Forecasting market turbulence using regime-switching models

We propose an early warning system to timely forecast turbulence in the US stock market. In a first step, a Markov-switching model with two regimes (a calm market and a turbulent market) is developed. Based on the time series of the monthly returns of the S&P 500 price index, the corresponding filtered probabilities are successively estimated. In a second step, the turbulent phase of the model is further specified to distinguish between bullish and bearish trends. For comparison only, a Markov-switching model with three states (a calm market, a turbulent bullish market, and a turbulent bearish market) is examined as well. In a third step, logistic regression models are employed to forecast the filtered probabilities provided by the Markov-switching models. A major advantage of the presented modeling framework is the timely identification of the factors driving the different phases of the capital market. In a fourth step, the early warning system is applied to an asset management case study. The results show that explicit consideration of the models’ signals yields better portfolio performance and lower portfolio risk compared to standard buy-and-hold and constant proportion portfolio insurance strategies.     

Investment and Innovation State Support of Agriculture in Russia as a Condition of WTO

Russian agriculture is one of the industries operating in the unstable economic situation in a developing market taking into account risks of the world economy, economic, political, and climatic factors. The role of agriculture is to provide people＇s needs for food, significant effects on employment, the efficiency of domestic production, and way of life in rural areas by obligatory preserving food security in Russia. One of the major tasks for agriculture is the development of innovations and investments aimed at improving the competitiveness of the domestic agricultural sector. Russia＇s membership in the WTO since 2012 is getting a particular importance in the innovation and investment support of agriculture. The strategy of innovative development of the Russian Federation until 2020 ＂Innovative Russia--2020＂ assumes three possible options for innovative development： inertial （directed on imports）, catch-up development and a local technological competitiveness and a variant of achieving leadership in leading scientific and technical sectors, and fundamental research. A positive point is that the strategy provides an algorithm of state support of the innovation cycle. The innovation cycle is the process associated with the sequence of innovation transformations （scientific or business ideas） in products, technology, business process and launches it on the market for commercial use. A positively developing regional aspect is of great importance.     

Accelerated radical innovation: Theory and application

Radical innovation has been responsible for some of society's greatest advances over the past hundred years in fields as diverse as transportation, power, information technology, and medicine. But as scholars have found, it is such a long-term, chaotic, meandering, unpredictable process that promising radical innovation concepts are often never undertaken, to society's detriment. Does it need to be this way? Or can radical innovation be accelerated so that it is manageable within modern society's economic and political time horizon? This question prompted the organization of the Accelerated Radical Innovation (ARI) project five years ago. In this paper we summarize the ARI methodology as it currently stands and then report the results of an empirical verification with a radical medical innovation project that is currently under way — monochromatic X-rays for cancer diagnosis and treatment. Several conclusions were drawn. First, by and large, the ARI model tracked closely with the reality of this innovation, offering confirmation of its grounding in the real world of innovation. Second, the model offered a rationale and framework for this innovation process that could be more widely adopted. Third, the ARI model exposed critical issues whose early resolution could have accelerating the innovation cycle. Fourth, the application of a core principle of ARI, Systematic Competitive Intelligence, could have provided early warning on a competing technology that emerged suddenly. Last, the use of another core ARI concept, accelerated innovation prototyping, might help the innovator overcome the key barrier facing the innovation — the necessity of a long, expensive, high-risk clinical trial. Overall, the verification study confirms the potential of the ARI model to put the radical innovation process on a faster, lower-cost, better-managed track.     

Risk Preferences and Asset Ownership: Integrating Prospect Theory and Transaction Cost Economics

We integrate prospect theory into the discussion of Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) to illustrate how risk aversion may affect integration decisions. In particular, we argue that risk aversion creates incentives to acquire assets in situations where neither opportunism nor transaction‐specific investments are present, provided the assets in question can change in value unpredictably during their use. Our theory illustrates that risk aversion could connect opportunism, asset specificity, and uncertainty with integration decisions in the presence of incomplete contracts. Our theory complements and extends TCE by showing the role of risk aversion in integration decisions under bounded rationality and contract incompleteness. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Agents or Stewards? Linking Managerial Behavior and Moral Development

The goal of this paper is to connect managerial behavior on the “agent-steward” scale to managerial moral development and motivation. I introduce agent- and steward-like behavior: the former is self-serving while the latter is others-serving. I suggest that managerial moral development and motivation may be two of the factors that may predict the tendency of managers to behave in a self-serving way (like agents) or to serve the interests of the organization (like stewards). Managers at low levels of moral development are more likely to behave like agents, while managers at higher levels of moral development are more likely to behave like stewards. I also argue that managers at the highest level of moral development may serve the interests of people other than the firm’s owners and thereby transfer wealth from the firm’s owners to third parties. Moral motivation is likely to be a factor that moderates the proposed relationships. Finally, I develop propositions that address the role of material incentives in controlling behavior of managers at different levels of moral development.     

Statistical treatment choice based on asymmetric minimax regret criteria

This paper studies the problem of treatment choice between a status quo treatment with a known outcome distribution and an innovation whose outcomes are observed only in a finite sample. I evaluate statistical decision rules, which are functions that map sample outcomes into the planner’s treatment choice for the population, based on regret, which is the expected welfare loss due to assigning inferior treatments. I extend previous work started by Manski (2004) that applied the minimax regret criterion to treatment choice problems by considering decision criteria that asymmetrically treat Type I regret (due to mistakenly choosing an inferior new treatment) and Type II regret (due to mistakenly rejecting a superior innovation) and derive exact finite sample solutions to these problems for experiments with normal, Bernoulli and bounded distributions of outcomes. The paper also evaluates the properties of treatment choice and sample size selection based on classical hypothesis tests and power calculations in terms of regret.     

Income mobility in Russia (2000–2005)

Using the data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS), this paper investigates income mobility in Russia during the period of rapid economic growth (2000–2005). Employing a broad set of mobility indices, we show that there is much mobility in household incomes from one year to the next and over longer periods in Russia. Both relative and absolute mobility in Russia are significantly higher than in Western countries. We demonstrate that income growth in Russia was strongly pro-poor in 2000–2005. Incomes of the relatively poor were growing faster than incomes of the relatively rich. However, this inequality-reducing effect was almost exactly offset by changes in the relative positions of individuals and the overall reduction in cross-sectional inequality was merely modest.     

The Effect of Ownership Structure on Corporate Social Responsibility: Empirical Evidence from Korea

Relatively little research has examined the effects of ownership on the firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR). In addition, most of it has been conducted in the Western context such as the U.S. and Europe. Using a sample of 118 large Korean firms, we hypothesize that different types of shareholders will have distinct motivations toward the firm’s CSR engagement. We break down ownership into different groups of shareholders: institutional, managerial, and foreign ownerships. Results indicate a significant, positive relationship between CSR ratings and ownership by institutions and foreign investors. In contrast, shareholding by top managers is negatively associated with firm’s CSR rating while outside director ownership is not significant. We conclude that different owners have differential impacts on the firm’s CSR engagement.     

The capital tax paradox in a greening economy

We adopt a simple model of endogenous growth with polluting capital and a fixed budget for aggregate emissions. Pollution abatement efficiency is growing over time due to technical progress. We find that long-run capital and consumption are inversely related to the initial capital stock. Capital taxation does not harm the economy but actually raises long-run consumption and production, which we call the “capital tax paradox.” The reason for this surprising result is that in an economy with a binding carbon policy, early abundance of polluting capital is not a blessing but a curse. It is preferable to have a large capital stock when abatement efficiency has grown sufficiently large. The paper also provides novel results on the impact of pollution intensity and the rate of technical progress on the greening of the economy and the pollution permit prices. In the quantitative part, we calibrate model and study economic growth under different assumptions on the basic model parameters.