Migration as a Strategy of Accumulation: Social and Economic Change in Eighteenth-Century Savoy

Migration from the mountain areas of pre-industrial Europe has been seen as the product of poverty. While hardship controlled the strategies of the more marginalized households, better placed families used their migration experience to establish themselves in commerce. Over generations they used contacts and kinship systems to develop important informal trading networks. It is difficult to establish the effects of this hidden activity on local mountain economies, but dowry payments and post mortem inventories are used to expose the impact of inflowing capital and its circulation.     

The Recognition and Timing of Deferred Tax Liabilities

Abstract:   This paper examines the characteristics of firms that account for deferred tax liabilities related to government investment grants under an extended adoption timing period. Not only the recognition but also the timing decision is associated with changes in future performance and changes in the debt structure. Recognisers outperform non‐recognisers in the future, while early recognition is related to post recognition performance but only for those firms that currently perform well. Changes in the balance sheet structure are also related to both decisions. Firms with recent increases in the debt level tend to postpone recognition, while currently well‐performing firms that increase their future debt level are less likely to recognise deferred taxes.     

Economic analysis of the impact of adopting herd health control programs on smallholder dairy farms in Central Thailand

The economic impact of adopting herd health programs for mastitis and reproduction by small-scale dairy producers of Central Thailand was assessed using a policy analysis matrix (PAM). Following a reduction in the incidence of bovine disease on adopter farms, an increase in private net profits is observed. More importantly the social costs of supporting dairy farmers is reduced; the PAM effective protection coefficient was reduced by 35% for mastitis program adopters and by 44% for reproductive program adopters, indicating improved social efficiency of dairy policy. Other indicators of efficiency and policy implications are discussed.     

Earnings Performance and Discretionary Disclosure

While the influence of earnings performance on disclosure is a fundamental issue in the disclosure literature, our understanding of this influence is limited. In this paper, I examine a comprehensive set of disclosures from a sample of firms experiencing an extended period of seasonally adjusted earnings increases. I study how these firms adjust disclosure in response to earnings increases, how disclosure changes as the period of strong earnings performance nears an end and how firms disclose during a subsequent period of earnings decline. I find an increase in disclosure during the period of increased earnings. This increase is pervasive across all types of disclosure and tends to be bundled with earnings announcements. The market responds positively to this disclosure. Firms continue to disclose at a high level as they approach earnings declines. However, they shift to disclosures that focus on the positive short-term results and do not discuss the impending decreases. While this behavior is systematic, the market does not appear to anticipate the subsequent earnings declines. Once the firms announce earnings declines, the magnitude of disclosure returns to the level provided prior to the increased earnings.     

Risks and Portfolio Decisions Involving Hedge Funds

This article characterizes the systematic risk exposures ofhedge funds using buy-and-hold and option-based strategies.Our results show that a large number of equity-oriented hedgefund strategies exhibit payoffs resembling a short positionin a put option on the market index and therefore bear significantleft-tail risk, risk that is ignored by the commonly used mean-varianceframework. Using a mean-conditional value-at-risk framework,we demonstrate the extent to which the mean-variance frameworkunderestimates the tail risk. Finally, working with the systematicrisk exposures of hedge funds, we show that their recent performanceappears significantly better than their long-run performance.