The law of one accounting variable

The ‘law of one accounting variable’ is defined in this paper as an extension of ‘the law of one price’. It says roughly that if the future payoffs of two assets are the same (in every state of the world), then the accounting variable of the assets are approximately the same. The paper derives a condition under which this law holds and shows that when the law holds for some accounting variables, these variables can replace betas in the multibeta representation of asset returns, provided some admissibility conditions are satisfied.     

Information transmission between the Gulf equity markets of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain

This paper examines whether the emerging Gulf markets of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in conjunction with the US market exhibit cointegrating relationship. Additionally, the transmission of information and volatility spillover between the Gulf markets is explored using a bivariate EGARCH model. We find that although the markets are not cointegrated, the Gulf markets do share information flows. Specifically, we observe an asymmetric spillover of volatility from the smaller though more liberal and accessible Bahraini market to the larger and less accessible Saudi market. The observed difference in information processing may partly be due to a well-developed Bahraini financial sector that encourages wider participation by international investors who play a significant role in assimilating new information.     

Basel’s value-at-risk capital requirement regulation: An efficiency analysis

We analyze the optimal portfolio policies of expected utility maximizing agents under VaR Capital Requirement (VaR-CR) regulation in comparison to the optimal policy under exogenously-imposed VaR Limit (VaR-L) and Limited-Expected-Loss (LEL) regulations. With VaR-CR regulation the agent strategy consists of simultaneous decisions on both the portfolio VaR and on the implied amount of required eligible capital. As a result, the performance of VaR-CR regulation depends on its design (the parameter n) and the agent preferences. We show that an optimal VaR-CR regulation allows the regulator on the one hand, to completely eliminate the exposure to the largest losses, which may jeopardize the existence of the institution, and on the other hand, to restrain the portfolio exposure to all other losses. These results rationalize the current Basel regulations. However, the analysis shows also that there is an optimal level of required eligible capital from the regulator standpoint. Counter-intuitively, any requirement above this optimal level is inefficient as it leads to a smaller amount of actually maintained eligible capital and thereby to a larger exposure to the most adverse states of the world. Unfortunately, the current Basel’s range of required levels (n = 3–4) is within this inefficient range. Moreover, with an inefficient regulation the agent might employ an inefficient reporting and disclosure procedure.     

Leadership,Creative Problem‐Solving Capacity,and Creative Performance: The Importance of Knowledge Sharing

This article presents two studies that examine whether leader supportive behaviors facilitate knowledge sharing and employee creative problem‐solving capacity, thereby enhancing creative performance. The findings from both studies indicate that leader supportive behaviors are directly and indirectly related, through both internal and external knowledge sharing, to employee creative problem‐solving capacity. In addition, creative problem solving was related to the two dimensions of creative performance—fluency and originality. However, a test of the mediation model indicated that creative problem solving only mediated the relationship between internal knowledge sharing creative performance and originality. These findings highlight the complex process by which leaders facilitate both internal and external knowledge sharing and employee creative problem‐solving capacity, thereby improving employee creative performance.     

Two polar cases of dynamic stability: voluntary exchange and income redistribution

Summary. It is known that when voluntary exchange is permitted at disequilibrium, dynamic stability may fail because of lack of liquidity. In this paper it is shown that when the economy runs out of liquidity dynamic stability can still be restored by means of a planning procedure of redistributing personal incomes.Received: 30 May 2003, Revised: 20 January 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: D01, D50.I wish to thank a referee for helpful comments.     

Environmental amenities and optimal agricultural land use: The case of Israel

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of changing land allocation among crops as a mechanism for increasing net-social benefits, where production profits and amenity values are augmented. A positive mathematical programming model is calibrated and applied to 43 regions in the northern part of Israel, using a crop-discriminating amenity-value function. Changes in land allocation increase net-social benefits by 2.4% nationwide and by up to 15% on the regional level, where in some regions the net-social-benefits-increase/profit-loss ratio exceeds 20. Therefore, the results indicate that a policy encouraging amenity-enhancement of agricultural land use is warranted, provided that it is implemented on a regional scale, rather than as a comprehensive nationwide-enforced program.     

Random competitive exchange: Price distributions and gains from trade

This paper studies the behavior of a competitive exchange under uncertain preferences and random indivisible endowments. We obtain explicit closed-form results for the price distribution and expected gains from trade, both for case where the market is “thin” and the number of traders is low, and for the asymptotic case where the number of traders tends to infinity. We demonstrate that increasing the number of traders reduces price variability and increases the expected gains from trade, and that increasing the variability of traders' reservation prices increases price variability as well as the expected asymptotic gains from trade.     

Damages for Breach of Contract: Should the Government Get Special Treatment?

Contracts that involve the government differ from contractsbetween two private parties in that the identity of one of theparties, the government, is subject to change. Given that theincumbent government knows that it might not be in power whenthe contract is completed, it may have an incentive to structurethe contract to make it more difficult for a new governmentto renegotiate it. I show that traditional damage measures usedin contracts between two private parties exacerbate this problem.The reliance damage measure induces the incumbent governmentto enlarge projects beyond the socially optimal level when itfears that a new government will want to cut it back. Expectationdamages suffer from the same defect, though to a lesser extent.