Stock exchange business models and their operative performance

In recent years stock exchanges have been increasingly diversifying their operations into related business areas such as derivatives trading, post-trading services and software sales. This trend can be observed most notably among profit-oriented trading venues. While the pursuit for diversification is likely to be driven by the attractiveness of these investment opportunities, it is yet an open question whether certain integration activities are also efficient, both from a social welfare and from the exchanges’ perspective. Academic contributions so far analyzed different business models primarily from the former perspective, whereas there is only little literature considering their impact on the exchange itself. By employing a panel data set of 28 stock exchanges for the years 1999–2003, we seek to shed light on this topic by comparing the technical efficiency and factor productivity of exchanges with different business models. Our findings suggest that exchanges that diversify into related activities are mostly less efficient than exchanges that remain focused on the cash market. In particular, we find no evidence that vertically integrated exchanges are more efficient. However, they seem to possess a substantially stronger factor productivity growth than other business models. We presume that integration activity comes at the cost of increased operational complexity which outweigh potential synergies between related activities and therefore leads to technical inefficiencies. Our findings contribute to the ongoing discussion about the drawbacks and merits of vertical integration.     

Analyst coverage and earnings management

What is the role of information intermediaries in corporate governance? This paper examines equity analysts’ influence on managers’ earnings management decisions. Do analysts serve as external monitors to managers, or do they put excessive pressure on managers? Using multiple measures of earnings management, I find that firms followed by more analysts manage their earnings less. To address the potential endogeneity problem of analyst coverage, I use two instrumental variables based on change in broker size and on firm's inclusion in the Standard & Poor's 500 index, and I find that the results are robust. Finally, given the number of covering analysts, analysts from top brokers and more experienced analysts have stronger effects against earnings management.     

Quantifying the Risk of Deflation

We propose formal and quantitative measures of the risk that future inflation will be excessively high or low relative to the range preferred by a private sector agent. Unlike alternative measures of risk, our measures are designed to make explicit the dependence of risk measures on the private sector agent's preferences with respect to inflation. We illustrate our methodology by estimating the risks of deflation for the United States, Germany, and Japan for horizons of up to 2 years. The question of how large these risks are has been subject to considerable public debate. We find that, as of September 2002 when this question first arose, there was no evidence of substantial deflation risks for the United States and for Germany, contrary to some conjectures at the time. In contrast, there was evidence of substantial deflation risks in Japan.     

The importance of seasonal variability and tactical responses to risk on estimating the economic benefits of integrated weed management

Seasonal variability is an important source of risk faced by farmers and, regardless of an individual's attitude to risk, there are options to tactically adjust production strategies as the outcomes of risk become known. The objective of this article is to measure the economic benefits of alternative approaches to managing weeds, one of the most serious production problems in Australian cropping systems. A bioeconomic model that combines weed biology, crop growth and economics is developed to value the effects of seasonal variability and the role of tactical responses and sequential decision making in determining an optimal integrated weed management strategy. This shows that there are substantial differences in the measured long‐term benefits from deterministic and stochastic simulations. It is concluded that, for research evaluation of technologies that involve complex biological and dynamic systems, ignoring the impacts of seasonal variability, responses to risk and sequential decision making can lead to an incorrect estimate of the economic benefits of a technology. In this case study of optimal weed management strategies in Australia, the size of the error is high.     

Additionality of public R&D grants in a transition economy

This paper examines the input and output additionality of public R&D subsidies in Western and Eastern Germany. We estimate the impact of public R&D grants on firms’ R&D and innovation input. Based on the results of this first step we compare the impact of publicly funded private R&D on innovation output with the output effect of R&D funded out of firms’ own pockets. We employ microeconometric evaluation methods using firm‐level data derived from the Mannheim Innovation Panel. Our results point towards a large degree of additionality in public R&D grants with regard to innovation input measured as R&D expenditures and innovation expenditures, as well as with regard to innovation output measured by patent applications. Input additionality has been more pronounced in Eastern Germany during the transition period than in Western Germany. However, R&D productivity is still larger for the established Western German innovation system than for Eastern Germany. Hence, a regional redistribution of public R&D subsidies might improve the overall innovation output of the German economy.     

我国家电业研发国际化分析

我国已成为家电制造的世界基地,但由于核心技术的缺乏,我国家电业的国际化进程并不顺利。我国家电业要想真正走出国门,仅仅有大量的产品出口是不够的,必须有相应的全球研发体系来打造国际化的企业。因此,研发国际化是我国家电制造企业提升技术实力,进行国际化的突破点。     

Conflict, defense spending, and the number of nations

This paper provides a formal model of endogenous border formation and choice of defense spending in a world with international conflict. We examine both the case of democratic governments and of dictatorships. The model is consistent with three observations. First, breakup of countries should follow a reduction in the likelihood of international conflicts. Second, the number of regional conflicts between smaller countries may increase as a result of the breakup of larger countries. Third, the size of the peace dividend (the reduction in defense spending in a more peaceful world) is limited by the process of country breakup.     

The Analysis of Welfare Effects of an Environmental Product Tax: An Application to the Taxation of Car Tyres in Hungary

A sophisticated welfare analysis developed by Morris and Kis (1996) is presented here for the study of the effect of a product charge tax on the car tyre market in Hungary. The analysis is extended and complemented in this paper by, first, using the AIDS model and an algorithm developed by Galarraga and Markandya (2000) to estimate demand elasticities from limited data and, second, including the income effects into the analysis. The latter does not have much impact on the results but the generalisation of the model might be useful for the analysis of different goods where the proportion of income spent on them is more important.     

Inverse of the Berge maximum theorem

Summary We consider an inverse of the Berge maximum theorem. We also give an application of our result to fixed point theory.     

A dynamic model of R&D competition

This study considers a dynamic model of R&D competition in a situation of no uncertainty with identical firms in a perfect foresight. We are going to find out about the effects of firms' absorptive capacity on R&D strategies in the presence of technological spillovers. The conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a feedback–Nash equilibrium on firms' R&D expense will be also discussed. Numerical simulations will show as the introduction of the absorptive capacity reduces the impact of spillovers degree on firms' R&D strategies.