Political and Regulatory Risk in Water Utilities: Beta Sensitivity in the United Kingdom

UK utilities are generally regulated by the periodic setting of a price cap (the RPI-X mechanism). To establish these caps, regulators must determine what returns are appropriate on the capital employed by utilities. This paper addresses the issue of the level of risk inherent in investment in the equity of regulated water utilities in the UK. It uses the techniques of the Kalman Filter to estimate daily betas for the major utilities in the period from privatisation to mid-1999. The paper demonstrates that water utilities' risk is time-variant. It demonstrates, also, that there have been significant political and regulatory influences in the systematic risk faced by water utility shareholders. It finds beta to display little evidence of cyclical variation across the regulatory review cycle. The paper also confirms that significant excess returns have been generated over the history of the privatised water sector and suggests that over-estimation of systematic risk faced by investors in the sector may imply further excess returns in the next regulatory review period.     

Small firms and the value of improvements in corporate governance mechanisms

Since 2002, many firms have been required to alter their board of directors and committees to increase management monitoring. Kinney and McDaniel (1989) and Chhaochharia and Grinstein (2007) provide empirical evidence suggesting that investments in corporate governance may differ based on firm size, and that under-investing in monitoring may be more pronounced in smaller firms. To further test whether the benefits of recent changes in companies' governance mechanisms accrue to smaller firms that have underinvested in governance, we examine the stock market reaction to changes in board structure over the twenty-four months following the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act. We construct a new composite measure of board structure and regress buy-and-hold abnormal returns on changes that occur in the Board Structure Index, finding that improvements in corporate governance quality result in economically significant abnormal returns accruing only to the smaller firms with weak initial board structures.     

The Economic Significance of the Cross-Sectional Autoregressive Model: Further Analysis

We reexamine whether investors can gain abnormal returns using the cross-sectional autoregressive model of stock returns. We find that the pattern of abnormal returns obtained is inconsistent over the time period 1934–94. We adjust for the higher commission costs in the pre-May 1 1975 period, a point overlooked in Jegadeesh (1990), by assuming a conservative one-way transaction cost of 0.75%. For the post-May 1 1975 period, we use a one-way transaction cost of 0.25%. The results show that investors who invest only on the long side would earn insignificant 'after-transaction cost' abnormal returns in the post-World War II period, 1946–94. The 'after-transaction cost' abnormal return from the short strategy is about 0.5% for the period 1946–94. This article shows that an investor would not earn abnormal returns using this model considering that it is more costly in practice to sell securities short and that most investors would not earn interest on short sale proceeds.     

Shareholder taxation and aggregate dividend payout: Evidence from the tax reform act of 1986

The effect of shareholder taxation on corporate dividend policy is a major controversy in financial economics. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 eliminated the statutory tax disadvantage of dividends versus long-term capital gains for individual shareholders. Using aggregate time series data I find evidence that corporate dividend payout has become more generous in the period after tax reform.     

Dividend Stability, Dividend Yield and Stock Returns: UK Evidence

This paper establishes an empirical role for two measures of dividend stability (as a proxy for dividend policy) in explaining UK stock returns. There is little systematic empirical evidence concerning the relation between dividend stability, dividend yield and stock returns despite the fact that a variety of theoretical models point to dividend policy as an important stock attribute. Here we construct two definitions of dividend stability, one of which involves dividend cuts, and use a sample of all listed UK firms from 1975 to 1997 to explore the relationship between stock returns and a variety of characteristics, including dividend stability. We find an inverse correlation between the stability of past dividend policy and systematic risk. Both stability measures have explanatory power over returns, but this is concentrated in January.     

Dividend Stability, Dividend Yield and Stock Returns: UK Evidence

This paper establishes an empirical role for two measures of dividend stability (as a proxy for dividend policy) in explaining UK stock returns. There is little systematic empirical evidence concerning the relation between dividend stability, dividend yield and stock returns despite the fact that a variety of theoretical models point to dividend policy as an important stock attribute. Here we construct two definitions of dividend stability, one of which involves dividend cuts, and use a sample of all listed UK firms from 1975 to 1997 to explore the relationship between stock returns and a variety of characteristics, including dividend stability. We find an inverse correlation between the stability of past dividend policy and systematic risk. Both stability measures have explanatory power over returns, but this is concentrated in January.     

Legal constraints,transaction costs and the evaluation of mutual funds

The paper considers the legal restrictions on investment and the transaction costs related to optimal turnover that affect mutual funds. A method is developed for mutual fund performance evaluation when both these factors are included in the reference portfolios, and it is applied to a sample of available Spanish mutual funds. The poor performance results reflected in previous studies are not significantly modified. However, when net returns on the reference portfolios are used in the evaluation the performance is clearly improved.     

我国环境税改革应以“环境红利”为首要目标

本文基于国际比较视角,将欧洲国家环境税改革的经验与我国实际情况相结合,主要从现行税制结构、社会保障制度以及劳动力市场等几个方面进行了比较,认为环境税的双重红利尤其是就业红利在我国现阶段实现的可能性较小,实施环境税改革应以追求环境红利为首要目标。     

Comment on ‘earnings management around UK open offers’

This note discusses the result of Iqbal, A., S. Espenlaub, and N. Strong. 2008 Iqbal, A., Espenlaub, S. and Strong, N. 2008. Earnings management around UK open offers. European Journal of Finance, this issue [Google Scholar]. Earnings management around UK open offers. European Journal of Finance, this issue, regarding long-run abnormal returns following open offers and announcement abnormal returns, compared with differing results in two previous studies based on similar samples. A survivorship bias explains some of the differences in the reported long-run abnormal returns. The difference in the announcement abnormal returns could be due to use of different data sources.     

税制绿色化评估的环境红利指标构建及其应用

当前,学术界采用单一的环境税收入所占比重指标进行评估有其内生缺陷,导致某些情况下评估结果无法真实反映环境税自身的变化。因此,从环境税“双重红利”视角,借鉴弧弹性理论,构建一个间接衡量环境质量是否改善的红利指标——绿色敏感度。依据绿色敏感度可以把税制绿色化程度区分为深灰绿区、浅灰绿区、浅绿区和深绿区四个象限。然后,以中国排污收费制度为例进行应用检验,结果显示：中国排污收费制度的绿色化激励效应较弱,绿色化程度仍处于第一象限的浅灰绿区。评估指标与结论对中国税制绿色化研究和环境保护税优化具有参考价值。     

我国税收征管制度变迁的路径选择——基于税收征纳交易费用的分析

与发达国家相比,我国征税费用过高;不同地区间税收征收成本差别较大;征税费用与纳税费用的比例不平衡并经常相互转化;由"寻租"、"设租"导致的税款流失严重。这些现象说明,我国的税收征蚋交易费用还不够合理。建议通过推进征纳系统的信息化、组织结构的扁平化、征税流程的精细化等有效措施,来实现我国以节约税收征纳交易费用为导向的税收征管制度变迁。     

The double dividend and the role of inequality aversion and macroeconomic regimes

The introduction of the European Community's carbon-energy tax in a small open economy is analyzed by comparing two kinds of revenue recycling. We use a dynamic general-equilibrium model with different regimes for the labor market, several income groups, and a crude valuation of environmental benefits. This allows for a more comprehensive empirical test of the double-dividend hypothesis, including equity aspects. It is shown that the weak double-dividend hypothesis can fail when equity aspects are taken into account.     

传闻消息对我国上市公司股价影响的实证分析

本文通过有关我国上市公司的传闻消息对上市公司股价影响的实证分析,得出在消息公布日前2天以及后3天的时间段里,传闻消息对股价有正影响,从而给投机者带来了非正常收益,但是从长期来看,传闻消息不会给投资者带来任何非正常收益。另外,通过对各类传闻消息对股价影响的进一步分析,发现在诸类传闻消息中,主力类传闻对上市公司股价的影响最为显著,能给投机者带来很大的非正常收益。     

Long-run performance following quality management certification

Public firms that seek and successfully receive certification of quality management, type ISO 9000, seem to experience different post-announcement share-price drifts depending on their size. This result is not consistent with the notion that companies seeking to implement a quality management system may be reducing agency problems between managers and shareholders, which are among corporate governance and control goals of any well management company. Otherwise, we should have observed material and positive abnormal share-price changes, following ISO 9000 registration announcements, independently of company size. Our results show that only stocks of large-size firms, experience positive average significantly abnormal returns over the post-announcement 1-, 2-, and 3-year horizons. On the other hand, stocks of small-size firms experience negative average significantly abnormal returns, and stocks of mid-size firms do not show any material gain over the same horizons. Although there is a rich finance literature that has studied the long-run abnormal stock-price returns following several major corporate events, this study seems to be the only one that have examined the potential long-run impact of this certification-event, despite the fact that those standards have been around since the middle 1980s.

法与经济学视野中的税法功能解析

从法与经济学的视角,即主要从微观的层面来探讨税法的功能,其主要体现在:使外部性问题内部化;减少不确定性;降低交易成本;提供激励机制;优化资源配置,提高税收效率等。     

Market Valuation Effect of Foreign Asset Divestitures in an Emerging Economy: Korean Evidence

We find evidence that foreign asset divestitures announced by Korean listed firms lead to a decrement in firm value. Interestingly the divestiture announcements by firms with a large proportion of institutional investors, who hold advanced professionalism in stock investments, contribute to an increment in firm value, but ones by firms with a large proportion of individual investors lead to a decrement in it. Unlike the case of firms in advanced countries, our distinctive finding that the divestiture announcements produce a decrement in firm value around the announcement day sheds new lights on market valuation effects of foreign asset divestitures of firms in other emerging economies.