ABNORMAL RETURNS AND ANALYSTS' EARNINGS FORECAST REVISIONS ASSOCIATED WITH THE PUBLICATION OF “STOCK HIGHLIGHTS” BY VALUE LINE INVESTMENT SURVEY

We examine the reaction of stocks and the response of financial analysts' earnings forecasts to securities recommended as “Stock Highlights” by Value Line Investment Survey. Significant abnormal returns appear around the publication of stock highlights. Stock price responses are relatively efficient and permanent. Using earnings expectation data provided by the Institutional Brokers Estimate System, we find analysts raise their forecasts significantly following Value Line recommendations. Near-term forecast revisions are significantly related to stock returns at the time of the recommendations. Thus, an explanation for Value Line's security recommendation success is its ability to generate firm-specific earnings information.     

The changing duties of today's foreman

There are, today, more foremen in ratio to the numbers of workers they are supervising; they have better educations than foremen have ever had before, or have ever been expected to have; and their responsibilities are expanding to new areas.     

Exploring the implications of m-commerce for markets and marketing

Business pundits have enthusiastically prognosticated about a seamless, mobile world where commerce occurs on an anywhere, anytime basis. This type of commerce has been referred to as mobile commerce or, more simply, m-commerce. However, there have been relatively few attempts to systematically explore the opportunities and challenges posed by m-commerce. This article investigates the implications of m-commerce for markets and marketing by means of a formal conceptualization of m-commerce, a space-time matrix that delineates the impact of mobile technologies, and a taxonomy of m-commerce applications. Sridhar Balasubramanian is assistant professor of marketing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His interests generally lie in the areas of marketing strategy, e-business, and game theory. He has published in such journals asMarketing Science, Journal of Retailing, andJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science. His doctorate is from Yale University. Robert A. Peterson holds the John T. Stuart III Centennial Chair in Business Administration and Charles C. Hurwitz Fellowship at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a former editor of theJournal of Marketing Research and theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science. His more than 150 publications include nearly one dozen books and award-winning articles. Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa holds the James L. Bayless/Rauscher Pierce Refsnes Chair in Business Administration at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, where she codirects the Center for Business, Technology & Law. She presently serves as the editor ofJournal of the Association for Information Systems. She is a founding member of the Global Round Table on Mobile Commerce Research, which held its inaugural meeting in Tokyo in May 2002.     

Causes of cross-autocorrelation in security returns: Transaction costs versus information quality

We examine empirically the role of transaction costs and information quality as causes of cross-autocorrelations in security returns. Nonsynchronous trading influences are addressed by forming weekly returns based on averages of closing inside bid and ask quotations for NMS securities. Stock return volatility scaled by the bid-ask spread is employed as a proxy for transaction costs and trading volume is used as a measure of information quality. We find evidence that both transaction costs and information quality may contribute to cross-autocorrelations, but that information quality dominates transaction costs in explaining cross-autocorrelations after controlling for autocorrelation influences.     

Malnutrition,child morbidity and the family decision process

A microeconomic model of the process by which infants and preschoolers are subject to malnourishment, diarrhea and other illnesses in developing countries is given. The model is econometrically based of a cross-section time-series for 1200 children from Candelaria, Colombia. Four primary issues are addressed: economic constraints and intra-family resource allocation decisions impacting on a child's nutritional and health status; the interrelationship between malnutrition, diarrhea, and other diseases; specific policy interventions (maternal-child health education, food supplementation and the encouragement of breast feeding) impacting on health and nutritional status; and the need to distinguish between the effect of different policy variables on a child's height and weight during infancy and preschool age. The observations were taken over a 7 year period during the Promotora maternal-child health program in Colombia.     

EVIDENCE OF A RELATION BETWEEN STOCK PRICE REACTIONS AROUND CASH DIVIDEND CHANGES AND YIELDS

Here, the relation between stock price reactions to announced dividend changes and the yields of the underlying securities is examined. A significant positive (negative) relationship is detected between announcement date returns and yield for dividend increases (decreases) even after controlling for the magnitude of the dividend change. Price reactions associated with dividend increases vary directly with the change in yield and, on average, low-yielding companies do not experience abnormal returns when they increase their dividends. Implied in these results is that the information conveyed through dividend changes varies with the yield of the underlying security and the market response is a function of factors beyond the pure information effect.