Asymmetric Information and the Predictability of Real Estate Returns

This article examines the relation between systematic price changes and the heterogeneity of investors information sets in real estate asset markets. The empirical implications rely on a theoretical economy in which information asymmetry alters the dynamic relation between returns and trading volume. We employ a filter-rule methodology to determine predictability in returns and augment the return-based conditioning set with trading volume. The additional conditioning information is necessary since the model is underspecified when predictability is based on returns alone. Our results provide new insight into the coexistence of informational and noninformational exchange in the speculative markets for real estate assets. Specifically, we find that the predictability of real estate returns is generally more indicative of portfolio rebalancing effects than an adverse-selection problem. These results are unique in addressing the time-variation in information asymmetry.     

An analysis of Japanese earnings forecast revisions with application to seasoned equity offerings

Using the bootstrap method, we explore the characteristics of revisions in Japanese earnings forecast data. We find that forecast revisions exhibit a downward trend over time as the actual earnings announcement date approaches, and are serially correlated with three significant lags. Using these characteristics we develop a model to estimate abnormal forecast revisions, and illustrate the model's use with a sample of Japanese companies announcing seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). In contrast to results obtained by studies using American data, our findings indicate significant positive upward revisions when Japanese firms announce an SEO.     

Eco-logical education for the long emergency

In its inadvertent creation of multiple ecological crises including climate change, humanity as a whole appears caught in a lemmings loop, racing toward a probable future identified as The Long Emergency. One might think that even the possibility of this future scenario should be sufficient to effect a revolution in education. Yet overall there appears to be insufficient depth of respons-ability in this regard, of taking heed of ecological educational discourse. The paper advocates a deeply ecological education through identifying the significance of ecoliteracy as involving a critical contrast between two worldviews (modernism and a prospective ecological worldview). The paper advances futures of ecological thinking through a deep interpretation of ecology and related terms including ecosystem and eco-logics. The complex integrative character of conceptual ecology is foregrounded and extended through associating it with transdisciplinarity, integralism and critical realism under the overarching orientation of Boyer's scholarship of integration.     

Gender differences in information processing: An empirical test of the hypothesis-confirming strategy in an audit context

Accounting education research reports that female students outperform male students. We posit that different information processing styles may have accounted for this difference. We postulate that because male students tend to process information selectively, they would rate confirming information as more important than female students would. Female students would rate disconfirming information as more important. We also postulate that male students are hypothesis-confirming whereas the female students are not. Consequently, female students being comprehensive processors, would rate the task as more difficult compared to male students. To test these propositions, 36 male and 33 female students performed an evaluation task that contained equal numbers of confirming and disconfirming cues. The students were required to rate the importance of these cues to their hypothesis. The results support our propositions except that female and male students do not rate confirming information significantly differently from each other.     

Rent Paying Ability and Racial Settlement Patterns

A bstract . Based on the belief that the major remaining hurdle to integration is economic , the proposition has frequently been advanced that if minority households could afford decent housing outside their current communities , many would move from their ghettoes into society at large. Evidence from two housing allowance demonstration projects and the recently completed Experimental Housing Allowance Program raises doubts as to the validity of this contention. While recipients of housing allowances frequently moved to better neighborhoods , only rarely were they able to break free of traditional settlement patterns . Findings suggest that while it may be necessary to increase the rent paying abilities of low-income minority households as a precondition of integration, that segregation is not likely to be eliminated until the social, psychological, and remaining legal issues associated with it are addressed as well.     

Reputation gaps and the performance of service organizations

Links between the reputation of organizations and their financial performance are intuitively attractive to assume, but often difficult to demonstrate convincingly. Gaps between employee and customer perceptions of corporate reputation have traditionally been associated with poor performance. In the context of service business and applying assimilation‐contrast theory, we hypothesize that the nature of such gaps will, in reality, have a differential effect on future revenue depending on the size and valence of the gap. The effects of small gaps should be assimilated by customers, but larger ones have a greater potential of creating a contrast effect resulting in significant increases or decreases in subsequent sales. In businesses where employees have a more positive view of the company reputation than customers, we hypothesize a growth in future sales, and where they have a relatively more negative view, a decline. We test the effects of what we label as reputation gaps in 56 business units drawn from nine service organizations and confirm our hypotheses. Among the implications of our findings are that managing reputation by elevating employee perceptions of a company's reputation above those perceived by its customers holds the potential to enhance future sales. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.