An Empirical Examination of the Parimutuel Sports Lottery Market versus the Bookmaker Market

A sports lottery in Korea presents a unique opportunity for comparing a parimutuel‐type sports lottery market against a bookmaker market outside the realm of horse racing. Using two‐ and three‐game soccer final‐score betting in the sports lottery market in Korea, which features matches in the English Premier League, we compare winning payoffs in this parimutuel‐type sports lottery against corresponding payoffs from an established bookmaker market in the United Kingdom. We find that for outcomes with relatively high payouts (that is, lower‐probability events), winning bets placed in the sports lottery market have greater payoffs than corresponding bets placed in the bookmaker‐based market. However, the opposite is true for outcomes with relatively low payouts (that is, higher‐probability events). Results suggest that participants in the sports lottery market tend to bet more toward high‐probability events than the amount implied by the bookmaker's odds. Results also suggest that the favorite‐longshot bias is still present in the bookmaker market, even when there is less threat of privately informed bettors than in horse racing.     

Efficiency in Pari-Mutuel Betting Markets across Wagering Pools in the Simulcast Era

Simulcast wagering, where bets from across the country are taken at tracks, off-track betting facilities, casinos, by phone or online and incorporated into the same mutuel pool, has contributed to a large increase in betting volume on American horse races since the mid-1990s. This article investigates betting-market efficiency in the simulcast era focusing on whether the interrelated betting markets comprised of win, place (finishing in the top two), and show (finishing in the top three) wagering are efficiently priced. We find that the increased accessibility and betting volume associated with simulcasting has reduced, but not eliminated, the inefficiencies seen in prior studies. Despite the inefficiencies in these markets, arbitrage is not profitable because market closing prices are unknown when bets are placed.     

Salience and the Disposition Effect: Evidence from the Introduction of “Cash‐Outs” in Betting Markets

The disposition effect describes the tendency of investors to sell assets that have increased in value since purchase, and hold those that have not. We analyze the introduction of betting market “Cash‐Outs,” which provide a continual update—and therefore increase the salience—of bettors' paper profits/losses on each bet. We find that the introduction of Cash‐Out increased the disposition effect in this market, as punters sold their profitable bets with greater frequency than before. We do not, however, find that the disposition effect has any impact on asset prices, either before or after this intervention.     

Assessing Bettors' Ability to Process Dynamic Information: Policy Implications

Regulation is often employed to encourage the provision of readily interpretable, explicit information to betting markets in an effort to promote their efficiency. This approach is supported by a considerable volume of laboratory‐based research which suggests that individuals make poor judgments in the face of implicit, dynamic information. This article investigates to what extent horserace bettors, who have strong incentives to make good probability judgments, require the regulator's protection from such hostile information environments. In particular, we examine the accuracy of the subjective probabilities of bettors concerning 16,344 horses in 1671 races. We find that bettors are skilled in adopting effective heuristics to simplify their dynamic information environment and, even in the face of restricted information, develop well‐calibrated judgments using outcome feedback. A number of factors that help bettors to achieve good calibration are identified and the implications for market regulation are discussed.     

Market In efficiency in Person‐to‐Person Betting: Examining ‘Known Loser’ Insider Trading on the Exchanges

Applying the Shin z measure of market efficiency to the relatively new person‐to‐person internet betting exchanges, Smith, Paton, and Vaughan Williams found “significantly lower market biases” compared to bookmaker‐dominated markets. A reduced favorite‐longshot bias is interpreted as evidence that insider trading on the exchanges “is not widespread” and “not as commonplace … as is sometimes portrayed in the media.” Given that the Shin measure assumes “betting with bookies,” whereas the exchanges represent “betting without bookies,” the present study employs the notion of ‘significant mover’ to empirically test for the presence of ‘known loser’ insider trading on the exchanges where traditional notions of bookmaking do not apply. Findings indicate that, far from being less problematized by insider trading compared to racetrack betting, activity aimed at profiting from “known losers” may be potentially commonplace on the exchanges. This includes profiting from horses that are unplaced. This study offers new insight into the efficiency of betting markets.     

Sentimental Preferences and the Organizational Regime of Betting Markets

We analyze the price impact of sentimental bettor preferences within a bookmaker betting market. A theoretical model demonstrates that, under reasonable assumptions about the nature of demand in a market with strong competition, the bookmaker will offer lower prices for bets with comparatively stronger demand. Using a sample of more than 16,000 English soccer matches we find evidence that more favorable odds are extended to bets on more popular clubs and that this effect is amplified on weekends when sentimental bettors face lower opportunity costs to wager. Our findings help to explain why the market for sports gambling operates as a hybrid structure with bookmakers able to attract a considerable share of the betting volume, although identical contracts are traded on exchange markets at lower costs: the organizational design of a quote‐driven market enables the dealer to take advantage of sentimental bettor preferences.     

Good Girl,Bad Boy? Evidence Consistent with Collusion in Professional Tennis

We identify professional tennis matches where one player competes for extraordinarily high payoffs while their opposition does not. Players “on the bubble” of direct qualification to upcoming Grand Slam events face substantially higher stakes than opponents, which presents an opportunity for collusion. Our findings produce evidence that is consistent with the hypothesis of unethical behavior taking place on the men's tour, as bubble players are 5.1 percentage points more likely to beat better ranked opponents than in comparable nonbubble matches. However, no such evidence emerges when analyzing women's tennis. We find additional support for the hypothesis of match‐fixing activities on the men's tour from analyzing the occurrence of tie‐breaks and the fact that our results become stronger once monetary incentives were increased after the 2013 season. Finally, the betting market does not predict this phenomenon, further confirming our suspicion of irregular activities.     

Macroeconomic policy-induced wealth effects on Chinese foreign housing investments

The unpegging of China's currency in 2005 creates positive wealth effects that trigger Chinese foreign buyers' responses to pay 3.42% more in housing prices relative to other foreign buyers. We find evidence of a higher propensity to purchase housing units with more visible features among Chinese foreign buyers after the policy shock relative to other foreign buyers. Chinese foreign buyers pay 11.0% premiums for high-floor units, 7.25% premiums for large units and 4.61% for luxury (more expensive) units after experiencing positive incomrtde shocks. We find that conspicuous consumption motives are augmented in high-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods with strong enclaves and social networks comprising residents from China. We show that conspicuous consumption motives are more significant for Chinese foreign buyers who are owner occupiers than for those who are investors. The results survive a slew of robustness and falsification tests, and we cannot reject the finding of wealth-induced conspicuous consumption by Chinese foreign buyers in Singapore's private housing market.     

Efficiency,Profitability, and College Football: do Bettors Overrate the Major Conferences in Interconference Play?

This article tests the efficient market hypothesis and the profitability of a simple betting strategy in college football. All games are examined that have a point spread for inter-conference matches involving a Power Five/Automatic Qualifying team from September 2003 through January 2016. The tests reject the efficient market hypothesis for these matchups, with a large subset of matches driving this result. The betting strategy evidence suggests it is nonrandom but it is not particularly profitable for the entire sample. However, there is evidence that betting on certain conferences to cover the point spread (win the bet) results in profitable returns over the period.

     

CEO experience and corporate financing decisions: Evidence from a natural experiment in China

Using the unique setting in China's economic transition and market reform, we investigate whether CEOs' experience regarding an economic boom affect corporate financing decisions. Economic booming, as a result of China's reform and open policy since 1978, affects individual risk preferences and decision behavior for those who grew up during the reform process. We find that Reform-and-Opening CEOs, who experience the reform and open-up era early in life, implement more aggressive capital structure policies and maintain higher leverage compared to Planned Economy CEOs. Furthermore, we determine that Reform-and-Opening CEOs tend to conduct debt issuance more frequently to cover financing needs as they can better deal with the liquidity risk of debt financing and confront the pressures arising from frequent monitoring by the debt markets. Using the stagewise regression, we find a cumulative effect of early growth experience. We also use the common trend test and placebo tests to deal with the concern that Reform-and-Opening CEOs pursue significantly more aggressive financial policies relevant to the systematic differences. Additional tests rule out the possibility that our results are driven by industry competition, state ownership, and educational ideology.     

Market Efficiency and Profitable Wagering in the National Hockey League: Can Bettors Score on Longshots?

Sports betting and racetrack markets continue to provide researchers with opportunities to test the efficient market hypothesis. This paper investigates the efficiency of a relatively new sports betting market, the National Hockey League, for 1990-1996. The market is found to be somewhat inefficient and simple wagering strategies are identified that result in profitable returns. Consistent with previous research for football and baseball, bettors in hockey are inclined to overbet favorites relative to their observed chance of winning. Interestingly, the market does not appear to be converging to efficiency.     

Are Analysts' Cash Flow Forecasts Naïve Extensions of Their Own Earnings Forecasts?

We examine the sophistication of analysts' cash flow forecasts to better understand what accrual adjustments, if any, analysts make when forecasting cash flows. As a preliminary step, we first demonstrate that prior empirical tests used to evaluate the sophistication of analysts' cash flow forecasts are not diagnostic. We then present three sets of evidence to triangulate our conclusion that analysts' cash flow forecasts incorporate meaningful accrual adjustments. First, we review a stratified random sample of 90 analyst reports and find that the majority of these analysts include explicit adjustments for working capital and other accruals in their cash flow forecasts. Second, using a large sample of analysts' cash flow forecasts from 1993–2008, we find that these forecasts outperform time‐series cash flow forecasts in correctly predicting the sign and magnitude of accruals. Finally, we find a significant market reaction to analysts' cash flow forecast revisions, suggesting that investors find these revisions informative. Collectively, our findings demonstrate that analysts' cash flow forecasts are not simply naïve extensions of their own earnings forecasts, but that they reflect meaningful and useful accrual adjustments. These findings are relevant to researchers who examine analysts' cash flow forecasts in a variety of settings, and to investors and practitioners who employ these forecasts for valuation purposes.     

Improving performance through cost allocation*

Abstract. This paper considers an intrafirm resource allocation model with a single principal and n agents. Each agent represents a division manager who uses a centrally provided input together with other inputs, including effort, to produce and sell final products. The principal represents an owner who is responsible for providing an input to the divisions. It is assumed that each agent (division manager) knows the local profit function for the division and has disutility for effort. The principal seeks to maximize firm-wide profits net of the costs of the centrally provided input and compensation to the agents. In this setting, which incorporates divergence of preferences and asymmetric information, it is shown that the principal and the n agents can strictly improve their welfare by moving from a set of compensation functions that do not include any allocation of costs to compensation functions that are based on cost allocation. Résumé. Les auteurs se penchent sur un modèle de répartition des ressources intraentreprise en présence d'un seul mandant et de n mandataires. Chaque mandataire représente un directeur de division qui utilise un intrant, fourni par l'échelon central, en conjonction avec d'autres intrants, y inclus l'effort, pour fabriquer et vendre des produits finis. Le mandant représente un propriétaire à qui incombe la responsabilité de fournir un intrant aux divisions. L'on suppose que chaque mandataire (directeur de division) connaît la fonction de profit de sa division et a l'effort en aversion. Le mandant cherche à maximiser les profits globaux de l'entreprise, compte tenu des coûts de l'intrant fourni par l'échelon central et de la rémunération des mandataires. Dans cette situation, qui fait intervenir des préférences divergentes et de l'information asymétrique, l'on démontre que le mandant et les n mandataires peuvent strictement améliorer leur situation en passant d'un ensemble de fonctions de rémunération qui ne prévoient aucune ventilation des coûts à des fonctions de rémunération basées sur la ventilation des coûts.     

Career Concerns and Management Earnings Guidance

This study provides evidence that managers' career concerns affect their earnings guidance decisions. We hypothesize that CEOs who are relatively more concerned about assessments of their abilities have stronger incentives to guide the market expectations of earnings downwards to increase the likelihood of meeting or beating the expectations. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that (i) short‐tenured CEOs, CEOs promoted from inside the firm, and nonfounder CEOs are more likely to provide downward earnings guidance when they have bad news, and (ii) their downward guidance tends to be more conservative. In response, analysts revise earnings forecasts less for the downward guidance provided by more career‐concerned CEOs. This indicates that analysts rationally incorporate these CEOs' stronger incentives to be conservative in their earnings guidance. Consequently, we find that CEOs with greater career concerns are not more likely to beat the market expectations, even when they provide more conservative downward guidance.     

Housing wealth changes and entrepreneurship: Evidence from urban China

This paper studies the impact of household-level housing wealth changes on entrepreneurship in urban China. Exploiting the 2011–2015 China Household Finance Survey, we control for lagged proxies for wealth, city-by-year fixed effects, and other household attributes and directly estimate the magnitude of homeowner's response to housing capital gains net of home maintenance and upgrading expenditures. We also instrument for housing wealth changes with structural breaks in city housing price trend. We find that a 10,000 RMB increase in housing wealth increases the propensity of a household becoming a business owner by about 0.7 percentage points in IV estimation. In addition, we provide new evidence for underlying channels that housing capital gains alleviate household credit constraints, reduce risk aversion and increase awareness of financial information.     

How Do Retailers Price Beer During Periods of Peak Demand? Evidence from Game Weeks of the German Bundesliga

This article considers retail beer pricing during game weeks of the German Bundesliga. German consumers exhibit a high degree of brand‐loyalty in their preference for regionally crafted beers, and we exploit the regional brand‐loyalty of German beer consumers to identify brand‐level demand shocks for beers preferred by the home team's fans and visiting team's fans during Bundesliga game weeks. We find retailer price adjustments at the category level mask a considerably more nuanced pricing behavior at the brand level. Retailers in regions hosting Bundesliga games significantly increase beer prices at the category level during game weeks; however, at the brand level, we find retailers selectively discount prices on the home team's sponsored beers and systematically raise prices on the visiting team's sponsored beers. Our findings are consistent with a “tourist–natives” model of retail pricing during periods of increased demand in the German beer market.     

Social network,intra-network education spillover effect and rural–urban migrants' wages: Evidence from China

This study examines the determinants of rural–urban migrant wages, paying special attention to the intra-network education spillover effect of the migrants' social network in China. Using the new migrant sample of Rural Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) 2009 survey data, we find that the migrants' social network does have a significant impact on their own earnings. In particular, we find evidence that there exists an education spillover effect of the migrants' social network, which indicates that the education level of the migrants' social network has a significant positive effect on their earnings. We also find that the education spillover effects differ with gender. The results are robust after considering the potential problem of endogeneity.     

When do stable matching mechanisms fail? The role of standardized tests in Chinese college admissions

In this paper, we investigate matching problems where priorities and preferences are misaligned. In the case of centralized Chinese college admissions, students are matched based on their test scores in standardized tests, a noisy realization of their aptitudes due to measurement errors. We show that in this case any matching mechanism that is stable with respect to score is not stable with respect to aptitude. The resulting instability leads to colleges' incentive to participate in early admissions (zizhu zhaosheng), a form of market unraveling. However, a manipulable mechanism such as the Immediate Acceptance mechanism, combined with limited information about priorities, may succeed in mending this market failure. We then design and conduct a laboratory experiment where we compare the performance of two mechanisms (the Immediate Acceptance mechanism and the Deferred Acceptance mechanism), under two timing conditions of the submission of students' rank-ordered lists of colleges (before the exam and after the exam), using a two-stage matching market design with the possibility of early offers. In the experiment, a significant level of market unraveling occurred under mechanisms that are not stable with respect to aptitude, confirming theoretical predictions. We also find that the Immediate Acceptance mechanism under pre-exam submission condition significantly reduces such unraveling.     

What is the Relationship Between Audit Partner Busyness and Audit Quality?

Contemporaneous studies generally find a negative relationship between audit partner busyness (APB), measured as the number of clients in an audit partner's portfolio, and audit quality. Their argument is that a busy partner does not devote sufficient time to properly audit his average client. Contrary to these studies, we argue that when busyness is optimally chosen by the partner, in equilibrium, there is no causal relationship between APB and audit quality. Using Australian data for the 1999–2010 period, we show that APB is not reliably linked to audit quality, consistent with this equilibrium theory. We argue that causality can be ascribed to the APB‐audit quality relationship when accounting scandals exogenously shocked the Australian audit market during the 2002–04 period and APB likely deviated from optimum levels. Supporting this disequilibrium view, we find that higher APB reduces a partner's propensity to issue first‐time going‐concern opinions during this period. Our evidence highlights the importance of the equilibrium condition in testing empirical associations between audit outcomes and endogenous auditor attributes, and shows that the detrimental effect of APB on audit quality is not as pervasive as contemporaneous studies suggest.     

Does environmental regulation affect firm exports? Evidence from wastewater discharge standard in China

This paper examines the effect of water pollution regulation on polluters' exporting decisions and exporting structure. Using a detailed firm-by-product level dataset, we employ a difference-in-differenceds model to identify the causal relationship between environmental regulation and firms' exporting performance. We find that stringent environmental regulation decreases both export likelihood and export values. Moreover, we examine the channels that the environmental regulation could affect firms' exporting performance through entry-exit of the export market, price transmission, adjustments of exporting destinations, and product switch. The tightening wastewater discharge standard appears to deter the new polluters rather than incumbents to enter the export market. Productive polluters could gain the relative larger export market by lowering down exporting prices and selling more products overseas. In response to this water pollution regulation, polluters would make substantial adjustments in their exporting destinations, exporting products, and exports value via different trade modes.