Is the cardholder an efficient alarm system to detect credit card incidents?

There is a growing tendency in credit card industry to increase the contribution of the smallest players, the cardholders, in the detection of card incidents. This article examines whether cardholders are efficient at detecting/communicating incidents of theft, loss or fraudulent use of their cards. The analysis focuses on whether they demonstrate enough speed of response to support a risk control subsystem by the issuer. The research follows a completely new approach showing how the issue can be handled by applying the concept of elasticity, a notion just recently exported from economics to the field of statistics by linking it with the reverse hazard rate. The issue is focused on the analysis of the characteristics of the elasticity function of the random variable that measures the delay of cardholders in reporting incidents. This study is illustrated with an application to a real data set of 1069 incidents.     

Is the Australian wool futures market efficient as a predictor of spot prices?

Giles and Goss (1980) have suggested that, if a futures market provides a forward pricing function, then it is an efficient market. In this article a simple test for whether the Australian Wool Futures market is efficient is proposed. The test is based on applying cointegration techniques to test the Law of One Price over a three, six, nine, and twelve month spread of futures prices. We found that the futures market is efficient for up to a six-month spread, but no further into the future. Because futures market prices can be used to predict spot prices up to six months in advance, woolgrowers can use the futures price to assess when they market their clip, but not for longer-term production planning decisions. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 565–582, 1999     

Co-operative wineries: Temporal solution or efficient firms? The Spanish case during late Francoism, 1970–1981

Part of economic theory has regarded co-operative firms as useful tools for dealing with market failures during periods of economic contraction, but also as suffering severe efficiency problems during periods of growth. The main aim of this article is to test this hypothesis in the case of Spanish co-operative wineries during the years of late Francoism. In order to do this, the balance sheets of 75 co-operative firms from the 1970s have been subject to financial-ratio analyses. The main conclusion is that these firms were inefficient due to their excessive financial debt. The Spanish Francoist government promoted their creation and granted financial aid – for their value as social and economic control systems – framing them within a rigid corporate system typical of authoritarian states. This involved limited autonomy and conditions conducive to free-riding behaviour, which is at the core of their inefficient performance.