Sampling Minority Business Owners and Their Families: The Understudied Entrepreneurial Experience*

We here review and critique prior research on minority entrepreneurship, paying particular attention to the contributions and limitations of deployed sampling techniques and research methodologies. As based on this review, we then introduce the 2003 and 2005 National Minority Business Owner Surveys—a comprehensive and primary data collection effort that used varied methodologies to secure in‐depth information about random national samples of African American, Korean American, and Mexican American populations as well as a comparison sample of nonminority business owners. We present the initial business ownership profiles developed with these recent data, in part, as a benchmark of the U.S. entrepreneurial experience, and compare the profiles with those presented in prior research. These profiles document similarities and differences across the four groups and provide an empirical foundation for understanding the origin of those similarities and differences. No longer can we ignore the in‐depth study of minority businesses and their owning families nor can we simply assume that all businesses are the same, regardless of minority status or ethnicity.     

The post-offering performance of IPOs in the health care industry

This paper investigates the post-offering performance of initial public offerings in the health care industry in a sample of 223 IPOs issued between 1985 and 1996. Statistically insignificant abnormal returns for IPOs relative to matched control firms and risk-adjusted health care index are evident for the whole sample. Thus, our empirical results support the overall information efficiency in the IPO market. However, numerical and statistical differences of the IPOs’ abnormal returns are documented in every subgroup specified according to the issuance years and sectors. We conjecture that such differences are due to the growing threat of government intervention and the significant structural changes.(JEL11, C11) The views expressed herein are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of our colleagues.     

Asymmetric effects of oil shocks on stock market returns in Saudi Arabia: evidence from industry level analysis

We examine the impact of oil price shocks on stock market returns in Saudi Arabia using the country-level as well as the industry-level stock market data. We find that the relation between changes in oil prices and equity returns is positive and significant at the country-level and at the industry level. Our results show that oil prices have asymmetric effects on equity returns for 4 out of 15 industrial sectors (e.g., hotel and tourism, insurance, multi-investment, and petrochemicals). These results have significant implications for investors, portfolio managers, policymakers, and corporate finance managers.     

Weekday variations in short-term contrarian profits in futures markets

This article documents and examines weekday patterns in short-term contrarian profits in futures markets. The Lo and Mackinlay (1990) methodology is used to construct contrarian portfolios and to compute daily contrarian profits. Contrarian portfolios are formed using daily closing prices and are based on the previous day's performance relative to a benchmark. Contrarian profits are measured over subsequent half-day intervals. The empirical results suggest that there are weekday patterns in short-term contrarian profits in futures markets. On average, contrarian profits are largest on Fridays, followed by those on Wednesdays, and smallest on Mondays. For currency futures, however, contrarian profits are largest on Mondays and smallest on Fridays.     

Using past contribution patterns to forecast fundraising outcomes in crowdfunding

The crowdfunding mechanism has proven to be a practical way of raising funds, especially with the widespread use of the Internet. However, one limitation of current crowdfunding platforms is that it is hard for creators and backers to anticipate the success of a campaign. This paper tackles this limitation. We take a two-pronged approach to building our forecasting model. First, we explore the nature and heterogeneity of contribution dynamics in crowdfunding campaigns and compare them across two natural groups (successful and unsuccessful campaigns). We then use insights generated from our exploratory analysis and draw upon the general laws of motion for stochastic processes in order to introduce a new dynamic model for predicting crowdfunding outcomes. Our model incorporates the history and dynamics of both the focal crowdfunding campaign and other campaigns for predicting outcomes. We compare our model to other parametric and semi-parametric benchmark models, and show substantial improvements.     

Long Memory In Futures Prices

This paper tests for fractional roots in the futures prices for selected commodities, foreign currencies, and stock indexes. The fractional testing method is the spectral regression method suggested by Geweke and Porter-Hudak (1983). The empirical results suggest the presence of a fractional exponent in the differencing process for several commodity and foreign currency futures prices. The returns series for these commodities and currencies exhibit long range positive dependence. However, differencing of exact order one is sufficient for the stock index futures prices. Implications are drawn concerning theoretical and econometric modeling and price forecasting.