On the Evolution of Investment Strategies and the Kelly Rule--A Darwinian Approach

This paper complements theoretical studies on the Kelly rulein evolutionary finance by studying a Darwinian model of selectionand reproduction in which the diversity of investment strategiesis maintained through genetic programming. We find that investmentstrategies which optimize long-term performance can emerge inmarkets populated by unsophisticated investors. Regardless whetherthe market is complete or incomplete and whether states arei.i.d. or Markov, the Kelly rule is obtained as the asymptoticoutcome. With price-dependent rather than just state-dependentinvestment strategies, the market portfolio plays an importantrole as a protection against severe losses in volatile markets.     

Darwinian dystopia: the shape of things to come

Acknowledging that evolution is directionless, shaped only by context and history, and that predicting the future is, therefore, a risky business, scenarios for ‘short-term’ (next few centuries) and ‘long-term’ (10s-100s of thousands of years) futures are offered. The short-term future will be determined by the appearance of transnational corporations that represent levels of social complexity above that of the nation state. Best described as laissez-faire capitalism run amok, the rise of transnationals controlled by powerful managerial elites is warranted or justified by the simultaneous emergence of neo-conservative ideologies that resemble the pernicious social Darwinism of Victorian England. The long-term future will be shaped by the failure of humans to control their fertility. In the face of cultural barriers to rational control of population growth, and as global populations exceed the carrying capacity of the planet, countless millions of ignorant, miserable humans will barely eke out an existence, surviving only long enough to reproduce more of the same. The prospects for speciation are nil, given that high global population densities will preclude reproductive isolation.     

Financial reporting on the Internet by 2010: a consensus view

This paper reports the final results of a Delphi study into corporate financial reporting by 2010. Twenty UK experts in accounting and the Internet representing academics, auditors, regulators, reporting companies and users participated in the study. A three-dimensional conceptual framework was adopted consisting of the role of the Internet (i.e. problem solver or problem creator), the determinant of change (technological determinism, non-technological determinism or contingency perspective), and the pace of change (conservatism, gradualism or radicalism). The consensus view was that the financial reporting package would evolve into a core of general purpose, standardised information (in both the hard copy and Internet version) together with a non-core of general purpose and customised information. Radical changes suggested by prior studies such as real-time reporting and disclosure of raw data will not occur, at least to the core package. Auditors will be reactive and cautious, and regulators will adopt a minimalist approach. The fundamental dilemma of financial reporting in the Internet environment will be between standardisation and customisation.     

评价股市:视野和方向

对中国股市如何评价?可以说是仁者见仁,智者见智.乐观者有之,悲观者有之.前不久在2006年中国企业高峰会论坛的"资本市场分论坛",来自海内外的专家就中国资本市场的发展发表了各自的看法,其中中国证监会副主席屠光绍和著名学者许小年的发言最为人关注     

Global forests: Another view

This article argues that deforestation poses much greater risks to tropical areas and to developing countries than to temperate areas and developed countries, and that much research must be done before the full impact and possible remedies can be assessed. The authors also show why the situation is more alarming than a recent analysis of the deforestation problem indicates.     

China's path:a view from the top

Vice Minister of Finance li Yong talks about his country's strategy to harness the discipline of accounting standards to help China achieve its development agenda.STORY LYNDA DUGDALEPHOTOSKEET BOOTH THE PROGRESS AND REFORMS achieved by China in its modern era of openness have created unprecedented economic productivity and prosperity.The resultant growth has given the country an international prestige that not only does its population proud,but also gives it a strong and important voice in the governance of the international economy.     

A comparison of the financial institutions' view and the market's view of country creditworthiness

In 1979, both Institutional Investor and Euromoney began publishing country risk ratings. For years, international commercial bankers have used these rating services as part of their international evaluation process for lending to sovereign governments. An examination of these services suggests that Institutional Investor's ratings, which are based upon questionnaire responses from commercial bankers, reflect the financial institutions' perception of country creditworthiness. On the other hand, Euromoney's ratings represent a market view in that they are based upon data observed from financial and credit markets. The purpose of this article is to investigate the consistency between the financial institutions' view and the market's view in assessing the creditworthiness of developing and newly industrialized countries.     

Reforming the UN: the view of the American people

It may come as a surprise that surveys of the US people on the subject of the UN and global issues show that the US government policy of ignoring major UN reform is at odds with strong preferences by the American people for many major UN reforms. Illustrating both ignorance and some surprising discretion, it is also true that the US public opposes few of the many reforms tested. The Americans Talk Issues Foundation (ATI) has conducted six opinion surveys of US people on the UN and global issues in the past three years, the highlights of the latest of which are reported here.     

近代西方社会福利思想历史演进述评——一种历史观的形成与发展

在资本主义的发展进程中,近代西方社会福利思想的历史演进主要围绕以下几个选择进行:以经济-政治经济分析框架选择为基础的关于市场和政府的运行机制,关于个人和集体、国家的责任主体,关于效率与财富创造、公平①与财富分配的核心理念。进过几个世纪的演进,综合分析框架下强调多元机制和多元责任主体的折中型的、体系化的社会福利思想逐渐形成,但其独立的核心理念并不很明确。     

Investor protection and the Coasian view

The corporate charters of a sample of Mexican firms show that private firms often significantly enhance the legal protection offered to investors, but public firms rarely do so. We construct a model that endogenizes the degree of investor protection that firms provide, using as a springboard the assumption that legal regimes differ in their ability to enforce precisely filtering contracts that provide protection only in those cases where expropriation can occur. Our model generates predictions about the types of contracts that would be employed and the levels of investor protection that would prevail across different legal regimes in both private and public firms.     

Banks and sovereign risk: A granular view

We investigate the determinants of sovereign bond holdings of German banks and the implications of such holdings for bank risk. We use granular information on all German banks and all sovereign debt exposures in the years 2005–2013. As regards the determinants of sovereign bond holdings of banks, we find that these are larger for weakly capitalized banks, banks that are active on capital markets, and for large banks. Yet, only around two thirds of all German banks hold sovereign bonds. Macroeconomic fundamentals were significant drivers of sovereign bond holdings only after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. With the outbreak of the sovereign debt crisis, German banks reallocated their portfolios toward sovereigns with lower debt ratios and bonds with lower yields. With regard to the implications for bank risk, we find that low-risk government bonds decreased the risk of German banks, especially for savings and cooperative banks. Holdings of high-risk government bonds, in turn, increased the risk of commercial banks during the sovereign debt crisis.     

Deconstructing the principal-agent model: a view from the bottom

The principal-agent model has been a popular paradigm in mainstream accounting research for nearly two decades. This paper argues that contrary to principal-agent theorists' claims to objectivity and neutrality, the theory actually imposes a capitalistic subjectivity on the object of the research, labor, and in so doing, rationalizes and legitimizes exploitation. To pioneer a new age, the innate dignity of life must be restored to human beings in systems of thought. An alternative conceptual frame aimed at assisting with creating a culture in which human enrichment replaces material riches as the object of economics is proposed.     

Selling off the public estate: A broker's view

There is much contemporary discussion about the impact on the UK of the creation of a single market amongst the member nations of the European Community (EC) in 1992. This impact needs to be assessed as precisely as possible given the unsubstantiated and conflicting claims being made. Because 1992 purports to be a further removal of trade barriers within the EC, the most accurate guide to its probable effect is a study of the impact of EC membership to date. This article analyses historical experience in order to reveal future trends.     

Sustainable development: A co-evolutionary view

The challenges of sustainable development can be organized around three themes. First, modernization has been unsustainable because it has been supported by the use of hydrocarbon fuels and chemicals which are limited in availability and damaging to the atmosphere and terrestrial and aquatic systems. Sustainable development will require that the use of energy and chemicals be subservient to ecosystem maintenance. Second, political consensus and bureaucratic mobilization will be more difficult because we no longer believe that development is almost inevitable through the application of Western science. On the other hand, we may be less prone to make mistakes. The decline in belief in progress has also increased the opportunities for non-Western cultures to define development for themselves. Third, we are shifting from a mechanical to a co-evolutionary understanding of systems which helps explain why development has been unsustainable and what we must do to attain sustainability.     

From authenticity to significance: Tourism on the frontier of culture and place

The tourism of the future will include greater demand on the part of citizens of economically emerging nations, as well as on the part of a growing number of retirement age persons in many of the more developed countries. There are important environmental, cultural, and social consequences associated with these demographic shifts. Trendsetters for the tourism of the near future are likely to be well-educated elites who are familiar with travel and comfortable in culturally diverse situations. They will have an understanding of the consequences of global economic development, and will better realize that their participation in tourism comes with a cost to communities and environments through which they pass. They will see value in tourism experiences that support principles of environmental sustainability, heritage preservation and cultural diversity, and human equality. This generation of tourists will have greater choice of travel venues and access to considerably more information on which to base their travel plans, and they will be more likely to expect travel experiences that have breadth as well as depth and that provide opportunities for self-improvement as well as leisure and entertainment.     

Habit formation and the equity–premium puzzle: a skeptical view

We argue that, ceteris paribus, introducing a habit that resolves the equity–premium puzzle is equivalent to increasing the Arrow-Pratt coefficient of relative risk aversion, AP-RRA. If we constrain the AP-RRA to a constant ‘acceptable’ level, the effect on the equity premium is quantitatively insignificant. In a dynamic setting, the fluctuations of the habit increase the equity premium, slightly, though generates unrealistic fluctuations in the risk-free interest rate. We conclude a habit is observationally equivalent, up to a first-order approximation, to a higher AP-RRA and to a preference shock. These effects cannot resolve the equity–premium puzzle.      

Perceptions of the true and fair view concept: an empirical investigation

If major groups of financial reporting participants differ in their perceptions of standards for financial reporting quality, such as 'true and fair view', 'present fairly' and 'fair presentation', a financial reporting expectation gap may occur. This article reports the results of a survey designed to explore this potential gap by determining New Zealand financial directors', auditors' and shareholders' perceptions of terms associated with financial reporting quality.
The results show that a clear majority of all three groups share similar perceptions of the 'true and fair view'; but perceive 'true and fair view' to be quite different from 'fairly presents' and 'fair presentation', terms the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants' (2005) describes as equivalent to 'true and fair view'. Thus there appears to be a perception gap between the respondents surveyed and the Institute. The findings also support a literal rather than a technical interpretation of 'true and fair view'; that respondents do not perceive 'true and fair view' as compliance with GAAP; and that 'true' ('truth' in accounting), the word separating 'true and fair view' from terms that include only 'fair', may be perceived as a key factor required for financial reporting quality.     

ATM市场利益机制探究:国际视角与中国策略

ATM市场是随着银行卡市场的产生而发展起来的,其功能和作用也从最初的为持卡人提供更多的便利性服务发展到现在成为个人金融服务的重要终端。本文试图通过对国外ATM市场发展态势和利益分配格局的分析研究,来解决中国ATM市场发展的关键问题——ATM市场的利益机制问题。