WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE EURO?

The Stability Pact ‐ intended to make EMU governments run prudent budgets ‐ is losing its credibility. This article asks the question: what will happen if national debts start to rise again and some governments then have difficulty borrowing? It suggests that there will be calls for bailout, that the EU's political structures will not cope well with the resulting arguments over which countries will pay, and that the eventual and painful result will be a return to the principle that currencies and political areas coincide.     

Service Competitiveness – An Anglo-US Study

This article reports on the latest in a series of international comparisons of management practices and performance outcomes of industries in various countries. Here, it is the service industries in the UK and the US which come under the microscope. Among the companies surveyed, there were more world-class performers in the US than the UK, but also more low performers. The concluding part of the article is diagnostic – the authors also suggest measures which could improve performance.     

Buyout candidates and their investment banking relationships: An empirical analysis of returns adjoining buyout offers

Previous studies document a significant positive price reaction at the proposal of a buyout offer. In this study the author examines the influence of investment banking relationships on target firms associated with buyout offers. The results support the hypothesis that knowledge of an impending buyout manifests itself before a buyout’s public announcement. The evidence supports the hypothesis that investment bankers use different strategies before a buyout.     

Pricing Options on an Asset with Bernoulli Jump-Diffusion Returns

The price movements of certain assets can be modeled by stochastic processes that combine continuous diffusion with discrete jumps. This paper compares values of options on assets with no jumps, jumps of fixed size, and jumps drawn from a lognormal distribution. It is shown that not only the magnitude but also the direction of the mispricing of the Black-Scholes model relative to jump models can vary with the distribution family of the jump component. This paper also discusses a methodology for the numerical valuation, via a backward induction algorithm, of American options on a jump-diffusion asset whose early exercise may be profitable. These cannot, in general, be accurately priced using analytic models. The procedure has the further advantage of being easily adaptable to nonanalytic, empirical distributions of period returns and to nonstationarity in the underlying diffusion process.