Household Debt,Consumption, and Income Inequality

Using the Johansen and Engle–Granger cointegration tests, we show that there is one cointegrating relationship between household debt, consumption, and income inequality in the United States for the period from 1929 to 2009. Given this result, we use a Vector Error-Correction model to further understand the dynamics among the three variables. Results indicate that increases in income inequality and consumption directly contribute to increases in household debt. Interestingly, the results reveal some feedback from household debt to income inequality. We also show that debt-driven consumption should be viewed with caution as the results show that increases in household debt correspond with future declines in the rate of consumption.     

A goal-seeking approach to capital budgeting

This paper articulates how a goal-seeking model addresses a variation of the capital-budgeting problem. Focused toward technology modernization in the public sector, this multi-criteria optimization model explicitly considers the diverse functions of the organization. In particular, the synergism amongst the functions is modeled as a multiplicative value function. The model is solved by the “constraint reduced feasible-region method”, resulting in a non-convex mathematical program that produces numerical intricacies. Linearization of the criterion (objective) functions reduces such intricacy. An Army-modernization acquisition-study was used to illustrate the proposed model, showing that its non-inferior solutions are remarkably stable. Comparison is also made with other approaches, typically formulated as goal-setting programs. The model highlights how technology acquisitions are affected as the priorities of each organizational function changes.     

Charting your company's future

Few companies have a clear strategic vision. The problem, say the authors, stems from the strategic-planning process itself, which usually involves preparing a large document, culled from a mishmash of data provided by people with conflicting agendas. That kind of process almost guarantees an unfocused strategy. Instead, companies should design the strategic-planning process by drawing a picture: a strategy canvas. A strategy canvas shows the strategic profile of your industry by depicting the various factors that affect competition. And it shows the strategic profiles of your current and potential competitors as well as your own company's strategic profile--how it invests in the factors of competition and how it might in the future. The basic component of a strategy canvas--the value curve--is a tool the authors created in their consulting work and have written about in previous HBR articles. This article introduces a four-step process for actually drawing and discussing a strategy canvas. Readers will learn how one European financial services company used this process to create a distinct and easily communicable strategy. The process begins with a visual awakening. Managers compare their business's value curve with competitors' to discover where their strategy needs to change. In the next step--visual exploration--managers do field research on customers and alternative products. At the visual strategy fair, the third step, managers draw new strategic profiles based on field observations and get feedback from customers and peers about these new proposals. Once the best strategy is created from that feedback, it's time for the last step--visual communication. Executives distribute "before" and "after" strategic profiles to the whole company, and only projects that will help move the company closer to the "after" profile are supported.     

Free Float And Market Liquidity: A Study Of Hong Kong Government Intervention

The August 1998 Hong Kong government intervention in the stock market offers a natural experiment for studying the relation between a free float and market liquidity, where a free float is the portion of listed share capital that is freely traded on the market. Our findings show that, relative to a group of control stocks, there was an increase in the price effects of trades for the 33 Hang Seng Index component stocks that were bought by the government. On the other hand, there was no clear cross‐sectional relation between the change in the price effect and the magnitude of government holdings or the decrease in the free float.     

Jumping hedges: An examination of movements in copper spot and futures markets

Price risk is an important factor for both copper purchasers, who use the commodity as a major input in their production process, and copper refiners, who must deal with cash‐flow volatility. Information from NYMEX cash and futures prices is used to examine optimal hedging behavior for agents in copper markets. A bivariate GARCH‐jump model with autoregressive jump intensity is proposed to capture the features of the joint distribution of cash and futures returns over two subperiods with different dominant pricing regimes. It is found that during the earlier producerpricing regime this specification is not needed, whereas for the later exchange pricing era jump dynamics stemming from a common jump across cash and futures series are significant in explaining the dynamics in both daily and weekly data sets. Results from the model are used to under‐take both within‐sample and out‐of‐sample hedging exercises. These results indicate that there are important gains to be made from a time‐varying optimal hedging strategy that incorporates the information from the common jump dynamics. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 26:169–188, 2006     

The performance of Japanese mutual funds

We analyze the performance of Japanese open-type stock mutualfunds for the 1981-1992 period. The results show that, regardlessof the performance measures and benchmarks employed, most ofthe Japanese mutual funds underperform the benchmarks by between3.6% and 10.8% per annum. These funds tend to invest more inlarge stocks with low book-to-market ratios. But this featuredoes not explain the underperformance. A potential explanationis the dilution effect caused by inflows of funds. In Japan,a new investor of an open-type fund only pays in the after-taxvalue of the net asset value. We conduct a bootstrap experimentto assess the magnitude of this dilution effect.     

Market Microstructure and Real Estate Returns

This paper examines the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) market microstruc-ture and its relationship to stock returns. When compared with the general stock market, REIT stocks tend to have a lower level of institutional investor participation and are followed by fewer security analysts. In addition, REIT stocks that have a higher percentage of institutional investors or are followed by more security analysts tend to perform better than other REIT stocks. Our results seem to confirm Jensen's ( 1993 , p. 868) proposition that ownership structure (that is, who owns the firm's securities) affects the value of the firm. Our findings also have implications about the well documented phenomenon that the financial performance of Commingled Real Estate Funds (CREFs) is better than that of REITs.     

Blue ocean strategy

Despite a long-term decline in the circus industry, Cirque du Soleil profitably increased revenue 22-fold over the last ten years by reinventing the circus. Rather than competing within the confines of the existing industry or trying to steal customers from rivals, Cirque developed uncontested market space that made the competition irrelevant. Cirque created what the authors call a blue ocean, a previously unknown market space. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In red oceans--that is, in all the industries already existing--companies compete by grabbing for a greater share of limited demand. As the market space gets more crowded, prospects for profits and growth decline. Products turn into commodities, and increasing competition turns the water bloody. There are two ways to create blue oceans. One is to launch completely new industries, as eBay did with online auctions. But it's much more common for a blue ocean to be created from within a red ocean when a company expands the boundaries of an existing industry. In studying more than 150 blue ocean creations in over 30 industries, the authors observed that the traditional units of strategic analysis--company and industry--are of limited use in explaining how and why blue oceans are created. The most appropriate unit of analysis is the strategic move, the set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering. Creating blue oceans builds brands. So powerful is blue ocean strategy, in fact, that a blue ocean strategic move can create brand equity that lasts for decades.