Going concern opinions and IPO pricing accuracy

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - In a marked shift, it has become relatively more common for ordinary initial public offerings (IPOs) to contain going concern opinions (GCOs) in...     

The economic burden of uncontrolled gout: how controlling gout reduces cost

Aim: To evaluate the burden of uncontrolled gout by examining estimated costs and cost drivers.

Materials and methods: Data from the 2012 and 2013?US National Health and Wellness Survey (NHWS; 2012 NHWS, n?=?71,157 and 2013 NHWS, n?=?75,000) were utilized in this study. Based on self-reported gout diagnosis and gout symptoms, respondents were categorized into three groups: controlled gout (n?=?344), uncontrolled gout (n?=?2,215), and non-gout controls (n?=?126,360). Chi-square tests and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVAs) were used to assess group differences on work productivity loss, healthcare resource utilization, and costs. Zero-inflated negative binomial regressions were used to assess the burden of uncontrolled gout on total costs after controlling for covariates.

Results: Patients with uncontrolled gout had higher presenteeism, overall work impairment, activity impairment, and number of emergency department visits than those with controlled gout or controls. Overall, uncontrolled gout patients had both higher indirect and total costs compared to patients with controlled gout. After controlling for confounders, those with uncontrolled gout had higher total costs than controlled gout respondents and non-gout controls; there was no significant difference in total costs between patients with controlled gout and non-gout controls.

Limitations: Results were based on cross-sectional, self-reported data, making causal inferences more uncertain. Additionally, sample size was small for controlled-gout respondents. Lastly, sampling weights were not used, thus potentially limiting generalizability.

Conclusion: Gout can be an expensive condition, particularly if it is not properly controlled. This study provides support that controlling symptoms (e.g. flares) can reduce the economic and societal burden of gout. Therefore, more attention needs to be paid to effective management of gout symptoms.     

Not just for business: some evidence on leisure motivations of conference attendees

Given the tough competition in the conference market, it is crucial to evaluate conferences not only from the point of view of professional utility and networking opportunities available for delegates but also to take into account leisure-related factors influencing attendees' decision making process, a field which undeservedly lacks scientific attention. This letter illustrates the role of leisure-related motivations for an under representative international sample of conference goers.     

Institutional Change in Nepal: Liberalization,Maoist Movement,Rise of Political Consciousness and Constitutional Change

ABSTRACT

Contradicting the rest of the world’s promptness to discredit communism as an alternative and Francis Fukuyama’s (1992 Fukuyama, F. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man . New York: The Free Press, A Division of Macmilan Inc. [Google Scholar]) teleological account of ‘the end of history,’ Nepal witnessed a Maoist revolution between 1996 and 2006. Such a ‘deviation’ from what Fukuyama and others have viewed as the path of development raises questions about the linear progression of history and its implicit dualism of market vs. government. As several Original Institutional Economists have discussed, analytical dichotomies lead to a simplistic understanding of transformation that disregards the multilayered nature of society and, thus, concludes that history unfolds linearly to arrive at a predetermined and homogeneous end. This paper analyzes the social transformation of Nepal that preceded the Maoist revolution, through the lens of Feminist Institutionalism, utilizing a multidisciplinary approach to understand the complexity of the impacts of liberalism-protectionism political changes on Nepali institutions.     

Network effects, market structure and industry performance

This paper analyzes oligopolistic markets with network externalities. Exploiting a minimal complementarity structure on the model primitives that allows for pure network goods, we prove existence of non-trivial fulfilled-expectations equilibrium. We formalize the concept of industry viability, investigate its determinants, and show that it improves with more firms in the market and/or by technological progress. These results enlighten some well-known conclusions from case studies in the management strategy literature. We also characterize the effects of market structure on industry performance, which depart substantially from ordinary markets. The approach relies on lattice-theoretic methods, supplemented with basic insights from nonsmooth analysis.     

Tacit Collusion in Repeated Auctions: Uniform Versus Discriminatory

Within an infinitely repeated game, I compare the level and conduct of collusion under uniform and discriminatory auctions. For this purpose, I characterize the optimal collusive schemes and sets of sustainable profits under these auction formats. I show that uniform auctions facilitate collusion more than discriminatory auctions: the optimal penal code is equally severe under the two formats; but bidders' deviation incentives are weaker in uniform auctions given that the pay-off irrelevant bids can be used to relax the enforcement problem. This discussion is particularly relevant after the recent reforms in the electricity industry in England & Wales, and elsewhere.     

Economic integration and specialization in production in the EU27: does FDI influence countries’ specialization?

The objective of this article is twofold. Firstly, we proceed to an analysis of the evolution of specialization in production in the enlarged EU, taking into account all its 27 member countries. Given their decomposability properties, we use the entropy-based indices to measure countries’ relative specialization and then, given our rather short period of analysis, we use the bootstrap method to analyze the evolution of the specialization index. We first analyze all economic sectors and then, our analysis is more detailed focusing on manufacturing industries. Globally, we find that specialization is decreasing across all economic sectors, while it is increasing across manufacturing industries. Secondly, we study specialization determinants, with a special interest in the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI). For homogeneity reasons, we analyze two separate samples, one including old EU members plus Cyprus and Malta and the other, the CEECs. In order to take into account the endogeneity of most of our independent variables, we use the vector autoregression (VAR) technique and analyse the impulse response functions. Globally, FDIs seem to positively influence countries’ relative specialization, for our both samples and for both economic sectors and manufacturing industries. However, their impact appears weaker than most of the other independent variables, such as the market potential or the relative endowments.     

Fiscal federalism in Russia: a critique of the OECD proposals

The OECD proposes to kill two birds with one stone in Russiaby simultaneously improving fiscal federalism, and using thefinancial reform process to press for full market liberalisation.This paper scrutinises the initiative and finds it wanting becausethe consensus reforms advocated conflate the re-centralisationof fiscal authority with optimal ownership, property rightsand effective market building, perpetuating the illusion thatthere are no bad market systems. The G-7 and Putin must do better.Yeltsin's mis-privatisation and mis-liberalisation, which spawnedrent seeking, asset stripping, asset seizing and a disregardfor profit maximising from current operations, have proved tobe path dependent and need to be rectified. Putin's increasinglyvisible efforts to rein private property rights must also betaken into account in designing on optimal fiscal federalistregime.     

Designing electricity auctions

Motivated by the new auction format in the England and Wales electricity market, as well as the recent debate in California, we characterize bidding behavior and market outcomes in uniform and discriminatory electricity auctions. Uniform auctions result in higher average prices than discriminatory auctions, but the ranking in terms of productive efficiency is ambiguous. The comparative effects of other market design features, such as the number of steps in suppliers' bid functions, the duration of bids, and the elasticity of demand are analyzed. We also consider the relationship between market structure and market performance in the two auction formats.     

Financial markets and firm size: The role of employment protection laws and barriers to entrepreneurship

This article provides evidence on the institutional determinants of firm size for the period 1980–1998. Using a comprehensive longitudinal database across 29 industrial sectors in 15 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, we study how labour regulations and barriers to entrepreneurship (BE) affect industrial organization in the presence of capital market frictions. We show that strict employment protection laws (EPL) and high BE negatively affect firm size in sectors that are more dependent on external funds. Our findings demonstrate that the interaction between market regulations and financial market imperfections help to explain some of the differences in firm structure across countries.