Do significant risk warnings in annual reports increase corporate bond credit spreads? Evidence from China

Based on listed companies issuing bonds on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2007 to 2017, this study analyzes the relationship between significant risk warnings in Chinese companies’ annual reports and corporate bond credit spreads. The main findings are as follows. First, in the Chinese market, “substantial warnings of significant risks” can significantly improve corporate bond credit spreads, reflecting the risk-warning effect; second, state-owned property rights weaken this effect, which only pertains to listed companies with poor risk management and low information quality; third, significant risk warnings increase investors’ heterogeneous beliefs, also affecting credit spreads; and fourth, through textual analysis, it is found that the corporate bond credit spread is greater when the disclosed risk factors are more pessimistic and less similar to those of the previous year. The findings of this paper help to enrich the literature on credit spreads and risk disclosure.     

Natural resource rents and internal conflicts: Can decentralization lift the curse?

We study how natural resource rents affect the risk of internal conflict within countries and how the federal structure of countries influences this relationship. Natural resource abundance may induce excessive rent-seeking and thus increase the risk of internal conflict. Fiscal and political decentralization as an institutional arrangement for rent-sharing and political codetermination of regions within a country may limit the destructive effect of natural resource rents on internal stability. Using cross-country and panel data from more than 90 countries covering the period 1984–2004, we find evidence that natural resource rents indeed increase the risk of internal conflict, but this relationship is significantly mitigated by political decentralization.     

投资持股关系中的“共享审计师”效应研究

以2007—2015年我国资本市场上具有投资持股关系的上市公司为样本，通过研究持股方和被持股方聘请同一家会计师事务所对持股双方各自审计收费和审计质量的影响，探讨投资持股关系的“共享审计师”中，“信息共享”效应与“低价揽客”效应谁更明显。研究表明，当具有持股关系的两家公司共同聘请同一家会计师事务所后，“信息共享”效应更明显，表现为持股双方的财务报表审计质量和持股方的审计收费显著提升。进一步研究发现：持股双方在不同情况下会选择性价比最高，最有利于自身的方式来获取信息，以谋求“信息共享”效应最大化。     

Pharmaceutical cost‐sharing systems and savings for healthcare systems from parallel trade

This paper studies the consequences of parallel trade in a two‐country model. It compares a coinsurance scheme (consumers pay a percentage of the drug price) and an indemnity insurance scheme (reimbursement is independent of the drug price) with respect to changes in copayments and public health expenditure. In the destination country, copayments for patients decrease to a larger extent under indemnity insurance, whereas reductions in public health expenditure occur only under coinsurance. In the source country, copayments increase less under coinsurance, whereas health expenditure is reduced more under indemnity insurance. In both countries, total expenditure under parallel trade is lower.     

Forecasting unknown-unknowns by boosting the risk radar within the risk intelligent organisation

This theoretical perspective paper interprets (un)known-(un)known risk quadrants as being formed from both abstract and concrete risk knowledge. It shows that these quadrants are useful for categorising risk forecasting challenges against the levels of abstract and concrete risk knowledge that are typically available, as well as for measuring perceived levels of abstract and concrete risk knowledge available for forecasting in psychometric research. Drawing on cybersecurity risk examples, a case is made for refocusing risk management forecasting efforts towards changing unknown-unknowns into known-knowns. We propose that this be achieved by developing the ‘boosted risk radar’ as organisational practice, where suitably ‘risk intelligent’ managers gather ‘risk intelligence information’, such that the ‘risk intelligent organisation’ can purposefully co-develop both abstract and concrete risk forecasting knowledge. We also illustrate what this can entail in simple practical terms within organisations.     

Are they telling the truth? Revealing hidden traits of satisfaction with a public bike-sharing service

Public bike-sharing systems (BSSs) are an emerging mode of transportation introduced by municipalities to solve congestion problems in metropolitan areas, especially when integrated with other types of transportation. In the last years, the number of public bike-sharing services has been constantly on the rise all over the world, and generally the overall satisfaction with them is high. However, satisfaction with public services is driven by mechanisms that can differ from those in the private sector. It is important to establish to what extent a high satisfaction is genuine or simply ephemeral. Even “old” public services (like public transportation) become “gold” when accompanied by the introduction of new technologies. In this paper we analyze this phenomenon using data from a satisfaction web-survey conducted among customers of the public BSS “BikeMi” in Milan, Italy, in a period when mobile technologies have been introduced to speed up the service. On analyzing the responses to satisfaction questions using simple summary statistics, the level of satisfaction resulted very high. However, our aim was to look for potential “darker” sides of the service by detecting possible hidden satisfaction components. For this purpose, we used the Nonlinear Principal Components Analysis, which is particularly powerful in this context. A simple textual analysis was also performed as a validating test. Results from our analysis indicated that satisfaction is flawed by a set of factors like the mechanics of the bikes, the picking and dropping system, and the apps used to organize the service. Less concern was detected for more general aspects of the service.     

The Effectiveness of Brand- and Customer-Centric Content Strategies at Generating Shares, ‘Likes’, and Comments

Brands are constantly competing for user attention on Facebook and are trying to encourage fans to share, click ‘like’, and comment their posts. Yet, it remains unclear what content strategies are successful at encouraging those behaviors. Noting that the effectiveness of brand content strategies still remains an uncharted research area, this study adopts a discovery-oriented approach and employs workshops, quantitative content analysis, and episodic interviews, to link desired user responses (namely clicks share, ‘like’, and comment) to brand content strategies. This study reveals that customer-centric content strategies are the most effective at encouraging user responses. Managers can use provided recommendations to engage their customers by adopting content strategies that result in desired behavioral reactions.     

What is happening in Paris? Airbnb,hotels, and the Parisian market: A case study

Airbnb has been the subject of heated discussions among tourism and hospitality scholars. In order to understand the true impact of P2Psharing on the tourism and hospitality landscape, it is important to understand that market in detail first. Therefore, in this paper, we explore the development of the Airbnb market over the last seven years in Paris, the most popular destination for Airbnb guests with more than 40,000 accommodation rentals. This research note is a summary of our findings on the Paris market. Our study shows different growth and seasonality patterns for Airbnb and hotels and dissimilarities in the geographical location of the offers. The findings indicate that the two products are not in direct competition and that their relationship might be more complex than previously thought. We trust that exploring the nature of the competitive relationship would be a valuable avenue for further investigation.     

中国股市行业风险与宏观经济之间的风险传导机制

本文采用行业收益率溢出指数度量股市行业风险,并进一步研究中国股市行业风险与宏观经济的相互影响,同时引入股息率和利率两个中介渠道深入挖掘其传导机制。我们运用GARCH-in-Mean模型对股市行业风险和宏观经济变量之间的一阶矩和二阶矩相互关系同时进行分析,结果发现,股市行业风险和宏观经济变量之间水平值和波动率都存在双向影响,对外溢出效应较大的行业起主导作用。此外,股市行业风险对宏观经济变量的影响方面,股息率和利率均起到中介渠道作用;宏观经济变量对股市行业风险的影响方面,只是利率起到中介渠道作用。股市行业风险与宏观经济的传导效应在不同时期差异显著。本文研究结论有助于深刻理解金融与实体经济之间的风险传导机制,对防范系统性风险、防止金融和实体经济“风险共振”以及提升金融服务实体经济能力等具有参考意义。     

Change-point detection for expected shortfall in time series

Expected shortfall (ES) is a popular risk measure and plays an important role in risk and portfolio management. Recently, change-point detection of risk measures has been attracting much attention in finance. Based on the self-normalized CUSUM statistic in Fan, Glynn and Pelger (2018) and the Wild Binary Segmentation (WBS) algorithm in Fryzlewicz (2014), this paper proposes a variant WBS procedure to detect and estimate change points of ES in time series. The strengthened Schwarz information criterion is also introduced to determine the number of change points. Monte Carlo simulation studies are conducted to assess the finite-sample performance of our variant WBS procedure about ES in time series. An empirical application is given to illustrate the usefulness of our procedure.