Market and Model Credit Default Swap Spreads: Mind the Gap!

Structural models of default establish a relation across the fair values of various asset classes (equity, bonds, credit derivatives) referring to the same company. In most circumstances such relation is verified in practice, as different financial assets tend to move in the same direction at similar speed. However, occasional deviations from the theoretical fair values occur, especially in times of financial turmoil. Understanding how the dynamics of the theoretical fair values of various assets compares to that of their market values is crucial to a number of market participants. This paper investigates whether a popular structural model, the CreditGrades approach proposed by Finger (2002) , Stamicar and Finger (2005) , succeeds in explaining the dynamic relation between equity/option variables and Credit Default Swap (CDS) premia at individual company level. We find that CDS model spreads display a significant correlation with CDS market spreads. However, the gap between the two is time varying and widens substantially in times of financial turbulence. The analysis of the gap dynamics reveals that this is partly due to episodes of decoupling between equity and credit markets, and partly due to shortcomings of the model. Finally, we observe that model spreads tend to predict market spreads.     

Does corporate social responsibility affect the cost of capital?

We examine the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the cost of equity capital for a large sample of US firms. Using several approaches to estimate firms’ ex ante cost of equity, we find that firms with better CSR scores exhibit cheaper equity financing. In particular, our findings suggest that investment in improving responsible employee relations, environmental policies, and product strategies contributes substantially to reducing firms’ cost of equity. Our results also show that participation in two “sin” industries, namely, tobacco and nuclear power, increases firms’ cost of equity. These findings support arguments in the literature that firms with socially responsible practices have higher valuation and lower risk.     

Does Zero Tillage Improve the Livelihoods of Smallholder Cropping Farmers?

The biophysical benefits of zero tillage (ZT) are well documented in the literature. However, the literature on its economic benefits, especially in the context of small and medium‐scale farmers in the temperate developing world is scanty. Using a study of 621 wheat farmers in Syria, we provide empirical evidence on the impacts of adoption of ZT on farm income and wheat consumption. We use propensity score matching (PSM) and endogenous switching regression (ESR) approaches to account for potential selection biases. After controlling for confounding factors, we find that adoption of the ZT technology leads to a US$ 189/ha (33%) increase in net crop income and a 26 kg (34%) gain in per capita wheat consumption per year (adult equivalent) – an indication of meaningful changes in the livelihoods of the farm households. Besides the biophysical and environmental benefits documented elsewhere, our results suggest that adoption of ZT can also be justified on economic and food security grounds. Therefore, ZT can have sizeable impacts in transforming the agricultural sector in the temperate developing world provided that the technology is well promoted and adopted.     

Stressors,Coping Mechanisms,Perceived Supervisory Support,and Well-Being Among Nurses During Accreditation Surveys: a Study from UAE

Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal - Organizational psychology applies psychological theories to improve the physical and mental well-being of employees, increase productivity, and...     

Coupling smiles

The present paper addresses the problem of computing implied volatilities of options written on a domestic asset based on implied volatilities of options on the same asset expressed in a foreign currency and the exchange rate. It proposes an original method together with explicit formulae to compute the at-the-money implied volatility, the smile's skew, convexity, and term structure for short maturities. The method is completely free of any model specification or Markov assumption; it only assumes that jumps are not present. We also investigate how the method performs on the particular example of the currency triplet dollar, euro, yen. We find a very satisfactory agreement between our formulae and the market at one week and one month maturities.     

Share transfer behaviour of newly introduced Tunisian companies and its determinants: An empirical analysis

This study seeks to determine the reasons behind original shareholder sales of particular numbers of shares at the IPO date. It also examines whether share transfer behaviour reveals specific characteristics of blockholders and if a non-linear relationship emerges between the variable representing the shares held by controlling shareholders immediately prior to the transaction and the share transfer variable. The sample consists of 46 Tunisian companies listed on the Tunis Stock Exchange during the period 1992–2012. Results show that the original shareholders sale decision depends significantly on company growth opportunities. Assignee shareholders benefit from favourable stock market conditions when they sell their shares at the IPO time. Share transfer behaviour depends on whether company ownership consists of a family or not, and on whether the shareholders are blockholders or not. Besides, controlling shareholders benefit from IPO to enhance their ownership.     

The microstructural foundations of leverage effect and rough volatility

We show that typical behaviors of market participants at the high frequency scale generate leverage effect and rough volatility. To do so, we build a simple microscopic model for the price of an asset based on Hawkes processes. We encode in this model some of the main features of market microstructure in the context of high frequency trading: high degree of endogeneity of market, no-arbitrage property, buying/selling asymmetry and presence of metaorders. We prove that when the first three of these stylized facts are considered within the framework of our microscopic model, it behaves in the long run as a Heston stochastic volatility model, where a leverage effect is generated. Adding the last property enables us to obtain a rough Heston model in the limit, exhibiting both leverage effect and rough volatility. Hence we show that at least part of the foundations of leverage effect and rough volatility can be found in the microstructure of the asset.     

Developing and validating a psychometric shopper-based mall equity measure

This paper introduces a new retailing concept called shopper-based mall equity (SBME). SBME is the differential effect of mall knowledge on shoppers' responses to a mall's marketing activities. The results of a study in two Canadian shopping malls consisting of 905 shoppers who were administered a questionnaire suggest that SBME is a bi-dimensional construct, composing two sub-scales, namely mall awareness and mall image. Further psychometric tests show a parsimonious SBME measure with support for convergent, discriminant and predictive validities. Multi-group latent mean structures show that the SBME measure is able to discriminate shoppers that globally attribute high-mall scores from those who globally attribute low-mall scores. The article includes theoretical and managerial implications.     

A Bayesian Net Benefit Approach to Cost‐effectiveness Analysis in Health Technology Assessment

The economic literature on cost‐effectiveness analysis in the context of decisions by health technology assessment agencies assumes as the quantity of interest a linear combination of the mean of the sampling distribution of the effectiveness and the cost. We argue that this is not always reasonable. Our reasons for this assertion are that (i) treatments are compared on the basis of mean values, and for some useful models the mean of the distribution of the cost, which is conditional on the available data, does not exist, and (ii) even for models for which the mean does exist, it might not constitute an accurate reflection of the distribution. This paper presents a general Bayesian cost‐effectiveness analysis of a single treatment, where the quantity of interest is the distribution, conditional on the data, of the net benefit. This approach permits a natural extension to several treatments, which enables us to make a statistical comparison. Illustrations with treatment comparisons for real and simulated data are given.