The ASEAN multilateral agreement on air services: En route to open skies?

The ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations recently adopted a Multilateral Agreement on Air Services that seeks to liberalize market access and ownership and control requirements for air carriers in the region. The Agreement is a precursor to an eventual Single Aviation Market arrangement targeted for 2015. This article analyzes the key provisions of the Agreement and identifies the factors that will likely impact on the future SAM. In particular, there is uncertainty as to whether the SAM will go beyond third, fourth and fifth freedom relaxations to include important seventh freedom rights as well as more permissive ownership and control structures for air carriers. There are also lingering concerns over the loss of state sovereignty impacting on attempts to harmonize safety and technical standards, aviation security and competition policy.     

浅论我国口述史工作者的修养

当代口述史研究引入我国时间尚短,符合我国实际的口述史研究范式和理论还在探索中。口述史研究因其生动性、民主性和广泛性等特点,研究方法逐渐为诸多学科吸纳。口述史研究要加快发展,取得更大的突破,其从业者的修养问题应给予重视。口述史工作者只有持“公正”之心;拥有扎实的史学功底和经过相关的专业培训;汲取相关学科成果,与时代紧密结合;高扬民主旗帜,让大众参与历史还原,口述史研究才能健康、持久。     

Intrinsic inflation persistence

Empirical evidence suggests that inflation determination is not purely forward-looking, but models of price setting have struggled to rationalize this finding without directly assuming backward-looking pricing rules for firms. This paper shows that intrinsic inflation persistence can be explained with no deviation from optimizing, forward-looking behaviour if prices that have remained fixed for longer are more likely to be changed than those set recently. A relationship between the probability of price adjustment and the duration of a price spell is shown to imply a simple “hybrid” Phillips curve including lagged and expected inflation, which is estimated using macroeconomic data.     

权证对投资者投资偏好影响的实证研究

金融衍生产品的出现提高了证券市场信息传递的速度，知情交易者通过对衍生品的投资提高传递的效率。本文通过对我国权证市场和相应标的股票市场交易高频数据的研究，探讨知情交易者在权证市场出现后是否改变了投资的对象。实证结果表明，尽管有部分知情交易者投资了认购权证，但是并没有证据表明知情交易者偏好认沽权证。造成这一结果的原因可能是权证制度自身的缺陷。     

How Banks' Value-at-Risk Disclosures Predict their Total and Priced Risk: Effects of Bank Technical Sophistication and Learning over Time

Using a sample of eight large commercial banks from 1994 to 2000, Jorion (2002) finds that banks' VaR disclosures for their trading portfolios predict trading income variability. We extend Jorion's findings using a larger sample of 17 banks from 1997 to 2002 reporting trading VaRs under FRR No. 48 (1997). We find that banks' trading VaRs have predictive power for trading income variability that increases with bank technical sophistication and over time. We find that banks' trading VaRs have predictive power for a bank-wide measure of total risk, return variability, and for two bank-wide measures of priced risk, beta and realized returns.     

Adoption of activity management practices in public sector organizations

This paper examines the extent to which activity management practices are adopted by Australian public sector organizations at each of Gosselin's (1997) levels of Activity Analysis, Activity Cost Analysis, and Activity‐based Costing. The present paper replicates Baird et al. (2004), thereby enabling a comparison of the extent of adoption of activity management in the public sector with that reported in the private sector in Baird et al. (2004). The results reveal that the adoption of higher level activity management practices (Activity Cost Analysis and Activity‐based Costing) is less prevalent in public sector organizations, whereas they adopt Activity Analysis to the same extent as the private sector.     

Pricing Annuity Guarantees Under a Regime-Switching Model

Abstract

We consider the pricing problem of equity-linked annuities and variable annuities under a regimeswitching model when the dynamic of the market value of a reference asset is driven by a generalized geometric Brownian motion model with regime switching. In particular, we assume that regime switching over time according to a continuous-time Markov chain with a finite number state space representing economy states. We use the Esscher transform to determine an equivalent martingale measure for fair valuation in the incomplete market setting. The paper is complemented with some numerical examples to highlight the implications of our model on pricing these guarantees.     

Multiperiod Optimal Investment-Consumption Strategies with Mortality Risk and Environment Uncertainty

Abstract

In this article we investigate three related investment-consumption problems for a risk-averse investor: (1) an investment-only problem that involves utility from only terminal wealth, (2) an investment-consumption problem that involves utility from only consumption, and (3) an extended investment-consumption problem that involves utility from both consumption and terminal wealth. Although these problems have been studied quite extensively in continuous-time frameworks, we focus on discrete time. Our contributions are (1) to model these investmentconsumption problems using a discrete model that incorporates the environment risk and mortality risk, in addition to the market risk that is typically considered, and (2) to derive explicit expressions of the optimal investment-consumption strategies to these modeled problems. Furthermore, economic implications of our results are presented. It is reassuring that many of our findings are consistent with the well-known results from the continuous-time models, even though our models have the additional features of modeling the environment uncertainty and the uncertain exit time.