Differences of opinion in sovereign credit signals during the European crisis

Motivated by the European debt crisis and the new European Union regulatory regime for the credit rating industry, we analyse differences of opinion in sovereign credit signals and their influence on European stock markets. Rating disagreements have a significant connection with subsequent negative credit actions by each agency. However, links among Moody’s/Fitch actions and their rating disagreements with other agencies have weakened in the post-regulation period. We also find that only S&P’s negative credit signals affect the own-country stock market and spill over to other European markets, but this is concentrated in the pre-regulation period. Stronger stock market reactions occur when S&P has already assigned a lower rating than Moody’s/Fitch prior to taking a further negative action.     

Sectoral analysis of foreign direct investment and growth in the developed countries

Empirical studies on foreign direct investment (FDI) and growth in developed countries have yielded conflicting results using cross-country regressions. We use sectoral data for a group of six country members of the OECD. Our paper is the first to identify the sector-specific impact of FDI on growth in the developed countries. Our results show that FDI has positive, or no statistically discernible, effect on economic growth directly and through its interaction with labor. Moreover, we find the effects seem to be very different across countries and economic sectors.     

The cash-holding link within the supply chain

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - Using a customer–supplier matched sample of US-listed firms from 1980 to 2016, we study the corporate cash-holding relationship between...     

Firms and regional favouritism

Using an unbalanced panel of 539 Vietnamese districts from 2000 to 2010 and the corresponding politicians’ profiles, we examine firm behaviour in response to favouritism by top-ranking politicians towards their districts of birth. Results show that the number of firms tend to increase in the home districts of politicians after they assume office. This favouritism is particularly pronounced for private domestic firms, construction firms and rural areas. However, state-owned firms are indifferent. We discuss the non-response of state-owned firms, potential mechanisms and channels behind the statistical results.     

Child injury prevention in Vietnam: achievements and challenges

As with other South Asian countries, injury is becoming a leading cause of death and morbidity among children in Vietnam. In response to the increasing burden of child injury, government and non-government agencies in Vietnam have combined efforts during the last decade to develop and implement various child injury prevention strategies and programmes. This article provides, through a review of relevant documents and interviews with major stakeholders, an overview of these efforts and highlights major challenges to child injury prevention in the country. The findings point to notable achievements in terms of increasing awareness of injury facing children at all levels in the community and developing a sound injury prevention policy framework in a relatively short period of time. However, much needs to be done to implement necessary environmental and legislative changes, strengthen child injury surveillance and injury prevention research; and to improve access to health services. The insight into the experience of Vietnam could benefit other low- and middle-income countries with a high burden of child injury.     

The Influence of Spiritual Traditions on the Interplay of Subjective and Normative Interpretations of Meaningful Work

Journal of Business Ethics - This paper argues that the principles of spiritual traditions provide normative ‘standards of goodness’ within which practitioners evaluate meaningful work....     

EFFECTS OF CHINA AND INDIA ON MANUFACTURED EXPORTS OF THE G7 ECONOMIES

This article analyzes the effects of China and India on manufactured exports of the G7 economies. The following three findings stand out. First, the rivalry effect of China is robustly significant in all investigated markets, including the world and the G7 countries collectively and individually, while the rivalry effect of India is significant in the French, Italian, Japanese, and world markets but insignificant in other markets. Second, the rivalry effect of China in the world market is substantial in 13 of 22 manufacturing industries, and most pronounced for textiles, telecom equipment, fabricated metal products, computing machinery, and furniture, while this effect of India is significant only in one industry (basic metals). Third, Germany is the only G7 economy that appears not to be affected by China's rivalry effect. Germany has also been more successful than other G7 economies in penetrating the Chinese market. (JEL O4, F1)     

Social media,political uncertainty,and stock markets

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - This study proposes a new measure of firm-level uncertainty exposure around important political events. More specifically, we construct a degree of...     

Nonlinearity and Low Deterministic Chaotic Behavior in Insurance Portfolio Stock Returns

This article presents new empirical evidence indicating a deterministic component in the portfolio return dynamics of life‐health and property‐liability insurance company stocks. Our research is motivated by the fact that nonlinearities are a fact of economic life for many financial applications the source of which is logically apparent, yet empirical evidence of their existence is at best weak. The primary reason attributed to the weak findings of nonlinearities reported in previous research is the use of aggregate data that can hide nonlinearities at the micro level. Insurance sector stock returns are analyzed because unique institutional characteristics indicate the possibility of identifying nonlinear dynamics. Tests based on the correlation dimension partially confirm the presence of nonlinearity. However, the more powerful Brock, Dechert, and Scheinkman (BDS) statistic strongly suggests the presence of nonlinearities in the insurance stock portfolio data. The BDS statistic applied to the standardized residuals of exponential generalized auto regressive conditional heteroskedasticity (EGARCH) models strongly rejects the null of independent and identically distributed, indicating that conditional heteroskedasticity is not responsible for the presence of the nonlinear structures in the data. In addition, tests for chaos based on locally weighted regressions indicate that insurance stock portfolio returns indicate low‐complexity chaotic behavior. This is an important result since most previous research has failed to report evidence of chaotic behavior in the time series of stock returns. Important contributions of this article are the application of tests of nonlinearities and chaos to more desegregated data sets and the findings of statistically significant evidence indicating nonlinearities and low‐deterministic chaotic behavior in insurance stock portfolio returns.     

Controls as a Sharable Knowledge Commodity: An Architecture for Open Exchange

The world seems to be getting more dangerous: terrorists; fraudulent corporations; money laundering; hurricanes; pandemics. Governments and organizations respond with a flurry of new controls. In some cases these are centrally mandated (e.g. Sarbanes Oxley). In others, organizations struggle to find their own control solutions. Seldom, however, do organizations work together as a community of common interests to share solutions to their control threats. In this paper we consider how an open exchange of control solutions might be supported electronically. We assume a community of similar organizations that wish to exchange detailed knowledge about organizational control techniques. These might be non-competing institutions, such as libraries, customs agencies, and even universities; or, they may in fact be competing organizations, wishing to exchange control solutions in dimensions where they do not compete – e.g. the airlines exchanging best practice about safety and security. The main point is to propose an information technology architecture that permits a view of organizational controls as shareable, exchangeable knowledge commodities.