Should You Spin Off Your Internet Business?

The purpose of most corporate spin-offs is to unlock the shareholder value of a business unit that is not critical to the parent company's success. Internet spin-offs raise additional problems, partly because they are so new. This article sets out a multi-dimensional framework to help managers decide how to structure their internet businesses: whether to keep them integrated into the parent company, to establish them as wholly-owned subsidiaries or to spin them off 'wholly or partially'. The authors argue that companies must weigh the trade-offs between what they call the 'three Cs': control, currency and culture. The collapse of internet stock prices in April/May 2000 reduced but did not eliminate then 'currency' attraction of the spin-off option. But issues of control and culture were always just as important. Above all, the decision must be made in the context of a company's total 'digital agenda': that is, as part of a company's overall strategy for creating and sustaining value in the new economy.     

日本泡沫经济与中国当前经济对比分析

近几年中国经济的某些现象与日本当年的泡沫经济颇有几分相似之处,如货币升值、房地产价格持续攀升,这使得人们担心中国经济能否如日本经济泡沫破裂后陷入长期低迷。但是,当前的中国经济与日本泡沫经济有许多的不同点:经济发展水平不同、金融自由化的程度不同、政府的重视程度及宏观调控措施不同、经济泡沫化的程度不同和经济增长的潜力不同,这种种的不同可以确保中国经济能够长期稳定的增长。     

ASSET PRICES,OUTPUT AND MONETARY POLICY IN A SMALL OPEN ECONOMY

We formulate a macro‐model of a small open economy in order to investigate the relative performance of rules that respond to asset prices and those that do not. Our model consists of three asset prices: the stock price, the long‐term interest rate and the exchange rate. These asset prices interact with nominal wage and price Phillips curves, a law of motion for the labour share, a dynamic IS curve that describes output adjustment and a Taylor‐type interest rate policy rule. Estimations of the model show that policy rules that respond to asset price movements dominate rules that do not.     

Stock price informativeness and analyst coverage

We examine whether more analyst coverage translates into more informative stock prices and apply this to both developed and emerging markets. We measure price informativeness using the association between current stock returns and future earnings. We argue that more informative stock prices contain more information about future earnings. Results indicate that analysts' activities do not contribute to the impounding of future earnings information into current stock prices, in accordance with the view that analysts are outsiders who do not have full access to firm‐level information. We also find that analysts specialize according to industry and that “industry expertise” is limited to developed countries. Overall, our evidence is consistent with the explanation that analysts focus on gathering and mapping industry‐ and market‐level information (macroeconomic information) into stock prices. Copyright © 2013 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Buy Local? Governmental Incentives to ‘Inform’ Consumers

This paper considers governmental incentives to provide information to local consumers about the relative merits of local versus foreign goods. We construct a model in which a local firm in a small, open economy competes in its domestic market with imports. Consumers are willing to pay an idiosyncratic premium for the local product, drawn from some support that the importing country government can affect through a costly information campaign. We examine incentives to undertake such a campaign in autarky and in the case of trade. We show, inter alia, that while a national welfare‐maximising government will always wish to shift this distribution upwards, it may not wish to reduce the variance of valuations, and that the optimal response of a foreign government will be to increase any support it offers to its exporters. Furthermore, falling world prices generally reduce the attractiveness of such a campaign both to a welfare‐maximising government and to one that cares only for domestic profits.     

Guiding the path: Identified skills for educating the next generation of workers

The changing economy brings about new and exciting opportunities for emerging workers. Research shows that adolescents transitioning to adulthood are eager to enter the workforce and begin their careers, but many will be underprepared for the types of responsibilities that their new positions will entail. Subjectively identifying the skills that current workers believe will be necessary for future job success provides insight into how school curriculum may adapt to the changing economy and better support their students. This study explores the viewpoints of workers and the skills that they will need to take the next steps in their careers.     

“套期保值”分析

国内外一些学者把套期交易和套期保值联系在一起。对上海商品交易所2003-2005年天然橡胶期货与现货价格实际变化情况进行研究,发现套期交易除了有锁定价格的作用外,还存在期货价格和现货价格的同方向不同幅度的变动,即套期存在保值差异和逆向风险。因此,套期保值应表述为套期锁险。     

Consumer protection in Switzerland: Strengthening countervailing power or competition?

Intervention by pressure groups overshadows the discussion of the extension and revision of legislation in the field of competition. The result is increasing codification of political interpretations of the rules underlying a market oriented economy. This tendency is not only illustrated by the draft law on the monitoring of prices but also by the one on consumer protection. In both cases, two guiding principles are at stake, namely the strengthening of rules of competition and the improvement of the position of consumers. The article emphasizes the economic implications of these two principles and shows how difficult it is to reconcile them in the new law. Measures designed to provide more transparent market structures may have adverse effects. Measures designed to reinforce the position of consumers create imperfect conditions on the demand side. In both cases it is unclear how their explicit and social costs will be divided between producers and consumers and what will be their impact on prices.     

网络商业发展中的问题与对策

人类社会进入信息时代后 ,Internet已被许多领域广泛应用 ,同样 ,2 1世纪的商业营销活动将越来越紧密地与Internet联系在一起 ,这是世界经济发展的必然趋势 ,对此我们要有足够的认识。要充分认识网络商业在未来商业活动中的地位和作用 ,认真研究我国发展网络商业中存在的问题并采取相应的对策 ,以促进我国网络商业的发展。     

A decentralized token economy: How blockchain and cryptocurrency can revolutionize business

As the underlying technology of bitcoin, blockchain is expected to create a new economic system by revolutionizing the way we communicate over the internet. Blockchain seeks to improve information security and transparency by sharing encrypted data among peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Due to its emphasis on security and trust, there is increased demand for blockchain’s application in a variety of business sectors. The decentralized nature of blockchain creates the new concept of a token economy in which the community’s revenue can be allocated to the actual content producers and service users who create value. This article looks at how blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are evolving and interconnected, creating a token economy through different business models. Blockchain is expected to be a key technology that enables new protocols for the establishment of a token economy in the future, leading to a new economic paradigm.     

Housing wealth effect in emerging economies

In this paper I estimate the impact of changes in real and financial wealth on private consumption for a panel of 17 emerging economies from Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. Households' consumption, income and the two measures of real and financial wealth – proxied by house and stock market prices – are found to be difference-stationary and co-integrated; by means of recent econometric techniques for heterogeneous panels, i.e. the pooled mean group estimator, inference is drawn about the long- and short-run relationships between the variables of interest. The main result of the analysis shows that both real and financial wealth positively affect households' consumption in the long-run, with the elasticity of housing wealth being larger than that of stock market wealth. Moreover, there is also a significant short-run adjustment from income, stock prices and house prices on consumption, i.e. consumption adjusts to its long-run relationship with lags. When the model is run for the two groups of countries separately, the long-run impact of an increase (decrease) in house prices is generally higher in Central and Eastern European economies with respect to Asian ones, which make them more vulnerable to further adverse housing market developments.     

Is a $200 Nordstrom Gift Card Worth More or Less Than a $200 Gap Gift Card? The Asymmetric Valuations of Luxury Gift Cards

Gift cards account for a $200 billion market in the US, yet little is known about consumers’ preferences and valuations of different gift cards. We examine how average US consumers feel about exchanging luxury brand gift cards (LGCs) versus non-luxury brand gift cards (NLGCs). Using secondary data analyses, surveys, and experiments, we demonstrate two asymmetries: between valuations of LGCs versus NLGCs and between valuations of gift cards by givers versus recipients. We show that LGCs are valued less than NLGCs with identical price tags. LGCs are more likely to be swapped or sold. Resellers demand and buyers pay lower prices for LGCs. These effects are mediated by the perceived utility of the gift cards as gifts and moderated by a person’s role in the gifting process. Gift givers value and prefer to give LGCs more, whereas recipients prefer and value NLGCs more.     

APPROXIMATE COMPLETENESS WITH MULTIPLE MARTINGALE MEASURES

We construct a financial market with countably many securities for which there are two equivalent martingale measures under which the market is approximately complete. Thus, approximate completeness does not in general guarantee unique consistent prices for nonmarketed claims. the construction also produces an economy with two agents and infinitely many traded goods which is in equilibrium but has no equilibrium when a new good (recognized by all as redundant) is tentatively traded.     

The capital market spillover effect of product market advertising: Evidence from stock price synchronicity

We analyze whether product market advertising has a spillover effect on stock price synchronicity by transmitting firm-specific information to the capital market and attracting more investor attention. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2017, we find that firms with greater advertising expenditures have lower stock price synchronicity. The results are robust after we address endogeneity concerns. In accord with our hypothesis that product market advertising increases the amount of firm-level information capitalized into stock prices through the information channel, we find that the impact of advertising on synchronicity is more pronounced for firms with a higher degree of information asymmetry and firms in the consumer-product industry. Further tests show that product market advertising enhances the ability of current period returns to reflect future earnings, and thus rules out that the negative relationship between advertising and synchronicity is driven by noise trading. Our results imply that product market advertising plays an informative role and improves information efficiency in a capital market.     

网络经济下财务报告的变革

本文认为,现行财务报告披露的信息不全面,已经无法满足多层次不同信息使用者的要求,其披露的形式和手段无法满足信息的时效性需求,无法满足用户对前瞻性信息的需求,在许多方面已经滞后于整个经济环境的要求。当前网络财务报告主要有事项报告和按需报告两种模式,这两种报告模式各有其优缺点。文章提出,为促进我国网络财务报告的实施,应研究借鉴网络财务报告最佳实践,推广可扩展商业报告语言(XBR L)的应用,制定网络财务报告准则,建立网络财务报告审计准则。     

Bid and ask prices of index put options: Which predicts the underlying stock returns?

In this study, we separately estimate the implied volatility from the bid and ask prices of deep out-of-the-money put options on the S&P500 index. We find that the implied volatility of ask prices has stronger predictive power for stock returns than does the implied volatility of bid prices. We identify two sources of the better performance of the ask price implied volatility: one is its stronger predictive power during economic recessions and in the presence of increasing intermediary capital risk, and the other is its richer information about the future market variance risk premium.     

论当前通货膨胀及其治理

多年来,我国经济始终保持着高增长、低通胀率的良好状态,这种现象甚至被外国学者称为"中国之谜"、"中国奇迹"。而自2007年开始,我国经济却接连遇到各种问题,经济增加放缓,连续两轮高通货膨胀,股市崩盘,何时经济回暖始终未知。本文主要从货币角度分析通货膨胀的成因,以及目前高通胀预期对经济增速放缓的影响,并对政策提出意见。     

Random Walk in the MIST

The term MIST has been coined to describe the next tier of large emerging economies, namely Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Turkey. This article reexamined whether the properties of mean reversion for stock prices held for the MIST emerging stock markets using the sample from April 2004 to April 2012. The authors utilized a panel unit test with Fourier transformation capable of taking multiple structural breaks into account to discover that MIST stock markets indeed follow a random walk process. This is consistent with the efficient market hypothesis, suggesting that historical information is not useful in predicting future prices in MIST stock markets.     

海外上市之德国证券市场股票上市规则研究

中国企业在海外证券市场的上市不仅能够拓宽融资渠道,而且促进了这些企业按照国际市场规则进行经营,也有利于国内企业国际竞争力的增强和海外市场的拓展。但是,企业选择上市地点,涉及上市地法律环境、上市公司自身资质等多种因素。因此,中国企业对海外上市地点的选择,应当综合考虑上市的成功基础、上市成本以及维持挂牌的后期资金和技术成本等,尽量降低发行风险和成本,以期最大可能地取得海外融资成功。