“Effective competition” in telecommunications,rail and energy markets

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“Effective competition” in telecommunications, rail and energy markets     

Do financial structures affect exchange rate and stock price interaction? Evidence from emerging markets

We investigated the relationship between stock prices and exchange rates in eleven emerging markets over the period of 1988 to 2014 using cointegration methodology and multivariate granger causality tests. We find that in emerging markets, the inner-financial structure, which reflects the proportion of direct financing and indirect financing, plays an important role in the link between exchange rates and stock prices. For ten out of the eleven emerging markets studied, the financial structure had a significant impact, either through the flow channel or stock channel. The effects of financial-economic structure (FIR) were much smaller.     

Can night trading reduce price volatility? Evidence from China's corn and corn starch futures markets

Since 2013, China's futures exchanges have implemented night trading for agricultural futures to reduce the overnight risk and price jump of futures products by extending trading hours. This study uses difference-in-differences (DID) to examine the impacts of night trading on daytime price volatility in corn and corn starch futures markets. On the basis of tick-by-tick data for these futures, we find that night trading has significantly reduced daytime volatility and contributed to price volatility stability in the corresponding futures market. Moreover, we make DID estimations for separate daytime sessions and find that the reduction of the daytime volatility takes place mainly during the first trading session. Robustness and placebo tests further support our main conclusions. Our results provide valuable guidance for futures exchanges and regulators seeking to formulate night trading policies for futures and options.     

Whither globalisation and convergence? Asian examples and future research

Among the most popular of buzzwords and debated topics for governments, policy-makers and management as well as academia are ‘globalisation’. Under its influence, one implication is that there is ‘convergence’ around a set of universally applicable and transferable beliefs and ‘global’ standards or ‘best’ practices which in turn produce ever more standardization with homogenized and similar nations and practices – the ‘McDonaldisation’ of everything. However, this is not a new idea and needs historical grounding and context. Also, in Asia, we can see globalization differently with not only constraints and alternatives, but even counter trends at both institutional and cultural levels, such as post-1980s ideas of the ‘Japanisation’ of management and industries and now the so-called ‘Korean Wave’ of Korean entertainment and popular culture rolling out over parts of the world. This indicates that globalization’s converging impacts are less all-powerful than is often portrayed and thought.     

Should the Internet care about regulation? Regulation and convergence

NETNOMICS: Economic Research and Electronic Networking -     

Financial Instruments and Promotional Banking in the EU are Growing — But is this Justified?

Institutions and the European Investment Bank are at the forefront of EU investment policy. Their role is expanding and it is now a widely-held position that an improvement in the economy will not eliminate the need for their intervention. The proposals for the 2021–2027 MFF launch more financial instruments and present ‘InvestEU’ as a larger more powerful version of the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI). However, promotional banking is often misunderstood and so is the actual size of promotional banking in Europe in which InvestEU will operate.     

Why do expiring futures and cash prices diverge for grain markets?

In recent years, cash and futures prices have failed to converge at expiration for selected corn, soybean, and wheat commodity contracts. This lack of convergence raises questions about the effectiveness of arbitrage activities, and increases concerns about the usefulness of these contracts for hedging. We describe the delivery process for these contracts, and show that it embeds a valuable real option on the long side—the option to exchange the deliverable for another futures contract. As the relative volatility of cash and futures prices increases, this option increases in value, which disconnects the cash market from the deliverable instrument in a futures contract. Our estimates of this option's value show that it may create significant price divergence. We parameterize an option pricing model using data on these three commodities from 2000 to 2008 and show that the option model fits closely to recent episodes of non‐convergence, which lends support to the importance of real option effects. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark

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Penny wise and pound foolish? How thinking style affects price cognition

Nine-ending pricing is a common marketing technique because of the traditional belief that consumers pay more attention to the dollar digits and less attention to the penny digits. This research challenges the universal effectiveness of nine-ending pricing and identifies thinking style as a moderator for the nine-ending price effect with analytic (holistic) thinkers more (less) prone to the effect of nine-ending prices. Further, we examine cognitive resource as a boundary condition for the moderating effect. Our results demonstrate that holistic thinkers are not responsive to nine-ending prices when they have unlimited cognitive resources. With limited cognitive resources (e.g., under time pressure or cognitive load), both holistic and analytic thinkers are subject to the nine-ending price effect. We identify the lack of holistic thinking as a mechanism underlying the nine-ending effect.     

Speculation and volatility—A time-varying approach applied on Chinese commodity futures markets

Experts have long discussed and empirically investigated whether speculative activity increases volatility on commodity futures markets. Little empirical research, however, analyzes the role of speculators on commodity futures markets in China. Using time-varying vector autoregression models with stochastic volatility, this paper investigates for four heavily traded metal and agricultural contracts, how the relationship between returns volatility and speculation evolves over time. Our findings indicate that speculative activity has little to no impact on volatility. On the contrary, for all commodities examined, returns volatility seems to amplify speculation.     

EU Membership and FDI: Is There an Endogenous Credibility Effect?

ABSTRACT

The European sovereign debt crisis has increased the uncertainty regarding the benefits and costs of membership in the Economic and Monetary Union. In this article, we decided not to propose a general model but to focus on one of the important components of the European financial integration. In particular, we develop a structural gravity model, influenced by some very recent theoretical and econometric advancements. This new structural gravity approach provides needed theoretical underpinnings as well as strong support for the econometric estimation of gravity models.     

Ownership structure and earnings management in emerging markets—An institutionalized agency perspective

Previous earnings management research has largely focused on firm-level governance mechanisms in single countries or on macro-level variables in multiple countries. Building on this research, we incorporate firm ownership predictors along with national institutional dimensions to explore why firm decision makers in emerging markets vary in their earnings management behavior. Our theoretical framework integrates agency and institutional theories proposing that firm-level ownership mechanisms do not function in isolation, but are reinforced or attenuated by elements of the institutional governance environment. The multilevel empirical analysis of 1200 firms in 24 emerging markets indicates that controlling ownership is positively related to earnings management. We find that the level of minority shareholder protection in a country weakens this positive relationship. We also find that regulatory quality strengthens the negative relationship between institutional ownership and earnings management activity. It is hoped that awareness of how firm ownership structures interact with national-level institutions in affecting firm-level behavior will help managers and investors develop skills and practices to better cope with business norms in emerging economies.     

EU Anti‐dumping and Tariff Cuts: Trade Policy Substitution?

The world trading system in its current form aims at reducing multilateral trade barriers across the board. Indeed, the last successfully concluded multilateral trade negotiations led to substantial tariff concessions on the part of most developed economies. What, however, happened to other forms of import protection? Have substantial tariff concessions subsequently been replaced by the use of alternative forms of import protection? In this paper we empirically investigate the relationship between negotiated external tariff cuts and the subsequent use of anti‐dumping actions by the EU. Evidence is found for larger Uruguay Round tariff cuts increasing the probability of subsequent anti‐dumping investigations.     

International SMEs from emerging markets—Insights from the Colombian textile and apparel industry

The internationalization of firms from emerging markets has been studied mainly from the perspective of large firms. Smaller and younger international firms based in emerging markets suffer from underrepresentation in the literature. This study sheds light on the internationalization of emerging market SMEs, focusing on Colombian textile and apparel exporters. Using mixed research methods, it illustrates the role of firm age in influencing internationalization strategy. It examines 1165 export contracts by 50 SMEs, discussing export intensity, speed, and geographic scope using recurrence analysis and cluster analysis. It contributes to international entrepreneurship by exploring new empirical evidence and examining it using a novel methodological approach.     

Competition and Environmental Policy in the EU: Old Foes,New Friends?

European competition authorities consider environmental and competition policy to be complementary, as each has the objective of improving social welfare. Naturally, one would imagine that environmental considerations have already been accounted for in competition policy practice, but thus far, only in the case of voluntary environmental agreements. This paper analyzes the extent to which the two types of policy are complementary by examining the legal framework of competition policy, voluntary environmental agreements and three competition cases with equal relevance to the environment and then examines the basic theoretical economic observation that less competition implies lower pollution levels relative to more competition. This trade-off between the benefits of reduced emissions on the one side and increased competition on the other implies that disregarding environmental considerations in the implementation of competition policy entails a negative externality, which can be eliminated if environmental considerations are internalized in competition policy. The impact of the externality is found to depend on the emission level, the emission damage, and market size. Further, this implies that if competition authorities were to adopt a broad definition of the relevant market in competition cases, then environmental considerations would play a limited role in competition policy, whereas a narrow definition implies that environmental considerations should have a much more important place than competitive considerations in competition policy.     

Yen or Yuan? The law of one price and economic integration in Asia

Using highly comparable local retail prices of 146 goods and services across 18 Asian countries over 1990–2014, we analyse price dispersion and test convergence to the law of one price (LOP ) for these prices around three price benchmarks—Asia‐average, Japan and China prices—to gain insight about market integration in overall Asia as well relative integration of Asian economies to Japan and China. Cross‐Asia price dispersion around China‐price benchmark, for both tradables and non‐tradables, diminishes significantly over the sample period whereas that around Japan‐price benchmark increases considerably, particularly after the 2008 crisis. There is convergence to the LOP for about half of goods and services in China‐ and Asia‐average price benchmarks. The percentage of convergent prices is significantly smaller in Japan‐price benchmark. Direct estimates of the convergence speed parameter also confirm these observations. Overall, our results show evidence of increasing economic integration in Asia in the last two decades. The process of price convergence appears to be driven by the emergence of China as the centre of economic gravity in the region. There is much room for improvement as economic integration in Asia is still far below that in Europe in the 1990s or USA in the 1980s.     

Bank merger and acquisitions activity in the EU: much ado about nothing?

This paper investigates the patterns of consolidation within the European banking industry and examines the efficiency of the banks involved in the merger and acquisitions (M&A) activity to determine whether their performance improved as a result of M&A decisions. The performance of these banks is compared with that of other large banks, which have chosen alternative routes of development. The period covered is 1998 to 2004. The findings suggest that banks involved in M&A activity are more efficient after the M&A or when compared with other large banks. Country-specific characteristics appear to play an important role in explaining the results.     

One country,two systems? The heavy-tailedness of Chinese A- and H- share markets

Chinese A- and H– share markets operate in different institutional environments (emerging/developing v.s. developed) and thus may have different tail risk properties. This paper focuses on the analysis of heavy-tailedness properties of these two markets using recently developed robust inference methods. The equality of tail indices of returns for A and H dual-listed companies cannot be rejected, and some A- and H– share returns may have infinite second moments. Their heavy-tailedness properties did not change significantly with respect to the 2008 financial crisis and the date when the corresponding company starts to be dual-listed.     

Does quality of innovation,culture and governance drive FDI?: Evidence from emerging markets

This study examines how technology, culture and corporate governance drive inward FDI in emerging economies. A study of 22 emerging economies shows that technology is the major attractive factor influencing inward FDI. Further, FDI increases as technology absorption and innovation capacity increase. The greater the quality of country governance, the greater the influence of corporate governance on FDI. Cultural dimensions such as individualism, masculinity and uncertainty avoidance exhibit a weaker influence on inward FDI, while power distance and indulgence have a stronger influence on inward FDI. Our results support the leapfrogging approach of emerging economies towards promoting innovation and enhancing technology adoption to drive FDI. Interaction effect of country governance further highlighted that the better the governance of a country the impact of technology, innovation, corporate governance and culture in attracting inward FDI also increases.