On public investment, long-run growth, and the real exchange rate

This paper extends the Barro (1990) endogenous growth modelwith productive government services to a two-country world withperfect capital mobility, populated by optimising agents withuncertain lifetimes. It shows that increases in government spendingon infrastructure for the home country result in higher growthrates and a terms of trade improvement. Both these effects arereversed after a point, showing that a hump-shaped curve—similarto the Barro curve, but with different properties—canbe obtained here even with lump-sum taxes. We also examine thewelfare implications of public investment policies, and characterisethe world economy's dynamics.     

A REGRET-THEORETIC EXPLANATION OF CORPORATE DIVIDEND POLICY

This paper uses Regret Theory to explain some survey results on managers' dividend policy decisions under uncertainty. Regret Theory suggests that when an individual chooses an action from a number of uncertain alternatives, his decision is influenced by the potential post-decision regret (pride) he feels on his inabilty (ability) to select the option with the best outcome. Based on this premise, we argue that (1) the decision to pay dividends and simultaneously raise venture capital from external sources is attributable to managerial aversion for regret at the failure of a risky investment opportunity implemented with internal funds generated by a conservative dividend policy; and (2) the decision to support dividends with borrowed funds when earnings are declining is motivated by the prospect that an improvement in the firm's financial condition will make the managers proud that their judgment has helped avert a potential crisis for the firm without any wealth loss to its shareholders.     

FROM COMPETITION TO REGULATION: THE SIX-YEAR BATTLE TO REGULATE CALIFORNIA'S INSURANCE MARKETS

Abstract: The passage of California's Proposition 103 in November 1988 changed the State's regulatory structure for insurers from a competitive to a heavily regulated system. The six-year legal battle that followed resulted in several California Supreme Court and United States Supreme Court rulings and an ultimate implementation of rate roll backs on property-liability insurers on November 22, 1994. The study examines both property-liability and life insurers' returns. While only property-liability insurers are affected by the rale rollback and prior approval rate regulation, both life and property-liability insurers are affected by the proposition's other provisions. This paper examines the effect of successive changes on both types of insurance companies and analyzes the differential impact of the changes in regulatory structure.     

Managerial Ownership, the Method of Payment for Acquisitions, and Executive Job Retention

This study investigates how acquiring and target firm managers' preferences for control rights motivate the payment for corporate acquisitions. We expect that managers of target firms who value influence in combined firms will prefer to receive stock. One reason top managers desire influence is to enhance their chances of retaining jobs in the combined firm. Our analysis shows a strong, positive association between managerial ownership of target firms and the likelihood of acquisitions for stock. We also find that managers of target firms are more likely to retain jobs in combined firms when they receive stock rather than cash.     

Standard promotion practices versus up‐or‐out contracts

This article develops a theory concerning the choice between standard promotion practices and up‐or‐out contracts. Our theory is based on asymmetric learning and promotion incentives. We find that firms employ up‐or‐out contracts when firm‐specific human capital is low and standard promotion practices when it is high. We also find that, if commitment to a wage floor is feasible and effort provision is important, up‐or‐out is employed when low‐ and high‐level jobs are similar. These results are consistent with many of the settings in which up‐or‐out is typically observed, such as law firms and academia.     

Efficiency Considerations in the Additive Hazards Model with Current Status Data

For current status data, L IN , O AKES and Y ing (1998) proposed a procedure for estimation of the regression parameters in the additive hazards model that makes clever use of martingale theory. However, one of the outstanding problems posed in the paper was the issue of efficient estimation, as their estimators do not attain the semiparametric information bound. In this paper, we explore this issue and provide a characterization of the NPMLE. We conduct efficiency comparisons between the NPMLE and the procedure of L IN et al . (1998) analytically and numerically through analysis of a dataset from a tumorigenicity experiment.     

Analyzing Real Estate Data Problems Using the Gibbs Sampler

Real estate data are often characterized by data irregularities: missing data, censoring or truncation, measurement error, etc. Practitioners often discard missing- or censored-data cases and ignore measurement error. We argue here that an attractive remedy for these irregularity problems is simulation-based model fitting using the Gibbs sampler. The style of the paper is primarily pedagogic, employing a simple illustration to convey the essential ideas, unobscured by implementation complications. Focusing on the missing-data problem, we show dramatic improvement in inference by retaining rather than deleting cases of partially observed data. We also detail Gibbs-sampler usage for other data problems.     

Qualitative Input–Output Analysis of the Indian Economic Structure

Qualitative input–output (IO) analysis can be considered mostly in terms of a graph-theoretic formulation, which involves the construction and use of an adjacency matrix, derived from a binary transformation of the IO coefficient matrix. Classical attempts at qualitative IO analysis have derived the structure from the direct IO coefficient table. In more recent attempts, greater sophistication has been achieved by incorporating a degree of quantification into the qualitative analysis. Also, the concept of important coefficients (IC) has been used for the construction of the adjacency matrix. The present study is carried out along these lines for the Indian economy.     

Underpricing and aftermarket performance of American depositary receipts (ADR) IPOs

American depositary receipts (ADRs) are negotiable instruments representing foreign company shares traded in US dollars in the US capital market. We present comparative analyses of the pricing and aftermarket performance of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) by ADRs and a matching sample of US firms over the 1990–2001 period. Offered by large, well-known multinationals, ADR IPOs go through a detailed scrutiny, and incur significant costs, during the pre-IPO period to recast financial statements in conformity with SEC rules and the US GAAP. This mitigates the information asymmetry between the IPO firm and investors. We categorize the ADR issuing country as developed or emerging, and our sample includes several cases of privatization of state owned corporations. The analyses indicate that (1) ADR IPOs are significantly less underpriced than comparable US IPOs; (2) IPOs from developed countries are more underpriced; and (3) Privatization IPOs are less underpriced than non-privatizations. The lower underpricing of ADR IPOs persists even after differential IPO attributes, the traditional proxies for information asymmetry and, the unique characteristics associated with ADR IPOs, are accounted for. We conclude that extant literature offers only partial explanation for this puzzling phenomenon.