Fixed costs and long-lived investments

Fixed costs models are difficult to analyze because they feature non-degenerate, time-varying distributions of capital across firms. If investments are sufficiently long-lived however then the cross-sectional distribution of capital holdings has virtually no bearing on the equilibrium and the aggregate behavior of fixed-cost models is essentially identical to neoclassical models. The findings are due to a near infinite elasticity of investment timing for long-lived investments – a feature shared by fixed-cost models and neoclassical models. “Irrelevance results” found in numerical studies of fixed-cost models are not parametric special cases but instead are fundamental properties of models with long-lived investment goods.     

Exploiting commodity momentum along the futures curves

This study examines novel momentum strategies in commodities futures markets that incorporate term-structure information. We show that momentum strategies that invest in contracts on the futures curve with the largest expected roll-yield or the strongest momentum earn significantly higher risk-adjusted returns than a traditional momentum strategy, which only invests in the nearest contracts. Moreover, when incorporating conservative transaction costs we observe that our low-turnover momentum strategy more than doubles the net return compared to a traditional momentum strategy.     

资本性环保支出与企业绩效交互影响问题研究

文章以环境成本为切入点,将环境成本区分为内部和外部两种,利用中国A 股重污染行业上市企业 2016—2020 年的面板数据分析环境成本对企业绩效的影响,并进一步检验社会责任表现的中介作用。结果表明：环境总成本、内部环境成本和外部环境成本的投入都可以显著提高企业绩效;环境总成本、内部环境成本与企业社会责任表现呈显著正相关;社会责任表现在环境总成本、内部环境成本对企业绩效的影响中发挥部分中介作用;滞后一期的环境成本可以显著提高企业绩效,滞后两期的环境成本对企业绩效影响并不显著,且影响逐渐减弱。     

Ownership structure and dividend policy: Evidence from Italian firms

Abstract

This paper reports on empirical investigations into the relationship between dividend policy and ownership structure of firms, using a sample of 139 listed Italian companies. Ownership structure in Italy is highly concentrated and hence the relevant agency problem to analyse seems to be the one that arises from the conflicting interests of large shareholders and minority shareholders. This paper therefore attempts to test the rent extraction hypothesis by relating the firm’s dividend payout ratio to various ownership variables, which measure the degree of concentration in terms of the voting rights of large shareholders. The hypothesis that other non-controlling large shareholders may have incentives to monitor the largest shareholder is also tested. The results of the empirical analysis reveal that firms make lower dividend payouts as the voting rights of the largest shareholder increase. Results also suggest that the presence of agreements among large shareholders might explain the limited monitoring power of other ‘strong’ non-controlling shareholders.     

Industry Costs of Equity: Incorporating Prior Information

I examine whether incorporating economically motivated prior information yields more accurate forecasts of industry costs of equity. I find that incorporating the long‐run mean of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) parameters and the industry characteristics in the cross section produces more accurate parameter estimates, which subsequently translate into more accurate out‐of‐sample forecasts of industry costs of equity. The outperformance of this method over rolling‐window estimates becomes larger as the forecast horizon extends into the future. These findings provide evidence that the CAPM parameters have a long‐run mean‐reversion property and correlate with the industry characteristics in a systematic way.     

Very fast money: High-frequency trading on the NASDAQ

This paper provides evidence regarding high-frequency trader (HFT) trading performance, trading costs, and effects on market efficiency using a sample of NASDAQ trades and quotes that directly identifies HFT participation. I find that HFTs engage in successful intra-day market timing, spreads are wider when HFTs provide liquidity and tighter when HFTs take liquidity, and prices incorporate information from order flow and market-wide returns more efficiently on days when HFT participation is high.     

Economic and financial themes in Australian aged care

This contribution reflects the results of work for a review of aged care in Australia. Initial material covers the policy arrangements in place prior to the beginning of the Review in September 2002. The main feature of the contribution is a survey of economic and financial performance of aged care entities not hitherto attempted. Most attention is directed to labour costs in relation to total costs and earnings before interest and taxes. Cross-section analyses are based on institutional differences between providers of services with some operating as “for profit” entities but most are not reflecting their religious, community-based and charitable origins. Locational differences are also examined. The results show a very great disparity in experiences so that notions of the average experience across providers of services cannot be upheld. Differences between the top 10 percent of entities offering services and the bottom quartile are striking. The implications for development of new strategic approaches to policies are clear.     

Profitability analysis in UK organizations: An exploratory study

Recent research into management accounting practices suggests that companies are now placing considerable emphasis on profitability analysis and consider it to be one of the most important management accounting practices. There is however little recent empirical research relating to the content and role of profitability analysis in companies. This paper will address this omission and report the findings derived from a survey of UK companies relating to information that is contained in profitability reporting, generated for managing the existing mix of a firm's activities. In particular, it focuses on the nature, content and role of profitability analysis carrying out some exploratory analysis and testing various propositions to explain the divergence in observed practices.A distinctive feature of the research is that, unlike some previous research, rather than focusing on the information that is accumulated within the costing system it focuses primarily on the information that is extracted from it for different purposes. Not surprisingly we find that different information is extracted for profitability analysis than for pricing purposes. The research findings also indicate that firms use a hierarchy of profit measures within the periodic profitability analysis statements and that profitability analysis is used mainly for attention-directing purposes for signalling the need for more detailed studies. For profitability analysis, the findings suggest that, in terms of what is considered the most important attention-directing measure, the use of some form of full costs based on arbitrary allocations is not as widespread as that suggested by previous studies. Evidence is also presented to suggest that the level of cost system complexity influences the observed practices.     

The Effect of SFAS No. 131 on the Cross-segment Variability of Profits Reported by Multiple Segment Firms

Our study assesses whether SFAS No. 131 improved disclosure about the diversity of multiple segment firms’ operations. We find a post-SFAS No. 131 increase in cross-segment variability of segment profits, an increase in the association between reported and inherent cross-segment variability, and an increase in association between reported variability and capital market incentives to disclose. We interpret the results as evidence that SFAS No. 131 increased the transparency of segment profitability disclosures, and as indicating SFAS No. 131 allowed firms depending more on external financing to disclose more about differences in segment profitability.

A counter-example to an option pricing formula under transaction costs

In the paper by Melnikov and Petrachenko (Finance Stoch. 9: 141–149, 2005), a procedure is put forward for pricing and replicating an arbitrary European contingent claim in the binomial model with bid-ask spreads. We present a counter-example to show that the option pricing formula stated in that paper can in fact lead to arbitrage. This is related to the fact that under transaction costs a superreplicating strategy may be less expensive to set up than a strictly replicating one.