Excess corporate payouts and financial distress risk

Firms that follow excessive payout policies (over-payers) are higher on the financial distress spectrum and have lower survival rates than under-payers. In addition, over-payers endure lower future sales and asset growth than under-payers and experience negative abnormal returns in the bond and stock markets. Exogenous import tariff reductions and commodity price jumps reduce the likelihood of overpayment. We interpret this as evidence consistent with financial flexibility considerations, rather than risk-shifting, explaining the decision to overpay. We also find that CEO overconfidence and catering incentives affect overpayment.     

Objective methods for graphical structural learning

Graphical models are used for expressing conditional independence relationships among variables by the means of graphs, whose structure is typically unknown and must be inferred by the data at hand. We propose a theoretically sound Objective Bayes procedure for graphical model selection. Our method is based on the Expected-Posterior Prior and on the Power-Expected-Posterior Prior. We use as input of the proposed methodology a default improper prior and suggest computationally efficient approximations of Bayes factors and posterior odds. In a variety of simulated scenarios with varying number of nodes and sample sizes, we show that our method is highly competitive with, or better than, current benchmarks. We also discuss an application to protein-signaling data, which wieldy confirms existing results in the scientific literature.     

“I don’t think Turkish used here is normal”: language attitudes of Turkish university students towards Cypriot Turkish

As a significant factor in social relationships, language attitudes of students are important to explore when building a school culture of tolerance. This study examines the language attitudes of university students from Turkey towards Cypriot Turkish (CT) and Standard Turkish. A mixed methods approach was adopted where 94 Turkish university students studying in the northern part of Cyprus where the two varieties are spoken, responded to a questionnaire in the first phase. The results of the analysis of this survey showed that the participants had somewhat negative attitudes towards CT. In the second phase of the study, where three focus groups were conducted, the findings of the first phase were confirmed. Intertwined with discourses of class, the participants specifically referred to “correctness” and “intelligibility” as important issues for their evaluations of CT and its speakers. CT was also perceived as an important marker of Turkish Cypriotness by the participants and was projected to be lower than any other variety of Turkish spoken in Turkey.

     

Wage mobility in Europe. A comparative analysis using restricted multinomial logit regression

The paper investigates cross-country differences in wage mobility in Europe using the European Community Household Panel. We examine the impact of specific wage-setting institutions, such as the collective bargaining and the trade union density, the employment protection regulation and the welfare state regime on wage mobility. We apply a log-linear approach that is very much similar to a restricted multinomial logit model and much more flexible than the standard probit approach that is typically applied in the research on wage mobility. It is shown that the macro-economic context and the aforementioned specific institutions explain a substantial part of the cross-country variation that is larger than the part that regime type explains. The findings also confirm the existence of an inverse U-shape pattern of wage mobility, showing a great deal of low-wage and high-wage persistence in all countries.     

Capital structure,equity ownership and firm performance

This paper investigates the relationship between capital structure, ownership structure and firm performance using a sample of French manufacturing firms. We employ non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods to empirically construct the industry’s ‘best practice’ frontier and measure firm efficiency as the distance from that frontier. Using these performance measures we examine if more efficient firms choose more or less debt in their capital structure. We summarize the contrasting effects of efficiency on capital structure in terms of two competing hypotheses: the efficiency-risk and franchise-value hypotheses. Using quantile regressions we test the effect of efficiency on leverage and thus the empirical validity of the two competing hypotheses across different capital structure choices. We also test the direct relationship from leverage to efficiency stipulated by the Jensen and Meckling (1976) agency cost model. Throughout this analysis we consider the role of ownership structure and type on capital structure and firm performance.     

Sensitivity of consumption to income and to government purchases: some specification and estimation issues

The paper derives a nonlinear error-correction model (ECM) for consumption and shows that existing models that are based on quadratic utility, combine permanent income and current-income consumption, and nest (or could nest) the hypothesis of substitutability between private consumption and government purchases are special cases of the ECM. The importance of some econometric issues that have not received proper attention in the literature is demonstrated by estimating the models using US aggregate quarterly data, 1953:1-1992:4. The evidence suggests that the ECM produces more reliable estimates than do the existing restrictive models.     

Value at risk models for volatile emerging markets equity portfolios

This paper investigates the issue of market risk quantification for emerging and developed market equity portfolios. A very wide spectrum of popular and widely used in practice Value at Risk (VaR) models are evaluated and compared with Extreme Value Theory (EVT) and adaptive filtered models, during normal, crises, and post-crises periods. The results are interesting and indicate that despite the documented differences between emerging and developed markets, the most successful VaR models are common for both asset classes. Furthermore, in the case of the (fatter tailed) emerging market equity portfolios, most VaR models turn out to yield conservative risk forecasts, in contrast to developed market equity portfolios, where most models underestimate the realized VaR. VaR estimation during periods of financial turmoil seems to be a difficult task, particularly in the case of emerging markets and especially for the higher loss quantiles. VaR models seem to be affected less by crises periods in the case of developed markets. The performance of the parametric (non-parametric) VaR models improves (deteriorates) during post-crises periods due to the inclusion of extreme events in the estimation sample.     

Benchmark Bonds Interactions under Regime Shifts

In the present paper we examine the interactions among five benchmark ten year government bonds, namely those of the USA, Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Our aim is to illustrate empirically a net of interactions existing among the major bond markets of Europe and the US market taking into account shifts in the underlying stochastic processes. For this purpose, differing from the rest of the relevant empirical literature, after specifying the long run equilibrium relations we estimate the linkages between the bond markets as subject to hidden Markov chains, by applying the Markov Switching Vector Error Correction framework (MS‐VECM). This formulation is found to efficiently reflect the shifts brought about by significant economic events, such as the European monetary unification. As a result we illustrate different short‐run relations referring to the periods before and after the monetary union. Overall, our empirical results indicate that stronger interactions among the markets of the system exist in the period after the EMU. Also, by means of a variance decomposition analysis we assess leader‐follower relations which indicate that the benchmark status of bonds has changed since the introduction of the common monetary policy framework in Europe.