Debt and Taxes and Uncertainty

With a graduated personal tax schedule, Miller showed that there could be an equilibrium debt supply for the corporate sector as a whole. In the presence of uncertainty there is also a unique debt/equity ratio for each individual firm, and this ratio is related to the firm's operational risk characteristics. However, if firms merge and spin off in response to tax incentives, the identity of firms is ambiguous and only the corporate sector is a meaningful construct. These arguments are developed in both discrete and continuous models that employ extensions of the arbitrage-free pricing theory.     

Political corruption and mergers and acquisitions

This research examines the relation between political corruption and mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We find that local corruption increases firm acquisitiveness but decreases firm targetiveness. The levels of corruption in acquirer areas relate positively to the bid premiums and negatively to the likelihood of deal completion. Corruption motivates acquiring firms to use excess cash for payment, which mitigates the negative effect of corruption on acquirer shareholder value. The evidence indicates that acquisitions help acquiring firms convert cash into hard-to-extract assets and relocate assets from the high to low corruption areas, thereby shielding their liquid assets from expropriation by local officials.     

East and west and north and south : A preliminary model

The Brandt report and other proposals for a new North-South world order continue to be the focus of lively debate, yet it is often argued that little concrete has emerged from their recommendations. A major reason for this, the author argues, is that the East-West conflict component is not sufficiently taken into consideration-East-West tensions are a severe constraint on and a determining factor of North-South relations. Using influence diagrams, the author develops a flexible framework for discussion and assessment of N/S-E/W relations.     

Tournament-based incentives and mergers and acquisitions

This research examines the relation between tournament-based incentives, which are proxied by the difference between a firm's CEO pay and the median pay of the senior managers, and mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We find that tournament-based incentives are positively related to firm acquisitiveness and acquiring firms' stock and operating performance. Further analysis indicates that positive acquisition performance increases the likelihood of the CEO being promoted from inside the acquiring firm. Our evidence is consistent with the view that tournament-based incentives motivate acquiring firms' managers to make greater efforts and take more risk that result in superior acquisition performance.     

The behavioral sciences and concepts and standards for management planning and control

This article reviews behavioral research on the individual, small groups and organizations and the implications of this research for management accounting. Also, opportunities for accounting research are identified and, where appropriate, extant accounting research is discussed. The conclusion is that studies of individual and group behavior are inseparable from studies of complex organizations and vice versa. Furthermore, fundamental research into personal, oragnizational, and environmental variables and their impact on effective management planning and control systems is urgently needed.     

Corporate Innovations and Mergers and Acquisitions

Using a large and unique patent‐merger data set over the period 1984 to 2006, we show that companies with large patent portfolios and low R&D expenses are acquirers, while companies with high R&D expenses and slow growth in patent output are targets. Further, technological overlap between firm pairs has a positive effect on transaction incidence, and this effect is reduced for firm pairs that overlap in product markets. We also show that acquirers with prior technological linkage to their target firms produce more patents afterwards. We conclude that synergies obtained from combining innovation capabilities are important drivers of acquisitions.     

Technology and values: problems and options

Science, technology and industry have come to form a positive feedback system of accelerating change, greatly extending the political choice and load carried by the democratic process, and having a potentially massive impact on culture and values. Three possible options are considered for dealing with this situation: limiting research, limiting dissemination, and reforming social institutions and culture. Only one aspect of the third option is considered, ie, the development of an appropriate epistemology to deal with the interaction of science, technology and values. The expansionist claim that science itself is developing to explain the sources of ethics, and will increasingly subsume the traditional areas of social science and the humanities has its problems. The views of the scientific restrictionist, Sir Geoffrey Vickers, a member of the Futures Advisory Board who died recently, deserve wider attention.     

Director gender and mergers and acquisitions

Does director gender influence CEO empire building? Does it affect the bid premium paid for target firms? Less overconfident female directors less overestimate merger gains. As a result, firms with female directors are less likely to make acquisitions and if they do, pay lower bid premia. Using acquisition bids by S&P 1500 companies during 1997–2009 we find that each additional female director is associated with 7.6% fewer bids, and each additional female director on a bidder board reduces the bid premium paid by 15.4%. Our findings support the notion that female directors help create shareholder value through their influence on acquisition decisions. We also discuss other possible interpretations of our findings.     

Trust and cross-border mergers and acquisitions

A number of studies suggest that social trust matters for investment. Using different measures of trust from World Values Survey, we show that countries where people display higher levels of trust engage in more cross-border M&A activities. When they do, these acquirers pay lower premiums. To the extent that these acquirers also tend to engage in larger acquisitions as well, our findings suggest that a larger selection pool of potential targets and higher value targets enable these acquirers to negotiate for lower premiums. We do not find evidence of the significant effect for target country trust levels. Hence, trust may benefit those acquiring firms in cross-border transactions.     

Growth and democracy: Trade-offs and paradoxes

The present paper attempts to reveal the relationships between some long-run systemic processes (on the economic, ecological, social and symbolic levels) and the theme of democracy. Starting from the distinction between democracy and autonomy, the paper focusses on its main issue: the trade-off between growth and autonomy. Continual growth can be produced, and indeed has been produced throughout history, only if accompanied by a loss of autonomy, even, beyond a certain scale threshold, to the detriment of representative democracy. While this conflict has never been rejected by political theorists, it has, in actual fact, been removed from all political debate.The second part of the paper seeks to individuate some of the long-run basic dynamics that characterise the global system: the analysis starts from the growth/accumulation/innovation process which characterized industrial capitalism, first, and financial capitalism, later, pointing out its self-pursuing, multi-scale, emergent nature with its main consequences for both ecological and social sustainability. The outcome of these processes, such as the loss of well-being, the increasing social and ecological costs and the growing fragmentation of the collective imaginary, in the long run leads the global system towards a condition of non equilibrium, from which either scenarios of greater autonomy or fatal risks for democracy itself, may emerge.     

LIBOR and swap market models and measures

A self-contained theory is presented for pricing and hedging LIBOR and swap derivatives by arbitrage. Appropriate payoff homogeneity and measurability conditions are identified which guarantee that a given payoff can be attained by a self-financing trading strategy. LIBOR and swap derivatives satisfy this condition, implying they can be priced and hedged with a finite number of zero-coupon bonds, even when there is no instantaneous saving bond. Notion of locally arbitrage-free price system is introduced and equivalent criteria established. Stochastic differential equations are derived for term structures of forward libor and swap rates, and shown to have a unique positive solution when the percentage volatility function is bounded, implying existence of an arbitrage-free model with such volatility specification. The construction is explicit for the lognormal LIBOR and swap “market models”, the former following Musiela and Rutkowski (1995). Primary examples of LIBOR and swap derivatives are discussed and appropriate practical models suggested for each.     

Amplification and asymmetry in crashes and frenzies

We often observe disproportionate reactions to tangible information in large stock price movements. Moreover these movements feature an asymmetry: the number of crashes is more than that of frenzies in the S&P 500 index. This paper offers an explanation for these two characteristics of large movements in which hedging (portfolio insurance) causes amplified price reactions to news and liquidity shocks as well as an asymmetry biased towards crashes. Risk aversion of traders is shown to be essential for the asymmetry of price movements. Also, we show that differential information can enhance both amplification and asymmetry delivered by hedging. This paper is based on part of my Ph.D. thesis submitted to the University of Minnesota. I am grateful to Andy McLennan and Jan Werner for their valuable advice and unwavering support. Also, I would like thank Mehmet Barlo, Michele Boldrin, Partha Chatterjee, Mehmet Ozhabes, Dimitrios Tsomocos and seminar participants at the University of Minnesota, the MEA and the MFA Meetings in St Louis for helpful comments. Comments on a previous draft by an anonymous referee greatly improved the presentation of this paper. Financial support from William W. Stout Fellowship is gratefully acknowledged.     

Technicalities and fantasy about men and women

Two ideas are presented for helping people in general, and women in particular, enjoy their greater freedom of choice in the future. Housing facilities could be designed to contain a number of nuclear families ; this would help allay the difficulties—psychological and economic—of the two-generation family, while preserving its good features. A fantasy of a three-generation family, with two people of the same sex and one of the opposite sex, serves to highlight some of the basic values which should be accepted or deliberately abandoned in the search for new styles of life.     

Systems and cities,patterns and populations

The course of human evolution on our planet is far more mysterious than the smooth flow of the history books suggests. At that moment in the last century when populations first began to increase rapidly, the railway and the steamship appeared—ideal transport for large numbers. As I.F. Clarke shows in these reviews, the first half of the 19th century was also the time when the first statisticians and sociologists learnt how to devise methods for the analysis and interpretation of the growing numbers that lived in the expanding cities of the new industrial nations.     

广西与东盟经贸合作的成效、问题与对策

中国-东盟自由贸易区的建设进程启动以来,广西与东盟在双边贸易、双向投资、国际经济合作等领域都取得了积极成效,但是也存在经贸合作的驱动力单一、合作伙伴国集中、贸易商品结构呈现低度化特征以及口岸基础设施建设落后等问题。本文在分析广西与东盟经贸合作中存在问题的基础上,提出了广西与东盟在未来＂钻石十年＂经贸合作发展的具体对策。     

Aggressive CEOs and bank mergers and acquisitions

The U.S. banking industry has seen waves of mergers since the 1980s. Despite a significant body of research on the determinants of these waves, there are few studies of how CEOs influence banks’ mergers and acquisitions (M&As). This paper studies the effect of CEO aggressiveness on bank M&As. We construct a new measure of bank CEO aggressiveness based on CEOs’ ancestral countries of origin and data on inter-country wars. We find that aggressive CEOs are more likely to acquire other banks. Moreover, the impact of CEO aggressiveness on bank M&A decisions is more pronounced when the CEOs are from larger and more profitable banks, when CEOs have a longer tenure, and when CEOs’ ancestral country of origin has a more masculine culture. Moreover, we show that aggressive CEOs are more likely to make acquisitions when CEOs possess more cultural maintenance, which captures the extent to which CEOs retain their original cultural values and beliefs. Finally, we document positive short-term stock market reactions to bank M&As initiated by aggressive CEOs.     

Stock and Bond Liquidity and its Effect on Prices and Financial Policies

An asset is liquid if it can be traded at the prevailing market price quickly and at low cost. We show that in addition to risk, liquidity affects asset prices and returns. Theories of asset pricing suggest that the expected return of an asset is increasing in its risk, because risk-averse investors require compensation for bearing more risk. Because investors are also averse to the costs of illiquidity and want to be compensated for bearing them, asset returns are increasing in illiquidity. Thus, asset prices should depend on two asset characteristics: risk and liquidity. This paper surveys research on the effects of liquidity on asset prices and returns, showing that liquidity is an important factor in capital asset pricing.     

Noise trading and prime and score premiums

This paper documents that a common element drives the time-series variation of the premium pricing of Primes and Scores. I argue that this common element is noise trading. The noise trading model of Delong, Shleifer, Summers and Waldmann (1990) predicts that returns on assets that are predominantly traded by noise traders will be correlated, since the misperceptions of noise traders are cross-sectionally correlated. Consistent with the noise trading hypothesis, changes in the average premium of Primes and Scores, which are predominantly traded by individual investors, are correlated with both changes in average discounts of closed-end funds and small firms returns. These empirical facts provide additional evidence that noise traders can affect security prices.     

国外金融监管协调合作的成功经验及启示

国际经验表明,金融危机的发生在很大程度上是由于金融监管不力,而监管不力往往又与各金融监管部门各自为政、缺乏协调合作紧密相关.基于加拿大、日本、韩国、澳大利亚等国家次贷危机前金融监管协调合作机制改革的考察,笔者分析了这些国家在监管机构设置与职能、监管机构协调与合作、监管信息收集与共享以及国际监管协调与合作方面取得的成功经...     

Cloud-based client accounting and small and medium accounting practices: Adoption and impact

Cloud accounting represents a major disruptive technology for the accounting industry. This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to collect data from eight small and medium accounting practices (SMPs) to test a preliminary model of the determinants and impact of cloud-based client accounting adoption by SMPs. Accordingly, the SMP was the unit of analysis. The complex triadic relationship between SMPs, their clients and cloud accounting provider necessitated an interorganisational perspective. Four factors contributed to SMPs’ adoption decisions: perceived benefits of cloud-based client accounting, perceived benefits of partner programs, organisational readiness (IT sophistication and client readiness), and external pressure (client and competitive pressures). Subsequent to adoption, SMPs experienced a decline in the levels of traditional (statutory) services provided. However, most noted increases in income from business advisory. All firms were at least as well off after adoption. Improvements in client relationships and the perceived value of accountants’ services were also noted. An adoption/impact typology predicted and found positive impacts for cloud initiators, in particular. The findings have implications for owners of SMPs, their SME clients, and for accounting professional bodies.