Covariance complexity and rates of return on assets

This paper considers the estimation of the expected rate of return on a set of risky assets. The approach to estimation focuses on the covariance matrix for the returns. The structure in the covariance matrix determines shared information which is useful in estimating the mean return for each asset. An empirical Bayes estimator is developed using the covariance structure of the returns distribution. The estimator is an improvement on the maximum likelihood and Bayes–Stein estimators in terms of mean squared error. The effect of reduced estimation error on accumulated wealth is analyzed for the portfolio choice model with constant relative risk aversion utility.     

Resale price maintenance and collusion

The article revisits the conventional wisdom according to which vertical restrictions on retail prices help upstream firms to collude. We analyze the scope for collusion with and without resale price maintenance (RPM) when retailers observe local shocks on demand or retail costs. In the absence of RPM, retail prices react to retailers' information, and deviations from collusive behavior are thus difficult to detect. By eliminating retail price flexibility, RPM facilitates the detection of deviations but reduces profits and thus increases the short‐run gains from a deviation. Overall, RPM can facilitate collusion and reduce total welfare when firms adopt it.     

Financial Times Business School Rankings: A Nontraditional Assurance Case in Three Parts*

The Financial Times of London (FT) is a business newspaper, with daily editions published in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, the United States, and Asia, and an estimated daily readership of 10 million people. In 1999 the FT began to publish a ranking of what it considered to be the top business schools in the world. Since their inception, these rankings have become increasingly relied upon by potential students and business school administrators worldwide. The FT's ranking is unique compared with other rankings because of its special international focus. Given the prominence of these rankings and the FT's position as a well‐respected business newspaper, the question of providing assurance over the business school rankings that the FT provides is particularly challenging.     

An Analysis of the Out-of-Market Gap for DVDs in the U.S.

We examine the out-of-market gap – the time between the end of a film’s theatrical run and its release on DVD – for a sample of U.S. films during 1988-2005. The average gap declined from 58.14 days in 1998 to 27.93 days in 2005; by 2005, 39% of the films were released on DVD prior to leaving the theaters. Probit and hazard models are estimated to explore the factors that influence a distributor’s decision to release a film on DVD before it exits the theaters, and the timing of the release for films that appear on DVD after they leave the theaters.      

The effect of deposit-rate ceilings on bank risk: A comment

In a recent issue of this journal, Mingo (1978) analyzed the effect of deposit-rate ceilings on bank risk. The analysis showed that deposit-rate ceilings increase a bank's total risk. The purpose of this note is to examine a different but related question: Is systematic risk affected by Regulation Q ceilings ceteris paribus? The results of our empirical test indicate that systematic risk is not affected by deposit-rate ceilings. Taken together then, Mingo's and the present results show that removal of deposit-rate ceilings would not increase bank risk.     

Inflation,Taxation, and Interest Rates

This paper demonstrates that the response of nominal interest rates to changes in inflationary expectations should lie between that predicted by the “Fisher” and “Darby” effects. The exact nature of the response will depend on the relative size of the income and capital gains tax rates, and the relative size of the derivatives of investment and savings to their respective after-tax real rates. The other major conclusion of this paper is that capital gains taxation offsets the negative effect on investment produced by treating depreciation on a historic rather than a replacement cost basis.     

Impact of telephone and satellite earth station installations on GDP : A model for rural areas of LDCs

Presents a method for estimating the impact on national development of installation of telecommunication facilities in rural areas of developing countries. A methodology developed by Hardy is applied to three groups of developing countries and a hypothetical rural region to estimate the impact on GDP per thin route satellite earth station installed over a ten year period. A logarithmic relationship between telephone density and impact on GDP per earth station is found, so that the impact per earth station increases with lower telephone densities. The model can be used to estimate the impact on national GDP of telephone installations and/or thin route earth stations in regions of low telephone density.     

Sustaining Collusion Via a Fuzzy Trigger

Probability theory is the standard economic representation of uncertainty, although it is not always an accurate one. Fuzzy logic is an alternative representation that does not require individual beliefs regarding the explicit functional form of uncertainty. This paper applies fuzzy logic to an oligopoly trigger pricing game. The fuzzy trigger pricing game reverses the standard cyclical price war prediction; collusion-sustaining price wars are most likely to occur during times of high demand. The fuzzy model also predicts that markets with relatively volatile prices are more likely to undergo collusion-sustaining price wars. The predictions are consistent with available empirical evidence.