Trade flows: a facet of regionalism or globalisation?

This paper examines the evidence about the extent of globalisationby focusing on some aspects of international trade flows. Areinterpretation of the existing evidence based on the analysisof tables and a range of indicators is provided in the firstpart of the paper. The focus is on whether the increase in tradeflows has been predominantly a global or regional phenomenon.The analysis points to the tentative conclusion that the dominanttendency is the increase in trade within regional blocs (NorthAmerica, the EU and the Asia–Japan blocs) rather thanacross them. To address the same question, a more formal analysisis undertaken in the second part of the paper, by focusing onthe relative speed of the convergence in openness within andacross regions of the world. Our results indicate that the degreeof openness converges faster across the countries of a givenregion rather than at the global level, reinforcing the conclusionsfrom the first part of the paper. The results are consistentwith the view that trade integration is more of a ‘regional’phenomenon than a ‘global’ one.     

Competition format,championship uncertainty and stadium attendance in European football – a small league perspective

To increase the number of regular season games, small football leagues are often organized as quadruple round robin tournaments with teams playing each other four times. Theoretically, however, the more games played, the less uncertain is the championship race, reducing fan interest in the league. This article uses data from Austria and Switzerland to study the relationship between competition format, championship uncertainty and attendance demand empirically. Results suggest that a team still in contention to win the championship positively affects attendance, while it is not the specificity of the competition format that per se contributes to less championship uncertainty.     

Cointegration Tests Of The Monetary Exchange Rate Model: The Canadian—U.S. Dollar, 1970 – 1994

Using data on the Canadian-U.S. dollar rate, we reexamine the monetary model of exchange-rate determination for the recent float in three ways. First, we test its long-run validity, using Johansen's multivariate cointegration techniques. Second, we examine and test the model for the presence of speculative bubble, and finally we test for parameter stability of Johansen's results using the Hanse-Johansen recursive tests. [F31]     

Corporate Political Activities and the SEC's Oversight Role in the IPO Process

We study how a regulator (Securities and Exchanges Commission; SEC) responds to IPOs that have a higher political profile. We find that IPOs with issuers (intermediaries) that actively pursue political strategies receive more (less) SEC comment letters than IPOs without such actors. Cross-sectional analysis reveals that the IPO's political environment moderates the relationship between social pressure for more corporate transparency and SEC scrutiny. Additional tests indicate that the political activities of issuers (intermediaries) contribute to a less (more) efficient IPO process. Overall, our findings suggest that politically active intermediaries have stronger incentives to accurately portray the IPO financial reporting environment than politically active issuers because they have greater reputational and political capital at stake; quite simply, the former have more to lose. We draw out the implications for theory, in terms of agency and reputation.     

Public policies to enhance regional entrepreneurship: another programme failing to deliver?

Small Business Economics - This paper examines public policies aimed at enhancing entrepreneurship. Drawing upon both theory and prior empirical work, it formulates four tests of policy...     

Firm resources,cultural distance and simultaneous international expansion in the retail sector

Despite the fact that many firms simultaneously expand into multiple new markets, we know very little about why firms choose this type of international expansion instead of sequentially entering new markets. Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV) we argue that in order to engage in simultaneous international expansion firms have to be able to draw on intangible assets, be financially strong, and have international experience that will enable them to reduce and/or shoulder the strains on managerial resources, time compression diseconomies and costs of simultaneously entering multiple new overseas markets. We further expect the strength of these associations to be moderated by the cultural distance between a firm’s home country and newly entered countries. Our analysis of the international expansion of the sales operations of 102 retailers over the period 2003–2012, during which these retailers sequentially or simultaneously entered into a total 836 overseas markets, largely supports our hypotheses. Our study underlines the usefulness of the RBV for understanding simultaneous international expansion as an important phenomenon that has received only scant scholarly attention to date.     

Accruals and the performance of stock returns following external financing activities

This paper investigates the relation of the external financing anomaly with the accrual anomaly, by focusing separately on working capital accruals and long-term accruals. We find that external financing and accrual hedge portfolios not only generate superior returns, but they also constitute statistical arbitrage opportunities. Portfolio-level analysis and firm-level cross-sectional regressions show that the ability of external financing measures in predicting future returns remains strong, after controlling for working capital accruals. However, this ability is substantially reduced after controlling for long-term accruals. Our results appear to be consistent with investors’ failure to recognise agency-related overinvestment and/or opportunistic earnings management.     

The determinants of net interest margin during transition

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - In this paper we examine the banking sector of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries during the transition period 1998–2016 in a...     

Neural network copula portfolio optimization for exchange traded funds

This paper attempts to investigate if adopting accurate forecasts from Neural Network (NN) models can lead to statistical and economically significant benefits in portfolio management decisions. In order to achieve that, three NNs, namely the Multi-Layer Perceptron, Recurrent Neural Network and the Psi Sigma Network (PSN), are applied to the task of forecasting the daily returns of three Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). The statistical and trading performance of the NNs is benchmarked with the traditional Autoregressive Moving Average models. Next, a novel dynamic asymmetric copula model (NNC) is introduced in order to capture the dependence structure across ETF returns. Based on the above, weekly re-balanced portfolios are obtained and compared using the traditional mean–variance and the mean–CVaR portfolio optimization approach. In terms of the results, PSN outperforms all models in statistical and trading terms. Additionally, the asymmetric skewed t copula statistically outperforms symmetric copulas when it comes to modelling ETF returns dependence. The proposed NNC model leads to significant improvements in the portfolio optimization process, while forecasting covariance accounting for asymmetric dependence between the ETFs also improves the performance of obtained portfolios.