Utility deregulation and stranded investments

Electric utilities in the U.S. are moving towards full competition in the electricity market. Many utilities carry stranded investments on their balance sheets and the disposition of stranded investments is a public concern, affecting the competing interests of customers and shareholders. Stranded investments represent past utility investments that may not be recoverable in a competitive environment. Recent federal regulations allow utilities to collect their stranded investments in wholesale rates, which is a benefit to shareholders at the expense of existing customers. We find that investor owned utilities with high stranded investments enjoyed larger security returns on the date regulations that allowed utilities to recover stranded investments was enacted. We also find that firms with stranded investments had larger security returns in the one-year period following passage of legislation. In substance, the regulations delayed the movement of the utility industry toward competition and put the burden of stranded investments on consumers, as opposed to shareholders.     

Mean-Variance Versus Direct Utility Maximization

Levy and Markowitz showed, for various utility functions and empirical returns distributions, that the expected utility maximizer could typically do very well if he acted knowing only the mean and variance of each distribution. Levy and Markowitz considered only situations in which the expected utility maximizer chose among a finite number of alternate probability distributions. The present paper examines the same questions for a case with an infinite number of alternate distributions, namely those available from the standard portfolio constraint set.     

CFO与独董职能PK

有人的地方就有江湖。换言之,有人的地方就有治理,公司也概莫能外。在公司治理中,有两个角色很特殊：独立董事和CFO。     

Portfolio Selection with Quadratic Utility Revisited

Considering a simple portfolio selection problem by agents with quadratic utility, an apparently counterintuitive outcome results. When such a choice is over two assets that can be ordered in terms of riskiness, an agent that is more risk averse may optimally invest a larger portion of wealth in the riskier asset. It is shown that such an outcome is not counterintuitive, since for the portfolios from which agents optimally choose, a larger proportion of investment in the riskier asset leads to a less risky portfolio.     

乡镇职能“一勺烩”——一位镇长对民生服务中心的感触

永宁县杨和镇,上午十点。作为镇长来说,张文的语速实在是有些快。由于有事来晚了,他拉着记者的手不断地道歉,不好意思不好意思,辛苦了辛苦了。我国有句老话,见面道辛苦,必定是江湖。不仅年轻镇长张文的老练让人惊讶,更让人惊讶的是宁夏在乡镇民生服务中心技术统合下的自主放开之举。     

Utility Indifference Hedging with Exponential Additive Processes

We determine the exponential utility indifference price and hedging strategy for contingent claims written on returns given by exponential additive processes. We proceed by linking the pricing measure to a certain second-order semi-linear Integro-PDE. As main application, we study the problem of hedging with basis risk.     

Tax Compliance and Rank Dependent Expected Utility

Formulating the classic Allingham and Sandmo [1972] tax compliance problem under Rank Dependent Expected Utility (RDEU) provides a simple explanation for the “excess” level of full compliance observed in empirical studies, which standard Expected Utility (EU) theory is unable to explain. RDEU provides a compelling answer to this puzzle, without the need for the moral sentiments or stigma arguments that have recently been advanced in the literature. Formally, we show that the threshold audit probability or penalty rate at which full compliance becomes optimal for the decisionmaker are significantly lower under RDEU axiomatics than in the EU case, and that the optimal level of underreporting is lower under RDEU. Numerical simulations using various parameterizations of the probability weighting function illustrate the large quantitative differences between the two models, while a simulation of underreporting rates in the US over the past 50 years shows how RDEU can go some way towards explaining the tax-compliance puzzle.JEL Classification No.: D81, H26     

Arbitrage Pricing Theory and Utility Stock Returns

This paper presents some new evidence that Arbitrage Pricing Theory may lead to different and better estimates of expected return than the Capital Asset Pricing Model, particularly in the case of utility stock returns. Results for monthly portfolio returns for 1971–1979 lead to the conclusion that regulators should not adopt the single-factor risk approach of the CAPM as the principal measure of risk, but give greater weight to APT, whose multiple factors provide a better indication of asset risk and a better estimate of expected return.     

The Expected Utility of the Doubling Strategy

It has been noted that a certain continuous-time trading strategy, termed the “doubling strategy”, generates a positive net return on borrowed funds, with probability one and within a finite period of time. Since the doubling strategy seems to represent a “free lunch” or arbitrage opportunity, a variety of constraints to render it infeasible have been proposed. In this paper, we show that the doubling strategy generates infinite disutility for a large class of utility functions, and we can think of no utility function for a risk-averse agent which is a counterexample.     

强化会计核算功能——重庆市江北区会计核算中心信息化系统

会计核算是财务管理的基本职能,是财政系统内最先实现电子化和信息化的部门。下面以重庆市江北区财政局会计核算中心信息化为例,介绍从背景调查、用户需求、解决方案到系统测试等一整套会计核算信息化方案。     

A Group Utility Maximizer Mechanism for Land Assembly

Buyers requiring large parcels of land for development purposes engage several owners in a bilateral trade seeking monetary payment in exchange for land – a business transaction most often referred to in the literature as the problem of land assembly. To avoid the holdout problem which is a typical consequence of such negotiations necessitates a good pricing strategy that meets the subjective valuation considerations of the owners and protecting property rights to warrant a fair and efficient outcome. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature that includes contributions from game theory in the form of Nash bargaining, Bayesian theory for incomplete information, auction theory and Mechanism Design which have individually enriched this field and proposed credible solutions. In this paper, we consider a setting that has a single buyer and N sellers. We take a Mechanism Design approach to study the assembly problem in a utilitarian framework, where we associate risk-averse utility functions with the sellers. Given a set of reserve prices reported by sellers, and their risk-aversion behaviour, we seek an incentive-compatible mechanism that simultaneously maximizes the sum of individual expected utilities while delivering a Pareto optimal per-seller penalty-reward structure. We show how this mechanism, inspired and adapted from the actuarial Risk Exchange concept in the Insurance industry, can be fruitfully applied to the land assembly problem, yielding an efficient and optimal solution to the holdout problem, while making very minimal demands on knowledge of sellers valuations. The working of the mechanism is illustrated with a simple example.     

Regulatory Climate and Electric Utility Capital Structure Decisions

A theoretical model of the role of regulatory climate in the capital structure decisions of regulated electric utilities is developed that indicates managers can mitigate the consequences of unfavorable regulation by increasing the proportion of debt in the capital structure. The increase in leverage is limited by increased bankruptcy risk with higher levels of debt. The model predicts that utilities will react to their regulatory climate by adjusting capital structure. This behavior may be an undesirable consequence of the regulatory process. Empirical support for the model, both cross sectional and over time, is provided.