Forestland rights institutions and forest management of Vietnamese households

This article aims to unbundle the influence of prevailing forestland rights institutions on the forest management behaviours of Vietnamese households. Based on a sample of 398 observations, we investigate the impact of two dimensions of forestland rights institutions (i.e. the formality and the duration) of two types of forest (i.e. production and protection forests) on two types of forest management behaviours (i.e. clearing and improving forest). We find that different dimensions of forestland rights institutions have different impacts on the forest management behaviour of households.     

A model of the socialist firm in transition to a market economy

This paper models the dynamic adjustment path of a socialist firm in transition to a market economy by a price shock that renders old capital obsolete. The firm can adjust with investment in more productive capital equipments. The optimal time paths of investment, output, and employment are analyzed and the impact of fiscal incentives like investment subsidies and a reduced corporate income tax rate are studied. Like output, the aggregate capital stock follows a J-curve. The conditions for viability of firms and the impact of variables such as wage increases on the value of the firm are discussed.     

An equivalence theorem in the theory of resource extraction

There exists a formal equivalence between a class of resource extraction problems with a stock-dependent net benefit function and Gale's canonical cake-eating problem.     

Selective penalization of polluters: an inf-convolution approach

Summary. We consider an asymmetric polluting oligopoly. We demonstrate that optimal tax rates per unit of emission are not the same for all firms. We call this property selective penalization. Our Optimal Distortion Theorem states that the efficient tax structure requires that high cost firms pay a higher tax rate. Our Pro-concentration Motive Theorem states that optimal taxes increase the concentration of the industry, as measured by the Herfindahl index. Our Magnification Effect indicates that the variance of marginal costs is magnified by a factor which depends on the marginal cost of public funds.JEL Classification Numbers: Q20, D60, D63.We wish to thank Peter Neary, Kim Long, Raymond Riezman and a referee for very helpful comments. Financial support from SSHRC and FCAR are gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank Hassan Benchekroun, Kim Long, and Koji Shimomura for discussions and comments.     

Short interest in exchange-traded funds

Short selling exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has become a common means of speculating or hedging in response to pessimistic expectations about a specific market or sector, as the short interest of ETFs is more than 10 times that of individual stocks, on average. We determine that sector-based ETFs have an abnormally large short interest level, whereas international ETFs have an unusually small short interest level. The level of short interest is larger for ETFs that have a higher trading volume and a lower market capitalization, regardless of the type of ETF assessed. The level of short interest is lower for ETFs representing indexes that have tradable derivatives, but higher for international ETFs representing indexes that have tradable derivatives. We also determine that the level of short interest in an ETF serves as an effective signal of bearish sentiment when considering all ETFs, but is not an effective signal when isolating any particular type of ETF.

Pricing behavior of exchange traded funds

We attempt to determine whether characteristics found to be effective indicators of individual stock price performance are effective indicators of exchange traded fund (ETF) price performance. Specifically, we test the performance of investing strategies based on separately categorizing ETFs into deciles according to size, trading volume, and momentum. When analyzing the entire sample, we find that the indicators can effectively signal differences in future performance. However, the indicators appear to be indirect proxies for the types of ETFs (broad-based, sector, or international). When we isolate each type of ETF, the indicators are not as effective. The indicators are not as useful for signaling unusual stock price performance of ETFs as they have been for individual stocks. We attribute the distinctly different results found here for ETFs to the unusual characteristics of ETFs that distinguish them from individual stocks. Investing strategies that rely on these indicators for selecting individual stocks may be indirectly driven by stock-specific fundamentals. However, fundamentals are not as meaningful for stock indexes (represented by ETFs) as for individual stocks.

Wealth creation from high-tech divestitures

We measure the change in value to sellers and buyers of divested high-tech assets. Sellers and buyers experience favorable announcement effects in response to high-tech divestitures. However, buyers of divested high-tech assets experience more favorable announcement effects than sellers, which is opposite of the related research findings on other types of divestitures. Based on a cross-sectional analysis, the announcement effects for sellers of high-tech assets are more favorable when there is an investment bank advisor, the transaction price is disclosed, and the size of the divestiture is large. The announcement effects for buyers of high-tech assets were also more favorable when there was an investment bank advisor during the tech-bubble period. Overall, the results suggest that the stock price behavior in response to divestitures of high-tech assets is distinctly different from that of other types of divestitures.     

Location-specific stock market indices: an exploration

This article develops an alternative location-specific stock market index driven by investors’ ‘attachment’ towards investment at a specific location. We evaluate the performance of hypothetical stock market indices that track companies based on their state of registration, taking the US stock market as our case. Using annual data since 1980 we present raw, risk-adjusted and value-weighted state portfolios’ returns to study the extent to which stock market performance varies by state-level demographics and economic factors. A dynamic panel data estimation – with and without spatial spillover effects – is employed to establish a strong association between stock price performance and the state-level (or geography-weighted) factors. We find that spatial effects are strong and that the ‘spatial attachment’ of companies in interaction with the various location-specific variables imparts an overarching influence on stock-price performance. Comparison of model performances further supports our claims.