The role of small bettors in price formation in betting exchanges

ABSTRACT

The presence of small bettors in betting exchanges generates mispricing, which can lead to exploitation by informed traders or result in permanent price deviations. This paper shows that mispricing from this source is also dependent upon variables of established relevance such as tournament round, the level of attention to the event, the volume of the betting, and bet type, further confirming these findings by means of cumulative accuracy profile (CAP) curves. It also offers evidence of the relevant role played by the type of device used to place the bet, whereby higher mispricing is observed in live bets placed via a mobile device, which appears to be associated with impulsive betting. This last finding could have practical implications for the regulation of the use of mobile devices to access gambling platforms.     

An Empirical Assessment of Customer Satisfaction in Tourism

The goal of this project is to find out if Spain is undergoing a disinvestment process in foreign service companies which might be leading to offshoring. To achieve this – after tackling conceptual and methodological aspects – a company's total disinvestment has been estimated. Subsequently, its ratio to gross investment has been evaluated for the whole sector and for all the activities the company performed in the 1993–2004 period. The result does not show a worrying disinvestment process. Over the last year in the study, though, a significant change has been seen, which might suggest the beginning of a disinvestment process in some activities – as is happening worldwide.     

Economic development, institutional change, and the political economy of agricultural protection An econometric study of Belgium since the 19th century

This empirical study uses 100 years of annual data on 11 agricultural commodities from Belgium to measure the impact of structural changes coinciding with economic development and changes in political institutions on agricultural protection. The analysis shows that changes in agricultural protection are caused by a combination of factors. Governments have increased protection and support to farmers when world market prices for their commodities fell, and vice versa, offsetting market effects on producer incomes. Other economic determinants were the share of the commodities in total consumer expenditures (negative effect) and in total output of the economy (positive effect). With Belgium a small economy, there was no impact of the trade position. Changes in political institutions have affected agricultural protection. Democratic reforms which induced a significant shift in the political balance towards agricultural interests, such as the introduction of the one‐man‐one‐vote system, led to an increase in agricultural protection. The integration of Belgian agricultural policies in the Common Agricultural Policy in 1968 coincided with an increase in protection, ceteris paribus. Both institutional factors, related to changes in access to and information about the decision‐making at the EU level, and structural changes in the agricultural and food economy may explain this effect.     

Does the Ethical Leadership of Supervisors Generate Internal Social Capital?

Ethics has recently gained prominence in debates surrounding social capital creation. Despite the significant theoretical progress in this field, it still lacks empirical research. The goal of this study is to empirically explore the ethical leadership of supervisors as an antecedent of the firm’s social capital. We build on social learning theory to argue that employees can learn standards of appropriate behavior by observing the behavior of role models. By displaying and enforcing ethical behavior, supervisors can facilitate the process through which employees learn to feel empathy toward others and establish profound affective relationships with them. Data were collected from 408 Spanish, French, and Portuguese part-time MBA students. Using structural equation modeling techniques, we show that the ethical leadership of supervisors exerts a significant influence on the structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions of social capital.     

网络经济环境下的西部经济发展研究

近十年来我国网络经济得到了蓬勃高速发展,但西部地区的网络经济发展水平与东部地区相比有较大的差距。本文用网络经济、区域经济、产业经济等理论,分析西部地区发展网络经济的区位条件、布局以及挑战与机遇,提出利用西部中心城市发展优势带动与辐射整个西部地区,促进西部地区网络经济发展,并提出了发展西部发展网络经济的几条建议。     

The business plan as a project: an evaluation of its predictive capability for business success

Although there is extensive research aimed at identifying the main success factors for new ventures, efforts directed at evaluating the real effect of the existence and quality of a business plan on a firm's survival chances have been limited. This study attempts to fill this gap by analyzing to what extent the quality of a business plan, measured according to its economic, financial and organizational viability, constitutes a good predictor of business survival; and how other variables related to the characteristics of the entrepreneur and the business can affect the predictive capability of the model under consideration. Hypotheses are tested using data collected from 2142 service firms. The results show that none of the three variables that evaluate business plan quality (economic, financial and organizational viability) seems to have a determining influence on survival chances. Adding essential characteristics related to the entrepreneur and the business (education and training, experience, kind of motivation, number of employees and start-up capital) does little to increase the model's predictive capabilities.     

Business Ethics in North America: Trends and Challenges

This conceptual paper analyses the arguments which have been made in favour of a transition towards humanistic management. In order to reconcile economic as well as moral arguments an integrative model of humanistic management is presented. This model outlines prospective lines of empirical research especially in the area where business conduct is profitable but not humanistic.     

Banking competition and economic growth: cross-country evidence

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of banking competition on industry economic growth using both structural measures of competition and measures based on the new empirical industrial organisation perspective. The evidence obtained in the period 1993–2003 for a sample of 53 sectors in 21 countries indicates that financial development promotes economic growth. The results also show that bank monopoly power has an inverted-U-shaped effect on economic growth, suggesting that bank market power has its highest growth effect at intermediate values. The latter result is consistent with the literature on relationship lending, which argues that bank competition can have a negative effect on the availability of finance for companies that are informationally more opaque.     

The speed of adjustment in working capital requirement

This paper analyzes the determinants of working capital requirement (WCR) and examines the speed with which firms adjust toward their target WCR. The findings indicate that firms adjust relatively quickly, which supports the hypothesis that current balance sheet items are easier to manipulate and could be changed quite easily, even in the short run. Moreover, we find that the speed of adjustment is not equal across all firms and varies according to their external finance constraints and their bargaining power. Firms with better access to external capital markets and greater bargaining power adjust faster due to their lower costs of adjustment.