Monday returns and asset pricing

The seasonal patterns observed on Monday stock returns are still unexplained by different asset pricing models. We attempt to fill this gap in the finance literature by using the Fama-French (Journal of Financial Economics 33:3–56, 1993) risk factors to explain the Monday seasonal. The results in the study show that Monday returns are explained by risk factors such as the market return, the size of the firms, and the book-to-market ratios of firms.     

Endogenous elites: power structure and patron-client relationships

In weak institutional settings, autocrats barter political and economic concessions for support to remain in power and extract rents. Instead of viewing the favors’ beneficiaries, i.e. the elites, as an exogenous entity, we allow the king to decide whom to coopt provided the subjects are heterogeneous in the potential support—their strength—they could bring to the regime. While the ruler can select the elites on the basis of their personal characteristics, an alternative strategy consists in introducing some uncertainty in the cooptation process. The latter strategy allows the king to reduce the clients’ cooptation price since in the event of a revolution the likelihood of being included in the future body of elites is lower. We show that weak rulers are more likely to coopt the society’s strongest individuals, while powerful rulers diversify the composition of their clientele. Moreover, when agents value more future discounted outcomes, the king is more likely to randomly coopt subjects.     

Competition for private capital and central grants: the case of Japanese industrial parks

Local governments invest in public infrastructure to develop their regions. When they depend on intergovernmental grants for local development and have opportunities to lobby upper-level governments for such grants, horizontal intergovernmental competition in lobbying activity may emerge in addition to competition over public infrastructure. This paper empirically examines the existence of these interactions between Japanese localities, by using data on the value of industrial parks as infrastructure provisions and on personnel interchanges between the central and local governments as a measure of lobbying activity. Our results suggest that a Japanese local government’s choice of the size of industrial parks and its invitation to central officers to act as a director on loan are positive responses to the neighboring local government’s policy choices. As the value of the industrial parks in a district is affected by the neighboring districts’ lobby activities and their industrial park values, we can interpret these results as evidence of inter-regional competition in these two dimensions, rather than control by the central government in this unitary state.     

Allocation of public funds to R&;D: a portfolio choice-styled decision model and a biotechnology case study

A decision problem—allocating public research and development (R&D) funding—is faced by a planner who has ambiguous knowledge of welfare effects of the various research areas. We model this as a reverse portfolio choice problem faced by a Bayesian decision-maker. Two elements of the planner’s inferential system are developed: a conditional distribution of welfare ‘returns’ on an allocation, given stated preferences of citizens for the different areas, and a minimum risk criterion for re-allocating these funds, given the performance of a status quo level of funding. A case study of Canadian public research funds expended on various applications of agricultural biotechnology is provided. The decision-making methodology can accommodate a variety of collective expenditure and resource allocation problems.