Determining a One-sided Optimum Specification Limit under the Linear Quality Loss Function

Kapur and Wang [The winter Annual Meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1987) p. 23] addressed the problem of product having the specification limits and process being not capable of specifications. They presented that the inspection policy in an online quality control system has a short-term approach to reduce variance of the items shipped to the customers. In this paper, we further propose the modified Kapur and Wangs model with the linear quality loss of product within specifications for determining a one-sided optimum specification limit.     

Public Housing,School Segregation,and Children’s Education: Evidence from Hong Kong

Evidence in the literature shows that public-housing residents move less frequently than others. This tendency may restrict school choice for children from public-housing families and lead to school segregation and lower educational outcomes for those children. Our empirical findings from Hong Kong show three strands of evidence that support this hypothesis. (1) Children from public-housing families are more likely to drop out of school after compulsory education. The result is robust after controlling for family background and a series of parental characteristics. (2) Public-housing families with school-age children are less likely to move than their private-housing counterparts. (3) Children from public-housing families are more likely to study in local community schools, which are located on the outskirts of Hong Kong and are of lower education quality. These findings have important policy implications for the public-housing programs such as those which have been implemented in Mainland China since 2011.     

Set the Optimum Process Parameters Based on Asymmetric Quality Loss Function

Recently, Huang has presented a trade-off problem of determining the optimumprocess parameters for the product quality and process adjustment cost. Aboutproduct quality, Huang adopts the symmetric quadratic quality loss function formeasuring the loss of profit. However, he has neglected other types of qualityloss function in the model. In this paper, we will further propose the modifiedHuang's cost model with the linear and quadratic asymmetric quality loss function of product for determining the optimum process parameters.     

Credit Constraint and the Asymmetric Monetary Policy Effect on House Prices

We study the possible asymmetric effect of monetary policy on house prices under different credit regimes. We first derive the implications of a theoretical model in which agents may be collateral‐constrained. We then empirically examine the implications of the model using the threshold vector autoregression model. Two different measures reflecting the tightness of the credit market are computed to serve as the threshold variable. We find that house prices react to a monetary shock initially more strongly but the effect is less persistent in a credit boom regime than in a normal credit regime. This result is consistent with the findings of our theoretical model.     

Performance Chasing,Fund Flows and Fund Size in Real Estate Mutual Funds

Real estate mutual funds have grown dramatically in number, size, scope and assets under management over the last 15 years, but little assessment is evident. The present study addresses this limitation. Better prior period performance is associated with greater shares of fund inflows for a period. Returns, however, are negatively associated with increased fund flows and fund size. Investors chase past performance limiting fund managers’ ability to optimize investments. Under normal market conditions, but departing from typical mutual fund performance, real estate mutual fund returns generally exceed relevant benchmarks on a before expenses basis and match benchmark returns after expenses. The ability to meet and exceed benchmark returns, however, does not hold during the financial crisis period. Overall, more established funds are shown to have higher returns while fund turnover is not a determinant of returns.     

Setting the futures margin with price limits: the case for single-stock futures

Price limits are artificial boundaries established by regulators to establish the maximum price movement permitted in a single day. We propose using a new censoring method that incorporates the effect of price limits on the futures price distribution and investigates how to set an appropriate daily margin level using single-stock futures in Taiwan. We compare our estimations with those obtained using the method in Longin (J Bus 69:383–408, 1999). The results show that (1) the margin levels derived from the Longin method, which ignore price limits in the estimation, are lower than those in our censoring method; and (2) the legal margin for single-stock futures set at 13.5 % by the Taiwan Futures Exchange to avoid default risk appears to be too high.     

The effectiveness of position limits: Evidence from the foreign exchange futures markets

This study considers the effects of the relative size of hedger and speculator open interests and the potential impact of implementing position limits on the price discovery process in both JPY–USD and EUR–USD futures markets. Hedging trading exerts a negative impact, regardless of its size, on price discovery in futures markets. Hedgers are less likely to be information motivated, so their trading uniformly delays the price discovery process. However, there is a positive and nonlinear impact of speculators’ trade size on price discovery, the contribution of which depends on the relative size of the speculative open interest. Contrary to conventional wisdom among regulators, speculative trading does not harm the market in terms of market efficiency; as long as the percentage of speculators’ open interest is below an endogenously determined threshold (approximately 20% for EUR–USD and 16.3% for JPY–USD), speculative trading even improves futures market efficiency.     

Diversification in local government tax structures

Fiscal problems of local governments, particularly urban centers, have been widespread during recent periods of general economic recession. These problems have resulted from a decline in the growth of revenues and hence an inability to keep pace with rapidly rising expenditures to cover public welfare and inflation. Increased reliance on fast growing but unstable revenues aggravates these problems. It may be possible, however, through proper selection of taxes to diversify away some of the instability in revenue. This paper develops a method to be used in analyzing tax diversification for local governments.     

Panel Cointegration Analysis of Audit Pricing Model

This paper addresses two issues that arise from testing and estimating cointegration in accounting research. The first issue is the failure to use more powerful cointegration tests by earlier researchers. This has led to the problem of low test power in the cointegration procedures employed in the earlier accounting literature. Another issue that has not received much attention in earlier studies of audit pricing is the endogeneity bias that arises from the endogenous nature of the regressors. Commonly used regressors such as auditee size and auditee complexity are endogenous and are often related to audit fees through a system of simultaneous equations. Endogeneity bias suggests that the conventional OLS estimators are biased.Using more powerful panel sample estimation procedures, we find that elasticities of total assets are in general under-estimated in the earlier studies when the conventional OLS method was used. We also find that the earlier studies tend to under-state the effects of the foreign subsidiary ratio and over-state the effect of the ratio of account receivables to total assets on audit fees.JEL Classification: C33, M41