Is ethical money financially smart? Nonfinancial attributes and money flows of socially responsible investment funds

We study the money flows into and out of socially responsible investment (SRI) funds around the world. In their investment decisions, investors in SRI funds may be more concerned with ethical or social issues than with fund performance. Therefore, SRI money flows are less related to past fund returns. Ethical money is less sensitive to past negative returns than are conventional fund flows, especially when SRI funds primarily use negative or Sin/Ethical screens. Social attributes of SRI funds weaken the relation between money inflows and past positive returns. However, money flows into funds with environmental screens are more sensitive to past positive returns than are conventional fund flows. Stock picking based on in-house SRI research increases the money flows. These results give evidence on the role of nonfinancial attributes, which induce heterogeneity of investor clienteles within SRI funds. We find no evidence of a smart money effect, as the funds that receive more inflows neither outperform nor underperform their benchmarks or conventional funds.     

Improving the estimation of total factor productivity growth: capital operating time in a latent variable approach

Measuring labor and capital services accurately is essential to obtaining reliable estimates of production functions and total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Using data on the operating time of capital, a series that exists for the French business sector, greatly improves the measurement of effective capital services in production. The ensuing estimation results are consistent with Cobb–Douglas technology under constant returns to scale, with the factor elasticities not statistically different from their income shares. In the same framework, TFP growth is estimated as a latent variable and found to be less volatile than accounting residuals, negatively correlated with employment, and free of cyclicality. It is statistically best estimated as a first-order autoregressive process, with an autoregressive coefficient of 0.95. Total factor productivity growth was estimated to have declined steadily between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, but the rate of decline has diminished since then.     

Bankruptcies and economic history the example of France

The study of French bankruptcy archives has resulted in extensive research into the 18th and 19th centuries. No synthesis has been completed yet. A preliminary review of the literature on the subject is presented here, focusing on three stages: the archives, the statistics, and the data utilization.     

Slack-based directional distance function in the presence of bad outputs: theory and application to Vietnamese banking

In this paper we extend the slack-based directional distance function introduced by Färe and Grosskopf (Eur J Oper Res 200(1):320–322, 2010) to measure efficiency in the presence of bad outputs and illustrate it through an application on data of Vietnamese commercial banks. We also compare results from the slack-based directional distance function relative to the directional distance function, the enhanced hyperbolic efficiency measure (Färe et al. in Rev Econ Stat 71(1):90–98, 1989) and the Farrell-type technical efficiency and confirm that it has greater discriminative power.     

One-step ahead adaptive D-optimal design on a finite design space is asymptotically optimal

We study the consistency of parameter estimators in adaptive designs generated by a one-step ahead D-optimal algorithm. We show that when the design space is finite, under mild conditions the least-squares estimator in a nonlinear regression model is strongly consistent and the information matrix evaluated at the current estimated value of the parameters strongly converges to the D-optimal matrix for the unknown true value of the parameters. A similar property is shown to hold for maximum-likelihood estimation in Bernoulli trials (dose–response experiments). Some examples are presented.     

Is it tax competition or tax exporting?

This paper extends the basic tax-competition model to a framework in which jurisdictions have market power over the price of the output produced within their borders. If firms within the jurisdiction are competitive, the jurisdiction can play the role of monopoly-rent collector by using taxes to restrict the level of output. It is shown that the basic tax competition model can be thought of as a special case of this more general framework. In this framework, the opportunity to export the tax burden can partially or fully offset the well-known effects identified by the tax competition model.