Geography,Informal Information Flows and Mutual Fund Portfolios

This paper explores how informal information channels impact mutual fund performance. We measure the strengths of two location‐based information channels: 1) information transfers among fund managers (fund‐fund links) and 2) transfers between managers and the companies in which they invest (fund‐company links). We find that each channel increases investment performance in the absence of the other, but decreases it when acting in combination. Stock selection associated with the presence of one channel, but the absence of the other, earns positive future returns. Our results indicate that the economic benefits of informal information channels depend critically on the nature of their interactions.     

Merger policy in innovative industries

We analyze optimal merger policy in R&D-intensive industries with product innovation aiming to improve the quality of products. Our results suggest that a permissive merger policy is rarely optimal in high-tech industries when the antitrust authority considers a welfare standard that balances the impact of mergers on consumers’ surplus and firms’ profits. In particular, relative to a benchmark where the effects from R&D are absent, we show that the optimal merger policy should not be substantially more permissive in the presence of those effects from R&D.     

The marketing of love: how attachment styles affect romantic consumption journeys

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science - The experience of romantic love is closely interlocked with consumption journeys—yet how and why consumers engage in romantic consumption is not...     

Default estimation,correlated defaults,and expert information

Capital allocation decisions are made on the basis of an assessment of creditworthiness. Default is a rare event for most segments of a bank's portfolio and data information can be minimal. Inference about default rates is essential for efficient capital allocation, for risk management and for compliance with the requirements of the Basel II rules on capital standards for banks. Expert information is crucial in inference about defaults. A Bayesian approach is proposed and illustrated using prior distributions assessed from industry experts. A maximum entropy approach is used to represent expert information. The binomial model, most common in applications, is extended to allow correlated defaults yet remain consistent with Basel II. The application shows that probabilistic information can be elicited from experts and econometric methods can be useful even when data information is sparse. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An empirical study of voluntary transfer pricing disclosures in China

This paper empirically investigates the factors that affect the management’s voluntary disclosures of the transfer pricing details of related-party transactions. Using Chinese data from 2004 and 2005, we hypothesize and find that firms that make voluntary disclosures of the pricing methods of related-party transactions are negatively associated with (i) a higher level of earnings management (as captured by abnormal related-party transactions) and (ii) its underlying incentives (as captured by the management’s performance-linked bonuses and the firm’s incentives to achieve earnings targets); further, they are positively associated with (i) a higher percentage of independent directors and (ii) a higher percentage of government ownership. Overall, our findings suggest that earnings management and its incentives, board composition, and ownership structure significantly influence the voluntary disclosure decisions of managers.     

More on Middlemen: Equilibrium Entry and Efficiency in Intermediated Markets

This paper generalizes Rubinstein and Wolinsky's (1987) model of middlemen (intermediation) by incorporating production and search costs, plus more general matching and bargaining. This allows us to study many new issues, including entry, efficiency, and dynamics. In the benchmark model, equilibrium exists uniquely and involves production and intermediation for some parameters but not others. Sometimes intermediation is essential: the market operates if and only if middlemen are active. If bargaining powers are set correctly equilibrium is efficient; if not there can be too much or too little economic activity. This is novel, compared to the original Rubinstein–Wolinsky model, where equilibrium is always efficient.     

Extreme Value Theory and Statistics of Univariate Extremes: A Review

Statistical issues arising in modelling univariate extremes of a random sample have been successfully used in the most diverse fields, such as biometrics, finance, insurance and risk theory. Statistics of univariate extremes (SUE), the subject to be dealt with in this review paper, has recently faced a huge development, partially because rare events can have catastrophic consequences for human activities, through their impact on the natural and constructed environments. In the last decades, there has been a shift from the area of parametric SUE, based on probabilistic asymptotic results in extreme value theory, towards semi‐parametric approaches. After a brief reference to Gumbel's block methodology and more recent improvements in the parametric framework, we present an overview of the developments on the estimation of parameters of extreme events and on the testing of extreme value conditions under a semi‐parametric framework. We further discuss a few challenging topics in the area of SUE. © 2014 The Authors. International Statistical Review © 2014 International Statistical Institute