Default and Recovery Risk Dependencies in a Simple Credit Risk Model

This paper provides evidence for the relationship between credit quality, recovery rate, and correlation. The paper finds that rating grade, rating shift, and macroeconomic factors provide a highly significant explanation for default risk and recovery risk of US bond issues. The empirical data suggest that default and recovery processes are highly correlated. Therefore, a joint approach is required for estimating time‐varying default probabilities and recovery rates that are conditional on default. This paper develops and applies such a model.     

A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF CHANGE IN THE ENGLISH NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE

This paper reports the findings of a longitudinal comparative case study of three National Health Service (NHS) hospital Trusts in England, investigating the perceptions of clinical, managerial and accounting professionals towards changing cost accounting and performance measurement practices. It incorporates both qualitative and quantitative data analysis, and is based on a contextualist understanding of change management, utilising the content‐process‐context approach (Pettigrew and Lapsley, 1994) to investigate the influence of receptive versus non‐receptive contexts on change. The analysis reveals limited success in improving performance measurement practices (the content of change) in Trusts. Nevertheless the specific context within which change was operationalised was found to be very important, with central mangers playing a key role in influencing change. The process of change indicated slow shifts in clinical‐accountant‐managerial relations, partly driven by changes in financial flows within the organisations.     

Insurance economics

Abstract

Background

Insurance accounting is generally speaking based upon the idea that a comparison shall be made between “premiums earned” and “claims incurred”. Even if there are exceptions in different countries and in different classes of business the method where premiums earned and claims incurred are compared is so widely used that we will take this method as our starting point for a discussion of the shortcomings, if any, of insurance accounting.     

Die Grundannahmen der Gleichgewichtstheorie

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Has the EU's Single Market Programme Fostered Competition? Testing for a Decrease in Mark‐up Ratios in EU Industries*

We use a panel approach, covering 10 EU Member States over the period 1981–99, for each of three major industry groups (manufacturing, construction and services) and 18 more detailed industries to test whether the EU's Single Market Programme has led to a reduction in firms’ mark‐ups over marginal costs. We address explicitly the uncertainty with respect to the timing of the changeover and allow for a possibly continuous regime shift in a smooth transition analysis. Where regime shifts can be found, the velocity of transition is extremely high, making the linear model a justifiable approximation. We also test for discrete structural breaks in the time window from 1986 to 1996, taking up endogeneity concerns in a generalized method of moments framework. Mark‐up reductions are found for aggregate manufacturing (although it is also suggested that mark‐ups increased in some manufacturing industries in the precompletion period at the end of the 1980s) and also for construction. In contrast, mark‐ups have gone up in most service industries since the early 1990s, which confirms the weak state of the Single Market for services and suggests that anti‐competitive defence strategies have emerged in EU service industries.     

Information Pricing: The Evidence From Equity Mutual Funds

The theory of information pricing implies that the benefits from obtaining costly information should be offset by the costs. In the case of mutual funds, this theory suggests that trades by fund managers should take place at prices that compensate their clients for the managers' costs of becoming informed. This paper controls for risk, fund size, and age to assess the relationship of a fund's information costs to its performance. The findings show that stock funds charging the highest expenses generally earn returns insignificantly different from funds charging the lowest expenses. This lends support to the theory of information pricing. The findings are also indicative of an efficient market, given that information is costly.