An Empirical Asset Pricing Model Accommodating the Sector-Heterogeneity of Risk

Stock returns are generally difficult to explain, as they are comprised of many discrete channels of risk. Empirical asset pricing models (EAPM), such as the Fama-French five-factor model (FF5), have been used to partition these channels across a series of systematic risk factors, such as company size (total market equity), value (book-to-market ratio), investment, and operating profitability. Prior EAPMs only accounted for how such factors contributed to risk at the market-level, ignoring any potential variation across sector. This study developed a sector-heterogenous model (SHM) which directly accounts for this variation by generalizing the Fama-French methodology to sector-subsets of stocks. The results demonstrated that risk is meaningfully heterogenous across sectors for each of the factors in the FF5, with different subgroups of factors being statistically significant within each sector. In a direct comparison of explanatory power, the SHM outperformed the FF5 and improved adjusted R² by an average of 5% for stocks across all sectors. Several applications of sector-heterogeneity were then demonstrated for stock-picking purposes, including a high-beta portfolio strategy using the SHM-beta which outperformed the S&P 500 in backtesting. This study concludes that meaningful sector-heterogeneity exists in market risk. This information is materially useful to investors.

     

Inflation Volatility with Regime Switching

This paper presents a new approach to model U.S. inflation dynamics by allowing regime switching in an unobserved components stochastic volatility framework. We use a modified particle filter to construct likelihood and estimate the model using MLE. The number of regimes is determined based on a bootstrap. We find that a model with three regimes and regime‐dependent constant volatilities has superior performance. In addition, we show that since 2000:II, U.S. inflation has entered a regime with moderate volatility where most of the volatility comes from transitory shocks.     

International Enterprises and Trade Unions

A “shipping war” has broken out between two friendly neighbouring countries: Estonia (a rather poor land; liberated of Soviet occupation in 1991), and Finland (a wealthy one; independent since 1918). Led by their trade union the Finnish dockers boycott Estonian ships demanding for Estonian sailors the salary in the same range as that is in wealthy West-European countries. Estonian Sailors' Union finds that such a war is not for their better work-conditions but against their working possibilities: the cheap labour force is the only possibility for a poor country to entice foreign investments in it. No matter how the “shipping war” will be solved – the problem will remain. This is the problem of two opposites – cheap labour force of poor countries and expensive one of wealthy countries –, and international enterprises standing between them. Could such an enterprise survive without using the cheap labour force? And if it could, how could the poor countries survive then? Could there be found a clear unambiguous ethical solution? What ought to be the role of trade unions in such international business conflicts?     

The missing pillar: the creativity theory of knowledge spillover entrepreneurship

Knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship and the prevailing theory of economic growth treat opportunities as endogenous and generally focus on opportunity recognition by entrepreneurs. New knowledge created endogenously results in knowledge spillovers enabling inventors and entrepreneurs to commercialize it. This article discusses that knowledge spillover entrepreneurship depends not only on ordinary human capital, but more importantly also on creativity embodied in creative individuals and diverse urban environments that attract creative classes. This might result in self-selection of creative individuals into entrepreneurship or enable entrepreneurs to recognize creativity and commercialize it. This creativity theory of knowledge spillover entrepreneurship is tested utilizing data on European cities.     

Window on Eastern Europe: Business and National Culture in Estonia

As the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe try to make capitalism work in an ethical manner, their historical background and the national culture acquired over centuries cannot be ignored, as this study from Estonia eloquently shows. Dr Professor Maksim Saat is Professor of Business Administration, and Dr Mari Meel is Assistant Professor of Business Ethics, at the Tallinn Technical University, Ehitajate tee 5, EE-0026 Tallinn, Estonia. In an Appendix Dr Meel describes how she teaches business ethics to university students.     

Does the sequence of presentations matter for academic conferences? An application of the peak-end rule in event management

Abstract

In psychology, the peak-end rule has been used to describe the effects of emotional factors on live experiences. However, it has yet to be examined in the contexts of events and conferences. This study investigated the influence of conference presentation order, excitement following peak experience, previous conference experience, and time since one’s last visit on conference satisfaction and loyalty. Although no significant differences in satisfaction and loyalty were found with regard to the order of presentations, previous experience and time since last visit were found to have significant effects on attendees’ outcomes. End-of-conference peak experiences exhibited the strongest influence on loyalty.     

Variance Decomposition Analysis for Nonlinear Economic Models1

In this paper, we propose a new method called the total variance method and algorithms to compute and analyse variance decomposition for nonlinear economic models. We provide theoretical and empirical examples to compare our method with the only existing method called generalized forecast error variance decomposition (GFEVD). We find that the results from the two methods are different when shocks are multiplicative or interacted in nonlinear models. We recommend that when working with nonlinear models researchers should use the total variance method in order to see the importance of indirect variance contributions and to quantify correctly the relative variance contribution of each structural shock.     

Political entrepreneurship: entrepreneurship ecosystem perspective

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - We use the entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective to study political entrepreneurship as a form of alignment between disruptive and...