Discussion of “Were Information Intermediaries Sensitive to the Financial Statement‐Based Leading Indicators of Bank Distress Prior to the Financial Crisis?”

I discuss Desai, Rajgopal, and Yu ( 2016 ) with the goal of helping readers think carefully about which implications of the study are likely to generalize to future economic downturns and which are likely to be specific to the facts and circumstances of the recent financial crisis, given that the crisis was driven by the expectation and then the realization of a single market variable, national house price depreciation.     

Introducing ‘Young Minds Matter’

Young Minds Matter: The second Australian Child and Adolescent Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing provides updated national prevalence estimates of mental disorders in children and adolescents and measures the burden and impact of these disorders and the use of services and unmet need for services in the health and education sectors. The field work for Young Minds Matter included face‐to‐face interviews with the primary carer of 6,310 children and adolescents aged 4–17 years who were randomly selected from across Australia. This article describes the survey, the response rates achieved and the representativeness of the sample.     

Product Development as Core Competence: How Formal Product Development Practices Differ for Radical,More Innovative,and Incremental Product Innovations

Although universally recognized as an important consideration in building product development (PD) competency, the effect of a firm's ability to vary its PD practices to develop winning products has been given scant attention in large‐scale, multiorganizational, quantitative studies. This research explores differences in formal new PD practices among three project types—incremental, more innovative, and radical. Using a sample of 380 business units, this research investigates how development practices differ across these three classes of innovation with respect to the formal PD process, project organization, PD strategy, organizational culture, and senior management commitment. Our results diverge from several commonly held beliefs about formal PD processes and the management of radical versus incremental innovations. Our results indicate that radical projects are managed less flexibly than incremental projects. Instead of being an offshoot of less strategic planning, radical projects are just as strategically aligned as incremental projects. Instead of being informally introduced entrepreneurial adventures, radical projects are often the result of more formal ideation methods. While these results may be counterintuitive to suppositional models of how to radical innovation happens, it is the central theme of this research to show how radical innovation actually happens. Our findings also provide a foundation for reexamining the role of control in the management of innovation. As the level of innovativeness increased, so too did the amount of controls imposed—e.g., less flexibility in the development process, more professional, full‐time project leadership, centralized executive oversight for new products, and formal financial assessments of expected NP performance.     

Jump detection with wavelets for high-frequency financial time series

This paper introduces a new nonparametric test to identify jump arrival times in high frequency financial time series data. The asymptotic distribution of the test is derived. We demonstrate that the test is robust for different specifications of price processes and the presence of the microstructure noise. A Monte Carlo simulation is conducted which shows that the test has good size and power. Further, we examine the multi-scale jump dynamics in US equity markets. The main findings are as follows. First, the jump dynamics of equities are sensitive to data sampling frequency with significant underestimation of jump intensities at lower frequencies. Second, although arrival densities of positive jumps and negative jumps are symmetric across different time scales, the magnitude of jumps is distributed asymmetrically at high frequencies. Third, only 20% of jumps occur in the trading session from 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM, suggesting that illiquidity during after-hours trading is a strong determinant of jumps.     

Retail Commercial Banking: An Update on a Period of Extraordinary Change

The 1990s has been an extraordinary period for theretail commercial banking industry. This industryupdate discusses some of the important developmentsand issues they have raised from the standpoint ofcompetition and antitrust policy. A massive mergermovement and removal of restrictions on interstatebanking have raised questions about barriers to entry,the influence of very large banks on the behavior ofother banks in local banking markets, the potentialfor multimarket interdependence among large banks thatmeet one another in numerous markets, and theappropriateness of local markets for analyzingcompetition. Finally, the emergence of electronicbanking and the unbundling of the pricing of serviceshave highlighted the possible importance of switchingcosts for customers in retail banking.     

Contracts Versus Price Discrimination: Evidence From the SONJ Case

A feature of the Standard Oil antitrust case is that much of the case revolves around Standard’s selling lubricating oils to railroads. This paper explores the government’s theory that Standard’s rebates to the Pennsylvania RR represented price discrimination. Standard’s defense was an assertion that the lubrication contracts were relational contracts involving a service and that the behavior which the government labeled discriminatory represented persistent inefficient behavior on the part of the Pennsylvania system. Data from the trial and other sources are used to attempt to determine if the evidence presented at trial favors price discrimination or Standard’s inefficiency defense. This is done using data envelopment analysis to determine the inefficiency the Pennsylvania RR. However, in the end, most aspects of the case must be considered “not proven.”     

Electronic monitoring and surveillance in call centres: a framework for investigation

The worker performing a monitored task and the social processes surrounding the task provide a basis for integrating psychological and sociological research on work performance monitoring and surveillance in call centres. Foci include individual boundaries, compliance and resistance, controlling the effects of monitoring, negotiated order, metacommunication, and social support.     

Myopic Corporate Behaviour with Optimal Management Incentives

Existing models in which stock markets lead to corporate 'short-termism' rely on an exogenously imposed objective for top managers. This paper endogenizes both managers' concern for short-term stock prices and the resulting distortions. We show that when the manager can trade on her own account on the stock market in a way that is observable to market participants but which is not verifiable in court, shareholders will choose an incentive contract which induces a bias towards short-term returns. Consistent with recent evidence, the short-term bias is greater when the optimal contract provides low-powered management incentives.