A Note on Affordability and the Optimal Share Price

Despite the increase in institutional ownership, decreased trading costs, and increased real personal savings, we find that the average stock price is lower today than it was in the 1920s. In the aggregate, the propensity to split is a function of recent market performance, personal savings, and the desirability of appearing to be a small firm. Our results indicate that, after decades of inflation and the average stock price falling, splitting stocks to return to an "affordable" trading range must be rejected as an explanation. This suggests that other economic forces are behind splits, whether traditional or behavioral in nature.     

A behavioral analysis of investor diversification

This paper studies the link between individual investors’ portfolio diversification levels and various personal traits that proxy informational advantages and overconfidence. The analysis is based on objective data from the largest Turkish brokerage house tracking 59,951 individual investors’ accounts with a total of 3,248,654 million transactions over the period 2008–2010. Wealthier, highly educated, older investors working in the finance sector and those trading relatively often show higher diversification levels possibly because they are better equipped to obtain and process information. Finance professionals, married investors, and those placing high-volume orders through investment centers show poorer diversification possibly as a reflection of overconfidence. Our analysis reveals important nonlinear effects, implying that the marginal impact of overconfidence on diversification is not uniform across investors but varies according to the investor's information gathering and processing abilities.     

THE REVOLUTION WITHIN: ICT AND THE SHIFTING KNOWLEDGE BASE OF THE WORLD'S LARGEST COMPANIES

This empirical article analyses the importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) in the technological diversification trend among the world's largest manufacturing firms during the 1980s and 1990s. The objective of the research is twofold: first, to emphasise the emerging differences among technologies when companies from different industries patent outside their traditional technological capabilities; secondly, to investigate whether the tendency among large companies from all industries to patent in ICT is distinctive when compared with the tendency to patent in other technologies. We find that technological diversification in large companies has clearly occurred in ICTs. Non-ICT specialist industries increasingly develop, rather than just utilise, the cluster of ICT-related technologies. We conclude that the development of corporate capabilities in the key technologies of the emerging ICT paradigm is more widespread than previously emphasised in the literature. One implication of this observation is that technological diversification and the information revolution may be related phenomena.     

Home-field advantage or a matter of ambiguity aversion? Local bias among German individual investors

This paper investigates whether familiarity induced by ambiguity aversion can help explaining the local bias phenomenon among individual investors. Using geographic closeness as a proxy for investor familiarity, we find that investors pull out of (unfamiliar) remote stocks and pour into (familiar) local stocks during times of increased market uncertainty. Moreover, the magnitude of this ‘flight to familiarity’ increases in the spread of an investor's ambiguity (about expected returns) between local and remote stocks. Our results prove robust to a number of alternative explanations of local bias. Specifically, we rule out a ‘home-field advantage’, where investors are able to translate information advantages about nearby companies into excess returns on their local stockholdings. We conclude that individual investors’ local bias is induced by ambiguity aversion in the portfolio selection process rather than a trading strategy based on superior information about local companies.     

Do insurance activities enhance the performance of financial services holding companies?

Stiroh and Rumble (2006) and Yeager et al. (2007) have argued that extension of banks into nonbanking activities produces no diversification benefits for financial services holding companies (FSHCs) eligible to consolidate banking and insurance products. We investigate the effect of aggregate nonbank activities, as well as two main areas of insurance business, namely agency and underwriting enterprise, on the risk-adjusted performance of FSHCs. Our sample includes a quarterly panel data of FSHCs over the period 2003–2011. We find that the effect of FSHCs’ entry into agency insurance activities on their risk-adjusted returns is dependent on their size; it is positive for FSHCs in the top quartile of our sample (assets greater than $4.495 billions), but negative for smaller and mid-size FSHCs. The effect of underwriting insurance activities on risk-adjusted returns is generally negative or statistically insignificant, except for some of the largest-size firms.     

经济转型期多元化经营的风险及对策

多元化还是专业化,这是企业发展过程中常遇到的问题,也是企业最困惑的问题之一。一般地,当宏观经济处于增长期,则行业发展趋好,行业竞争较弱,此时多元化经营比较容易成功;当宏观经济处于成熟期和衰退期,则行业发展趋势变坏,行业竞争加剧,多元化经营则难以成功。经济转型将使传统行业的发展趋势受到不利影响,从而加大多元化经营的风险。     

谈王灵农场经济社会发展

实践科学发展观,必须坚持以人为本,从实际出发,转变经营方式,走特色发展之路,开创企业发展的新局面。     

多元化经营与经营绩效——基于中国纺织业上市公司的实证研究

本文采用2003～2005年相关数据的算术平均数，通过方差分析和相关分析相结合的方法，对我国纺织业上市公司多元化经营与其盈利能力、成长能力和绩效稳定性能力的关系进行了实证分析。理论分析和实证研究表明：适度的多元化经营对于我国纺织企业在现阶段是可行的，也是合理的。     

实用型本科口译人才培养的对策研究

我国口译教学中存在课时少、练习量不足、课程开设与教学内容不合理等问题。为满足社会对多层次口译人才的需要,必须改革现有英语专业课程设置模式,使口译人才培养向多元化方向发展。