An Empirical Study on Corporate Governance and Market Valuation in China

This paper empirically studies the relationship between the governance mechanisms and the market valuation of publicly listed firms in China. The authors construct measures for corporate governance mechanisms and measures of market valuation for all publicly listed firms on the two stock markets in China by using data from the firm’s annual reports. They then investigate how the market-valuation variables are affected by the corporate governance variables while controlling for a number of factors commonly considered in market valuation analysis. A corporate governance index is also constructed to summarize the information contained in the corporate governance variables. The index is found to have statistically and economically significant effects on market valuation. The analysis indicates that investors pay a significant premium for well-governed firms in China, benefiting firms that improve their governance mechanisms. Translated from Economic Research Journal, 2005, 2 (in Chinese)     

成功的关键：以一致声音发言的行业

女士们、先生们:我作为IVSC的代表和该会的主席,非常感谢能获得在此开幕式上演讲的崇高待遇。我对自己被列为论坛嘉宾和演讲人也感到非常荣幸。让我首先对我们的东道主中国资产评估协会这次为精心组织国际评估准则委员会年会和本次论坛——昆明国际评估论坛所付出的巨大努力表示敬意!今天我们大家济济一堂,这表明论坛得到了广泛的关注和支持,真是令人振奋。中国资产评估协会于1999年IVSC在北京首次举行的会议上当选为IVSC常务理事,多年来已成为国际评估准则委员会的活跃成员。我对中国资产评估协会作为IVSC理事会和准则委员会的成员…     

Adam Smith’s theory of economic development: “Of the natural progress of opulence”

Adam Smith’s theory of economic development contained within Chapter I, Book III, of theWealth of Nations is presented in this paper. According to Smith, the natural order of development as it proceeds from primary to secondary to tertiary activity is determined by the evaluation of the relative risk and potential profit to be earned in alternative uses of capital. The emphasis of this theory is on the behavior of economic agents facing risk, rather than the amount of capital or the size of national saving or other measurable variables as in some modern approaches.     

Return predictability in African stock markets

This paper models weekly index returns adjusted for thin trading as a nonlinear autoregressive process with conditional heteroscedasticity to investigate the weak-form pricing efficiency of 11 African stock markets. Specifically, the use of the EGARCH-M model allows us to capture how conditional volatility affects the pricing process without imposing undue restrictions on the parameters of the conditional variance equation. On the basis of such a robust model, we are able to reject the evidence in prior studies that the Nigerian stock market is weak-form efficient. On the other hand, we confirm extant results that the markets in Egypt, Kenya, and Zimbabwe are efficient while that of South Africa is not weak-form efficient. We also generate new results, which point to the efficiency of the stock markets in Mauritius and Morocco, while the markets in Botswana, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Swaziland are not consistent with weak-form efficiency.     

What Makes a Blockbuster Video Game? An Empirical Analysis of US Sales Data

This study uses a unique data set of individual video game titles to estimate the effect of an exhaustive set of observable characteristics on the likelihood of a video game becoming a blockbuster title. Due to the long‐tailed distribution of the sales data, both ordinary least squares and logistic regression models are estimated. The results consistently show that blockbuster video games are more likely to be released by one of the major publishers for popular hardware platforms. Results also show that games of higher quality are significantly more likely to sell a greater number of units than those of a lower quality. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hedging dairy production losses using weather-based index insurance

This article proposes a temperature–humidity index insurance product and examines whether this product can effectively protect against the risk of reduced milk production caused by heat stress. Results suggest that even when premiums are at higher than actuarially fair levels and the insurance purchaser is faced with both spatial and temporal basis risks, a temperature–humidity index insurance product would provide risk management benefits to a representative south‐central Georgia dairy producer.     

Productivity Growth and Environmental Regulation in Mexican and U.S. Food Manufacturing

Many argued during the NAFTA debate that trade liberalization would favor Mexican over U.S. food processors, especially because of lax environmental laws south of the border. We find through an examination of profit functions that productivity growth in Mexico has outstripped that in the United States, suggesting free trade indeed will benefit Mexican suppliers. U.S. pollution regulations have had no impact on the profitability or productivity of U.S. food manufacturing. In contrast, Mexico's swiftly rising environmental standards have enhanced food processors' productivity growth, corroborating the Porter hypothesis. Pollution law, therefore, has favored Mexican over U.S. food processing, but for reasons few had anticipated.     

Cause‐related marketing and customer donations in an online marketplace

• eBay for Charity provides mechanisms for embedding charitable fundraising and donations into the UK's largest online marketplace, with 18 million unique visitors each month. This paper explores some of our findings concerning the impact of charitable activity on the behaviour of those who participate, including buyers, sellers, and the charities themselves, and suggests ways these findings could be applied to other forms of online fundraising in the future.

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.