An investigation into the financial characteristics of dividend initiating firms

Dividend announcements are said to have an informational content concerning the value of the firm. Most studies on dividend announcements have involved models to predict change or to analyze that informational content. The purpose of this study is to establish the financial characteristics of firms that initiate or significantly increase dividends. One hundred firms were selected for study. Fifty of the firms had recently either initiated or significantly increased dividends; the other fifty were selected at random. Significant differences were found in the financial characteristics of the two groups. The results were generally consistent with previous studies and finance theory. There were however, two genuine surprises. The dividend initiating firms possessed lower levels of liquidity and activity than firms selected at random. This suggests that dividends may not be paid to dispose of excess cash, but to provide shareholders with some tangible reward in periods of low liquidity and little activity.     

Bayesian inference for the mover–stayer model in continuous time with an application to labour market transition data

This paper presents Bayesian inference procedures for the continuous time mover–stayer model applied to labour market transition data collected in discrete time. These methods allow us to derive the probability of embeddability of the discrete‐time modelling with the continuous‐time one. A special emphasis is put on two alternative procedures, namely the importance sampling algorithm and a new Gibbs sampling algorithm. Transition intensities, proportions of stayers and functions of these parameters are then estimated with the Gibbs sampling algorithm for individual transition data coming from the French Labour Force Surveys collected over the period 1986–2000. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Technical analysis compared to mathematical models based methods under parameters mis-specification

In this study, we compare the performance of trading strategies based on possibly mis-specified mathematical models with a trading strategy based on a technical trading rule. In both cases, the trader attempts to predict a change in the drift of the stock return occurring at an unknown time. We explicitly compute the trader’s expected logarithmic utility of wealth for the various trading strategies. We next rely on Monte Carlo numerical experiments to compare their performance. The simulations show that under parameter mis-specification, the technical analysis technique out-performs the optimal allocation strategy but not the Model and Detect strategies. The latter strategies dominance is confirmed under parameter mis-specification as long as the two stock returns’ drifts are high in absolute terms.     

Institute for the future's study of the UK, 1978–1995

The method used expert opinions (collected through interviews), scenario generation, and a simple econometric model. Some methodological innovations are reported; eg aids to assist experts in thinking ahead, and in how scenarios are generated and aggregated.     

Leverage and investment in diversified firms

Within diversified firms, the negative impact of leverage on investment is significantly greater for high q than for low q segments and significantly greater for non-core than for core segments. This differs substantially from focused firms and is consistent with the view that diversified firms allocate a disproportionate share of their debt service burden to their higher q and non-core segments. We also find that, among low-growth firms, the positive relation between leverage and firm value is significantly weaker in diversified firms than in focused firms. We conclude that the disciplinary benefits of debt are partially offset by the additional managerial discretion in allocating debt service that is provided by the diversified organizational structure.     

Strategies for understanding and changing local revenue policies and practices in Ghana's decentralization programme

The 1971 Local Administration Act is the basis for Ghana's attempt to decentralize development planning and budgeting from the centre in Accra to the 68 districts of Ghana. The Act allows District Councils to collect numerous revenues and to retain them as a financial base for implementing District development projects. In 1977 the Economic and Rural Development Management training programme was initiated to help improve revenue collection and the development planning and budgeting capacity of elected officials and civil servants at the district level. Participants worked in teams to determine the potential district revenue base for decentralized development planning, to understand local behavioural patterns in the revenue collection process, and to recommend procedures for improving district revenue administration. The training programme has resulted in dramatic improvements in district government revenue policies and practices leading to a larger financial base for the funding of projects identified and designed locally. Data indicating the positive impact of the training programme for improving local revenue are provided for Techiman District.     

Racial differences in unemployment: A spatial perspective

Conclusions It has been demonstrated that racial differences in unemployment in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas are widespread. The differences tend to vary, however, by region with the greatest difference occurring in the metropolitan areas of the North-Central region and the least difference occurring in the metropolitan areas in the West.     

Asian development and poverty reduction strategies: Integrating fisheries into the development discourse

Asia is the world’s foremost capture fishery and aquaculture producer. It is also home to the majority of the world’s fishers and marine fleet (decked and undecked). Consequently, there is every reason to expect that this importance is reflected in national development discourses. This article identifies the socio-economic importance of fisheries in the region in terms of its contribution to primary exports, domestic protein consumption, employment and poverty alleviation. We then analyse national development and poverty reduction strategy documents using a content analysis methodology previously applied to measure the extent to which environmental or forestry issues had been mainstreamed into national policy documents. This enables us to identify those countries that have currently integrated fisheries into the national development discourse – and those that have not. We conclude by proposing two strategies to enable the more effective integration of fisheries into the development agenda.     

Hybrid Choice Models: Progress and Challenges

We discuss the development of predictive choice models that go beyond the random utility model in its narrowest formulation. Such approaches incorporate several elements of cognitive process that have been identified as important to the choice process, including strong dependence on history and context, perception formation, and latent constraints. A flexible and practical hybrid choice model is presented that integrates many types of discrete choice modeling methods, draws on different types of data, and allows for flexible disturbances and explicit modeling of latent psychological explanatory variables, heterogeneity, and latent segmentation. Both progress and challenges related to the development of the hybrid choice model are presented.