An Empirical Investigation of the Contingent-Claims Approach to Pricing Residential Mortgage Debt

Despite the growth of theoretical mortgage-pricing research, few empirical tests have been published. The primary objective of this paper is to provide an empirical test of the contingent-claims approach to pricing residential mortgages. This is accomplished by examining the differences between contract mortgage rates generated by the theoretical contingent-claims model and corresponding actual rates observed for 121 consecutive months from January 1981 through January 1991. We find that the contingent-claims model produces an unbiased prediction of changes in actual rates.     

Residential Immobility of the Elderly: An Empirical Investigation

This paper investigates the reasons for the substantially lower residential mobility rates among the elderly than the non-elderly. Households with low propensities to move are posited to be those that face few benefits from moving—that is, they are near equilibrium with respect to their housing consumption and tenure choice—or those that face large costs to moving. Using household data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, measures of housing disequilibrium and tenure disequilibrium were constructed. Elderly renters were found to be largely in equilibrium and would benefit little from moving. In contrast, elderly homeowners are more likely to be in substantial disequilibrium than their younger counterparts. Conclusions as to which costs to moving are most salient could not be made.     

Residential Real Estate Brokerage Efficiency and the Implications of Franchising: A Bayesian Approach

This paper provides substantial evidence that real estate brokerage firms choosing to franchise are more cost-efficient than firms that remain independent. It uses 1995 cost data obtained from a nationwide survey of real estate brokerages to analyze the differences in firm efficiency across firm type—franchised and independent. We estimate a single stochastic cost frontier using Bayesian statistics and measure firm efficiency relative to that frontier conditional on firm type. The results indicate that real estate brokerages are relatively efficient, implying a competitive market, but franchised brokerages are substantially more efficient than their independent counterparts.     

The Liquidity of Property Shares: An International Comparison

This article investigates the magnitude and determinates of share liquidity over the 1990–2007 period in the world's four largest securitized real estate markets: the United States, the United Kingdom, Continental Europe and Australia. We document a significant and consistent role for market capitalization, nonretail share ownership and dividend yield as drivers of liquidity across markets. We also document significant differences in liquidity across countries and between property and nonproperty companies. Also striking is the lack of correlation among our three measures of liquidity across property firms and time. This supports the notion that share price liquidity is multifaceted and therefore reliance on any one measure of liquidity in empirical work may produce misleading conclusions. Although we find some evidence of a connection between liquidity and firm value, it is less conclusive than prior studies.     

Major Innovation as a Dynamic Capability: A Systems Approach*

Major innovation (MI), composed of both radical and really new innovation, is an important mechanism for enabling the growth and renewal of an enterprise. Yet it is poorly managed in most established firms, and success stories are rare. This conceptual article draws on systems theory, recent advances in dynamic capabilities theory, and the management of innovation literature to offer a framework for building an MI dynamic capability. The framework is composed of seven elements that together form a management system rather than a process‐based approach to nurturing radical innovation. These system elements are (1) an identifiable organization structure; (2) interface mechanisms with the mainstream organization, some of which are tightly coupled and others of which are loose; (3) exploratory processes; (4) requisite skills and talent development, given that entrepreneurial talent is not present in most organizations; (5) governance and decision‐making mechanisms at the project, MI portfolio, and MI system levels; (6) appropriate performance metrics; and (7) an appropriate culture and leadership context. It is argued that dynamic capabilities for phenomena as complex as MI must be considered in a systems fashion rather than as operating routines and repeatable processes as the literature currently suggests. A set of propositions is offered regarding how each element should play out in this parallel management system. Finally, each element's role in the major innovation system is justified in terms of four criteria required by systems theory: (1) The system is identifiable, and its elements are interdependent; (2) the effect of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts; (3) homeostasis is achieved through interaction and networking with the larger organization; and (4) there is a clear purpose in the larger system in which the MI management system is embedded. Examples are given to demonstrate these criteria. Systems theory offers a new way of thinking about dynamic capability development and management.     

浅析我国的流动性过剩现象和通货膨胀

流动性过剩已经成为我国经济运行过程中存在的一个严重问题。从分析流动性过剩的现象入手,剖析我国流动性过剩与通货膨胀的关系以及此类通货膨胀的特点,并有针对性的提出对策。     

Major Developments in Residential Mortgage and Housing Markets Since the Hunt Commission

A number of important changes have been made to the mortgage finance system since the Hunt Commission filed its report, and the economic environment has been altered substantially. This paper examines shifts in the relative importance of public and private institutions in the residential mortgage markets during the past decade, within the context of Hunt Commission recommendations. Changes in the cyclical sensitivity of mortgage and housing activity, and the implications of rapid inflation for the growth of these markets, also are considered.     

Loan Subsidy Valuation: An Alternative Approach

In a recent paper, Jennergren analyzed four loan subsidy valuation methods suggested in authoritative textbooks. He showed that the first three can be derived from a unique formula whose value depends on the nonsubsidized loan amount that is assumed to be replaced by the subsidized loan. When the WACC method is used, this debt replacement must implicitly take into account the target debt-to-value ratio set by the firm. In this article, we suggest an alternative approach that allows us to clearly incorporate the corresponding debt constraint and to determine the resulting adjustment to be made. This adjustment appears to be different from that recommended by Jennergren. More generally, we suggest an alternative view of the consistency of the methods.     

持续经营审计意见的多变量分析

本文采用实证研究方法,分析注册会计师出具持续经营审计意见的影响因素,并从持续经营能力判别因素变量中,找出七个与持续经营审计意见显著相关的指标变量进行分析,试图为注册会计师控制执业风险提供一种定量分析思路,以期提高注册会计师持续经营审计的准确性.     

Estimating Market Power with Weak A Priori Information: An Exploratory Approach to the Model-Specification Problem

Choosing the wrong theoretical model to describe an industry??s behavior may lead to biased estimates of the degree of market power. This paper presents a two-step, data-driven methodology to reduce the risk of mis-specification bias. In the first step, a sliced inverse regression identifies the significant factors that affect the industry??s pricing behavior. In the second step, a non-parametric regression of price on the SIR factors estimates the link functions. The output of the algorithm offers useful information to identify the model that best approximates the industry??s pricing behavior. In addition, the output of the algorithm is used to develop a post-estimation test for model specification.     

融资租赁：一种解决中小企业融资问题的办法

本文在对我国现行中小企业融资总是现状、所采取的对策和进一步解决的主流思路考察的基础上，认为要从根本上解决中小企业融资问题需要进一步拓宽思路。由于融资租赁具有融资融物、财产两权分离等诸多特性，不失为解决我国中小企业融资问题的一种可行办法，并具有其独特的优势。本文的最后，提出了促进我国融资租赁业发展的若干措施和建议。     

Overbuilding: A Game-Theoretic Approach

The persistence of excess vacancy has long been documented in the literature. We propose that, because vacant land does not produce income, there is a tendency for developers to build whenever they can identify a development opportunity. Since developers have to compete with each other for the development opportunity, in the aggregate, developers will supply more units than the demand in the market. In the face of an oversupply, we show that, under certain circumstances, developers will not lower the rental rate to eliminate vacancy space. Our model also has implications for investment decisions dealing with projects that could take advantage of existing but not fully utilized assets.     

A Multi-Attribute Product Life-Cycle Approach to Replacement Decisions: An Application of Saaty's System-With-Feedback Method

The lack of investment in new manufacturing technology compromises the long-range competitiveness of a manufacturing company. The choice of appropriate manufacturing equipment is an extremely important management decision. This paper presents a multi-attribute approach to equipment replacement decisions based on the product life-cycle. The problem is formulated using the System-With-Feedback (SWF) model developed by Saaty [10]. Saaty's model is particularly suitable tor the modeling of time-dynamic and tnieraciive elements of such replacement situations.     

国有重点煤炭企业发行可转换公司债券探讨

可转换公司债券（以下简称转券）是一种新型的金融衍生工具,于７０年代后期在西方证券市场上推出,８０年代盛行,至８０年代末９０年代初已被亚洲国家所广泛采用。我国企业尝试运用转券筹资始于１９９１年,先后有深宝安、中纺机、深南玻等上市公司在境内外发行转券。１...     

Students as Arbitrators: An Empirical Investigation

No previous work has examined whether students are appropriate substitutes for arbitrators in research studies, despite the fact that students have been used in at least one experimental study of arbitral decisions. This study compares the decisions rendered by 233 students and 146 practicing arbitrators on two hypothetical discharge cases and finds that there are significant differences between decisions of arbitrators and students.     

Modelling Professional Sports Leagues: An Industrial Organization Approach

This paper outlines a simple model of professional sports contests that can provide a number of useful insights into the operations of professional sports leagues. The model incorporates a concern for competitive balance on the part of fans and has the advantage that a number of league market structures can be analyzed using standard industrial organization techniques. The model can also be used to determine the effect of a number of league rules including revenue sharing, payroll caps, and luxury taxes on the respective demands for talented players. In addition, it can be shown that the model of professional sports contests developed here has a useful parallel with a standard model of differentiated products.      

Enhancing the Creative Performance of New Product Teams: An Organizational Configurational Approach

Innovation is crucial to managing ever‐increasing environmental complexity. Creativity is the first stage of the innovation process and is particularly relevant in modern new product development (NPD) projects. In response to a call for further empirical research on collective creative performance combining individual and team levels in a comprehensive framework, this paper offers useful evidence for the design of NPD teams to foster creative performance. The results suggest that different sets of individual traits and collective processes combine and interact, enabling a similar level of creative performance from different configurations of individual and team “ingredients.” There are no consistently good‐quality or poor‐quality NPD teams or processes. However, equifinal configurations—based on team composition, and interpersonal, coordination, control, and diversity management processes—can be effective in producing creative products. Through a large‐scale study of 119 teams of students involved in an NPD activity, this paper contributes by expanding creativity and NPD team design literature, providing the basis for a “first right” approach to real‐world, in‐company research. It first proposes and tests the adoption of the configurational equifinality approach in the NPD team design domain, introducing the concept of complementarities among different types of “team ingredients,” both at the individual and team level. Second, it introduces different multidimensional measures of team creative performance, relevant to generalizing and comparing the research results. Third, it offers several guidelines for designing real‐world NPD teams through the combination of diversity and interpersonal management, as well as coordination and control processes, which have not been studied to any great extent but are at times controversial in creativity literature.     

Multivariate statistics in industrial marketing management: A practitioner tool kit

Much published work over the years has pointed to the differences between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketing. An undesirable by-product of this sometimes misdirected distinction is that managers working within B2B environments have generally not considered the use of what are seen as B2C techniques, such as multivariate statistical analysis. This article is structured in three parts. First, the argument for the similarities between B2B and B2C marketing is developed; second, three different multivariate statistical techniques are presented and combined to form a practical tool kit for use by B2B managers on strategic, operational, and tactical levels; and third, the results of an application of the techniques in the life science research chemicals industry is reported, demonstrating that the tool kit substantially enhanced managerial understanding of customer decision processes.     

Unions and Police Productivity: An Econometric Investigation

We examine the effect of unionization on police productivity in large U.S. metropolitan areas. We define police output in the context of a production function model that draws also on the crime literature. We estimate the resulting model using a data set that includes published and unpublished government statistics as well as our own survey of police departments. Results suggest that the effect of unions on police productivity varies according to categories of police performance. In particular, if performance is stratified according to the severity of crimes, unions seem to have an insignificant effect on police productivity with respect to serious crimes. For minor crimes, unionization alters the parameters of police production function, leading to diminished productivity.