertainty mainly occurs in transactions subject to asset specificity. I also examine price controls and market power as alternative explanations for vertical integration in the industry, but fail to find support for these hypotheses.     

Presale Contract and its Embedded Default and Abandonment Options

The presale contract is a popular property selling method that allows a buyer to default on the remaining payment and/or a developer to abandon a project. Using a simple two-period game theoretical model, we derive a closed-form pricing equation for a presale contract that explicitly accounts for a developer??s abandonment option and a buyer??s default option. Although a developer has an abandonment option under either a spot sale or a presale method, the option is more valuable under a presale contract because of an additional cash inflow from the presale downpayment. A presale also provides a buyer a default option, which is valuable in a real estate market with uncertain demand and price risk. We analyze the implications of the abandonment option on a developer??s construction decision and choice of selling method, as well as the implications of the default option on a buyer??s purchase decision. Furthermore, our model framework has implications to the pricing of futures contracts that involve both stochastic revenues and costs.     

Fraud Allegations and Government Contracting

This paper examines whether fraud allegations affect firms’ contracting with the government. Using a data set of whistleblower allegations brought under the False Claims Act against firms accused of defrauding the government, we find that federal agencies do not reduce the total dollar volume of contracts with accused firms; however, they substitute approximately 14% of the harder‐to‐monitor cost‐plus contracts for fixed‐price contracts. This effect is concentrated in the procurement of services and explained by contract and service substitution. Finally, we find that after the conclusion of the investigation, the government reduces the contract dollar volume by approximately 15% for cases that resulted in a settlement. Our findings indicate that contract‐design changes are used to mitigate uncertainty in suppliers’ reputation.     

Do the Forward Sales of Real Estate Stabilize Spot Prices?

We examine the effect of forward sale (pre-sale) activities on the volatility of spot prices in the real estate market. The abundance of pre-sales data and major changes in regulatory control on the pre-sale market during the 90's in Hong Kong allow us to undertake empirical tests using Hong Kong's real estate data. Our results show that the volatility of spot prices increased significantly after forward sales were severely dampened by regulatory control measures introduced in 1994, but decreased again when the measures were partly relaxed in 1998. The results contribute to the long lasting debate on whether the introduction of a futures market reduces the volatility of spot prices. Previous studies were mainly conducted in markets with low transaction costs, notably financial markets. By utilizing the unique regulatory changes in the pre-sale market of Hong Kong, we are able to conduct an experiment on the conditional volatility of spot prices in a high information-cost environment, thereby shedding light on the important role of forward housing contracts in providing price expectation information for spot trading.     

Disclosure of outsourcing in the annual report: Causes and market returns effects

Firms increasingly are utilizing outsourcing to enhance or maintain their competitiveness. Prior research shows that capital markets value a firm's decision to outsource. This study uses a sample of firms announcing outsourcing arrangements in a press release to examine which factors are associated with the subsequent decision to voluntarily provide or withhold information about outsourcing in their annual report. The paper also examines whether annual report disclosure is a reliable signal of future market performance. We find that underperforming firms, larger firms, and firms experiencing negative outsourcing announcement market returns and negative long-term market returns are more likely to disclose outsourcing in their annual reports. There is also evidence that firms' disclosure of outsourcing in the annual report signals an improvement in market performance that is credible to the capital markets. We contend that the disclosure and subsequent firm performance issues we investigate apply to any type of outsourcing arrangement, and therefore our results are relevant to future information systems research on this subject. Our findings also suggest that regulatory standards could reduce private information search costs for investors by providing a common disclosure methodology for outsourcing activities.     

Examining the forward pricing function of the Australian equity index futures contract

The relationship between the Australian equity index futures and spot prices is examined. Tests indicate that futures prices with one, two and three months to maturity are unbiased predictors of the spot and hence provide an efficient hedging mechanism for Australian equity index market participants, while six‐, nine‐ and twelve‐month futures prices are biased predictors of spot prices, indicating that speculative opportunities may exist in futures contracts for these time spreads. An analysis of the short‐run dynamic properties of the long‐run equilibrium relationship found that for all time spreads the futures prices respond to changes in the long‐run equilibrium, and for the twelve‐month contract, both futures and spot prices adjust to return to the long‐run equilibrium.