Efficiency in the Pricing of the FTSE 100 Futures Contract

This paper studies the pricing efficiency in the FTSE 100 futures contract by linking the predictable movements in futures returns to the time-varying risk and risk premia associated with prespecified factors. The results indicate that the predictability of the FTSE 100 futures returns is consistent with a conditional multifactor model with time-varying moments. The dynamics of the factor risk premia, combined with the variation in the betas, capture most of the predictable variance of returns, leaving little variation to be explained in terms of market inefficiency. Hence the predictive power of the instruments does not justify a rejection of market efficiency.     

Worksharing,access and bypass: the structure of prices in the postal sector

This paper studies a liberalized postal market where entrants may offer end-to-end products or concentrate on one of the segments of the network. Absent effective bypass, entry does not appear to be a serious financial threat to the incumbent, even when the products are perfect substitutes. This is no longer true when the entrant offers cheaper service in delivery. Then, the universal service provider may loose the entire pre-sorted mail market. It is left with probably low volume demand from households and from firms with high preparation cost, and its financial viability may be jeopardized. This paper has been presented at 13th CRRI Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics, June 2005.     

Corporate tax policy and incorporation in the EU

In Europe, declining corporate tax rates have come along with rising tax-to-GDP ratios. This paper explores to what extent income shifting from the personal to the corporate tax base can explain these diverging developments. We exploit a panel of European data on legal form of business to analyze income shifting via incorporation. The results suggest that the effect is significant and large. It implies that the revenue effects of lower corporate tax rates—possibly induced by tax competition—will partly show up in lower personal tax revenues rather than lower corporate tax revenues. Simulations suggest that between 12% and 21% of corporate tax revenue can be attributed to income shifting. Income shifting is found to have raised the corporate tax-to-GDP ratio by some 0.25% points since the early 1990s. This research was carried out while Ruud de Mooij was a visiting fellow at DG ECFIN in October 2006. The views expressed in this Article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the European Commission.     

Gender Analysis of the Policy Responses to High Oil Prices: A Case Study of South Africa

ABSTRACT

The 2007–8 surge in oil prices has created concern about its impacts on poor and vulnerable populations in developing countries. Government management of the energy crisis was shown to be important in reducing adverse impacts. This study uses an applied general equilibrium framework to examine alternative policy and external shocks with the recent surge in oil prices in South Africa through a gender lens. Simulation results show that although the 2007–8 energy crisis contributed to slowing down South African gross domestic product (GDP) growth and reducing employment and earnings, the distributional impact between men and women has been neutral. This neutrality is driven by an increase in capital inflows, which has mitigated the exchange rate depreciation owing to the oil price hike. Without an increase in capital inflows, the crisis would have significantly depreciated the exchange rate and contributed to decreasing women's market opportunities and increasing women's workload as compared to men.     

Decision making and brand choice by older consumers

Older adults constitute a rapidly growing demographic segment, but stereotypes persist about their consumer behavior. The goal of this review was to develop a more considered understanding of age-associated changes in consumer decision making. Our theoretical model suggests that age-associated changes in cognition, affect, and goals interact to make older consumers’ decision-making processes, brand choices, and habits different from those of younger adults. We first review literature on stereotypes about the elderly and then turn to an analysis of age differences in the inputs (cognition, affect, and goals) and the outcomes (decisions, brand choices, and habits) of decision processes.     

Rational Versus Intuitive Gatekeeping: Escalation of Commitment in the Front End of NPD

The unwillingness of a gatekeeper to let go of a fruitless new product development (NPD) project wastes valuable resources and hampers NPD performance. The onset of such escalation of commitment is likely to occur already in the front end of NPD, where high ambiguity and complexity make it hard to distinguish fruitless from potentially successful projects. This study investigates if a gatekeeper’s thinking style—whether they think rationally or whether they follow their intuition—can prevent escalation of commitment in the front end. Theory on cognition provides arguments for and against either thinking style’s influence on escalation of commitment, but empirical evidence on this matter is lacking. Our study demonstrates that gatekeepers who think rationally are less likely to escalate their commitment than those who follow their intuition. This result holds both in a correlational study of dispositional thinking styles, as well as in an individual‐level randomized experiment in which the thinking style of experienced practitioners before they take gate decisions is induced. Our findings provide ample opportunities for improving existing front end gate review practices, such as allocating candidates for gatekeeper positions based on their thinking style, training gatekeepers to think rationally, and increasing the use of gate‐decision rules and templates.     

Research in business service purchasing: current status and directions for the future

Management Review Quarterly - This paper provides a systematic literature review and a future research agenda on the topic of purchasing of business services (BuSe). BuSe purchasing has...     

Passive Hedge Fund Replication – Beyond the Linear Case

In this paper we extend Hasanhodzic and Lo (2007) by assessing the out‐of‐sample performance of various non‐linear and conditional hedge fund replication models. We find that going beyond the linear case does not necessarily enhance the replication power. On the other hand, we find that selecting factors on the basis on an economic analysis allows for a substantial improvement in out‐of‐sample replication quality, whatever the underlying form of the factor model. Overall, we confirm the findings in Hasanhodzic and Lo (2007) that the performance of the replicating strategies is systematically inferior to that of the actual hedge funds.