Investigating the diversifying or hedging nexus of cannabis cryptocurrencies with major digital currencies

Decisions in Economics and Finance - This paper sets out to explore the nexus between cryptocurrencies connected to cannabis production and the three highest capitalization digital currencies....     

An Ethical Inquiry of the Effect of Cockpit Automation on the Responsibilities of Airline Pilots: Dissonance or Meaningful Control?

Journal of Business Ethics - Airline pilots are attributed ultimate responsibility and final authority over their aircraft to ensure the safety and well-being of all its occupants. Yet, with the...     

A new take on voice: the influence of BlackRock’s ‘Dear CEO’ letters

Review of Accounting Studies - Abstract We examine whether broad-based public engagement by institutional investors influences the behavior of portfolio firms. We investigate this question in the...     

Shareholder Activism and Voluntary Disclosure Initiation: The Case of Political Spending

Demand for disclosures on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues has increased dramatically. Using corporate political spending disclosures as our setting, we conduct a detailed inquiry of 541 political spending‐related shareholder proposals from 2004 to 2012 to highlight the role of shareholder activism as a mechanism to motivate ESG disclosure. Unlike earlier studies, we examine both proposals that went to a vote and proposals that were withdrawn by the activist, allowing us to assess more comprehensively the success of shareholder activism. We find that 20 percent of firms targeted by disclosure proposals begin disclosing in the subsequent year, although implementation rates vary by proposal type—8 percent for proposals subject to a vote versus 56 percent for proposals withdrawn. The sponsor is also important: unions and public pension funds are less likely than other activists to target firms with agency problems and are less successful in having proposals withdrawn, and the implementations they obtain are viewed more negatively by the broader investor base. Our findings highlight shareholder proposals as one mechanism through which investors can successfully express their preferences for corporate disclosure policies. Given activists' long‐standing interest in environmental and social disclosure policies, we believe our findings generalize to a broader set of ESG disclosures.     

Flood Risk and Salience: New Evidence from the Sunshine State

A growing literature finds evidence that flood risk salience varies over time, spiking directly following a flood and then falling off individuals' cognitive radar in the following years. In this article, we provide new evidence of salience exploiting a hurricane cluster impacting Florida that was preceded and followed by periods of unusual calm. Utilizing residential property sales across the state from 2002 through 2012, our main estimate finds a salience impact of ?8%, on average. The salience effect persists when we base estimation only on spatial variation in prices to limit confounding from other simultaneous changes due to shifting hedonic equilibria over time. These effects range from housing prices decreases of 5.4–12.3% depending on the year of sale. Understanding flood risk salience has important implications for flood insurance and disaster policy, the benefits transfer literature, and, more broadly, our understanding of natural disaster resilience. JEL Classification: Q51, Q54, R21     

Media-Based Sentiment Indices as an Alternative Measure of Consumer Confidence

In this paper, we consider the feasibility of constructing online sentiment indices, using large amounts of media data, as an alternative to the conventional survey method used to create the consumer confidence index in South Africa. A clustering framework is adopted to provide an indication of possible candidate sentiment indices constructed from a combination of different text sources and dictionaries that best mimic the traditional survey-based consumer confidence index from the South African Bureau for Economic Research (BER). The results conclude that it is possible to create an index using sentiment analysis using online editorial data that does resemble the BER’s consumer confidence index. The different media-based sentiment indices (MSI) show a significant level of correlation and co-movement with the BER’s CCI. Impulse responses and cross-correlation functions indicate that the MSI could potentially lead the survey-based method up to two quarters. Furthermore, Granger-causality tests show that the media-based indices are good predictors of future consumer confidence index values. The results provide motivation for further study on the use of sentiment-based techniques and online media data sources to track consumer confidence within an emerging market such as South Africa.     

Stock market volatility forecasting: Do we need high-frequency data?

The general consensus in the volatility forecasting literature is that high-frequency volatility models outperform low-frequency volatility models. However, such a conclusion is reached when low-frequency volatility models are estimated from daily returns. Instead, we study this question considering daily, low-frequency volatility estimators based on open, high, low, and close daily prices. Our data sample consists of 18 stock market indices. We find that high-frequency volatility models tend to outperform low-frequency volatility models only for short-term forecasts. As the forecast horizon increases (up to one month), the difference in forecast accuracy becomes statistically indistinguishable for most market indices. To evaluate the practical implications of our results, we study a simple asset allocation problem. The results reveal that asset allocation based on high-frequency volatility model forecasts does not outperform asset allocation based on low-frequency volatility model forecasts.     

Auditors,Specialists, and Professional Jurisdiction in Audits of Fair Values

Auditors frequently use valuation specialists to help them evaluate fair values, but researchers and regulators know little about how auditors use these specialists. Based on interviews with 28 auditors and 14 valuation specialists, I develop a theoretical framework informed by expert systems and professional competition theories. The interviews suggest that institutional pressures in the fair value environment unevenly impact auditors and specialists, causing tension between auditors' needs for ontological security and jurisdictional claims. This tension leads to one-sided competition between auditors and specialists and incomplete acceptance of specialists' work. Auditors' competitive behaviors coupled with this incomplete acceptance result in a tendency to make specialists' work conform to auditors' views. Collectively, these findings suggest that auditors use specialists as an institutional mechanism to create comfort, but not insight. This study links expert systems and professional competition theories, and it provides critical insight into some assumptions underlying tenets of each theory. It also informs researchers, regulators, and practitioners interested in understanding and addressing problems related to the use of specialists.     

Transition towards and of sustainability—Understanding sustainability as performative

Our purpose is to explore the concept of “sustainability” when understood from a performative perspective, i.e. as a concept that is filled with meaning across time. Drawing on a 10 year-long study of the digital footprint of Stockholm Royal Seaport, claimed to be northern Europe's largest sustainable urban development district, we show that “sustainability” emerged as the project became associated with particular places, projects, histories, and technologies. This means that “sustainability” was local in that it was situated in the particular spatial context of the project; temporal in that it was situated in a particular time; and political in that it expressed particular values and perspectives. The study contributes to explaining why “sustainability” remains—and always will remain—a contested concept, which is why sustainability transitions are complex. Consequently, we suggest that the transition towards sustainability always involves the transition of sustainability, something that needs to be acknowledged in order for a transition to actually become sustainable.