European integration: the third step

A perception of declining EU competitiveness has intensified calls for structural reforms within the EU. This paper examines recent evidence on changes in relative EU competitiveness and considers the observed changes in relation to the evolving competitive environment facing EU firms. Our analysis suggests that recent declines in EU competitiveness reflect changes (or lack thereof) within the EU in response to an evolutionary “Third Step” in the process of EU integration: global market integration. Starting from the mid-1990s, we find that the EU began to face unprecedented increases in external sources of competition. The rising competition from external sources and declining export market competitiveness created pressures for EU firms to alter their organizational and product market strategies to meet the challenge of a globally integrating market. While many leading EU firms have responded to this challenge, most EU firms remain hampered by anachronistic EU product and labor market regulations that have inhibited adjustments that could better restore the competitiveness of EU based firms. In particular, our analysis points to labor market rigidities and limited growth in the services sector as factors limiting adjustment to the realities of a global market. The growing calls for structural reforms therefore reflect the rising external competitive pressures on EU firms as they attempt to respond to growing global competition.

Fee pressure and audit quality

This study investigates the association of audit fee pressure with an inverse measure of audit quality, misstatements in audited data, during the recent recession. Fee pressure in a year is measured as the difference between benchmark “normal” audit fees and actual audit fees. We find fee pressure is positively and significantly associated with accounting misstatements in 2008, the center of the recession. Our results suggest that auditors made fee concessions to some clients in 2008, and that fee pressure was associated with reduced audit quality in that year.     

Asian Corporate Governance—and the Case of Dual‐Class Shares: CARE Conference | Hong Kong Polytechnic University | June 9, 2014

The case of the Alibaba IPO illustrates the divergence of corporate governance standards between the United States and many other markets, and reopens the debate on the one‐share one‐vote principle. Since corporate governance standards develop in ways that reflect the history and legal and political environments of different countries, we should not expect to see a global convergence of these standards—nor is it generally desirable to transplant policies from one market to another without understanding their historical backgrounds. Nevertheless, the U.S. approach to regulation raises the concern that competition among exchanges will cause issuers to “shop around” and tempt the exchanges to relax their standards in a race to the bottom. While market participants and regulators outside of the U.S. debate whether and how to modify the one‐share, one‐vote rule, they face challenges in coming up with new rules that strike the right balance between effective corporate governance and market development.     

我国商业银行客户关系管理研究

在客户关系管理观念逐渐传入我国银行业的同时,各软件开发公司也纷纷推出了银行CRM系统。然而,实施客户关系管理的真正主体是银行的工作人员,仅凭一套CRM系统是远远不够的,我国商业银行工作人员应该进一步转变营销理念,努力使客户满意,留住客户。     

Option pricing and Esscher transform under regime switching

Summary We consider the option pricing problem when the risky underlying assets are driven by Markov-modulated Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM). That is, the market parameters, for instance, the market interest rate, the appreciation rate and the volatility of the underlying risky asset, depend on unobservable states of the economy which are modelled by a continuous-time Hidden Markov process. The market described by the Markov-modulated GBM model is incomplete in general and, hence, the martingale measure is not unique. We adopt a regime switching random Esscher transform to determine an equivalent martingale pricing measure. As in Miyahara [33], we can justify our pricing result by the minimal entropy martingale measure (MEMM).We would like to thank the referees for many helpful and insightful comments and suggestions.Correspondence to: R. J. Elliott     

Returns to scale and asset prices

The q‐theory of investment is proposed to explain firm growth effects, where previous papers identify a negative effect of firm growth, including asset growth, real investment and net share issuance, on future stock returns. This paper uses returns to scale from the production function to test the dynamic q‐theory, which predicts that the firm growth effect is theoretically weaker for firms with decreasing returns to scale (DRS) than for non‐DRS firms. Our empirical results generally support the prediction of dynamic q‐theory. However, we find that the dynamic q‐theory explains little of the value, momentum and ROE effects from the standpoint of returns to scale.     

BAYESIAN STATE SPACE MODELS IN MACROECONOMETRICS

State space models play an important role in macroeconometric analysis and the Bayesian approach has been shown to have many advantages. This paper outlines recent developments in state space modelling applied to macroeconomics using Bayesian methods. We outline the directions of recent research, specifically the problems being addressed and the solutions proposed. After presenting a general form for the linear Gaussian model, we discuss the interpretations and virtues of alternative estimation routines and their outputs. This discussion includes the Kalman filter and smoother, and precision-based algorithms. As the advantages of using large models have become better understood, a focus has developed on dimension reduction and computational advances to cope with high-dimensional parameter spaces. We give an overview of a number of recent advances in these directions. Many models suggested by economic theory are either non-linear or non-Gaussian, or both. We discuss work on the particle filtering approach to such models as well as other techniques that use various approximations – to either the time state and measurement equations or to the full posterior for the states – to obtain draws.