Do Countries Matter More in Determining the Relationship Between Employee Welfare and Financial Performance?

Extant literature suggests that employee‐friendly practices influence corporate decision‐making. Using a bargaining framework, we examine the role of country‐level determinants in influencing employee‐friendly practices and their impact on value creation. Utilizing a comprehensive sample of 25,483 firm‐year observations from 56 countries, we find that firms domiciled in countries with weak employment protection and regulations can potentially benefit by voluntarily undertaking employee‐friendly practices. Also, in countries with flexible labor market conditions, firm value is enhanced by undertaking employee‐friendly practices. Furthermore, the importance of employee‐friendly practices in value creation is observed strongly in countries that provide better infrastructure, productivity, and incentives.     

Financial development,corporate governance and cost of equity capital

Existing research suggests that external governance is more relevant than internal governance in affecting a firm’s value. We contribute to the literature by explicitly examining the interactive role played by country-level financial development and legal institutions in influencing the impact of firm-level governance on the cost of equity capital. Using a comprehensive sample of 7380 firm years drawn from 22 developed countries, we show that firm-level corporate governance attributes affect the cost of equity capital primarily in the Common Law countries with high levels of financial development. Our study is the first to highlight the complementary effects of legal origin, financial development and firm-level governance attributes in influencing the cost of equity capital.     

Analytical Valuation of American Options on Jump-Diffusion Processes

We derive analytic formulas for the value of American options when the underlying asset follows a jump-diffusion process and pays continuous dividends. They early exercise premium has a form very different form from that for diffusion processes, and this can be attributed to the discontinuous nature of the price paths. Analytical formulas are derived for several distributions of the jump amplitude.     

NUMBER OF TRANSACTIONS AND VOLATILITY: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY USING HIGH‐FREQUENCY DATA FROM NASDAQ STOCKS

Our empirical evidence based on transactions data of a sample of Nasdaq stocks indicates that trades of large firms are related to the proxies of marketwide and firm‐specific information. For large firms, an increase in the number of trades seems to have a beneficial effect on liquidity as measured by bid‐ask spreads. On the other hand, trades of small and medium firms are associated with firm‐specific information and are not related to marketwide information. For small and medium firms, the frequency of trades is positively associated with bid‐ask spreads, apparently because of the adverse information content of trades. JEL classification: G10, G12, G13     

United states and french competition in the world market

Conclusion The purpose of the study has been to examine whether the direction of international trade is governed by the doctrine of comparative cost. It is concluded that this doctrine does explain a significant percentage of the flow of trade between the two countries studied. There are additional factors, however, as listed in the introduction which also influence trade between nations.The inability to include non-labor costs such as material costs and selling costs in explaining the variations in the exports of France and the U.S., results from the paucity of data available in these areas in the national statistics of France. However, since the establishment of the O.E.C.D., additional data concerning industries have been made available in growing volume. Moreover, the O.E.C.D. has endeavored to harmonize the ways in which data from the European countries and the U.S. are collected. As comparable data become available, further research will be necessary to measure the importance of non-labor costs to total costs and their influence on export performance.A large section of the article has been adapted from the author's 1969 doctoral dissertation at the New School for Social Research.     

Deposit insurance subsidies,moral hazard,and bank regulation

The model developed in the paper separates deposit insurance subsidies into two components: a premium-linked subsidy which arises from an ex-ante mispricing of the deposit insurance premium, and an asset-linked subsidy which arises from a lack of ex-post monitoring of the bank's actions. The identification of these two subsidies provides important insight into the relation between deposit-insurance subsidies and bank risk. The asset-linked subsidy is higher for banks of average risk and lower for very-high and very-low risk banks. The premiumlinked subsidy behaves differently under risk-adjusted and fixed-rate premiums. The model also indicates that the implementation of a riskadjusted insurance-rate schedule alone would not be sufficient to eliminate the bank's excessive risk-taking behavior. Thus, some combination of risk-sensitive deposit-insurance pricing and regulatory control is necessary to reduce the moral hazard problem.     

Corporate social responsibility and corruption risk: A global perspective

This paper extends our knowledge on corporate corruption risk by examining whether and to what extent corporate social responsibility (CSR) affects firm-level corruption risk. Using a cross-country sample of major multinational firms, we find that firm-level CSR mitigates corruption risk. On closer examination, we find that the relationship between CSR and corruption risk is mediated by country-level variables such as institutional quality, protection of minority shareholders’ rights, stock market development and freedom of the press. Further, we find that in emerging countries, CSR mitigates corruption risk only when the country-level institutional quality is high and citizens enjoy press freedom. Our findings suggest that both formal institutions and the quality of civil society influence the effect of CSR on corruption risk. Our results remain robust to controls for endogeneity and potential sample selection bias.