Interrelations between the dynamics of oil prices and demand: Contemporary characteristics

The article shows that the unprecedented rise in oil prices was in recent years accompanied by an increase in oil consumption. The author considers the growth that was seen in the magnitude of oil sales despite multiple increases in price to be, along with the buying up of oil as a high liquidity asset, a phenomenon that indicates an approaching crisis and allows us to create new approaches to its forecasting.     

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Schlafst?rungen vorbeugen - Oft sind Schlafst?rungen Bestandteil psychischer, organischer oder neurologisch degenerativer Erkrankungen. Sie k?nnen aber auch die Folge falschen Verhaltens oder ungemessener Schlafbedingungen sein. Also: Was f?rdert gesunden Schlaf, was behindert ihn?     

Housing sector as an important factor of economic recovery and formation of medium-term economic dynamics

Motives of reduction of credit financing sources for housing construction under conditions of financial and economic crisis are analyzed in the paper, and a set of centralized measures for attracting investments to this sphere for restoration of volumes of housing starts is proposed.     

Deregulating the domestic natural gas market: Conditions and mechanisms

The paper looks at topical points of the formation of the domestic natural gas market, the definitive ones being the rules of interaction between the monopoly company and the independent gas producers. Elaborated corporate interaction rules are presented as a Grid Code. The mechanism of a business game between key domestic gas market players is proposed as a Grid Code development tool.     

Technology development in the multinational firm: a framework for planning and strategy

Abstract The authors' purpose is to improve the coupling between technology development and corporate strategic planning in multinational firms by providing a much needed technology planning framework. The framework, which is developed in some detail, divides the planning process into three stages: technology scanning, strategy development (product level) and implementation (country level). In the first stage an answer is sought to the question, “What technologies (as distinct from businesses) are we, or should we be in?”. in the second, the aim is to develop a strategy for each of the products from the chosen technologies; in the third stage, details of implementation on a country-by-country basis are worked out. Although presented as a sequence of three stages, the framework is to be applied iteratively. The authors argue that technology for all its vital importance to a global company, cannot be treated as a profit centre. This is part of the difficulty in implementing the technology management function, especially in multidivisional and global firms. They believe that use of this framework will make it easier to integrate technology development into the strategic planning process. In addition it will serve to integrate managers from different parts of the company into a formalized technology planning exercise.     

Airline hubs in the Single European Market: A benchmark analysis

‘Liberalization’ of European air markets could allow the formation of airline hubs to obtain the associated economies of scope and scale. This study simulates the formation of these hubs. A model of U.S. hub location, estimated as a function of demographic and economic characteristics, is applied to European cities to identify likely hub locations. The results provide a benchmark for evaluating future airline competition in the Single European Market. However, the study is only an approximate prediction of hub location because political and structural constraints will keep the European air market from developing the competitive atmosphere found in the U.S..     

An Examination of ERR and Asset Allocation in Public Pension Plans

In this paper, we examine the usefulness of expected rates of return (ERR) for public pension plans. Specifically, we test the correlation between the expected rate of return on plan assets and asset allocation. We also examine the predictive power of ERR on the actual returns of the pension assets. We find that the correlation between expected return and the percentage of assets that are equity securities is relatively weak. Further, we find that the percentage of assets that are equity securities is a much better predictor of actual returns than the disclosed expected return in public pension plans. These results provide evidence to support SFAS No. 87 , which requires the disclosure of plan assets and against recently promulgated SFAS No. 132 , which eliminates this disclosure requirement. The evidence also supports GASB 25'sStatement of Net Plan Assets .     

The Many Faces of Information Disclosure

In this article we ask: what kind of information and how muchof it should firms voluntarily disclose? Three types of disclosuresare considered. One is information that complements the informationavailable only to informed investors (to-be-processed complementaryinformation). The second is information that is orthogonal tothat which any investor can acquire and thus complements theinformation available to all investors (preprocessed complementaryinformation). And the third is information that substitutesfor the information of the informed investors in that it revealsto all what was previously known only by the informed (substituteinformation). Our main results are as follows. First, in equilibrium,all types of firms voluntarily disclose all three types of information.Second, in contrast to the existing literature, complementaryinformation disclosure by firms strengthens investors' privateincentives to acquire information. Substitute information disclosureweakens private information acquisition incentives. Third, whilecomplementary information disclosure has an ambiguous effecton financial innovation incentives, substitute information disclosureweakens those incentives.     

The role of co-skewness in the pricing of real estate

The current study investigates whether systematic skewness offers an alternative perspective as to why the risk-adjusted returns on real estate should be similar to that for stocks. This is not a trivial issue since an affirmative finding implies that we might be incorrectly measuring real estate risk from both a pricing and a portfolio allocation perspective. A multivariate test of the Kraus-Litzenberger model is used to investigate this skewness proposition with the K-L CAPM tested against several alternative versions of the CAPM. The study finds that the Kraus-Litzenberger model offers additional insights into the measurement of real estate risk. Evidence is also found that both the zero beta and the consumption-oriented CAPM hold, which is consistent with the recent literature in real estate.