Reliability and relevance of fair values: private equity investments and investee fundamentals

Review of Accounting Studies - We directly test the reliability and relevance of investee fair values reported by listed private equity funds (LPEs). In our setting, disaggregated fair value...     

Macroeconomic risks and characteristic-based factor models

We show that book-to-market, size, and momentum capture cross-sectional variation in exposures to a broad set of macroeconomic factors identified in the prior literature as potentially important for pricing equities. The factors considered include innovations in economic growth expectations, inflation, the aggregate survival probability, the term structure of interest rates, and the exchange rate. Factor mimicking portfolios constructed on the basis of book-to-market, size, and momentum therefore, serve as proxy composite macroeconomic risk factors. Conditional and unconditional cross-sectional asset pricing tests indicate that most of the macroeconomic factors considered are priced. The performance of an asset pricing model based on the macroeconomic factors is comparable to the performance of the Fama and French (1993) model. However, the momentum factor is found to contain incremental information for asset pricing.     

为能源而战--亚洲今夏节能新举措

由于最近一轮破纪录的油价飙升,许多能源紧缺的亚洲国家政府纷纷带头推动节能举措,以抑制今夏的能源需求。继中国政府宣布26℃为办公场所室内最佳的空调温度之后,韩国一位部长亲自走上T型台,加入一场“不打领带”的时装秀,以鼓励办公室工作人员身着更凉爽的服装;而在印度尼西亚,政府为节约能源,     

Factors influencing participation in the Nova Scotia Environmental Farm Plan Program

There is growing interest in Nova Scotia's Environmental Farm Plan (NS EFP) program among farmers and policy makers because of several reasons. First, effectiveness of standardized or uniform beneficial management practices in mitigating the negative environmental impacts from agriculture is limited by inherent heterogeneities in agricultural production systems. In addition, there is heightened interest in farmers generating ecological goods and services to society. This study investigates the determinants of participation in the NS EFP program. A discrete choice model of NS EFP participation was applied to a sample of 83 farmers (representing a 31% response rate). To increase relevance of the study to program administrators, the study also examined farmers’ use of various channels and sources of information on farm conservation practices. The most used sources of information on farm conservation practices include a mix of interpersonal sources and government agencies. Although online information (especially those available for free) appears to be gaining popularity in usage, overall, electronic and computer channels of information (especially radio and television) were used less compared with traditional channels of communicating farm conservation information (such as newsletters and agricultural magazines). Regression analysis suggests that farm characteristics (i.e., farm type, farm size, farm income) and farmer capacity variables (i.e., specialized training and knowledge from EFP program information sessions and workshops, and on-farm stewardship demonstrations) were significant determinants of environmental farm planning.     

Persistent myths about emergency seed aid

Seed interventions are the major agricultural response during emergency and recovery phases of humanitarian relief. They are implemented by diverse agencies, and widely promoted: for instance the FAO alone managed 400 such projects between 2003 and 2005. However, seed aid suffers from a lack of critical attention, perpetuating widespread myths among practitioners, policymakers, and the larger humanitarian community. This paper challenges five predominant myths about seed aid: (1) seed aid is needed whenever food aid is; (2) seed aid can do no harm; (3) disasters wipe out seed systems; (4) effective implementation is a straightforward logistical exercise, and; (5) improved seed is the best form of aid. These myths are juxtaposed with recent empirical work across a range of countries, particularly in Eastern and Southern Africa. The perpetuation of such myths highlights a serious absence of scrutiny of emergency seed aid, and helps explain why such aid is repeated year after year in many sites, with little apparent positive effect. The paper argues that the invisibility of seed aid is a major cause for the lack of oversight and concludes that donors and farmer beneficiaries must become centrally involved in seed aid governance.     

Do Court Decisions Drive the Federal Trade Commission’s Enforcement Policy on Merger Settlements?

Mergers are generally conglomerate in nature with only minor (if any) horizontal overlaps. Under U.S. law, an enforcement agency may challenge any anticompetitive aspect of the merger and the consequent delay associated with litigation would impose costs on the firm. These costs may give the enforcement agency “leverage” to extract a settlement even when the firm would prevail in court. This paper explores whether the FTC’s decisions to challenge transactions approximate the case law. We find that the representative enforcement regimes of the FTC and the courts are remarkably similar, although the FTC credits efficiencies, while courts consider buyer sophistication as a mitigating factor.     

Liberal economic nationalism,financial stability,and Commission leniency in Banking Union

This paper demonstrates that protection and promotion of insolvent banks remains a high priority for national authorities in Europe, and the Commission partially accommodates these impulses in the desire to preserve national financial stability. Insolvent banks are kept alive despite Banking Union rules on resolution designed to facilitate their closure at the cost of private investors. Italian and Portuguese cases demonstrate that pressure to relax state aid rules is strongest where problems are the greatest. However, the long-term trend is still an incremental decrease in national leeway to protect and promote national bank ownership.     

Receiving,Recording, and Responding to Customer Complaints: The Effects of Formalizing Customer Complaint Handling Policies in Retail Firms

ABSTRACT

Given the critical need for retail firms to provide high quality customer service and satisfaction, this article investigates the importance of formalizing customer complaint handling policies and procedures with regard to its relationship to the ways in which retail companies receive, record, and respond to customer complaints. A survey of 184 firms from the retail environment of a midsized community reveals that the existence of such formalized procedures is significantly associated with firm size, better channels of communication with customers, mechanisms of recording customer feedback, and better-trained employees, which have been shown to relate to higher firm performance.     

A continuous income-based grade gap decomposition on university course grades

The earnings premium for education, and higher education in particular, is well documented. This article examines the college achievement gap between students coming from positions of high and low socio-economic status. Other papers have also looked at this issue, often by employing, at least in part, an Oaxaca decomposition. Past papers artificially divided socio-economic status into binary groups of high and low, in order to employ the decomposition. Socio-economic status is innately a continuous variable. Therefore, we implement a continuous version of the Oaxaca decomposition. Higher socio-economic students are both slightly better prepared in terms of observable characteristics and have better returns to their characteristics than lower socio-economic students. Notable differences across results obtained from the binary and continuous decomposition methods are discussed.