保健品价格虚高

保健品的价格历来是”雾里看花”。国内一般水产品加工企业生产一粒鱼油丸的成本不足010元，出厂价最多0．15元，但在保健品市场，一百粒一瓶的鱼油丸，价格却在170-260元之间不等。有业内人士指出：一般情况下，保健食品零售价是成本价的3—10倍，有的甚至高达十几倍、几十倍，其中的回扣利润达到50％以上，实际利润最低也能达到100％-200％。     

Mandatory IFRS Adoption and the Contractual Usefulness of Accounting Information in Executive Compensation

We examine how the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in continental Europe affects the contractual usefulness of accounting information in executive compensation, as reflected in pay‐performance sensitivity (PPS) and relative performance evaluation (RPE). The empirical evidence indicates a weak increase in accounting‐based PPS in the post‐adoption period, primarily driven by countries with large differences between IFRS and their previously adopted local accounting standards. We also document a significant increase in accounting‐based RPE using foreign peers after the adoption. Additional analysis shows that the increase in RPE is greater for firms with more foreign sales, and for those with lower availability of domestic peers of comparable size. The overall results are consistent with the compensation committees in those countries perceiving earnings after IFRS adoption to be of higher quality and comparability. Our paper highlights an important benefit of IFRS largely ignored by the literature, that is, the higher earnings quality and comparability brought by the adoption of IFRS facilitate executive compensation contracting.     

General Properties of Option Prices

When the underlying price process is a one-dimensional diffusion, as well as in certain restricted stochastic volatility settings, a contingent claim's delta is bounded by the infimum and supremum of its delta at maturity. Further, if the claim's payoff is convex (concave), the claim's price is a convex (concave) function of the underlying asset's value. However, when volatility is less specialized, or when the underlying process is discontinuous or non-Markovian, a call's price can be a decreasing, concave function of the underlying price over some range, increasing with the passage of time, and decreasing in the level of interest rates.     

强生陷入"召回门"

位于美国波士顿郊区的一家药店,眼下正面临十几种强生产品缺货的烦恼,包括美林、泰诺、胃能达,以及露得清护肤品。在过去的一个多世纪里,强生一直是质量保证的代名词。然而,这家老字号旗下的子公司McNeil,却在去年宣布召回2.88亿件产品,其中有1.36     

Credit Risk Spreads in Local and Foreign Currencies

Governments, corporations, and even small firms raise and denominate capital in different currencies. We examine the micro‐level factors that should be considered by a borrower when structuring debt denominated in various currencies. This paper will show how the currency composition of debt affects the cost of debt through the interaction with the risk of company's assets. We look at the currency mismatch in the firm and analyze its credit spread within a Merton's type model with bankruptcy. We show that foreign currency borrowing is cheaper when the exchange rate is positively correlated with the return on the company's assets. The determining factor is not just whether a given company is an exporter or importer, but rather the statistical correlation between the rate of return on the firm's assets and changes in the exchange rate.