STOCK‐BOND CO‐MOVEMENTS AND FLIGHT‐TO‐QUALITY IN G7 COUNTRIES: A TIME‐FREQUENCY ANALYSIS

This paper examines co‐movement between stock returns and changes in 10‐year government bond yields as well as flight‐to‐quality behaviour in G7 countries. We conduct the wavelet squared coherence analysis to explore the dynamics in both time and frequency domain. Our results provide evidence of positive co‐movements, which vary over time and across investment horizon. The higher co‐movement is found to be more concentrated in the lower frequency bands. We further analyse the dynamic nature of the scale‐dependent wavelet correlations and find that the correlations are highly volatile and significantly increase across different time scales during the episodes of equity market turbulence. The increase in correlations reflects flights from stocks to safer bond investments as a result of dramatic changes in investor sentiment and risk aversion at times of market stress.     

Collaboration and innovation: An empirical study of Indian technological enterprises

In 2010, the Indian government declared 2010–2020 to be the ‘Decade of Innovation’ and established the State Innovation Councils and Sectoral Innovation Councils to encourage and facilitate innovation by technological firms. In this paper, we study the relationship between collaboration and innovation in a cross‐section of Indian firms, paying particular attention to the impact of the innovation councils. Our results suggest that domestic collaborations have an important impact on firm innovation, as do the innovation councils, but that the impact of the councils is less for firms that collaborate.     

No‐arbitrage implies power‐law market impact and rough volatility

Market impact is the link between the volume of a (large) order and the price move during and after the execution of this order. We show that in a quite general framework, under no‐arbitrage assumption, the market impact function can only be of power‐law type. Furthermore, we prove this implies that the macroscopic price is diffusive with rough volatility, with a one‐to‐one correspondence between the exponent of the impact function and the Hurst parameter of the volatility. Hence, we simply explain the universal rough behavior of the volatility as a consequence of the no‐arbitrage property. From a mathematical viewpoint, our study relies, in particular, on new results about hyper‐rough stochastic Volterra equations.     

CEO age and tax planning

This study investigates the association between CEO age and corporate tax planning. Using a sample of 11,537 firm‐year observations from the fiscal year 1997–2013, I find CEO age exerts an economically significant influence on firms’ tax policies, incremental to economic determinants identified in prior research. Specifically, CEO age is positively related to cash and GAAP effective tax rates, and negatively related to permanent book‐tax difference, suggesting that older CEOs are less likely to take actions to lower tax burden. The results hold across different model specifications and robustness tests to address potential bias arising from endogeneity, sample selection issue, and the confounding effect of CEO tenure.     

Robust consumption‐investment problem under CRRA and CARA utilities with time‐varying confidence sets

We consider a robust consumption‐investment problem under constant relative risk aversion and constant absolute risk aversion utilities. The time‐varying confidence sets are specified by Θ, a correspondence from [0, T] to the space of the Lévy triplets, and describe a priori drift, volatility, and jump information. For each possible measure, the log‐price processes of stocks are semimartingales, and the triplet of their differential characteristics is almost surely a measurable selector from the correspondence Θ. By proposing and investigating the global kernel, an optimal policy and a worst‐case measure are generated from a saddle point of the global kernel, and they constitute a saddle point of the objective function.     

Valuing Initial Public Offerings Using Article 11 Pro Forma Financial Information in the Prospectus*

We investigate whether Article 11 pro forma financial information assists investors in valuing IPOs. While the SEC expects it to be helpful in assisting investment decisions, Article 11 pro forma financial information is based on registrants' understanding and assumptions, and registrants can exercise their own judgment when preparing pro forma financial statements. It is therefore an empirical question whether the information contained in pro forma financial statements is useful to investors. We examine the association between pro forma adjustments of earnings and book value of equity and the IPO offer value and find asymmetric results. While positive pro forma adjustments of earnings and book value of equity are positively associated with the IPO offer value, negative pro forma adjustments of earnings and book value of equity are negatively associated with the IPO offer value, suggesting that negative pro forma adjustments are priced as growth opportunities. Additional analyses reveal that the association between pro forma adjustments of book value of equity and the IPO offer value varies across different time periods and industries and that pro forma adjustments of book value of equity are initially mispriced by investors. In contrast, we do not find similar results for pro forma adjustments of earnings. Further empirical tests show that the asymmetric results of mispricing of pro forma adjustments of earnings and book value of equity may be explained by the requirements of Article 11 of Regulation S‐X for pro forma adjustments dictating that adjustments to earnings reflect only recurring items while adjustments to book value reflect both recurring and nonrecurring items.     

Auditors' Responses to Workload Imbalance and the Impact on Audit Quality*

Using detailed data for fieldwork hours and audit hours by rank from audit engagements in Korea, we examine whether audits conducted under workload imbalance, proxied by busy‐season audits, impair audit quality, and how auditors adjust staff assignments for busy‐season audits. We generally find that busy‐season audits are associated with lower audit quality, and that audit firms reduce the involvement of senior auditors during busy‐season audits. In addition, the greater the involvement of senior auditors and junior auditors, the lesser the deterioration in audit quality. Finally, although there is no increase in interim audits in response to workload imbalance during busy seasons, increasing interim audits can mitigate the negative impact of busy‐season audits on audit quality. Our results are relevant to auditors and regulators, who have expressed concerns about the adverse effects of workload imbalance on audit quality.     

Do analysts add value when they most can? Evidence from corporate spin‐offs

This article investigates how securities analysts help investors understand the value of diversification. By studying the research that analysts produce about companies that have announced corporate spin‐offs, we gain unique insights into how analysts portray diversified firms to the investment community. We find that while analysts' research about these companies is associated with improved forecast accuracy, the value of their research about the spun‐off subsidiaries is more limited. For both diversified firms and their spun‐off subsidiaries, analysts' research is more valuable when information asymmetry between the management of these entities and investors is higher. These findings contribute to the corporate strategy literature by shedding light on the roots of the diversification discount and by showing how analysts' research enables investors to overcome asymmetric information. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is There a Causal Effect of Working Part‐Time on Current and Future Wages?

In this paper, I study the causal effects of part‐time work on current and future wages. To estimate these effects, I use a random effects model with a wage equation capturing the employment history and a dynamic multinomial probit component for the choice of employment status. Exclusion restrictions from the institutional context are exploited to support identification. The results suggest that working part‐time with few hours has a large causal effect on current wages, but more extensive part‐time work does not reduce current wages. However, both types of part‐time work lead to negative long‐term wage effects.     

Extreme Value Theory and Statistics of Univariate Extremes: A Review

Statistical issues arising in modelling univariate extremes of a random sample have been successfully used in the most diverse fields, such as biometrics, finance, insurance and risk theory. Statistics of univariate extremes (SUE), the subject to be dealt with in this review paper, has recently faced a huge development, partially because rare events can have catastrophic consequences for human activities, through their impact on the natural and constructed environments. In the last decades, there has been a shift from the area of parametric SUE, based on probabilistic asymptotic results in extreme value theory, towards semi‐parametric approaches. After a brief reference to Gumbel's block methodology and more recent improvements in the parametric framework, we present an overview of the developments on the estimation of parameters of extreme events and on the testing of extreme value conditions under a semi‐parametric framework. We further discuss a few challenging topics in the area of SUE. © 2014 The Authors. International Statistical Review © 2014 International Statistical Institute