Capital Flows to Latin America (2003–17): A Critical Survey from Prebisch’s Business Cycle Theory

ABSTRACT

The economic literature on capital flows to developing countries has shared two important commonalities since the 1990s. Published works (whether they focus on the external situation or stress the domestic determinants of capital flows) tend to assume a beneficial effect of capital inflows, which leads to an improvement of peripheral institutions, whose deficiencies are ostensibly the main cause of economic turmoil and/or failure in attracting capital flows, in continuity with New Institutional Economics. In doing so, mainstream economists deliberately overlook the asymmetric characteristics of the international monetary system and the persisting hegemony of dollar. Raul Prebisch’s pioneering work on business cycles in Latin America provide an alternative view, one capable of amending the existing mainstream literature. On the one hand, Prebisch stressed the destabilizing role of capital inflows on Latin American economies, particularly short-term speculative capital. On the other hand, Prebisch designed a set of counter cyclical monetary policies in order to contrast capital volatility, particularly during downturns. An analysis of stylized facts shows that, when correctly updated, Prebisch’s theory has remarkable explanatory potential when applied to Latin America’s current economic and financial situation.     

Forecasting corporate financial distress in the Southeast Asian countries: A market-based approach

This study is conducted to investigate the prediction of corporate financial distress based on the Merton (1974) market-based Distance to Default (DD) model over the period from 1997 to 2016 which covers a range of economic financial circumstances, including the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) and Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The study focusses on the six largest countries in the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), comprising of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Unlike previous studies which focus mainly on bankruptcy, this paper focusses on early warning distress indicators that signal distress well before bankruptcy. This is when firms experience difficulty in servicing debt as measured by interest coverage ratio (ICR) at a firm level and non-performing loans (NPLs) at a country level. Key empirical findings from this paper indicate that the market-based distance-to-default (DD) model is generally a good early warning indicator of financial distress in the following year, particularly for ICR, but that prediction accuracy varies between individual countries in the Southeast Asian region.     

CEO regulatory focus and myopic marketing management

This study details the mechanisms on how CEO regulatory focus affects the salience of the gains versus losses involved in myopic marketing decision-making, and how such CEO psychological attributes interact with internal equity-based compensation, external pressure from equity analysts, and environmental turbulence to affect firms’ myopic marketing management propensities. We find that when faced with short-term earnings pressure to meet earnings expectations and when time is no longer a resource, predominantly promotion-focused are more likely to engage in myopic marketing management to benefit from the temporary stock price increase, which comes from meeting or beating earnings expectations. Conversely, predominantly prevention-focused CEOs are less prone to such short-termist actions which results in long-term value loss. For the moderating variables, we find that: (1) equity-based compensation tends to attenuate myopic marketing tendencies of promotion-focused CEOs but have no impact on prevention-focused CEOs, (2) whether equity analysts improve monitoring or aggravate short-term earnings pressure depends on the CEO’s regulatory focus, and (3) environmental turbulence does not increase the myopic marketing management tendencies of predominantly promotion-focused CEOs but rather intensifies the relunctance of prevention-focused CEOs to take short-termist actions. We further find that myopic marketing management mediates the impact of CEO regulatory focus on future firm performance. These findings have important implications for firms and boards when selecting new CEOs and structuring the compensation of existing CEOs. Firms need to simultaneously consider the fit between the CEOs’ regulatory focus, firms’ needs, the business environment, as well as CEO compensation structure.     

政府随机审计的动态博弈模型及政策启示

本文在一个三阶段动态博弈框架下，对政府随机审计过程中的政府审计机关与政府审计对象以及国家与政府审计对象之间的动态博弈特征进行了分析。分析结果显示：政府审计机关与政府审计对象之间存在一个纯策略纳什均衡，而国家和政府审计对象之间存在一个混合策略纳什均衡。政府审计对象接受国家实质性审计的概率是政府审计对象被政府机关审计发现违规或不作为后的惩罚倍数的单调递减函数，而政府审计对象的违规或不作为的概率分别是政府审计对象被政府机关审计发现违规或不作为后的惩罚倍数和政府审计对象的应尽义务或责任的单调递减函数，却是政府审计机关审计行为成本的单调递增函数。同时，结合研究结论和中国政府审计全覆盖的现实，给出了一些政策建议。     

European quanto option pricing in presence of liquidity risk

In this paper, we study the pricing problems of the European quanto options in which the underlying foreign asset is in imperfectly liquid markets. First, we assume that the dynamics of the underlying foreign asset price are affected by market liquidity and propose a liquidity-adjusted quanto model. This allows for the effects of market liquidity on European quanto option pricing. And then we derive the analytical pricing formulas for four different types of European quanto options. Finally, we empirically investigate the pricing performance of our proposed model with a European quanto construction involving the SSE 50 ETF, as the underlying asset, and the CNY/HKD exchange rate. Empirical results demonstrate that the pricing accuracy of the proposed model is markedly superior to that of the Black-Scholes quanto model. In other words, allowing for liquidity risk in the framework of European quanto option pricing can make markedly improvements in fitting the real market data. Particularly, the improvement rate is high for medium-term and out-of-the-money options. Moreover, these results are robust for different liquidity measures.     

Information flow between prediction markets,polls and media: Evidence from the 2008 presidential primaries

Are the forecast errors of election-eve polls themselves forecastable? We present evidence from the 2008 Democratic Party nomination race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showing that the answer is yes. Both cross-sectional and time series evidence suggests that market prices contain information about election outcomes that polls taken shortly before the contests do not. Conversely, election surprises relative to polls too Granger cause subsequent price movements. We then investigate whether the additional information in prices could come from the media coverage of these campaigns, and uncover a set of complex relationships between pollster’s surprise, price movements, and various aspects of media coverage. Prices anticipate the balance and content of media coverage, but not the volume. On the other hand, it is the volume of media coverage, not the balance or content, that anticipates the surprise element in election outcomes. Moreover, Granger causality between prices and election surprises barely changes after controlling for media coverage, and causality from media volume to surprises persists too after controlling for price movements. Taken together, the results suggest that both prices and the volume of media coverage contain independent election-relevant information that is not captured in polls.     

Settlement procedures and stock market efficiency

This study examines why most derivatives markets that settle on the day following expiration choose the opening rather than the closing price as the final settlement price (FSP), whereas most markets that settle on the expiration day select an average rather than a single price as the FSP. Four exogenous changes in the Taiwan Futures Exchange settlement procedures provide an experimental basis for studying the settlement procedures’ impact on underlying assets. Greatest market efficiency is observed when the FSP is determined by a single rather than an average price and hypothesize that manipulation is prevented at the expense of market quality.     

Media coverage and investment efficiency

We examine the effect of media coverage on firm-level investment efficiency. We find that media coverage reduces under-investment but increases over-investment. The negative effect of media coverage on under-investment is more pronounced in firms affected by greater information asymmetry and poorer corporate governance. The positive effect of media coverage on over-investment is driven by media-induced CEO overconfidence. Additional results show that both investment- and non-investment-related news coverage decrease under-investment, while non-investment-related news coverage is more influential in increasing over-investment. In general, higher news optimism is associated with less under-investment but more over-investment. Moreover, media coverage affects investment efficiency through its information dissemination rather than information creation function. Collectively, our results suggest that firms’ media visibility promotes more over-investment than under-investment.     

Is there a diversification “cost” of Shari’ah compliance? Empirical evidence from Malaysian equities

Islamic equity portfolios work with a smaller investment universe given the filtering of non-Shari’ah compliant stocks. It has been theoretically argued that this culminates in suboptimal portfolio diversification, which in turn adversely affects risk-adjusted returns. We offer empirical evidence that such a conceived portfolio diversification “penalty” is far from a foregone conclusion, at least empirically. Our results tend to indicate that Islamic portfolios are not invariably handicapped in terms of portfolio diversification. We also explored dimensions that may account for differences in the relative investment performance between Islamic and conventional portfolios, such as portfolio constraints, short selling and market conditions. We believe this paper is among the first to apply substantial empirical analysis specifically with respect to the portfolio diversification perspective on Islamic equity investments.