The EU public procurement regime— Does it work?

Has the Single Market for public procurement had the expected effects after six years in progress? The following article attempts to answer this question by first presenting alternative theoretical approaches to analysing the EU liberalisation of the public procurement market and then confronting these with the result of an empirical analysis.     

Whistle-Blowing Methods for Navigating Within and Helping Reform Regulatory Institutions

There are at least four important, institutional obstacles to whistle-blowing to regulatory institutions. First, regulatory institutions are often systematically understaffed and do not have the resources needed to adequately process whistle-blowing cases. Second, regulators who process whistle-blowing cases are often systematically inexperienced and do not understand the strategic importance of whistle-blowing cases. Third, regulators are often under systemic pressure from the politicians who appoint them to ignore whistle-blowing cases relevant to their sources of financial and/or ideological political support. Fourth, there are high systemic risks to whistle-blowers who blow the whistle to regulatory institutions. Nonetheless, understanding how the institutions and obstacles operate can help us understand what types of whistle-blowing methods can be used to navigate around the obstacles and within the regulatory institutions. In addition, sometimes whistle-blowing methods can help reform regulatory institutions.     

Finite sample accuracy and choice of sampling frequency in integrated volatility estimation

We consider the properties of three estimation methods for integrated volatility, i.e. realized volatility, Fourier, and wavelet estimation, when a typical sample of high-frequency data is observed. We employ several different generating mechanisms for the instantaneous volatility process, e.g. Ornstein–Uhlenbeck, long memory, and jump processes. The possibility of market microstructure contamination is also entertained using models with bid-ask bounce and price discreteness, in which case alternative estimators with theoretical justification under market microstructure noise are also examined. The estimation methods are compared in a simulation study which reveals a general robustness towards persistence or jumps in the latent stochastic volatility process. However, bid-ask bounce effects render realized volatility and especially the wavelet estimator less useful in practice, whereas the Fourier method remains useful and is superior to the other two estimators in that case. More strikingly, even compared to bias correction methods for microstructure noise, the Fourier method is superior with respect to RMSE while having only slightly higher bias. A brief empirical illustration with high-frequency GE data is also included.     

中国的双顺差、日本经验及失衡调整

我要讲的题目是"中国的双顺差:失衡与相互依赖",主要是从90年代开始,在过去十六年中的十三年,中国国际收支经常账户和资本账户同时出现了盈余,也就是出现了双顺差.这是非常特殊的现象.首先,我从国别比较的角度来透视中国出现双顺差的独特性,然后分析中国的双顺差是如何产生的.我认为,中国的双顺差主要是由加工贸易和外商直接投资推动的.     

Are you a collaborative leader?

Social media and technologies have put connectivity on steroids and made collaboration more integral to business than ever. But without the right leadership, collaboration can go astray. Employees who try to collaborate on everything may wind up stuck in endless meetings, struggling to reach agreement. On the other side of the coin, executives who came of age during the heyday of "command and control" management can have trouble adjusting their style to fit the new realities. In their research on top-performing CEOs, Insead professors Ibarra and Hansen have examined what it takes to be a collaborative leader. They've found that it requires connecting people and ideas outside an organization to those inside it, leveraging diverse talent, modeling collaborative behavior at the top, and showing a strong hand to keep teams from getting mired in debate. In this article, they describe tactics that executives from Akamai, GE, Reckitt Benckiser, and other firms use in those four areas and how they foster high-performance collaborative cultures in their organizations.     

Rhetoric and hegemony in consumptive wildlife tourism: polarizing sustainability discourses among angling tourism stakeholders

Nature-based tourism frequently results in controversies over access rights, but also over how resources should be managed and utilized. In this article, we explore disagreements on management strategies and angling practices, which followed in the wake of the gradual introduction of increasingly strict harvest regulations in salmon angling in the Orkla River of Norway. Different views on what represent the most severe threats to the salmon stock appeared in this case to originate in rather complex patterns with respect to the ways stakeholders related to and engaged with salmon, rivers and nature in general. The identification of incompatible goals and motives of various categories of stakeholders has for long been a dominant approach in research on these types of conflicts. In this contribution, we broaden the scope by exploring how such controversies involve competition for hegemony with respect to how management and angling practices should be discursively framed.     

Third wave development expertise

In this paper I offer a normative account of development expertise. Although extending expertise beyond the traditional development experts to include local stakeholders, this normative account aims to delimit legitimate forms of expertise. I label this normative view third wave development expertise. Third wave expertise is distinguished from both the technocratic and the social constructivist views of development expertise. In particular, I discuss the notions of contributory and interactional expertise. Contributory expertise denotes the extent to which a group of agents possesses (tacit, embodied, or explicit) knowledge which can make a significant contribution to development decision-making, while interactional expertise denotes the extent to which they are able to communicate this knowledge meaningfully. While local stakeholders may possess contributory expertise in matters of their own development, they may lack interactional expertise to communicate this knowledge. Resolving this issue, I argue, requires a mediator who can interact with and between external experts and local stakeholders.     

Fast Ninomiya–Victoir calibration of the double-mean-reverting model

Abstract

We consider the three-factor double mean reverting (DMR) option pricing model of Gatheral [Consistent Modelling of SPX and VIX Options, 2008], a model which can be successfully calibrated to both VIX options and SPX options simultaneously. One drawback of this model is that calibration may be slow because no closed form solution for European options exists. In this paper, we apply modified versions of the second-order Monte Carlo scheme of Ninomiya and Victoir [Appl. Math. Finance, 2008, 15, 107–121], and compare these to the Euler–Maruyama scheme with full truncation of Lord et al. [Quant. Finance, 2010, 10(2), 177–194], demonstrating on the one hand that fast calibration of the DMR model is practical, and on the other that suitably modified Ninomiya–Victoir schemes are applicable to the simulation of much more complicated time-homogeneous models than may have been thought previously.     

Foreign institutional investors and dividend policy: Evidence from China

This study examines whether foreign institutional investment influences firms’ dividend policies. Using data from all domestically listed nonfinancial firms in China during the period of 2003–2013, we find that foreign shareholding influences dividend decisions and vice versa.Furthermore, changes in dividend payments over time positively affect subsequent changes in foreign shareholding, but the opposite is not true. Our study indicates that foreign institutional investors do not change firms’ future dividend payments once they have made their investment choices in China. Moreover, they self-select into Chinese firms that pay high dividends. Our evidence suggests that in an institutional setting where foreign investors have tightly restricted access to local securities markets and a relatively high risk of expropriation by controlling shareholders exists, firms can use dividends to signal good investment opportunities to foreign investors.     

Market Integration,Choice of Technology,and Welfare

This paper develops an international trade model where firms in a duopoly may diversify their technologies for strategic reasons. The firms face the same set of technologies given by a tradeoff between marginal costs and fixed costs, but depending on trade costs firms may choose different technologies. Market integration may induce a technological restructuring where firms either diversify their technologies or switch to a homogeneous technology. In general, market integration improves welfare. However, a small decrease of trade costs which induces a switch from heterogeneous technologies to a homogeneous technology may locally reduce global welfare. The model also shows that productivity differences lead to intra‐industry firm heterogeneity in size and exports similar to the “new–new” trade models with monopolistic competition.