On the implications of market power in banking: Evidence from developing countries

This paper investigates how different degrees of market power affect bank efficiency and stability in the context of developing economies. It sheds light on the competition-stability nexus by documenting and analyzing the complex interactions between a tripod of variables that are central for regulators: the degree of market power, bank cost and profit efficiency, and overall firm stability. The results show that an increase in the degree of market power leads to greater bank stability and enhanced profit efficiency, despite significant cost efficiency losses. The findings lend empirical justification to the traditional view that increased competition may undermine bank stability, and may bear significant implications for stressed banking systems in developing economies.     

Hermite polynomial based expansion of European option prices

We seek a closed-form series approximation of European option prices under a variety of diffusion models. The proposed convergent series are derived using the Hermite polynomial approach. Departing from the usual option pricing routine in the literature, our model assumptions have no requirements for affine dynamics or explicit characteristic functions. Moreover, convergent expansions provide a distinct insight into how and on which order the model parameters affect option prices, in contrast with small-time asymptotic expansions in the literature. With closed-form expansions, we explicitly translate model features into option prices, such as mean-reverting drift and self-exciting or skewed jumps. Numerical examples illustrate the accuracy of this approach and its advantage over alternative expansion methods.     

Disclosure Versus Recognition: Inferences from Subsequent Events

Standard setters explicitly state that disclosure should not substitute for recognition in financial reports. Consistent with this directive, prior research shows that investors find recognized values more pertinent than disclosed values. However, it remains unclear whether reporting items are recognized because they are more relevant for investing decisions, or whether requiring recognition itself prompts differing behavior on the part of firms and investors. Using the setting of subsequent events, I identify the differential effect of requiring disclosure versus recognition in a setting where the accounting treatment of an item is exogenously determined. For comparable events, I find a stronger initial market response for firms required to recognize relative to firms that must disclose, although the large magnitude of the identified effect calls into question whether this difference can be attributed to accounting treatments alone. In examining various reasons for the stronger market response to recognized values, I fail to find support for the hypothesis that this difference is due to differential reliability of disclosed and recognized values. I do find some evidence that investors underreact to disclosed events, consistent with investors incurring higher processing costs when using disclosed information.     

Collateral and capital structure

We develop a dynamic model of investment, capital structure, leasing, and risk management based on firms' need to collateralize promises to pay with tangible assets. Both financing and risk management involve promises to pay subject to collateral constraints. Leasing is strongly collateralized costly financing and permits greater leverage. More constrained firms hedge less and lease more, both cross-sectionally and dynamically. Mature firms suffering adverse cash flow shocks may cut risk management and sell and lease back assets. Persistence of productivity reduces the benefits to hedging low cash flows and can lead firms not to hedge at all.     

Balanced-budget rules: Chaos and deterministic sunspots

Schmitt-Grohé and Uribe [11] illustrate that a balanced-budget rule can lead to aggregate instability. In particular, under such a rule it is possible for a steady state to be locally indeterminate, and therefore sunspot equilibria are possible. In this paper, I extend their analysis to investigate the possibility of chaotic equilibria under a balanced-budget rule. A global analysis reveals Euler equation branching which means that the dynamics going forward are generated by a differential inclusion of the form . Each branch alone will not imply interesting dynamics. However, by switching between the branches, I show that the existence of Euler equation branching in an arbitrarily small neighborhood of a steady state implies topological chaos in the sense of Devaney on a compact invariant set with non-empty interior (the chaos is “thick”). Moreover, the chaos is robust to small C¹ perturbations. This branching under a balanced-budget rule occurs independently of the local uniqueness of the equilibrium around the steady state(s).     

虚拟研发中的知识产权管理策略——基于案例的分析

科学的知识产权管理是虚拟研发成功的关键。波音7E7飞机的研发实践表明:依据虚拟研发组织的周期性、发挥核心企业主导作用、认真选择合作伙伴并恰当分解任务、完善信息系统是知识产权管理的最主要因素。我国的C3G联盟研发实践,也对虚拟研发及其知识产权管理模式进行了初步的探索。我国虚拟研发应当在发挥企业主体地位、合理选择合作伙伴和合作模式、注意运行安全的基础上,全过程完善知识产权管理。     

Imperfect Accounting and Reporting Bias

Errors and bias are both inherent features of accounting. In theory, while errors discourage bias by lowering the value relevance of accounting, they can also facilitate bias by providing camouflage. Consistent with theory, we find a hump‐shaped relation between a firm's propensity to engage in intentional misstatement and the prevalence of unintentional misstatements in the firm's industry for the whole economy and a majority of the industries. The result is robust to using firms’ number of items in financial statements and exposure to complex accounting rules as alternative proxies for errors and to using the restatement amount in net income to quantify the magnitude of bias and errors. To directly test for the two effects of errors, we show that when errors are more prevalent, the market reacts less to firms’ earnings surprises and bias is more difficult to detect. Our results highlight the imperfectness of accounting, advance understanding of firms’ reporting incentives, and shed light on accounting standard setting.