Shadow costs of incomplete information and short sales in the valuation of the firm and its assets

This paper presents a simple framework for the valuation of compound options within shadow costs of incomplete information and short sales. The shadow cost includes two components. The first component is the product of pure information cost due to imperfect knowledge and heterogeneous expectations. The second component represents the additional cost caused by the short-selling constraint. Information costs are linked to Merton's (1987. Journal of Finance 42, 510) model of capital market equilibrium with incomplete information, CAPMI. This model is extended by Wu et al. (1996. Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, 7, 136) who propose an incomplete-information capital market equilibrium with heterogeneous expectations and short sale restrictions, GCAPM. This model is used in our paper to provide for the first time in the literature analytic solutions for derivatives in the presence of both shadow costs of incomplete information and short sales.When deriving the compound call option formula, we consider a call option on a stock, which is itself an option on the assets of the firm. Our methodology incorporates shadow costs of incomplete information and short sales on the firm's assets as well as the effects of leverage in the capital structure. The formula can be useful in the valuation of several corporate liabilities in the presence of information uncertainty and short sales constraints about the firm and its cash flows. Our analysis can be used for the valuation of several real options.     

Which institutional investors matter for firm survival and performance?

Using data that spans three decades, we assess the diverse roles of institutional investors in impacting survival and performance of chronically underperforming firms and contrast the results for consistently overperforming firms. We find material differences in investor roles and investment returns between these samples. Differentiating among institutional types, controlling for prior performance and attrition bias provides insights unattainable by examining aggregated holdings. For underperformers, results are negative for activist pension funds and long-term institutions, positive for activist hedge funds and short-term institutions, and mixed for institutional blockholders.     

The economic benefits of market timing the style allocation of characteristic-based portfolios

Many exchange traded funds track simple characteristic-based equity portfolios such as the market capitalization, the fundamental value or the inverse volatility portfolio. This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence for the economic benefits in exploiting the timing-gains that result from the time-varying relative performance of these characteristic-based portfolios. Under a factor model for expected returns, we show that this dynamic portfolio allocation can be efficient across the low-dimensional set of characteristic-based portfolios. We assess the out-of-sample performance on the S&P 100 universe over the period 1990–2013 and show gains in stability and significant positive risk-adjusted returns for the dynamic style portfolio. We conduct several robustness tests and extensions confirming the benefits of dynamic style allocation across characteristic-based portfolios.     

Forecasting economic activity from yield curve factors

This paper provides clear-cut evidence that the slope and curvature factors of the term structure of interest rates (yield curve) contain more information about future changes in economic activity than the term spread itself, often used in the literature as a predictive regressor of economic activity. These two factors reflect different information about future economic activity, which is smoothed out by the term spread. The paper shows that the slope factor has predictive power on future economic activity over longer horizons ahead, and thus may be interpreted as reflecting future business cycle conditions. On the other hand, the curvature factor, which enters the term spread with opposite sign than the slope factor, has predictive power on shorter movements of future economic activity which may be associated with changes in the current stance of monetary policy. These results hold for a number of world developed economies.     

行为驱动法解决贵州高职高专贫困生心理问题探析

贵州省的高职高专院校贫困生心理问题严重,如何解决成了目前各学者研究的一个重点,在理论上探讨了行为驱动法解决贫困生心理问题的必要性和可行性,并结合工作实践给出了利用行为驱动法解决贵州高职高专贫困生心理问题的实践探索。     

中国金融发展与经济增长研究综述

金融发展与经济增长的关系是金融发展理论的核心问题,目前,学术界对二者的关系仍存争议.本文首先从理论层面回顾了金融与经济之关系的产生和演变路径,在此基础上,梳理总结了关于金融与经济关系的主要学术观点以及实证研究领域,最后,提出了未来的研究趋势和有待深入研究的问题.     

Progressive taxation and the intensity and timing of investment

This paper examines the effect of progressive taxation on a firm's investment intensity and timing decisions using a real options approach. The firm possesses a perpetual option to invest in a project at any instant by incurring an irreversible investment cost at that time. The amount of the irreversible investment cost determines the intensity of investment that augments the value of the project. Tax progression is specified in a particular case of a constant marginal tax rate with an exogenously given tax exemption threshold that makes the average tax rate increase with the tax base. We show that the firm's investment decisions are neutral to tax progression only when the exogenously given tax exemption threshold is sufficiently large. When tax neutrality does not hold, we show that progressive taxation has a perverse effect on investment intensity. Finally, we show that progressive taxation induces the firm to invest earlier as compared to the case under proportional taxation (i.e., in the absence of any tax exemption).     

MODELING UNCERTAIN FORECAST ACCURACY IN SUPPLY CHAINS WITH POSTPONEMENT

We examine a situation where a manufacturer operates in a two‐mode production environment. The first mode could involve overseas vendors and manufacturing facilities. If additional units are later required, the company must use its second mode—more expensive last‐minute domestic vendors and manufacturing sites. We develop a new methodology for analyzing the impact of forecast accuracy on the decision to postpone production. We examine the interaction of forecast accuracy, shortage vs. holding costs, transportation costs and the cost of postponing production in the supply chain of a single product facing uncertain demand. Our model can be used to analyze the cost of important changes, such as increasing forecast accuracy, reducing the cost of backorders, lowering the cost of delaying production, or lowering transportation costs. Our model allows a firm to understand its overall cost structure so that it can accurately evaluate the impact of improved forecast accuracy and lowered costs in the context of postponement.     

财政压力、货币超发与明代宝钞制度

本文遵循“财政压力-政府行为”分析框架来剖析“大明宝钞”崩坏的制度根源。“大明宝钞”制度的崩坏根源于以财政为中心的宝钞制度设计缺陷。这种制度设计是为了满足政府财政开支需求与避免财政危机。易言之，明代财政压力促成了货币财政化的宝钞制度设计，导致了货币超发，最后致使宝钞崩坏并退出流通领域。财政压力是古今政府的常态。财政压力并非必然导致政府采取掠夺性的货币政策。在英国，国王的财政压力导致了以限制王权为目的的《大宪章》和“光荣革命”。明代中国，为何没有在财政压力之下走上制度变革之路，这个问题实在令人深思。