On information release and the January effect: Accounting-information hypothesis

Since most firms select December fiscal year-ends, theJanuary effect is a fiscal year-end accounting effect, according to the accounting-information hypothesis. This hypothesis attributes the unusually large stock returns in January to higher risk, caused by uncertainty about the impending announcement of firm performance. The empirical evidence does not support the hypothesis. Small firms with non-December fiscal year-ends fail to display a fiscal year-end effect. Yet all small firms, regardless of their fiscal year-end month, exhibit large January returns.     

On the explanation of schooling,occupation and earnings: Some alternative path analyses

Summary Jencks's well-known sociological path analysis connecting parental socio-economic characteristics and some ability measure of the person investigated with his or her schooling, occupation and income is available for the United States, Sweden and the Netherlands in various versions. For the United Kingdom the analysis has now been applied to the new General Household Survey, supplying over 5000 observations. This article compares the various results and offers a few alternative models, using the American and British data. These alternatives do not offer, in the British case, improvements in variance explained. Moreover, most regression coefficients show wide variations between countries. A suggestion for improvement is derived from a recent study using at least three occupation characteristics.We are grateful to the British Office of Population Census and Surveys for making available to us the data from which the UK results reported in this article were obtained.     

Does Firm Size Comfound the Relationship Between Corporate Social Performance and Firm Financial Performance?

There has been some theoretical and empirical debate that the positive relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and firm financial performance (FFP) is spurious and in fact caused by a third factor, namely large firm size. This study examines this question by integrating three meta-analyses of more than two decades of research on (1) CSP and FFP, (2) firm size and CSP, and (3) firm size and FFP into one path-analytic model. The present study does not confirm size as a third factor which would confound the relationship between CSP and FFP. That is, even if firm size is controlled for across studies (comprising, on average, over 15 000 observations), CSP and FFP remain positively correlated, showing a "true-score" corrected path coefficient p of 0.37.     

Pacific Basin stock markets and international capital asset pricing

In this paper, we follow Harvey (1991) to investigate whether rates of return on Pacific Basin stock markets can be explained by conditional version of International Capital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM), which allows for time-varying expected returns, variances, and covariances. The results show that most individual Pacific Basin markets can be described by the conditional ICAPM. However, the multiple markets' tests do not support the conditional ICAPM formulation, and the estimates of world reward to risk ratio are not the same across these markets. Furthermore, the Ghysels and Hall test (Ghysels & Hall, 1990a, 1990b) shows that the estimates of parameter are also unstable in the conditional ICAPM formulation. This implies that it is difficult to use world return to describe the relationship between expected return and risk for the Pacific Basin stock markets.     

Neue Konzepte für das Controlling der Zukunft

Die Rahmenbedingungen des Controlling haben sich tiefgreifend gewandelt, ohne dass dies vom traditionellen Controlling ausreichend nachvollzogen worden w?re.     

中国经济的高速增长--不具转型危机的转型?

高投资需求是中国经济增长的主要动力。国有企业可能因三种因素而触发转型危机：现有亏损和坏账的真实数据比目前的统计数据恐怕要高;如果继续拖延国有企业重组,如果保持、甚至转化预算约束,如果债务升级,那私长期债务积累的危险将会增加;如果货币、财政和工业政策出现急转弯,对国有企业实行硬预算,而赞成大批企业倒闭、失业急剧上升、投资减少及金融体系重大冲击。要避免转型危机,就必须把渐进转型所“创造”的时间果断用于推动重组。财政扩张对需求会有短期影响,抵抗通货紧缩,而不赞成通货膨胀压力,但对未来能否保持持续增长在很大程度上取决于消费者和投资者的行为。