The market value of preventive activities: A contingent-claims approach

We use a contingent-claims approach to determine the market value of preventive investments. We show that the lower the initial probability of accident, the greater is the market value of a reduction in this probability. Besides, at initially low probabilities, ceteris paribus, the market gives a higher value to a reduction in accident probability when aggregate (correlated) catastrophic risks rather than independent ones are involved. The reverse occurs at initially high probabilities.     

An analysis of members' perspectives of service quality in Hong Kong tourist association membership system

The objectives of the study were (1) to evaluate members' satisfaction and expectation towards the quality of services provided by the HKTA membership system; (2) to identify the performance “gap” between members' satisfaction and expectation in the HKTA membership system; and, (3) to explore the impact of members' satisfaction level in participating in the HKTA membership system. A comprehensive survey was conducted and a Simple Random Sampling plan was used to survey 600 members. It was found that 28 out of 32 attributes had negative performance “gaps.” The likelihood of participating in HKTA activities was dependant on the members' satisfaction in “Increase social awareness,” “Opportunities to liaise with business associates” and “Upgrading staff through training courses.” The implications of the findings were discussed and recommendations were proposed.     

Organizational Politics:Tactics, Channels, andHierarchical Roles

This research examines the relationships among the types of self-serving political messages sent in organizations, the channels through which they are sent, and the targets to whom they are sent. Two theoretical streams converge in this study: Communication as Political Behavior and Media Usage Theory. A review and synthesis of these two bodies of literature yielded three hypotheses, each of which received strong statistical support. The data suggest that the process of encoding and transmitting self-serving messages is strongly related to the specific target to whom they are sent (boss, subordinate, or peer) and the channel through which they are sent (face-to-face, telephone, memo, or e-mail).     

An Ampirical Assessment of the Contribution of Small Business Employment to U.S. State Economic Performance

Small Business Economics - Small business proponents regularly couple their arguments for favorable government policies and reduced tax and regulatory burdens, to the presumed benefits of increased...     

The bias in time series volatility forecasts

By Jensen's inequality, a model's forecasts of the variance and standard deviation of returns cannot both be unbiased. This study explores the bias in GARCH type model forecasts of the standard deviation of returns, which we argue is the more appropriate volatility measure for most financial applications. For a wide variety of markets, the GARCH, EGARCH, and GJR (or TGARCH) models tend to persistently over‐estimate the standard deviation of returns, whereas the ARLS model of L. Ederington and W. Guan (2005a) does not. Furthermore, the GARCH and GJR forecasts are especially biased following high volatility days, which cause a large jump in forecast volatility, which is rarely fully realized. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 30:305–323, 2010     

Is the US Dollar a Suitable Anchor for the Newly Proposed GCC Currency?

Responses of inflation and non‐oil output growth from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to monetary policy shocks from the United States (US) were estimated to determine whether there is evidence to support the US dollar as the anchor for the proposed unified currency. A structural vector autoregression identified with short‐run restrictions was employed for each country with Fed funds rate as the US monetary policy instrument, non‐oil output growth and inflation. The main results suggest that for inflation, the GCC countries show synchronised responses to monetary policy shocks from the US which are similar to inflation in the US, and for non‐oil output growth, there is no clear indication that US monetary policy can be as effective for the GCC countries as it is domestically. Consequently, importing US monetary policy via a dollar peg may guarantee only stable inflation for the GCC countries – not necessarily stable non‐oil output growth. If the non‐oil output response is made conscientiously – and there are concerns over the dollar’s ability to perform its role as a store of value – a basket peg with both the US dollar and the euro may be a sound alternative as confirmed by the variance decomposition analysis of our augmented SVAR with a proxy for the European short‐term interest rate.     

Estimating JP Morgan Chase's Profits From the Madoff Deposits

JP Morgan Chase had deposits from Bernard L. Madoff's investors totaling $5.5 billion at one point in 2008. The Chase account was supposedly where most of the funds in his Ponzi scheme were deposited. Any large deposit can be a considerable source of profit to a bank. Assuming that the deposits returned the bank's net interest margin and grew at a random geometric rate, this article estimates that JP Morgan Chase generated $435 million in after‐tax profits from this very large account over the course of 16 years. With JP Morgan Chase the target of pending lawsuits relating to the Madoff fraud, this article's methodology and results may be of interest to litigants, prosecutors, journalists, and academics.     

Short Sale Constraints and Single Stock Futures Introductions

This paper exploits the unique experimental setting created by nearly 1,300 new single stock futures listings on the OneChicago exchange between 2003 and 2009. I investigate the impact of derivatives introductions on the tightness of short sale constraints facing their underlying assets. After controlling explicitly for supply and demand conditions in the stock lending market, this experiment reveals a precipitous decline in active utilization rates and loan fees in the lending market, after the futures introductions. The paper provides strong evidence that supports the view that derivatives represent a viable alternate synthetic short selling venue relaxing short sale constraints facing their underlying assets.     

The effective tax rate and the pretax rate of return

This paper presents new estimates of the taxes paid on nonfinancial corporate capital, on the pretax rate of return to capital, and on the effective tax rate. The basic time series show that both the pretax rate of return and the effective tax rate have varied substantially in the past quarter century.An explicit analysis indicates that, after adjusting for different aspects of the business cycle, pretax profitability was between one and 1.5 percentage points lower in the 1970s than in the 1960s. The rate of profitability in the 1960s was also about one-half of a percentage point greater than the profitability in the 7 years of the 1950s after the Korean war.Changes in productivity growth, in inflation, in relative unit labor costs, and in other variables are all associated with changes in profitability. None of these variables, however, can explain the differences in profitability between the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.Looking at broad decade averages, the effective tax rate and the pretax rate of return move in opposite directions, lower pretax profits occuring when the tax rate is high. There thus appears to have been no tendency for pretax profits to vary in a way that offsets differences in effective tax rates.