Audit pricing and nature of controlling shareholders: Evidence from France

This study examines whether auditors are employed as a monitoring mechanism to mitigate agency problems arising from different types of controlling shareholders. In a context of concentrated ownership and poor investor protection, controlling shareholders can easily expropriate wealth from minority shareholders and profit from private benefits of control. However, this agency conflict has been rarely studied, as the most commonly assumed agency conflict occurs between managers and shareholders. Using an audit fee model derived from Simunic (1980), we study the impact of the nature of controlling shareholders on audit fees in French listed firms. Our results show: (1) a negative relationship between audit fees and government shareholdings; (2) a positive relationship between audit fees and institutional shareholdings; and (3) no relationship between audit fees and family shareholdings. These results illustrate the mixed effects of the nature of ownership on audit fees.     

Spillover effects and conditional dependence

A better understanding of cross-market linkages and interactions would help to better manage international financial exposure. So far, no attempt has been made to investigate the degree of price and volatility spillovers in a non-Gaussian conditional framework. We present a new model for these transmission mechanisms that relies on asymmetric-t marginal distributions and a copula function to characterize the conditional dependence. Rendering the dependence parameter time varying, we investigate how the dependence structure is affected by stock return innovations.     

Implied volatility surfaces and market activity over time

An impressive body of the literature has investigated the patterns of changes in implied volatilities across strike prices and maturities. Although such studies try to explain the existence of the volatility skew and term structure, they remain silent about the evolution of the volatility surface as time goes by and market variables move. Relying on a technique of signal processing called Independent Component Analysis, we extract volatility modes that account for most of the variations in the shape of the surface. We then relate the magnitude of volatility changes along those modes to market activity.     

Lopsided effects of telecom reforms on mobile markets in the enlarged EU: Evidence from dynamic quantile model

The European Union (EU) has recently been significantly enlarged with addition of ten countries, almost all from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). This was expected to enhance the performance of the mobile telecommunications industry in the accession countries and in turn to consolidate the highly fragmented European mobile telecoms market to finally reach the single market goal. However, the significant differences between mobile telecommunication performances from one country to another in the enlarged European area raise the issue of how optimal and durable the EU-level reforms have been. We use dynamic quantile regression methods to estimate the effects of mobile telecommunication reforms on the providers' performance in the EU enlargement context. This approach allows uncovering potential asymmetric effects of telecom reforms policy by letting the parameters of regressions vary across the conditional distribution of the sector's performance indicators. Using annual data from on 32 European countries from 1993 to 2011, we document asymmetrical responses to the reforms depending on the conditioning quantile at which they are calculated. Our results show that the effects of the generic and imposed European reforms are notably beneficial and larger for players in developed European countries characterized initially by real and higher degree of the reforms implementation. Accordingly, the success and durability of European reforms, especially in the new CEE member states, which often fail to comply with the pace of the reforms' adoption of industrialized European countries, is not guaranteed when countries specifications are not sufficiently taken into account. A final appealing result regarding the regress of the reform-performance relationship in the mobile markets after enlargement even for western countries attract attention on revising the Europe's current approach to telecoms regulation.     

Hedonic study on mobile telephony market in France: pricing–quality strategies

This paper provides a hedonic price analysis of mobile telephony services for the French market. We adopt the hedonic price theory to examine the relationship between changes in price levels and the evolution of the market for mobile telecommunications industry in France from June 1996 to December 2002. The results support the hypothesis that there was price competition between service providers in the earlier period. There were also large differences in prices set by individual service providers which, however, did not persist over time. Next, using estimates from hedonic-price equation for each operator separately, we found that the three-mobile providers seemed to adopt similar pricing strategies over the period 1996–2002. Quality indexes are also calculated. The results of a comparative analysis indicate that in the period 2000–2002 neither the quality nor the price indexes show significant changes for the three mobile providers. These results are of some consequence, especially after the French competition authority decision in December 2005 which stated the existence of collusion on the mobile market during the same period (2000–2002). Surprisingly, our primer results supporting the assumption of potential collusive conduct in France are not re-affirmed when comparing the French and German markets.     

Return interval,dependence structure,and multivariate normality

We focus on changes in the multivariate distribution of index returns stemming purely from varying the return interval, assuming daily to quarterly returns. Whereas long-tailedness is present in daily returns, we find that, in agreement with a well-established idea, univariate return distributions converge to normality as the return interval is lengthened. Such convergence does not occur, however, for multivariate distributions. Using a new method to parametrically model the dependence structure of stock index returns, we show that the persistence of a dependence structure implying negative asymptotic dependence in return series is the reason for the rejection of multivariate normality for low return frequencies.     

Blockholders’ Ownership and Audit Fees: The Impact of the Corporate Governance Model

This paper examines how two prominent corporate governance models, namely the shareholder and stakeholder models, have different effects on the relation between agency conflicts and the supply, and demand of audit services. Shareholder (stakeholder) countries rely heavily on public (private) information to reduce information asymmetry for outside investors in the context of high (low) litigation risk. We expect audit fees to reflect the level of agency conflicts in shareholder countries as well as the needs for information of the major blockholders in stakeholder countries. Using a sample of 7982 firm-year observations from 19 countries, we find a U-shaped relation between controlling shareholding and audit fees for shareholder countries and an inverted U-shaped relation between controlling shareholding and audit fees for stakeholder countries. These results are consistent across different firm-level governance arrangements.     

Revisiting the finite mixture of Gaussian distributions with application to futures markets

We present a new estimation method for Gaussian mixture modeling, namely, the kurtosis‐controlled expectation‐maximization (EM) algorithm, which overcomes the limitations of the usual estimation techniques via kurtosis control and kernel splitting. Our simulation study shows that the dynamic allocation of kernels according to the value of the total kurtosis measure makes the proposed kurtosis‐controlled EM algorithm an efficient method for Gaussian mixture density estimation. This algorithm yielded considerable improvements over the classical EM algorithm. We then used the discrete Gaussian mixture framework to account for the observed thick‐tailed distributions of futures returns and applied the kurtosis‐controlled EM algorithm to estimate the distributions of real (agricultural, metal, and energy) and financial (stock index and currency) futures returns. We proved that this framework is perfectly adapted to capturing the departures from normality of the observed return distributions. Unlike in previous studies, we found that a two‐component Gaussian mixture is too poor a model to accurately capture the distributional properties of returns. Similar results have been obtained for stocks, indexes, currencies, interest rates, and commodities. This has important implications in many financial studies using Gaussian mixtures to incorporate the thickness of the tails of the distributions in the computation of the value at risk or to infer implied risk‐neutral densities from option prices, to name but a few. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 21: 347–376, 2001