Why Do Fund Families Release Underperforming Incubated Mutual Funds?

Although the average incubated mutual fund outperforms nonincubated funds by up to 3.41% annually, a large number of released funds underperform during incubation. We find that launching underperforming incubated mutual funds is associated with objectives that attract large inflows and lower relative risk. These findings are consistent with the use of incubation to maximize fee revenue through means other than the flow‐to‐performance relationship. We also find that underperforming incubated funds are incubated longer suggesting that families release funds opportunistically to take advantage of outperformance when it is observed.     

The Domestication of Geopolitics: Buddhist-Muslim Conflict and the Policing of Marriage and the Body in Ladakh,India

This paper approaches intimacy as a site of geopolitical practice. What happens when the body is the territory through which geopolitical strategies are played out? In the Leh district of India's Jammu and Kashmir state Buddhist/Muslim conflict is articulated at the site of the body and geopolitical strategies impinge on personal decisions. Over the past century religious identity has increasingly taken on political meaning in Leh, particularly since the 1980s. Interestingly, for average Ladakhis political conflict is described in terms of bodies – that is, through discussions of who should or should not eat together, get married, or have children. By destabilising the global geopolitical scale, we can arrive at a richer and more nuanced understanding of the everyday ways in which our bodies are incorporated into or reject incorporation into geopolitical strategies to control territory.

In the past, the Buddhists were more. Now, it's the Buddhists, mostly, I think, who have used family planning. Among the Shia Muslims, if you look in Kargil and Chushot, even now, they have nine each or eight each. Rinpoches say that our Buddhists are getting fewer, and then our Hill Council, in the future it's going to be run by Shia Muslims. What the Buddhist Association did, it said to all the Buddhists, “You should think. Up to four, or up to six, or up to five, let them be born. Don't sterilize after two.” (Yangdol, 45-year-old Buddhist mother of three) ¹ 1. Names of research participants have been replaced with pseudonyms throughout. Yangdol uses here the term “Balti,” to refer to Shia Muslims. In Ladakh the terms Balti and Kache are frequently used to distinguish between Shia and Sunni Muslims. These terms however, are somewhat misleading as they are geographic markers – Balti means a person from Baltistan and Kache means Kashmiri. These terms are regularly applied to Ladakhis to denote their religious identity, but in my interviews I have found it is more common for Buddhists to deploy these words and that Muslims more often differentiate using the terms Shia and Sunni. In later interviews throughout this paper I have translated Balti and Kache as Shia and Sunni, however, I have bracketed the term to indicate this substitution. A rinpoche is a high monk, generally the reincarnated spiritual leader of a particular monastery. Kargil is the district to Leh's west, dominated by Shia Muslims, and Chushot is a Shia-majority village that meanders along the Indus River, just southeast of Leh.

In the beginning, in the very beginning, the relationship was very good. We were like one person. There were Buddhists who married with Muslims, and Muslims who married with Buddhists. Now, times have changed, and things are different. Now people don't understand, and they have bad hearts. (Razia, 45-year-old Sunni mother of two)     

Do risk and competition trigger conditional cooperation? Evidence from public good experiments

We investigate the effect of intra-group competition and risk marginal per capita returns on subjects' cooperative behavior in a one-shot public good game—following the well-known approach proposed by Fischbacher, Gächter, and Fehr (2001) and extending the Colasante et al. (2018, 2019) parametrization. We study the interaction between environment and social preferences and test the existence of a causal relationship of risk and competition over cooperative behavior when an individual's benefit of the public good is heterogeneous and uncertain. Our results report experimental evidence about competition fostering cooperative behavior leading to a rise in contribution for all the subjects regardless of their social preferences. However, risk has a detrimental effect on cooperative behavior due to encouraging free riding.     

The Other Side of Value: The Effect of Quality on Price and Return in Real Estate

We examine the effect of quality on price and return in real estate. Quality real estate stocks generally trade at higher prices. However, similar to findings in the aggregate stock market (Asness et al. 2013), quality in listed real estate is not fully reflected in price. A long quality, short junk portfolio (QMJ) is found to produce average risk-adjusted returns of 3.6 % per quarter (14.4 % annually). QMJ has a significantly positive coefficient when added as a dependent variable to a 4-factor model explaining U.S. real estate excess returns, including market, size, value and momentum factors, and leads to a small improvement in the overall fit of the model. Further investigation of the components of quality shows that profitability has a consistently positive relationship with real estate excess returns, while higher dividend payout is consistently associated with lower returns, in contrast to findings for conventional firms.     

Testing Employment Determination in Unionised Economies as a Repeated Game

This paper is an empirical analysis of alternative bargaining theories of wage and employment determination. Using data from manufacturing sectors of the Spanish economy, we find that unions and firms are not myopic and take dynamic considerations into account in the bargaining process. This work is an empirical test of the bargaining model in Espinosa and Rhee (1989) and provides support for their conclusions.     

Behind the scenes of the telecommunications miracle: An empirical analysis of the Indian market

The paper analyzes the demand and supply characteristics of the Indian telecommunications market, with the aim of contributing to the debate on the effectiveness of universal access policies in developing countries. The discussion is supported by some empirical evidence derived from a small time-series-cross-section dataset, containing mainly information on the fixed-lines segment of the market. The analysis suggests that the price elasticity of demand for fixed lines might be sensibly higher than the levels usually found in developed countries, while the crucial role of income and other sociodemographic variables seems to be confirmed. The paper also studies the impact of cellular penetration on fixed-lines diffusion. The results suggest the existence of a (positive) network effect in low penetration areas, while substitution (displacement) seems to arise in the most developed ones. Finally, the paper analyzes the supply side of the market, to assess the impact of market competition on investment. Competition seemingly helps stimulating investment in the most developed areas, but does not seem to have a significant impact in the less developed ones.     

Identifying tourists with smaller environmental footprints

This paper identifies which information about tourists serves as the best predictor of their pro-environmental behavior at home and on vacation. If a small set of predictors can be identified, the tourism industry would be able to use them to focus attention on attracting tourists with smaller environmental footprints. Results from a survey asking respondents about pro-environmental behavior in their role as residents and tourists indicate that environmental concern, altruism, feeling morally obliged to behave in an environmentally friendly manner, age and regional identity are the best predictors of the segment of people who behave in an environmentally friendly way at home. Income levels and moral obligation best predict membership of the segment of environmentally friendly tourists. The two segments overlap; differences between them are due to the fact that, at home, people can create the infrastructure they require to behave in an environmentally friendly way. On vacation they need to adjust to the infrastructure provided, which can act as a barrier to pro-environmental behavior. Results have direct practical implications, highlighting the value of demand-side approaches to environmentally sustainable tourism for protected areas, both urban and rural, such as focusing on those market segments that have the highest intrinsic inclination to protect the environment.     

Enhancing consumer engagement in an online brand community via user reputation signals: a multi-method analysis

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science - Generating and maintaining consumers’ engagement in online brand communities is critical for marketing managers to enhance relationships and gain...     

The effects of Six Sigma on corporate performance: An empirical investigation

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of adopting Six Sigma on corporate performance. Although there is a fairly large and growing body of anecdotal evidence associated with the benefits of implementing Six Sigma, there is very little systematic and rigorous research investigating these benefits. This research extends previous research in several important ways including utilizing a sample of 84 Six Sigma firms that represent a wide variety of industries and firm characteristics, utilizing rigorously constructed control groups to ensure the validity of our comparisons and conclusions, and investigating the impact of adopting Six Sigma on corporate performance over a ten year period. To carry out this investigation, the event study methodology is employed. The ten year period consists of three years prior to Six Sigma implementation, the event year corresponding to the year Six Sigma is adopted, and six years post Six Sigma implementation. To assess the impact of adopting Six Sigma on corporate performance we utilize commonly used measures including Operating Income/Total Assets (OI/A), Operating Income/Sales (OI/S), Operating Income/Number of Employees (OI/E), Sales/Assets (S/A), and Sales/Number of Employees (S/E). The sample Six Sigma firms are compared to different benchmarks including the overall industry performance and to the performance of carefully selected portfolios of control firms. The results of the study indicate that adopting Six Sigma positively impacts organizational performance primarily through the efficiency with which employees are deployed. More specifically, enhanced employee productivity results were observed in both static analyses that assessed the performance of the sample Six Sigma firms relative to their control groups at discrete points in time and dynamic analyses of the Six Sigma firms’ rate of improvement relative to the rate of improvement of their control groups. Benefits in terms of improved asset efficiency were not observed. Finally, there was no evidence that Six Sigma negatively impacts corporate performance.