PLANNING MULTIPLE LOCATION INVENTORIES

Supplying customer demand from comparable alternate inventory locations when an item is out of stock at its primary stocking point creates a virtual inventory for that item. The expectation is that if more inventories can be drawn upon, the inventory for an item would be lower, the fill rate would be higher, or both. While generally true that safety stocks will be lower, regular stocks, on the other hand, may rise with such cross filling of demand. In this study, a methodology is developed that balances the cross filling effects on both regular and safety stocks for determining whether an inventoried item should be cross‐filled. An example and guidelines are given to show how the methodology can be simplified and applied in practice.     

Efficient Markets Hypothesis and the Emerging Capital Market in Sri Lanka: Evidence from the Colombo Stock Exchange – A Note

The behaviour of stock prices on the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) is examined with a view to determine its consistency with the weak form of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH). Runs, Autocorrelation and Cointegration tests are applied to daily, weekly and monthly CSE index data for the period of January 1991–November 1996. Results of Runs, Correlation and Cointegration tests overwhelmingly reject the serial independence hypothesis, leading to the conclusion that the behaviour of stock prices in the Colombo Stock Exchange is not consistent with the weak form of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. Tests of the-day-of-the-week-effect, however, show that there is no evidence of such a phenomenon on the Colombo Stock Exchange stock prices. Results of the tests of the-month-of-the-year-effect lead to the conclusion that CSE prices do not display any month-specific behaviour.     

Forecasting Stock Index Futures Price Volatility: Linear vs. Nonlinear Models

The study examines the relative ability of various models to forecast daily stock index futures volatility. The forecasting models that are employed range from naïve models to the relatively complex ARCH-class models. It is found that among linear models of stock index futures volatility, the autoregressive model ranks first using the RMSE and MAPE criteria. We also examine three nonlinear models. These models are GARCH-M, EGARCH, and ESTAR. We find that nonlinear GARCH models dominate linear models utilizing the RMSE and the MAPE error statistics and EGARCH appears to be the best model for forecasting stock index futures price volatility.     

From T-Bills to Stocks: Seasonal Anomalies Revisited

This paper employed eleven data series which consist of stocks, bonds, bills, equity premiums, term premiums, and various default premiums to investigate whether January seasonality reported in existing literature is robust across different states of the economy as this has important trading implications. For the periods 1926–1990, small stocks, small stock premiums, low grade bonds, and default premiums (spread between high grade, low grade and government bonds) reveal January seasonality and that the seasonality is robust across different states of the economy except for low grade bond returns and default premiums. January seasonality for low grade bond returns and low grade bond default premiums are primarily driven by results found during periods of economic expansion. Overall, January seasonality is more evident during the economic expansion periods although the magnitude of default premiums is larger during periods of economic contraction. Furthermore, prior findings of strong summer equity returns are primarily driven by the results found during the periods of economic contraction. It is also found that equity returns are generally higher during periods of economic expansion.     

Quality Competition and Social Welfare in Markets with Partial Coverage: New Results*

We use a vertical product differentiation model under partial market coverage to study the social welfare optimum and duopoly equilibrium when convex costs of quality provision are either fixed or variable in terms of production. We show the following new results. First, under fixed costs, the social planner charges a uniform price for the single variant that just covers costs of quality provision. Like the duopoly equilibrium, this socially optimal pricing entails a partially uncovered market, but a smaller share of the market is served compared with the duopoly equilibrium. Second, for the variable cost case, it is socially optimal to provide both high‐ and low‐quality variants, but market shares need not be equal. This differs from the result in fully covered markets. Third, in the duopoly equilibrium, the quality spread is too wide under variable costs relative to the social optimum. Under fixed costs, the duopoly produces two variants, but quality is too low relative to the social optimum, which has only one variant.     

Futures and forward price differential and the effect of marking‐to‐market: Australian evidence

The objective of this paper is to examine the effects of marking‐to‐market of futures contracts on the price differential between futures and forward contracts based on the predictions of the Cox, Ingersoll and Ross (1981) (CIR) model. Cox et al ., (1981) derive a series of propositions with respect to the relationship between futures and forward prices and a set of testable implications. These are tested empirically in this paper using Australian data from November 1991 to June 1997. The results provide evidence of the presence of significant futures and forward price differences, where the futures price is consistently below the forward price. Only partial support is found for the Cox et al ., (1981) propositions, implying that the effect of marking‐to‐market is not able to fully account for the price differential. Therefore, it is not possible to rule out the influence of other institutional factors on the futures‐forward price difference.     

规范政府采购专家评审机制 完善市场经济体制

本文从政府支出的角度,分析了政府采购制度在健全我国社会主义市场经济体制中的作用,并阐明依法规范政府采购专家评审机制,充分发挥政府采购评审专家作用,是实现我国《政府采购法》的关键。     

Var模型与我国的金融风险管理

Var模型作为金融风险量化管理的有效方法，在国际金融界得到了广泛的认同和应用。本文介绍了Var模型的基本思想及Var值估算的三种具体方法，并对Var模型在中国金融风险管理中的应用前景进行了分析和展望。     

注册会计师的角色认识与监管中的难题思考

从审计市场的供需两方来看,作为以提供审计服务换取收入的注册会计师,不可避免地有着“经济人”的共有特征——追求自身利益最大化,但同时,由于需求方信息使用者的广泛性,注册会计师实际上又肩负着维持市场秩序的社会责任,这正是注册会计师比其他提供劳务的行业受到更多限制的原因所在。从中关独立审计的发展轨迹可见,为了使注册会计师担当好其应有的社会角色,单靠市场或政府都是不可行的,作为公众利益的代言人——政府,如何合理把握市场与政府的界限,做好市场主体权利的配置是各国政府共同面临的难题。     

北京先行经济指数研究

"北京先行经济指数"是我国第一个区域性先行经济指数,在试运行中取得了很好的效果。该指数以我国现行统计制度为基础,紧密结合北京实际,通过构造基准循环、"提取"先行指标、编制指数、返回检验等步骤,对北京先行经济指数的科学性和有效性进行了分析。先行指数超前GDP增速变化4～8个月这一重要研究结论在返回检验中得到了很好的证实。