How Does Legitimacy Operate in Emerging Capital Markets? Investigating the Moderating Effects of Premium Listings and Firm Size on Risk

Drawing on an institutional theoretical perspective, we investigate the impact of the origins of organizational legitimacy on systematic risk using a sample of 358 Brazilian companies between the years 2002 and 2007. We regard three origins of legitimacy—formal–regulatory (presence in premium listings), cultural–cognitive (board of directors), and normative legitimacy (reputation)—to empirically investigate how a company's size and adherence to premium lists moderate other sources of legitimacy. Our results indicate that only under apparently better quality corporate governance conditions—presence in premium listings—do corporate reputation and the board of directors reduce systematic risk. In addition, we show that the effect of reputation on risk is positively moderated by firm size. Copyright © 2018 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Comparing approval procedures for new drugs

We analyse how drug approval procedures influence the incentives of pharmaceutical firms to commercialise new drugs in the presence of international reference pricing. Since 1995, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) coordinates a centralised approval procedure for specific new drugs in the EU. With such a centralised procedure, the EMA grants simultaneous drug approvals for all EU countries. Alongside, non‐centralised procedures coexist for approvals of other new drugs and approvals can be sequential. We focus on the effects of the exogenous timing of drug approvals, either simultaneous or sequential, and we compare the effects of centralised versus non‐centralised procedures on the firms’ incentives to commercialise new drugs in different markets. In a context of international reference pricing, we show that a centralised procedure limits the number of countries where the firm commercialises new drugs, compared to a non‐centralised procedure. We also show in a simplified framework that countries are better off with non‐centralised procedures, while pharmaceutical firms in theory prefer the drug to be approved everywhere as soon as possible, as in an early centralised procedure. This is in line with the stated objective of the EMA to generate savings for the pharmaceutical firms.     

An empirical test of the Post-Keynesian growth model applied to functional income distribution and the growth regime in Brazil

The main purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate whether, between 1970 and 2008, the Brazilian economy was profit-led or wage-led. To this end, we approach a canonical post-Keynesian growth model (PKGM) to estimate certain vector autoregressive (VAR) models and perform Granger non-causality tests. Three main results are extracted from the generalized impulse-response functions provided by the VAR models. First, a positive profit-share innovation affects economic growth and capacity utilization rate, both in the same direction, suggesting a profit-led pattern. Second, a profit share shock positively affects both the ratio actual/potential output, and capital accumulation, reinforcing the previous result. Third, a capacity utilization shock is shown to positively affect both output growth and capital accumulation via the accelerator effect. On the one hand, the pairwise Granger non-causality test does not provide any evidence of causality running from profit share to economic growth or capacity utilization. On the other hand, there is some evidence of Granger causality running from profit share to capital accumulation.     

Contrarians or momentum chasers? Individual investors’ behavior when trading exchange-traded funds

Conducting the first study of momentum impact on households’ exchange-traded fund (ETF) trading behavior, we find that Finnish households are less contrarian when trading benchmark index ETFs than when trading common stocks. Also, their propensity to chase recent positive momentum is higher when purchasing ETFs than when purchasing stocks. As expected, results are stronger for ETF purchases than sales. Our findings are consistent with hypotheses that households are less overconfident trading index ETFs than common stocks, that contrarian behavior is more often rational when trading stocks than when trading ETFs, and that households trade ETFs for the long run.     

Financing choice and local economic growth: evidence from Brazil

Journal of Economic Growth - We study how financing non-traditional local activities, conceived here as a proxy for activity diversification, is associated with economic growth. We use...     

On the Real Effect of Financial Pressure: Evidence From Firm‐Level Employment During the Euro‐Area Crisis

Using a large panel of mainly unquoted euro‐area firms over the period 2003–2011, this paper examines the impact of financial pressure on firms’ employment. The analysis finds evidence that financial pressure negatively affects firms’ employment decisions. This effect is stronger during the euro area‐crisis (2010–2011), especially for firms in the periphery compared to their counterparts in non‐periphery European economies. When we introduce firm‐level heterogeneity, we show that financial pressure appears to be both statistically and quantitatively more important for bank‐dependent, small and privately held firms operating in periphery economies during the crisis.     

A bivariate infinitely divisible law for modeling the magnitude and duration of monotone periods of log‐returns

The focus of this article is modeling the magnitude and duration of monotone periods of log‐returns. For this, we propose a new bivariate law assuming that the probabilistic framework over the magnitude and duration is based on the joint distribution of (X,N), where N is geometric distributed and X is the sum of an identically distributed sequence of inverse‐Gaussian random variables independent of N. In this sense, X and N represent the magnitude and duration of the log‐returns, respectively, and the magnitude comes from an infinite mixture of inverse‐Gaussian distributions. This new model is named bivariate inverse‐Gaussian geometric ( in short) law. We provide statistical properties of the model and explore stochastic representations. In particular, we show that the is infinitely divisible, and with this, an induced Lévy process is proposed and studied in some detail. Estimation of the parameters is performed via maximum likelihood, and Fisher's information matrix is obtained. An empirical illustration to the log‐returns of Tyco International stock demonstrates the superior performance of the law compared to an existing model. We expect that the proposed law can be considered as a powerful tool in the modeling of log‐returns and other episodes analyses such as water resources management, risk assessment, and civil engineering projects.