Economic and policy implications of spectrum license fee payment methods

This paper argues that “Do auctions raise consumer prices?” is a misleading question. License fee payment methods, rather than spectrum assignment methods, are key factors that bring forth different market outcomes in the wireless telecommunication industry. This paper analyzes and discusses the effects of three spectrum license fee payment methods—upfront lump-sum fees, royalties, and profit sharing—on economic efficiency, spectrum supply, and government revenue. Royalties create distortions in product and factor markets but can induce the government to increase spectrum supply and encourage firms’ investments. A caveat is that the analyses are based on the model assuming monopoly market and information certainty.     

Implied volatility term structure and exchange rate predictability

This paper provides empirical evidence of the predictive power of the currency implied volatility term structure (IVTS) for the behavior of the exchange rate from both cross-sectional and time series perspectives. Intriguingly, the direction of the prediction is not the same for developed and emerging markets. For developed markets, a high slope means low future returns, while for emerging markets it means high future returns. We analyze predictability from a cross-sectional perspective by building portfolios based on the slope of the term structure, and thus present a new currency trading strategy. For developed (emerging) currencies, we buy (sell) the two currencies with the lowest slopes and sell (buy) the two with the highest slopes. The proposed strategy performs better than common currency strategies – carry trade, risk reversal, and volatility risk premium (VRP) – based on the Sharpe ratio, considering only currency returns, which supports the exchange rate predictability of the IVTS from a cross-sectional perspective.     

The China–US Trade War: Deep‐Rooted Causes,Shifting Focus and Uncertain Prospects

The USA has waged a trade war against China, whose rapid rise has come to be seen as a threat to US hegemony. Besides imposing additional tariffs on imported Chinese products, the USA is also tightening restrictions on the transfer of technology to China and the business activities of some Chinese high‐tech companies, notably Huawei. The escalation of the trade war into a tech war could lead to a decoupling between the US and Chinese economies, if not a world economy divided into two economic blocs that centered on them.     

Further empirical evidence on block transactions below the MBR: the Spanish market

There is a relatively unknown market for partial control or corporate influence in Spanish listed firms, where the control transaction size is below the legal threshold that triggers a mandatory tender offer, as this kind of deal looks for exercising some degree of control, but not a full control. The goal of this paper is to go further in its empirical analysis by exploring its distinguishing features, using as the criterion to define its transactions obtaining a seat in the board of directors. We find that these deals are mainly located in the segment of the market of large trades where the rules for private negotiations are easier to implement; the size of the block is relatively large and it is negotiated as a whole block. Besides, the most common buyer has no previous stake in the firm. We find no evidence that the buyers pay, in median, for a seat on the board of directors, but the variability of the premiums for those blocks is higher and shows that buyers that had no control position in the target firm pay more for being among largest shareholders (partial control) and less for not being among them (influence).     

A location-routing model for prepositioning and distributing emergency supplies

We propose a two-stage location-routing model with recourse for integrated preparedness and response planning under uncertainty. The model is used for risk management in disaster situations where there are uncertainties in demand and the state of the infrastructure. We solve the two-stage model by converting it into a single-stage counterpart. The latter is then implemented in an illustrative example. Comparative analyses are run to investigate the (1) value of planning location and routing in a single model, (2) value of transshipment, (3) differences when an expected-value objective is used, and (4) value of transshipment in the expected-value model.     

The valuation of risk transfer in UK school public private partnership contracts

A number of studies have examined the public private partnership (PPP) policy and have questioned the risk transfer argument used by the UK government to legitimise its adoption. This paper contributes to the literature by illustrating how accounting numbers have been used to value risks and justify the PPP decision. Data from the full business cases of two UK PPP schools and semi-structured interviews are used to illustrate the complexities and subjective judgements involved in valuing risks and achieving optimal risk transfer. The analysis suggests that the accounting numbers used to value risks are not neutral or objective but are socially constructed and may be manipulated to justify the PPP decision.     

Liquidity risk in derivatives valuation: an improved credit proxy method

The models used to calculate post-crisis valuation adjustments, market risk and capital measures for derivatives are subject to liquidity risk due to severe lack of available information to obtain market implied model parameters. The European Banking Authority has proposed an intersection methodology to calculate a proxy CDS or Bond spread. Due to practical issues of this method, Chourdakis et al. introduce a cross-section approach. In this paper, we extend the cross-section methodology using equity returns, and show that our methodology is significantly more accurate compared to both existing methodologies, and produces more reliable, stable and robust market risk and capital measures, and credit valuation adjustment.     

Conference Announcement

This paper presents a case study of a landslide that devastated a small rural community in the redwoods of northern California. This seemingly mundane event is used to explore several insights offered by recent literature on environmental risk, and illustrate the extent to which our reliance on modern, technologically complex industrial systems as the basis for risk scholarship may limit our understanding of the role of environmental risk in society. This landslide, and the political upheaval that followed it, point to the need for more rigorous sociological analysis of how hazards , rather than risks, are legitimated in political discourse through a process called 'normalization'; and of the complex of organizational structures of causation that encourage the development of risky situations, not only in modern technological systems, but in systems of society-environment interaction with a much longer history, such as the extraction and management of timber.     

风险文化：拉什美学维度自反性现代化的后果

拉什著名的风险文化概念是其美学维度自反性现代化自我建构的终极产物，与贝克的风险社会有根本的区别。从美学维度自反性现代化与风险文化之间的因果关系出发，根据美学维度自反性现代化主体、思维模式、传播媒介等方面在风险境遇中的演化趋势，对风险文化的生成原因进行剖析及反思。     

Modeling Foreign Exchange Risk Premium in Armenia

This paper applies stochastic discount factor methodology to modeling the foreign exchange risk premium in Armenia. We use weekly data on foreign and domestic currency deposits, which coexist in the Armenian banking system. This coexistence implies elimination of the cross-country risks and transaction costs, leaving the pure foreign exchange risk. It is shown that there exists a systematic time-varying risk premium that increases with maturity. Using two-currency affine term structure and generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH)-in-mean models, we find that the central bank's foreign exchange market interventions and ratio-of-deposit volumes significantly affect public expectations about foreign exchange fluctuations. We also find that the foreign exchange risk premium accounts for the largest part of the interest differential. When accounting for economic and institutional differences, our results can be extended to other countries.