Multinationals from emerging economies: Strategies,challenges, and the way forward

Multinationals from emerging economies are relatively new players in the global economy. This Special Issue includes five articles that cover several important aspects of the market and nonmarket strategies pursued by emerging market multinational corporations (EMNCs). Given that only a few firms from emerging markets embrace the possibilities and challenges of going global, we highlight the need to examine country, industry, and firm level antecedents of the emergence of EMNCs. We also draw attention to the need to study the role played by immigrant populations in EMNC internationalization.     

An emerging market multinational Company's internationalization: From original equipment manufacturer to global brand leader

We examine an emerging market multinational company's (EMNC's) transformation from an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to an original brand manufacturer (OBM) and global leader. Our longitudinal study of Hisense—China's largest TV company (and the world's third largest) spans three decades and involves detailed interviews with over 50 executives. We study how the company's global value chain network evolved, how it reconfigured its organization, upgraded its capabilities, and enhanced its brand reputation. We develop propositions that may contribute to improved explanations for an EMNC's internationalization sequence, development of competitive advantages, overseas management practices, and brand building.     

Learning equilibrium mean-variance strategy

We study a dynamic mean-variance portfolio optimization problem under the reinforcement learning framework, where an entropy regularizer is introduced to induce exploration. Due to the time–inconsistency involved in a mean-variance criterion, we aim to learn an equilibrium policy. Under an incomplete market setting, we obtain a semi-analytical, exploratory, equilibrium mean-variance policy that turns out to follow a Gaussian distribution. We then focus on a Gaussian mean return model and propose a reinforcement learning algorithm to find the equilibrium policy. Thanks to a thoroughly designed policy iteration procedure in our algorithm, we prove the convergence of our algorithm under mild conditions, despite that dynamic programming principle and the usual policy improvement theorem failing to hold for an equilibrium policy. Numerical experiments are given to demonstrate our algorithm. The design and implementation of our reinforcement learning algorithm apply to a general market setup.     

Crypto quanto and inverse options

Over 90% of exchange trading on crypto options has always been on the Deribit platform. This centralized crypto exchange only lists inverse products because they do not accept fiat currency. Likewise, other major crypto options platforms only list crypto–stablecoin trading pairs in so-called direct options, which are similar to the standard crypto options listed by the CME except the US dollar is replaced by a stablecoin version. Until now a clear mathematical exposition of these products has been lacking. We discuss the sources of market incompleteness in direct and inverse options and compare their pricing and hedging characteristics. Then we discuss the useful applications of currency protected “quanto” direct and inverse options for fiat-based traders and describe their pricing and hedging characteristics, all in the Black–Scholes setting.     

西部大开发中的金融市场建设

西部金融市场应该是开放型、复合型的金融市场。开拓完善西部金融市场宜树立大金融概念,从财政、金融、证券、保险、基金等方面着手。面对国际、国内市场化的社会经济环境,构建西部金融市场应主要依靠市场机制的力量,同时,也需要政府部门强有力的扶持。在西部大开发初期,政府的宏观调控和政府扶持尤其重要,本文就此提出了六点金融政策创新建议。     

比较优势与西部开发

落后地区在实现“追赶战略”中有着潜在“比较优势”;西部欠发达地区“比较优势”难以发挥的原因是市场机制不足;西部地区走出困境、重新赢得“比较优势”的内生要求是市场充分运行。     

Testing for weak-form efficiency of crude palm oil spot and future markets: new evidence from a GARCH unit root test with multiple structural breaks

There is a sizeable literature that tests for weak-form efficiency in commodity and energy spot and future prices. While many studies now allow for multiple structural breaks to address the criticism that conventional unit root tests have low power to reject the unit root null in the presence of structural change, the extant literature overlooks the fact that conventional unit root tests are biased in the presence of conditional heteroscedasticity. We apply a recently developed generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) unit root test with multiple structural breaks to crude palm oil spot and future prices and find much more evidence against weak-form efficiency than that found using tests that fail to allow for conditional heteroscedasticity. Our results point to the importance of allowing for heteroscedasticity when testing for efficiency in commodity and energy spot and future prices.     

The effects of domestic rice market interventions outside business-as-usual conditions for imported rice prices

The Philippine government intervenes in the domestic rice market through the imposition of import tariffs and the provision of producer and consumer subsidies. While policymakers are aware that these programmes come with allocative efficiency costs, they justify the programmes on the grounds that they insulate the domestic economy from unexpected price spikes in the international rice market. An interesting matter for policy evaluation is to quantify the insulation benefit that the programmes provide in circumstances of sudden severe import price spikes. To examine this question, we undertake a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) simulation in which the Philippines is subject to an external rice price shock. We find that the insulation benefit of the support programmes under a 2008-like event is worth approximately 0.10% of real consumption. However, the cost of insuring against these price spikes is significant. We estimate the annual cost of the rice market interventions at approximately 0.40% of real consumption.     

Technological forecasting at the Korean stock market: A dynamic competition analysis using Lotka–Volterra model

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to analyze the dynamic relationship between the Korean Stock Exchange (KSE) and Korean Securities Dealers Automated Quotation (KOSDAQ), two competing markets at the Korean stock market, in the viewpoint of technological forecasting of competition. The Lotka–Volterra system of equations, one well-known competitive diffusion models, is adopted to represent the competitive situations of the Korean stock market and it is estimated using daily empirical index data of KSE and KOSDAQ during 1997–2001. The results show that there existed a predator–prey relationships between two markets in which KSE acted as a prey for the time being after the emergence of KOSDAQ. This interaction was altered to symbiotic relationship and finally to pure competition relationship. We also perform an equilibrium analysis of the estimated Lotka–Volterra equations. As a result, we find that there is an equilibrium point in a dynamic sense. However, the equilibrium point could be unstable in the latest pure competition relationship.     

Cross-sectional and time-series momentum returns and market dynamics: evidence from Japan

We test the behavioural theories of overconfidence and underreaction on cross-sectional (CS) and time-series (TS) momentum returns in the Japanese stock markets. Both CS and TS momentum returns are large and significant when the market continues in the same state and turns into losses when the market transitions to another state, consistent with the overconfidence but not the underreaction model. We find that TS conditional momentum returns exceed conditional CS momentum returns because of its active position since TS takes a net long (short) position following UP (DN) markets while CS is a zero-cost strategy irrespective of the market state. Finally, we find no relation between idiosyncratic volatility (IV) and momentum returns which is not supportive of either the overconfidence or underreaction model but implies that IV is not a significant limit to arbitrage in Japan.