Liquidity commonality and the intervalling effect

Past studies of liquidity commonality have reported conflicting findings regarding the relationship between market liquidity and firm size. The present paper provides empirical evidence that underlying estimation problems might be responsible for these results. We develop a model of information and spreads that provides some insights into the firm size–liquidity relationship. Our empirical evidence confirms the main testable implications of the model and presents evidence that the presence and strength of common covariability in liquidity depends upon the interval over which liquidity movements are measured. These intervalling effects are caused by delays in information being incorporated into bid and ask spreads.     

An Empirical Study on Corporate Governance and Market Valuation in China

This paper empirically studies the relationship between the governance mechanisms and the market valuation of publicly listed firms in China. The authors construct measures for corporate governance mechanisms and measures of market valuation for all publicly listed firms on the two stock markets in China by using data from the firm’s annual reports. They then investigate how the market-valuation variables are affected by the corporate governance variables while controlling for a number of factors commonly considered in market valuation analysis. A corporate governance index is also constructed to summarize the information contained in the corporate governance variables. The index is found to have statistically and economically significant effects on market valuation. The analysis indicates that investors pay a significant premium for well-governed firms in China, benefiting firms that improve their governance mechanisms. Translated from Economic Research Journal, 2005, 2 (in Chinese)     

成功的关键：以一致声音发言的行业

女士们、先生们:我作为IVSC的代表和该会的主席,非常感谢能获得在此开幕式上演讲的崇高待遇。我对自己被列为论坛嘉宾和演讲人也感到非常荣幸。让我首先对我们的东道主中国资产评估协会这次为精心组织国际评估准则委员会年会和本次论坛——昆明国际评估论坛所付出的巨大努力表示敬意!今天我们大家济济一堂,这表明论坛得到了广泛的关注和支持,真是令人振奋。中国资产评估协会于1999年IVSC在北京首次举行的会议上当选为IVSC常务理事,多年来已成为国际评估准则委员会的活跃成员。我对中国资产评估协会作为IVSC理事会和准则委员会的成员…     

Switzerland and the euro

Switzerland is not a member of the European Union and, therefore, does not belong to the euro area. Nevertheless, the exchange rate of the Swiss franc against the euro has remained fairly stable. This stability does not imply that the Swiss National Bank pegs the exchange rate to the euro. On the contrary, the Swiss National Bank continues to pursue an autonomous monetary policy since monetary autonomy conveys various benefits to the Swiss economy.     

Adam Smith’s theory of economic development: “Of the natural progress of opulence”

Adam Smith’s theory of economic development contained within Chapter I, Book III, of theWealth of Nations is presented in this paper. According to Smith, the natural order of development as it proceeds from primary to secondary to tertiary activity is determined by the evaluation of the relative risk and potential profit to be earned in alternative uses of capital. The emphasis of this theory is on the behavior of economic agents facing risk, rather than the amount of capital or the size of national saving or other measurable variables as in some modern approaches.     

Return predictability in African stock markets

This paper models weekly index returns adjusted for thin trading as a nonlinear autoregressive process with conditional heteroscedasticity to investigate the weak-form pricing efficiency of 11 African stock markets. Specifically, the use of the EGARCH-M model allows us to capture how conditional volatility affects the pricing process without imposing undue restrictions on the parameters of the conditional variance equation. On the basis of such a robust model, we are able to reject the evidence in prior studies that the Nigerian stock market is weak-form efficient. On the other hand, we confirm extant results that the markets in Egypt, Kenya, and Zimbabwe are efficient while that of South Africa is not weak-form efficient. We also generate new results, which point to the efficiency of the stock markets in Mauritius and Morocco, while the markets in Botswana, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Swaziland are not consistent with weak-form efficiency.     

What Makes a Blockbuster Video Game? An Empirical Analysis of US Sales Data

This study uses a unique data set of individual video game titles to estimate the effect of an exhaustive set of observable characteristics on the likelihood of a video game becoming a blockbuster title. Due to the long‐tailed distribution of the sales data, both ordinary least squares and logistic regression models are estimated. The results consistently show that blockbuster video games are more likely to be released by one of the major publishers for popular hardware platforms. Results also show that games of higher quality are significantly more likely to sell a greater number of units than those of a lower quality. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.