A comparison of static and dynamic portfolio policies

Garleanu and Pedersen (2013) show that the optimal static portfolio policy in light of quadratic transaction costs is a weighted average of the existing portfolio and the target portfolio. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of the robust target portfolio in the static portfolio policy that considers quadratic transaction costs. By using both empirical and simulated data, we find no evidence that the optimal dynamic portfolio policy proposed by Garleanu and Pedersen (2013) is superior to the static portfolio policy that trades towards the robust target portfolio. The robust target portfolio is achieved by either introducing time-varying covariances or restricting portfolio weights. Furthermore, the static portfolio with time-varying covariances and the short sale-constrained static portfolio are both very efficient in reducing portfolio turnover. The good performance of the static portfolio policy is robust to parameter uncertainty and trading parameters.     

发达国家促进就业的税收政策比较与借鉴

失业是市场经济条件下普遍存在的现象,失业率过高对经济健康发展和社会稳定带来负面影响。世界各国采取许多宏观经济政策,包括税收政策来促进就业。我国目前在利用税收政策促进就业方面做得还不够,应借鉴发达国家经验,对相关税收政策做进一步的调整。     

Pointers to government policies for technical innovation

The main phases in postwar industrial development patterns are summarised to show where we are now, and to indicate possible future directions for government policies towards technological innovation. A number of tables compare policies in different OECD countries, and the text draws attention to such underlying principles as going for high-technology industries, ensuring consistency within a government's policies, or the wise use of government procurement activities.     

Relate hospital charges to use of services.

Despite their constantly rising charges that provoke government regulators and insurance companies to impose "caps," hospitals and other health care institutions continue to use antiquated cost control systems. This author describes a new accounting system, based on the amount of care each patient needs, that has been in use at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary for six years. In this system, basic "clinical care units" (determined by a peer review process and in collaboration with third-party payers) establish the acceptable standard for a given diagnosis. With charges and reimbursement based more directly on the labor and services involved, hospitals can plan more efficient use of nursing staff and other personnel and services. Use of established norms for each diagnosis also helps staff and third-party insurers determine when hospital resources are being used most productively.     

Preventive medicine for hospital costs.

The reality of soaring health care costs has hospital administrators facing the prospect of mandatory state regulation or voluntary restraint on their financial expenditures. In either event, whether formulated and implemented through external rate setting or internal cost containment, managers should be preparing to adjust their hospitals' management control systems to the emerging requirements of tighter budgetary limitations. The authors discuss the implications such cost-containment programs have for hospital control systems, identify the five cost-influencing variables that must be monitored, and consider the critical importance of incorporating attending physicians into the management control effort.     

A new era for hospital liability

Hospitals are no longer merely facilities with equipment where autonomous physicians practice; they owe a direct duty of reasonable care to patients. This dramatic transition for hospitals will ensure a sea of change in the character of hospital medical practice and management.     

A bivariate model for evaluating equity-linked policies with surrender option

This article proposes a bivariate lattice model for evaluating equity-linked policies embedding a surrender option when the underlying equity dynamics is described by a geometric Brownian motion with stochastic interest rate. The main advantage of the model stays in that the original processes for the reference fund and the interest rate are directly discretized by means of lattice approximations, without resorting to any additional transformation. Then, the arising lattices are combined in order to establish a bivariate tree where equity-linked policy premiums are computed by discounting the policy payoff over the lattice branches, and allowing early exercise at each premium payment date to model the surrender decision.     

A welfare analysis of spectrum allocation policies

Economic analysis of spectrum policy focuses on government revenues derived via competitive bidding for licenses. Auctions generating high bids are identified as “successful” and those with lower receipts as “fiascoes.” Yet spectrum policies that create rents impose social costs. Most obviously, rules favoring monopoly predictably increase license values but reduce welfare. This article attempts to shift analytical focus to efficiency in output markets. In performance metrics derived by comparing 28 mobile telephone markets, countries allocating greater bandwidth to licensed operators and achieving more competitive market structures are estimated to realize efficiencies that generally dominate those associated with license sales. Policies intended to increase auction receipts (e.g., reserve prices and subsidies for weak bidders) should be evaluated in this light.     

寿险保单强制执行的法律问题研究

寿险保单属典型的财产权,在保险事故发生之前相关权利主要归属投保人,在法律上为民诉法相关司法解释所规定的债权,可被法院强制执行。法院在执行寿险保单时,不得直接要求保险公司解除寿险保单,而应要求投保人解除寿险保单并由保险公司协助扣划保单现金价值。企业为员工购买的寿险保单不得因企业负债而被执行,投保人为被执行人时应允许被保险人或受益人支付对价取得投保人地位。本文同时就保险公司如何应对协助执行寿险保单时可能面临的风险提出了对策。     

Strategies for survival in the hospital industry.

Hospitals, besieged by new competitors and pressured to cut costs, are entering a new and unfamiliar environment. As usage declines and the government's new prospective payment system makes itself felt, hospitals are feeling the pinch. Nonprofit hospitals face competition from newer, for-profit providers of health care. These authors discuss the factors that have led some hospitals to close and forced most others to consider how they can lower costs while maintaining high-quality care. Several strategies exist to help hospitals cope with their new problems. The authors point out the advantages and disadvantages of downsizing, diversification, and joint ventures, among other practical measures that hospitals can take.     

Europe of regions in the 1980s: A critique of policies for tomorrow

This study is a critical contribution to the discussion on West European regional policies. Concepts which are outdated and give in to transient considerations are dismissed and a qualitatively different framework of three supra-national entities is offered, corresponding to the development of West European economies over the last three decades. The characteristics and potentials of these entities are described and contrasted with the existing pattern of thinking in the EEC planning institutions which fail to recognise the realism of these trends.     

Government policies to enhance access to credit for infrastructure-based PPPs: an approach to classification and appraisal

Governments across the world have introduced a variety of instruments to enhance private investors’ appetites for public–private partnership (PPP) projects. The use of such instruments has become a core component of development and growth policies, for example by the EU as part of the Junker Plan. This paper provides a comprehensive categorization of these instruments, the risks they target and their effects, at both the project and system level, to support policy-makers to design the most appropriate instruments to attract private capital into infrastructure development.     

Determinants of futures-oriented environmental policies: A multi-country analysis

This research explores the validity of several hypotheses concerning the future-orientedness of countries. Nine hypotheses that relate futures-orientedness to characteristics of countries are presented. Several of these hypotheses represent ‘conventional wisdom’ about the differences between developed and developing countries and their respective values and political systems. As an example, it can be argued that conventional wisdom holds that more democratic countries will be more futures-oriented. The number of international environmental agreements signed by a country and the number of provisions related to AGENDA21 being implemented by a country were used as proxies for measures of futures-orientedness. Almost 30 independent variables drawn from a variety of secondary sources were used in two multiple regression models to investigate the hypotheses. The results do not support several pieces of conventional wisdom. Specifically, the results suggest that there is: a negative relationship between democracy and futures-orientedness; no relationship between the level of development and futures-orientedness; and a negative relationship exists between wealth and life expectancy and futures-orientedness. These results call into question a view that more democratic, developed, and rich countries are more concerned about the future than their ‘less developed’ counterparts. The results did indicate that countries with more environmental problems tend to be more futures-oriented as are countries that may be experiencing population pressures. Countries with more land tend to be less futures-oriented. More work is needed to better understand the relationships between culture and governmental decision-making structures on futures-orientedness. Future research should also focus on constructing better measures of futures-orientedness.     

Global implications of national unconventional policies: A comment

This comment discusses “Global Implications of National Unconventional Policies” by L. Dedola. P. Karadi and G. Lombardo, which was presented in Carnegie-Rocherster conference in April 2012.     

A 20-20 Vision for India: targets, policies and implementation

We live in a unipolar world not only politically and militarily, but intellectually too with globalisation attaining the status of dogma. As globalisation has not always helped developing countries, swadeshi, or self-reliance, has been strongly advocated by influential groups in India. Logically, there is space for both: globalisation for improving competitiveness of tradeables, and swadeshi for maximising employment through non-tradeables.India has been growing well but not as well it could because of excessive impedance to growth. Impedance has three components: weight of tradition, reluctance to change, and friction against movement. Positive feedback in the form of local autonomy has been suggested as a remedy. As positive feedback is inherently unstable, it should be circumscribed by negative feedback. Integral feedback, integrating over all local units combined together, and over time, should minimise risk of instability.Apart from local autonomy, India will progress fast only if bureaucracy is assured security. In particular, frequent, arbitrary and often vindictive transfers of officials have become a dreaded menace. They should be subjected to the rule of law. Politicians have become a problem; many of them bank on promoting hatred. As a remedy, each voter may be given as many votes as there are candidates, and also the option to make each vote either positive or negative. Then, any hate vote gained will be nullified by the negative votes. Hate will cease to be profitable.President Kalam’s proposal for shifting investment from congested cities to rural areas by linking loops of villages by four types of connectivity—physical, electronic, economic and knowledge—promises to hasten India’s growth, and improve the environment too. Ultimately, that way we can dream of a future where even the poorest will enjoy all basic Maslow Needs—water, shelter, education, health services, connectivity, good environment, and enough surplus of money and time to enjoy leisure.

Will I be rich, will I be pretty?

Will there be rainbows day after day?

—Song in the movie The Man Who Knew Too Much

Exclusive vs. Independent agencies: A comparison of performance

A peculiar feature of insurance is its marketing through a variety of channels about whose performance rather little is known. This paper examines two of the more important variants prevailing in Continental Europe, exclusive and independent agencies (the latter typically having contractual relationships with several companies). Two types of contract governing their behavior are examined for their incentives in terms of growth and cost control. Data covering insurance agencies of both types operating in the Swiss market are used to test for differences while holding constant contract provisions operating on the revenue side. The hypothesis that exclusive agents are less concerned about cost control than independent agencies receives a large measure of confirmation, while no evidence of better performance both in terms of growth and loss ratio can be found.Thanks are due to J. A. Blanco (University of Zurich) for a thorough checking of the mathematical derivations. Helpful comments where provided by B. Berliner (Swiss Re), M. Hellwig (University of Basel), and H. Müller (University of Zurich), participants at the 14th Seminar of the European Group of Risk and Insurance Economists, Geneva, September 21–23, 1987, and — last but not least — two anonymous referees.     

Applying VaR to REITs: A comparison of alternative methods

This study employs five methods to calculate the VaR of twelve REITs portfolios and evaluates the accuracy of these methods. Firstly, we find that the VaR varies among individual portfolios. The Hotel REITs has consistently the largest VaR. The low-leveraging portfolio tends to have the largest VaR measured by the parametric methods, while the high leveraging portfolio has the largest VaR calculated by the non-parametric methods. Secondly, each method performs differently at different confidence levels, and no method dominates the others. At the 95% confidence level, the EWMA method performs relatively well. The EQWMA and the two non-parametric methods perform equivalently and slightly overestimate VaRs. The EQWMA_T method ranks the bottom and significantly overestimates VaRs for all portfolios. At the 99% confidence level, the EQWMA method performs the best. The EQWMA_T and the two non-parametric methods perform equivalently and may overestimate VaR for all portfolios. The EWMA method turns out to be the worst and tends to underestimate the VaR. These findings may provide more insights for institutional real estate investors.     

A survey of budget-related planning and control policies and procedures

This article reports the results of a survey of budgeting practices of American manufacturing firms. It is based on the responses (27.4% response rate) from a systematic, random sample of all manufacturing firms listed on the files of Compustat. The survey instrument covered six sections: preparation of the planning budget, cost control procedures, performance reporting and communication, budget related procedures for overall company planning and control, administration of the budgeting system, and time dimensions of the planning process. Fifty variables were surveyed. While respondents generally indicated that they use recommended budgeting techniques, there were instances where the responses indicated otherwise. There appears to be significant resistance to incorporating such matters as statistical techniques and to developing feedback channels to get information from line managers regarding their feelings about the role they play in the budgeting process. On the other hand, formalization of the budgeting process is common. It might be concluded that a significant lag time exists between development and implementation of such ideas as statistical control procedures and the tools of human relations.