ESG,risk, and (tail) dependence

While environmental, social, and governance (ESG) trading activity has been a distinctive feature of financial markets, the debate if ESG scores can also convey information regarding a company’s riskiness remains open. Regulatory authorities, such as the European Banking Authority (EBA), have acknowledged that ESG factors can contribute to risk. Therefore, it is important to model such risk dependencies and quantify what part of a company’s riskiness can be attributed to the ESG scores. This paper aims to question whether ESG scores can be used to provide information on (tail) riskiness. By analyzing the (tail) dependence structure of companies with a range of ESG scores, that is within an ESG rating class, using high-dimensional vine copula modeling, we are able to show that risk can also depend on and be directly associated with a specific ESG rating class. Empirical findings on real-world data show positive not negligible ESG risks determined by ESG scores, especially during the 2008 crisis.     

Globalisierung,Versicherung und Welthandelsrecht (WTO)

The article identifies the technological progress in respect of the transport of goods (?container revolution“), passengers (wide body aircraft) and data (world wide web) as the true basis of the present and irreversible development which is usually referred to as globalization. Its effect on insurance is discussed in relation to the capital markets and to the insurance markets. With regard to the latter the main effect of globalisation is the progressive unboundedness of risks which is correlated to the globalization of social and economic developments. The unboundedness of risks would require a world wide extension of insurance business which is, however, in many cases impeded by legal barriers delimiting insurance markets. The deregulation of these barriers has been triggered by GATS, but the process of liberalisation of insurance markets is far from being accomplished.     

Consumption, (dis)aggregate wealth,and asset returns

In this work, I show, from the consumer's budget constraint, that the residuals of the trend relationship among consumption, financial wealth, housing wealth and labor income (summarized by the variable cday) should predict better U.S. and U.K. quarterly stock market returns than a variable like cay from Lettau and Ludvigson (2001), which considers aggregate wealth instead.I find that the superior forecasting power of cday is due to: (i) its ability to track the changes in the composition of asset wealth; and (ii) the faster rate of convergence of the coefficients to the “long-run equilibrium” parameters.In addition, the results suggest that, while financial wealth shocks are mainly transitory, fluctuations in housing wealth are very persistent. Moreover, they highlight that expectations about future returns are “synchronized” across countries.     

Contents of PMM,Volume 29 (2009)

This article appraises the recent UK quantitative easing (QE) monetary experiment. From March 2009 to February 2010, the Bank of England spent £200 billion on gilts and corporate bonds. This experiment represents, as a proportion of GDP, the most ambitious monetary policy ‘mission’ in history. Using several indicators to examine the impact of QE, our analysis leads to a conclusion which, metaphorically, is akin to that ascribed to the 1970 Apollo 13 Moon mission: a ‘successful failure’.     

（武汉大学 经济与管理学院会计系，湖北 武汉430072）

复杂不透明的避税交易为公司高管的自利行为提供了机会。国企高管薪酬激励扭曲程度较大,所握权力缺乏监督,当他们从显性薪酬契约中获得的货币性私有收益较低时,可以通过避税交易寻租,此时国有上市公司避税程度较大;国有上市公司与子公司、受同一母公司控制的其他公司发生的异常关联交易、以及对异常经营活动现金流的操纵是国企高管避税寻租的实现途径。但是,“四大”审计并不能对高管避税寻租产生治理作用。     

Estimation of the ARFIMA (p,d, q) fractional differencing parameter (d) using the classical rescaled adjusted range technique

Derived from the general ARMA (p, q) class of short-term dependent models, the Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (ARFIMA) specification provides a means of modelling long-term dependence in time-series data. In financial and economic time-series, the application of the ARFIMA model has been predominantly by the Maximum Likelihood (ML) methods, and the Geweke and Porter-Hudak (GPH) two step procedure. Extending the application of the classical rescaled adjusted range to long-term dependent ARFIMA (p, d, q) processes, estimates of the fractional differencing parameter (d) may also be derived by the Hurst exponent.     

Environmental,Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure: A literature review

Voluntary nonfinancial Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure is a rapidly growing and increasingly important topic that has attracted great attention from both academic researchers and capital market participants in recent years. The objective of this survey study is to provide a comprehensive review of the ESG disclosure literature in accounting research with suggestions for the future. Specifically, we organize the literature into four categories: motivations for and consequences associated with ESG information, in addition to disclosure- and user-level characteristics with the potential to affect the observed outcome of information disclosure. We also discuss the key role of nonfinancial rating agencies as a new type of ESG information intermediary in capital markets and suggest opportunities for future research.