The Global Crisis and Equity Market Contagion

We analyze the transmission of the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis to 415 country‐industry equity portfolios. We use a factor model to predict crisis returns, defining unexplained increases in factor loadings and residual correlations as indicative of contagion. While we find evidence of contagion from the United States and the global financial sector, the effects are small. By contrast, there has been substantial contagion from domestic markets to individual domestic portfolios, with its severity inversely related to the quality of countries’ economic fundamentals. This confirms the “wake‐up call” hypothesis, with markets focusing more on country‐specific characteristics during the crisis.     

Sell‐Side Analyst Research and Stock Comovement

We document that a stock's price around a recommendation or forecast covaries with prices of other stocks the issuing analyst covers. The effect of shared analyst coverage on stock price comovement extends beyond analyst activity days. A stock's daily returns covary with the returns of other stocks with which it shares analyst coverage. These links between stock price comovement and shared analyst coverage are consistent with the coverage‐specific information we find in earnings forecasts; analysts who cover both stocks in a pair expect future earnings of the stocks to be more highly correlated than do analysts who cover only one stock from the pair. Collectively, our evidence indicates that analyst research produces coverage‐specific spillovers that raise price comovement among stocks that share analyst coverage. The strength of these spillovers is comparable to spillovers from broad industry and market information in analyst research.     

Trade Openness and Exchange Rate Regimes

The paper evaluates the net welfare gains of inflation targeting over a fixed exchange rate as a function of a country's trade openness, using a multisectoral structural model calibrated to Chile. For most calibrations with separable preferences, net welfare gains are increasing in trade openness. The reason is that in more open economies terms of trade shocks, which favor inflation targeting, become quantitatively more important, while price markup shocks in the imperfectly competitive nontradables sector, which favor exchange rate targeting, become less important. The most important exception is heavily indebted countries, where net welfare gains are decreasing in trade openness.     

THE DETERMINANTS OF STATE‐LEVEL CAPS ON PUNITIVE DAMAGES: THEORY AND EVIDENCE

Under the standard economic model of torts, punitive damages correct for imperfect detection. Incorporating litigation costs into the model provides a justification for punitive damage caps. At the optimum, caps balance deterrence against the cost of litigation. Empirical testing of the model is performed via Cox proportional and parametric hazard analyses, using a panel dataset from 1981 to 2007. The results reveal a positive relationship between legal services employment (a proxy for legal costs) and cap enactment, and a negative relationship between state gross state product (a proxy for damages) and cap enactment. Cap enactment is also influenced by political ideology. (JEL K13, K41, L51)     

A New Look at Husbands' and Wives' Time Allocation

The impacts of economic and non‐economic factors on husbands’ and wives’ market work time and housework time are estimated using 13 years of data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics. Several limitations in earlier studies are addressed, and a unique feature of the study is the direct estimation of effects on time allocation from changes in the prices of market‐produced goods and input goods in household production. Many of the findings of earlier studies are reconfirmed, but new insights are also explored. Husbands and wives respond similarly in their time allocations to changes in input goods prices, but their responses are different to changes in market goods prices.     

Using Reference Models within the Enterprise Resource Planning Lifecycle

ERP-specific reference models describe on a conceptual level the structure and functionality of enterprise resource planning solutions. However, these models focus on depicting executable processes and do not take into account tasks related to business engineering, system selection, implementation or change. This paper discusses how reference process models can be used within the entire ERP lifecycle. All phases of the ERP lifecycle have individual requirements for the management of the relevant knowledge. It will be shown how extended reference models can serve as a knowledge repository for enterprise resource planning. This paper includes several pragmatic recommendations for managers involved in ERP projects.     

Equity Issuance and Adverse Selection: A Direct Test Using Conditional Stock Offers

We conduct a unique test of adverse selection in the equity issuance process. While common stock is the dominant means of payment in bank mergers, stock acquisition agreements provide target shareholders with varying degrees of protection against adverse price movements in the bidder's stock between the time of the merger agreement and the time of merger completion. We show that it is the degree of protection against adverse price changes and not the percent of stock offered in a bank merger that explains bidder merger announcement abnormal returns. This result is difficult to explain outside of an adverse selection framework.