Dividend reinvestment plans: An empirical analysis

This study examines the effect of initiating discount and no discount dividend reinvestment plans on shareholder wealth. The results show a negative response to DRP announcements, which is significantly smaller than that found in studies of new equity offerings. These results are consistent with the Scholes and Wolfson (1989) hypothesis that managers in need of equity capital use DRPs to mitigate the adverse stock price effects of new equity issue announcements. Furthermore, there is a significant difference in the price response of discount and no discount DRPs for industrial firms. This result is supportive of the signaling potential of discount DRPs. Supportive evidence is also found in the analysis of firm characteristics for industrial firms.     

Sustaining Collusion in Growing Markets

The impact of demand growth on the collusion possibilities is investigated in a Cournot supergame where market growth may trigger future entry and the collusive agreement is enforced by the most profitable ‘grim trigger strategies’ available. It is shown that even in situations where perfect collusion can be sustained after entry, coping with a potential entrant in a market which is growing over time may completely undermine any pre‐entry collusive plans of the incumbent firms. This is because, before entry, a deviation and the following punishment phase may become more attractive thanks to their additional effect in terms of delaying entry.     

Public-Private Partnerships and Prices: Evidence from Water Distribution in France

We use an original database of 5000 French local public authorities to explore the impact of organizational choice and performance as measured by consumer prices. In quantifying the impact of the choice of public-private partnerships (PPPs) on performance, we consider the related issue of the determinants of organizational choice. We estimate a switching regressions model to account for the endogeneity of organizational choice, and find that in our sample, (i) the choice by local public authorities to engage in a PPP is not random, and (ii) conditional on the choice of a PPP, consumer prices are significantly higher on average.     

The endless need for regulation in telecommunication: An explanation

Telecommunication services have existed as a legal monopoly nearly throughout its entire history. In 1998, telecom market liberalisation was achieved across the European Union (EU) through the introduction of competition among telephone services. Asymmetrical obligations were deemed necessary in order to compensate the market power of the former monopolist.As the evolution of asymmetrical regulation in Spain illustrates, obligations and the telecommunications operators subject to them increased with the regulatory framework established in 2002 in the EU. This new regulatory framework may continue to expand through the inclusion of functional separation as another possible asymmetrical obligation. In short, it seems that the regulatory pressure on the telecommunications industry is increasing, despite the lapse in time since the liberalisation of the industry.In this paper, a methodology developed by the Austrian School of Economics is applied in order to explain why the telecommunication market is subject to increasing regulation in Europe, rather than deregulation, after more than 10 years of liberalisation. In particular, Mises's theory of price control is used to explain the evolution of the regulation of local loop unbundling.     

Assessing Applied Protection across the World*

This paper presents MAcMap–HS‐6, a database providing a consistent, ad valorem equivalent measure of tariff duties and tariff rate quotas for 163 countries and 208 partners, at the six‐digit level of the Harmonized System (5111 products), accounting for all preferential agreements. We describe the methodology used to compute and aggregate an ad valorem equivalent of applied protection. Emphasis is placed on minimizing the endogeneity bias in the aggregation procedure, while acknowledging structural differences in export specialization. The resulting quantitative assessment is illustrated by giving an overview of applied protection across the world in 2001, in terms of average as well as distribution.     

A model depicting the relations among perceived stressors,role conflict and organizational commitment: A comparative analysis of Hong Kong and the United States

As managers and employees from different cultures begin to encounter one another in the workplace, the need arises to understand how organizational variables relate differentially based on one's culture. This study attempts to provide a preliminary examination of the relationship between stressors, sources of conflict and job commitment across two differing cultures, specifically the United States and Hong Kong. Although more similarities than differences between the two cultures were found, this study provides at least preliminary evidence that members of different cultures may perceive some stressors differently and exhibit different relationships between stressors and work attitudes.     

Sunspot fluctuations in dynamics with predetermined variables

Summary. In this paper, I study the existence of Sunspot Equilibria in a general framework whose dynamics allow for the presence of predetermined variables in the system. The main motivation for this research comes from the fact that previous studies did not allow for such predetermined variables which, nevertheless, appear quite naturally in economic models. I show, for a non-negligible subset of dynamics with predetermined variables verifying usual assumptions, the existence of Stationary Sunspot Equilibria fluctuating between an arbitrary finite number of states arbitrarily close to a steady state. Received: March 1, 1995; revised version September 18, 1996     

Feature selection methods involving support vector machines for prediction of insolvency in non‐life insurance companies

We propose two novel approaches for feature selection and ranking tasks based on simulated annealing (SA) and Walsh analysis, which use a support vector machine as an underlying classifier. These approaches are inspired by one of the key problems in the insurance sector: predicting the insolvency of a non‐life insurance company. This prediction is based on accounting ratios, which measure the health of the companies. The approaches proposed provide a set of ratios (the SA approach) and a ranking of the ratios (the Walsh analysis ranking) that would allow a decision about the financial state of each company studied. The proposed feature selection methods are applied to the prediction the insolvency of several Spanish non‐life insurance companies, yielding state‐of‐the‐art results in the tests performed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.