New development: ‘Healing at a distance’—telemedicine and COVID-19

ABSTRACT

In extreme circumstances such as pandemics, the presence of patients in hospital emergency departments becomes untenable. Healthcare professionals and organizations worldwide are leaning on technology as a crucial ally to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak. This article focuses on the positive impact of telemedicine for helping service provision, from enabling virtual triage to mitigating the negative psychological effects of social isolation. The authors discuss the challenges and opportunities to telemedicine practices.     

Ex-Day Price Behaviour, Market Microstructure and Settlement Costs

It is well documented that share prices on ex-dividend days drop by less than the value of the dividends paid. However, the explanations offered to date remain inconclusive. This study examines the behaviour of share prices on ex-dividend days using data from the UK after the introduction of the 1988 Income and Corporation Taxes Act. Following [10] we sub-divide the data conditional on the size of the dividend paid. We find that for the large dividend sub-sample, when the impact of market micro-structure is taken into account, the ex-dividend price drop is not significantly different to the value of the dividend paid.     

THE PRE-ANNOUNCEMENT SHARE PRICE BEHAVIOUR OF UK TAKEOVER TARGETS

This paper examines the sources of pre-bid announcement abnormal returns (ARs) accruing to target companies' shareholders. To control for publicly available information, targets are classified as either identified or unidentified. The paper finds that prior disclosure of bid related information does give rise to pre-bid ARs. For identified targets there is no evidence that these ARs arise from trading on unpublished price sensitive information. For unidentified targets, trading on unpublished price sensitive information may give rise to ARs, although these ARs could be explained by stakebuilding. ARs do not occur prior to the first bid news item, a result contrary to previous US studies.     

Analysts' Forecasts and the Broker Relationship

Analysts' ability to forecast earnings per share has been the subject of considerable debate. A concern highlighted in previous research is the agency problem which may arise when analysts have a close working relationship with the firms for which they are providing forecasts. This paper provides evidence that this relationship does not improve the accuracy of the earnings forecasts, but stimulates optimistic forecasts. In addition, the paper examines whether firm size is a factor in forecast accuracy or bias.     

Cognitive Inertia in a Turbulent Market: the Case of UK Residential Estate Agents

Recently, a number of researchers seeking to develop cognitive approaches for understanding processes associated with the development and implementation of competitive positioning strategies have drawn attention to the notion of ‘cognitive inertia’. Once established, there is a danger that actors may become overly dependent on their mental models of competitive space, to the extent that they fail to notice changes in the material conditions of their business environment, until these changes have become so widespread, or significant in other ways, that their organization's capacity for successful adaptation has been seriously undermined. While there have been several anecdotal accounts of cognitive inertia reported in the literature, and a number of researchers have explored processes of cognitive change in organizations more generally, to date there have been virtually no studies published which have investigated this phenomenon specifically within the domain of competitor assessment. This paper reports one such investigation, a longitudinal field study which explored the extent to which actors' mental models of competitive space in the UK residential estate agency (real estate) industry, an industry characterized by high volatility in recent years, remained stable or changed over time. An initial sample of 208 respondents from 58 firms completed detailed questionnaires at the onset of the recent recession in the UK property market. The questionnaires were designed to elicit the respondents' perceptions of their own organization and various competitors on a number of key dimensions. A sub-sample of 114 respondents from 41 firms returned a further set of completed questionnaires, 12 to 18 months later, when the recession had become deeply established. The findings are entirely consistent with the cognitive inertia hypothesis. The results indicate that the respondents' individual and collective cognitions remained highly stable, despite a significant down-turn in the property market from T1 to T2.     

Dividend valuation,trading and transactions costs: the 1997 partial abolition of dividend tax credit repayments

Although UK resident tax-exempt shareholders lost the right to repayment of tax credits on dividends paid by UK resident companies in July 1997, they could continue to receive tax credit repayments in respect of dividends received from Irish resident companies until December 1998. In July 1997 the rate of tax credit on Irish companies' dividends was 21%, and this was reduced to 11% in December 1997. We obtain insights into the incentives and behaviour of UK tax-exempt investors in response to these changes in the relative ‘tax attractiveness’ of investments in Irish resident companies. We find that only at its highest rate, 21%, was the level of dividend tax credit on Irish companies' dividends sufficient to induce changes in UK tax-exempt shareholders' investment strategies; and that the propensity for dividend capture by tax-exempt investors is heightened when the dividend tax credit yield is of the order of 0.8 or more and dividend yield is of the order of 2.6% or more.