An examination of life-course use of housing information by the elderly

An examination of the housing decisions of a group of elderly (n= 43) was undertaken to establish the nature of information used throughout the life course and to determine the degree of success of a variety of sources of information in promoting housing satisfaction. A purposive sample of elderly men and women in different tenure groups and house types, from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and encompassing ‘young old’ as well as ‘old old’ were interviewed to establish patterns of formal and informal information flow and to determine, as far as is possible, whether information was actively or passively acquired. As would be perhaps expected, elderly owner occupiers, and particularly those from socioeconomic groups I, II and IIIN had used, and continue to use, formal sources of information to a far greater extent than did elderly tenants who had been in manual occupations, who preferred (and had always preferred) to look to family and friends to satisfy their housing information needs. Written information on housing choices appeared to be of limited value to most elderly, although it may be the case that leaflets and booklets are inappropriate sources of housing information for all age groups, not simply the elderly.     

Zombie Board: Board Tenure and Firm Performance

We show that board tenure exhibits an inverted U‐shaped relation with firm value and accounting performance. The quality of corporate decisions, such as M&A, financial reporting quality, and CEO compensation, also has a quadratic relation with board tenure. Our results are consistent with the interpretation that directors’ on‐the‐job learning improves firm value up to a threshold, at which point entrenchment dominates and firm performance suffers. To address endogeneity concerns, we use a sample of firms in which an outside director suffered a sudden death, and find that sudden deaths that move board tenure away from (toward) the empirically observed optimum level in the cross‐section are associated with negative (positive) announcement returns. The quality of corporate decisions also follows an inverted U‐shaped pattern in a sample of firms affected by the death of a director.     

Analyst Forecast Consistency

We show empirically that analysts who display more consistent forecast errors have greater ability to affect prices, and that this effect is larger than that of stated accuracy. These results lead to three implications. First, consistent analysts are less likely to be demoted and are more likely to be nominated All Star analysts. Second, analysts strategically deliver downward‐biased forecasts to increase their consistency (if at the expense of stated accuracy). Finally, the benefits of consistency and of “lowballing” (accuracy) are increasing (decreasing) in institutional investors’ presence.     

FIRMS’ CHARACTERISTIC AND EQUILIBRIUM WITH TRADEABLE PERMITS MARKET*

We study, in a simple model, the partial equilibrium of an industry with n firms endowed by different Cobb‐Douglas technologies which have different pollution effects. The price of input (labour) and the demand curve to the industry are given. Pollution is restricted by a tradeable market of permits in the industry. Each firm is characterised by a parameter combining production efficiency and pollution effect, its e‐characteristic. The equilibrium depends mainly on these e‐characteristics which are linked to the performance of the technologies. In the long run performances are defined per unit of capital. Last, we analyse the consequences of permits’ allocations on the profitability of the firms.     

The Relation Between Patent Citations and Tobin's Q in the Semiconductor Industry

The market value of a firm is largely determined by the expected returns to the firm's tangible and intangible assets. However, accounting data generally excludes intangible assets. Financial variables which are constructed in part from accounting data, such as Tobin's Q, are thus biased. If measures of intangible capital are successful in explaining variation in Q, then a case can be made for incorporating such measures into future research. In high technology industries, such as the semiconductor industry, valuing a firm's intangible assets requires the valuation of its technological capital. Past studies have relied heavily on simple patent counts and research and development expenditures to quantify the technological component of a firm's intangible assets. This paper examines the ability of measures of intangible capital to explain variation in Q and considers an additional data source, patent citations. We find that stock variables created from citation data contain relevant information about the market's valuation of intangible assets.