The Greenspan years: an analysis of the magnitude and speed of the equity market response to FOMC announcements

We examine the impact of monetary policy on the S&P 500 using intraday data. The analysis shows an economically and statistically significant relationship between S&P 500 intraday returns and changes in the Fed funds target rate. The significance and magnitude of the response is dependent on whether the change was expected or unexpected. An expected change in the Fed funds target rate has no impact on prices in the broad equity market; however, an unexpected change of 25 basis points in the Fed funds target rate results in an approximate 48 basis points decline in the broad equity market’s return. The speed of these market reactions is rapid with the equity market reaching a new equilibrium within 15 minutes.

Investment bank monitoring and bonding of security analysts’ research

We assess investment banks’ influence over the agreement between their analysts’ research behavior and their clients’ interests, in the post-reform era. Competing banks discipline their analysts with worse career outcomes for producing biased reports, issuing shirking reports, and for involvement in the earnings guidance game, showing meaningful monitoring of their analysts. Highly reputable banks provide more monitoring discipline of their analysts and bonding of their moral hazard than other banks. The findings agree with the banks taking responsibility for aligning analysts’ behavior with clients’ interests.     

The relationship between corporate social responsibility and shareholder value: an empirical test of the risk management hypothesis

Do shareholders gain when managers disperse corporate resources through activities classified as corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Strategy scholars have recently developed a theoretical model that links such activities to shareholder value when a firm suffers a negative event; we test key portions of this theory of the ‘insurance‐like’ property of CSR activity. We posit that such activity leads to positive attributions from stakeholders, who then temper their negative judgments and sanctions toward firms because of this goodwill. We extend the risk management model by theorizing that some types of CSR activities will be more likely to create goodwill and offer insurance‐like protection than other types. We delineate several firm and event specific characteristics that we expect to influence the link between CSR activities and an insurance effect. We then test our model using an event study of 178 negative legal/regulatory actions against firms throughout the 11 years from 1993–2003. We find that participation in institutional CSR activities—those aimed at a firm's secondary stakeholders or society at large—provides an ‘insurance‐like’ benefit, while participation in technical CSRs—those activities targeting a firm's trading partners—yields no such benefits. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for future theorizing and research into the economic value of CSR engagement. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A note on the evaluation of information in zero-sum repeated games

Two players play a zero-sum repeated game with incomplete information. Before the game starts one player receives a private signal that depends on the realized state of nature. The rules that govern the choice of the signal are determined by the information structure of the game. Different information structures induce different values. The value-of-information function of a game associates every information structure with the value it induces. We characterize those functions that are value-of-information functions for some zero-sum repeated game with incomplete information.     

Enumeration of Nash equilibria for two-player games

This paper describes algorithms for finding all Nash equilibria of a two-player game in strategic form. We present two algorithms that extend earlier work. Our presentation is self-contained, and explains the two methods in a unified framework using faces of best-response polyhedra. The first method lrsnash is based on the known vertex enumeration program lrs, for “lexicographic reverse search”. It enumerates the vertices of only one best-response polytope, and the vertices of the complementary faces that correspond to these vertices (if they are not empty) in the other polytope. The second method is a modification of the known EEE algorithm, for “enumeration of extreme equilibria”. We also describe a second, as yet not implemented, variant that is space efficient. We discuss details of implementations of lrsnash and EEE, and report on computational experiments that compare the two algorithms, which show that both have their strengths and weaknesses.     

Summary of Results of Survey of Seminar Attendees

Abstract

The Society of Actuaries undertook a three-phase research project on mortality improvement in the three NAFTA countries: Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. Phase 1 consisted of a literature review of papers on projecting mortality levels in the future and a study of the trend in mortality improvement during this century. Phase 2 consisted of a discussion of different facets of modeling mortality rates at a seminar attended by 79 experts (actuaries, demographers, economists, and medical researchers) representing different countries. The last session of the seminar consisted of the completion of a survey by the attendees to obtain input for Phase 3, which would analyze the impact of mortality improvement on the social security system of each country. This paper summarizes the results of the survey.

The survey results illustrate the difficulty in forecasting mortality levels, because the effects of many factors that could have significant impact on mortality rates are unknown. This suggests the need for dynamic forecasting, which allows for the possibility of random shocks. A majority of the survey respondents believe that stochastic forecasting models, despite their complexity, have significant potential to add value. Respondents also believe that both historical data and cause-specific mortality forecasts are useful as input and also in validating forecasts of the aggregate levels of mortality. The challenge is to develop more sophisticated forecasting models to produce results that are relatively easy to interpret and to communicate these results to the desired audiences, including the public and policymakers.

The survey results suggest that the aggregate effect of lifestyle changes, medical advances, diseases, catastrophe, and physical environmental changes is an increase in life span. However, there is much uncertainty about the future. Respondents expect that beyond the year 2020 the mean annual rate of reduction in mortality for males age 65 and over will average about 0.58% for Canada, 0.76% for Mexico, and 0.67% for the U.S. The results for the female age 65 and over population are 0.64%, 0.83%, and 0.70%, respectively. The age 65 and over population is expected to see larger percentage reductions in mortality than the 0–14 and 15–64 populations. The reductions in male and female mortality will be ultimately the same, and the mortality levels in the three countries will ultimately converge, although differences may persist for decades.     

Assessing the impacts of EU's common agricultural policy on regional convergence: sub-national evidence from Germany

This article assesses the relationship between transfers arising from EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and convergence in both farmers’ revenues and interpersonal income redistribution using a sample of 26 regions in the state of Hesse, Germany, over the period 1979 to 2004 and 1991 to 2004, respectively. We thereby combine the concept of sigma convergence with Shorrock's inequality decomposition in order to determine the driving forces in distributional dynamics of farmers’ revenues. Additionally, we apply alternative methodologies to investigate how per capita incomes have evolved over time. Explicitly comparing the situations with and without transfers, our results indicate that the CAP tends to smooth differences in farmers’ revenues across regions, but does not impede a strong divergence through time. The latter is mainly driven by increasing structural differences between the regions, while disparities in intensity turn out to be less important. The empirical analysis also shows that CAP transfers reduce income inequality within society as a whole. However, this impact proved to be negligible in explaining distributional dynamics and growth of per capita incomes.     

Extrinsic Cues and Consumer Judgments of Food Product Introductions: The Case of Pangasius in Norway

In this article, the authors explore how the extrinsic cues corporate social responsibility, endorsement, and country of origin affect consumer evaluations of product quality, value, and expected product popularity for frozen Pangasius filets, a farmed fish product just recently introduced into the Norwegian market. The effects of these three variables are tested on purchase intentions. By means of a 2?×?2?×?2 factorial experiment in combination with survey data, the authors find that the three extrinsic cues under study had different effects on the evaluative variables. Furthermore, these variables all had positive and significant effects on purchase intentions. Hence, the general conclusion is that importers of new food products like Pangasius can benefit from focusing on extrinsic cues when the intrinsic cues are hard to evaluate or are unknown. Through the indirect effect on purchase intentions, extrinsic cues play an important role when consumers judge unfamiliar and new products.     

Intervening with victims of intimate partner violence

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a critically important public health problem. Physicians and other health care providers have a unique opportunity to help IPV victims, not only in treatment but in prevention of this devastating problem. Health-care providers should receive thorough and on-going training and administrative support for identifying, appropriately treating, and referring IPV victims to IPV advocates and other community-based resources with whom the provider has developed a close working relationship. In the clinical setting, health-care providers may intervene early as the victim’s first and only point of contact concerning the violence in their lives. In the larger community, health-care providers can become spokespersons and educators to help change social norms and can get involved in coordinated community responses to ensure cohesive actions by all societal sectors to prevent IPV in their communities.