Oil risk contracts,business conduct and performance patterns: Data panel analysis

Using the economic and financial performance data of international companies for the exploration, and exploration–extraction (E&E) of oil, as well as the patterns of institutional situation and orientation with the government market and national oil companies or NOCs that receive project offers, we analyze the institutional development and behavior patterns by type of E&E contract, following the strategic actor approach, or the so-called agency theory. Additionally, in light of Mexico's energy reform being implemented between 2015 and 2019, we analyzed the types of license contracts compared to those for production and shared profit. Subsequently, it was determined-through panel data methods in the analysis of 17 companies between 2005 and 2015-that global companies present bigger yields and commitments compared to specialized companies, confirmed by their net income and returns on equity or ROE.     

The relationship between corporate governance and foreign ownership of the banks in developing countries

The aim of this paper is to determine the effect of corporate governance on foreign ownership of the banks. Within this context, annual data of 65 developing countries for the periods between 2004 and 2013 was analyzed. In addition to this situation, 7 explanatory variables were used in this study in order to achieve this objective. As a result of the analysis, it was identified that there is a strong relationship between operations of foreign banks and governance levels of the countries. In this regard, it was determined that the factors of corruption, political stability, rule of law and flexibility in legal regulations affect foreign bank operations. Moreover, it was also analyzed that foreign bank operations are stronger in the countries that have low poverty, high political stability and efficient legal infrastructure. On the other hand, it was defined that strict legal regulation affects foreign bank operations negatively which shows that foreign banks prefer to enter into the countries that have flexible legal regulations. This study gives essential information to developing countries about the factors that affect the decisions of foreign banks in order to enter into a developing country. Therefore, by considering the results of this study, the authorities of these countries can have a chance to take necessary actions so as to attract foreign banks.     

Oblivious equilibrium for concentrated industries

This article explores the application of oblivious equilibrium (OE) to highly concentrated markets. We define a natural extended notion of OE, called partially oblivious equilibrium (POE), that allows for there to be a set of strategically important firms (the “dominant” firms), whose firm states are always monitored by every other firm in the market. We perform computational experiments that explore the characteristics of POE, OE, and Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE), and find that POE generally performs well in highly concentrated markets. We also derive error bounds for evaluating the performance of POE for cases where MPE cannot be computed.     

Assessing the Impact of District Primary Education Program in India

We examine the impact of India's District Primary Education Program (DPEP) introduced in the mid‐1990s. We exploit the fact that the DPEP was targeted towards primary school age children and was introduced in phases to different districts in India, and many of the districts never got the program to implement a difference‐in‐difference strategy to find the causal impact of the program on probability of attended primary school, probability of completed primary education and years of schooling. We find that the DPEP program increased the probability of attended primary school and completed primary school by about 2 percentage points. Similarly, the program increased the years of schooling by 0.16 years.     

Optimal Exchange-Rate Policy in a Model of Local-Currency Pricing with Vertical Production and Trade

In this paper, we examine optimal exchange-rate flexibility in a model of local-currency pricing with vertical production and trade. Following a large body of empirical evidence, we assume that final-goods prices are sticky, but intermediate-goods prices are flexible. We find that, unlike what is found in the literature, optimal nominal exchange rate is flexible under local-currency pricing. The key element in deriving our conclusion is the difference in expenditure shares between home and foreign households. The conclusion holds even if the degrees of home bias in production are identical between home and foreign final-goods producers, which contrasts with the findings in the literature.     

Do economic statistics contain information to predict stock indexes futures prices and returns? Evidence from Asian equity futures markets

This research examines the impact of local and international market factors on the pricing of stock indexes futures in East Asian countries. The purpose of this paper is to present a study of the significant factors that determine the major stock indexes futures’ prices of Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. This study first investigates the relationships between Hang Seng Index Futures, KLCI Futures, SiMSCI Futures, KOSPI Futures, Taiwan Exchange Index Futures and local interest rates, dividend yields, local exchange rates, overnight S&P500 index and a newly constructed index, Asian Tigers Malaysia Index (ATMI). 11 years historical data of stock indexes futures and the economic statistics are studied; 10 years in-sample data are used for testing and developing the pricing models, and 1 year out-of-sample data is used for the purpose of verifying the predicted values of the stock indexes futures. Using simple linear regressions, local interest rates, dividend yields, exchange rates, overnight S&P500 and ATMI are found to have significant impact on these futures contracts. In this research, the next period close is predicted using simple linear regression and non-linear artificial neural network (ANN). An examination of the prediction results using nonlinear autoregressive ANN with exogenous inputs (NARX) shows significant abnormal returns above the passive threshold buy and hold market returns and also above the profits of simple linear regression (SLR). The empirical evidence of this research suggests that economic statistics contain information which can be extracted using a hybrid SLR and NARX trading model to predict futures prices with some degree of confidence for a year forward. This justifies further research and development of pricing models using fundamentally significant economic determinants to predict futures prices.

     

Public–Private Sector Wage Gap in Australia: Variation along the Distribution

Previous research on public–private wage differentials in Australia has focused on the mean of the conditional wage distribution. Using six waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, this study employs quantile regressions to examine whether the sectoral wage effect varies along the wage distribution. For females, public sector wage premiums are relatively stable for almost the entire distribution. For males, they decrease monotonically and are negative for the top half of the distribution. The decomposition results show that the observed differences in individuals and job characteristics explain a substantial proportion of the sectoral wage gap.     

Analyst Herding and Stock Price Crash Risk: Evidence from China

We examine the proposition that firms with disproportionately more analysts herding in their coverage, as measured by a larger herding index value, have higher crash risk. Our findings are consistent with the main proposition. The results suggest that information production, rather than monitoring, is the primary mechanism behind the positive relation between herding and crash risk. Our conclusion is robust to different measures of crash risk, crash risk windows, herding measures, subsamples, and instrumental estimation. In addition, using post‐earnings announcement drift, we report that analyst herding slows down bad news transmission in the market. Our findings extend the literature by documenting that analyst herding plays a role in enhancing crash risk. Analyst herding has economic consequences on the covered firms. We offer support for the concern in the literature regarding analyst herding and market fluctuations.