the international monetary fund and developing countries a review of the evidence and policy options as its systemic role evaporated with the collapse of the bretton woods system so the international monetary fund imf became drawn into a much more specific role in the context of the balance of payments bop problems that developing countries were encountering at its inception the imf had been seen as having no specific role in developing countries but now it became exclusively these countries that formed its clientele while during the 1970s the imf had continued to make a few relatively large loans to a limited number of industrial countries italy and the united kingdom beyond the mid 1970s industrial countries ceased to draw any resources from it

trading volume and information revelation in stock markets i consider a market microstructure model in which the rates of public and private informa tion arrival are probabilistic the latter depends on the availability of private information that is stochastically changing over time in equilibrium traders estimate the availability of private information using past periods trading volume and use this information to adjust their strategies the time series properties include contemporaneous correlation between price variability and volume and autocorrelation in price variability similar to garch the model explains why trading volume contains useful information for predicting volatil ity and provides predictions on the limit and market order placement strategies of traders

the political economy of bilateral bailouts imf loans during times of financial crisis often occur in conjunction with bilateral financial rescues these bilateral bailouts are substantial in size and a central component of international cooperation during financial crises we analyze the political economy of bilateral bailouts and study the trade offs that potential creditor governments experience when other countries find themselves in financial distress creditor governments want to stabilize crisis countries by providing additional liquidity particularly if the crisis country is economically or politically important to them but they are constrained by domestic politics politicians aim to balance these countervailing pressures they provide bailouts when their own economy is exposed to negative spillover effects and when the crisis country is important for geostrategic military or political reasons domestic economic and political constraints on the other hand limit their ability to bail out other countries we test our hypotheses using an original data set on bilateral bailouts by the g7 countries to countries that experienced financial crises between 1975 and 2010 the findings of our statistical analysis support our theoretical argument and contribute to a deeper understanding of international cooperation s complex structure during financial crises

structural changes in volatility and stock market development evidence for spain abstract in this paper we review the factors that lead to changes in stock market volatility and use alternative methodologies of endogenous breakpoint detection in order to analyze whether the volatility of the spanish stock market has changed significantly over the period 1941 2001 this period corresponds to years of profound development of both the financial and the productive sides of the economy in this country the analysis of the spanish stock market suggests that volatility has behaved in a different manner over the period 1941 2001 after three decades of low volatility a structural break in volatility is detected in 1972 coinciding with the opening of the spanish economy from 1972 to 2001 the years of more intense financial development the stock market presents a higher level of volatility and lower persistence this effect is partly attributable to the increased growth of trading volume brought about by the economic development process

the information content of annual earnings releases a trading volume approach this paper reports the results of an empirical examination of the relations between the volume of securities traded the magnitude of surprises in annual earnings announcements and firm size although early trading volume studies e g beaver 1968 kiger 1972 and foster 1973 replicated basic information content studies with findings similar to those based on security prices we should not expect that security price and trading volume research will continue to yield identical results when more refined hypotheses are tested trading volume reflects investors activity by summing all market trades whereas security prices reflect an aggregation or averaging of investors beliefs as a result we will on occasion observe differences between price and volume reactions to earnings announcements as did morse 1981 this study extends the recent trend toward tests of more refined hypotheses by using a larger sample to examine the associations between unexpected earnings firm size and trading volume and testing whether such associations can be generalized across fiscal year end dates and stock exchange listing my results show a continuous positive relationship between trading

trader see trader do how do small fx traders react to large counterparties trades abstract we show that information about the counterparty of a trade affects the future trading decisions of individual traders the effect is such that traders tend to reverse their order flow in line with the better informed counterparties informed traders primarily incorporate their own private as well as publicly available information into prices whereas uninformed traders mainly magnify the effect of the informed this pattern of interaction among traders extends to different order types traders treat their own and others market orders as more informative than limit orders

ceo characteristics and firm r d spending over the past fifteen years a number of studies have examined the determinants of firm r d spending these studies however almost invariably focus on the role of firm or external ownership characteristics in predicting r d spending while overlooking the attributes of the top managers involved in allocating corporate resources in this study we change that focus by empirically examining how r d spending as compared to industry competitors varies at firms based on the characteristics of their ceos using a sample of publicly traded firms we find that ceo characteristics explain a significant proportion of the sample variance in firm r d spending even when corporate strategy ownership structure and other firm level attributes are controlled in terms of individual ceo characteristics we find that r d spending is greater at firms where ceos are younger have greater wealth invested in firm stock and signifacant career experience in marketing and or engineering r d in contrast to existing theory we find that the amount of a ceo s formal education had no significant association with r d spending once a ceo has attained a college degree however significant r d spending increases are found at firms where ceos have advanced science related degrees from subgroup analyses we further find that ceo effects on relative r d spending increase with longer ceo tenure implying that ceos over time may mold r d spending to suit their own preferences from these results we make implications for both research on determinants of r d spending and managerial practice

political connections and entrepreneurial investment evidence from china s transition economy abstract recent literature in entrepreneurship suggests that market and legal institutions matter for entrepreneurial investment yet prior studies have focused on the role of formal institutions building on new institutional theory and political connections literature this study aims to evaluate the role of political connections in entrepreneurial reinvestment in less developed and transition economies the purpose of this paper is threefold first it aims to demonstrate systematically how political connections affect entrepreneurial reinvestment second it applies this relationship to a subsample group i e small and medium enterprises smes in order to empirically test whether political connections are more beneficial for large firms or smes third it demonstrates that political connections substitute for rather than complement formal market and legal institutions the empirical test uses a nationally representative sample of entrepreneurial firms from china s transition economy

round the clock market efficiency and home bias evidence from the international japanese government bonds futures markets abstract this paper examines how information is processed between almost identical international futures markets london liffe and tokyo tse jgb futures in these markets variations in open to open changes are virtually the same as those of close to close changes suggesting that information is transmitted efficiently across markets with small opening pricing errors the overall results confirm market efficiency around the clock yet the intraday u shaped patterns in volume volatility of the london jgb futures suggest home bias in international investments indicating a less global view of trading than expected specifically at the liffe open london investors rush to rebalance portfolios instead of doing so at the tse close which is only one hour before the liffe opens

informational linkages across trading regions evidence from foreign exchange markets abstract using a new high frequency data set from electronic broking services ebs this paper examines informational linkages in the euro dollar and dollar yen exchange rates across five trading regions asia pacific the asia europe overlap europe the europe america overlap and america information is proxied by exchange rate return direction of return volatility trading activity and order flow we find that informational linkages are statistically significant at both own region and inter region levels but own region spillovers dominate in economic significance especially for volatility and trading activity in addition order flow spillovers from the europe america overlap trading region are the most important source of spillovers to other trading regions for both currency pairs

the imf as a biased global insurance mechanism asymmetrical moral hazard reserve accumulation and financial crises a large literature has established that the international monetary fund imf is heavily politicized we argue that this politicization has important consequences for international reserve accumulation and financial crises the imf generates moral hazard asymmetrically reducing the expected costs of risky lending and policies for states that are politically influential vis a vis the institution using a panel data set covering 1980 to 2010 we show that proxies for political influence over the imf are associated with outcomes indicative of moral hazard lower international reserves and more frequent financial crises we support our causal claims by applying the synthetic control method to taiwan which was expelled from the imf in 1980 consistent with our predictions taiwan s expulsion led to a sharp increase in precautionary international reserves and exceptionally conservative financial policies

forward curves scarcity and price volatility in oil and natural gas markets the role of inventory in explaining the shape of the forward curve and spot price volatility in commodity markets is central in the theory of storage developed by kaldor kaldor n 1939 speculation and economic stability the review of economic studies 7 1 27 and working working h 1949 the theory of the price of storage american economic review 39 1254 1262 and has since been documented in a vast body of financial literature including the reference paper by fama and french fama e f and k r french 1987 commodity futures prices some evidence on forecast power premiums and the theory of storage journal of business 60 55 73 on metals the goal of this paper is twofold i validate in the case of oil and natural gas the use of the slope of the forward curve as a proxy for inventory the slope being defined in a way that filters out seasonality ii analyze directly for these two major commodities the relationship between inventory and price volatility in agreement with the theory of storage we find that i the negative correlation between price volatility and inventory is globally significant for crude oil ii this negative correlation prevails only during those periods of scarcity when the inventory is below the historical average and increases importantly during the winter periods for natural gas our results are illustrated by the analysis of a 15 year database of us oil and natural gas prices and inventory

committee assignments constituent preferences and campaign contributions committee assignments constituent preferences and campaign constributions the familiar economic model of regulation as developed by stigler 1971 peltzman 1976 and becker 1983 posits an essentially frictionless market process for regulatory policy formation in which a single regulator legislator chooses policy to maximize net support from competing groups in this paper we extend the supply side of this model by considering the effect of legislative institutions and unorganized constituent preferences on the ability of incumbents in the house of representatives to serve specific interest groups we then test this formulation by examining the recent history of interest group campaign contributions to these legislators our theoretical model concentrates on how a legislator allocates time between serving specific interest groups outside his district and serving his constituency we do not model interest group decisions directly assuming simply that they purchase their desired amount of service from the lowest cost suppliers our model sorts legislators by the supply price at which they can serve a particular group this price depends on the preferences of the voters in the legislators district and the productivity of the legislator in producing policy service for each group 1 the empirical section tests the model by examining the pattern of interest group campaign contributions to house incumbents from 1978 through 1984 our regression analysis tends to confirm both implications of the theory first the pattern of campaign contributions from specific interest groups to legislators is shaped by the division of substantive legislative and regulatory jurisdictions represented by the system of house standing committees second voter preferences influence the pattern of contributions by affecting the supply price at which a legislator can offer policy to interest groups legislators with sympathetic or indifferent constituencies are able to offer a lower price and are therefore able to attract larger sums than those with hostile constituencies these results are important for two reasons first the influence of congressional institutions such as committees on policy is not widely accepted while several studies faith levins and tollison 1982 weingast and moran 1983 weingast 1984 grier 1989 and robert 1990 have documented the effects of changes in a particular committee on policies under its jurisdiction this work considers the jurisdiction of only a single committee in each case 2 by examining the linkages between congressional committees and political action committees pacs we investigate whether interest groups act as if committees have power second while the chicago model of regulation emphasizes correctly in our view that policy is the result of vote maximizing calculations and the incremental balancing nature of any equilibrium the model is imprecise about which sets of preferences are most important in determining the levels of policy or the size of changes in policies focusing on committees promotes a parsimonious specification of both the political players members of the relevant committee rather than the entire congress and the pivotal voters committee members constituencies more than the nation determining specific policy outcomes the paper is organized as follows section i reviews some issues on the nature and sources of committee influence in the u s congress the second section incorporates committee assignments into a theory of decision making by interest group investors sections iii and iv describe our data and estimation technique and present the empirical results the fifth and final section discusses some implications and conclusions of this research i committee power in congress legislators differ substantively by virtue of their committee assignments committees in congress and particularly in the house of representatives possess disproportionate power over the policy areas in their respective jurisdictions have the right to hold hearings and recommend budget allocations for the bureaus in their jurisdiction goodwin 1970

an empirical evaluation of the overconfidence hypothesis abstract recently several behavioral finance models based on the overconfidence hypothesis have been proposed to explain anomalous findings including a short term continuation momentum and a long term reversal in stock returns we characterize the overconfidence hypothesis by the following four testable implications first if investors are overconfident they overreact to private information and underreact to public information second market gains make overconfident investors trade more aggressively in subsequent periods third excessive trading of overconfident investors in securities markets contributes to the observed excessive volatility fourth overconfident investors underestimate risk and trade more in riskier securities to document the presence of overconfidence in financial markets we empirically evaluate these four hypotheses using aggregate data overall we find empirical evidence in support of the four hypotheses

price reversals bid ask errors or market overreaction abstract we show that bid ask errors in transaction prices are the predominant source of apparent price reversals in the short run for nasdaq firms once we extract measurement errors in prices caused by the bid ask spread we find little evidence of market overreaction on the contrary we find that security returns are positively and not negatively autocorrelated we also show that bid ask errors lead to substantial spurious volatility in transaction returns about half of measured daily return variances can be induced by the bid ask effect

the effect of imf programs on economic growth abstract using a bivariate dynamic version of the heckman selection model we estimate the effect of participation in international monetary fund imf programs on economic growth we find evidence that governments enter into agreements with the imf under the pressures of a foreign reserves crisis but they also bring in the fund to shield themselves from the political costs of adjustment policies program participation lowers growth rates for as long as countries remain under a program once countries leave the program they grow faster than if they had remained but not faster than they would have without participation

fx trading and exchange rate dynamics i examine the sources of exchange rate dynamics by focusing on the information structure of fx trading this structure permits the existence of an equilibrium distribution of transaction prices at a point in time i develop and estimate a model of the price distribution using data from the deutsche mark dollar market that prroduces two striking results 1 much of the short term volatility in exchange rates comes from sampling the heterogeneous trading decisions of dealers in a distribution that under normal market conditions changes comparatively slowly 2 public news is rarely the predominant source of exchange rate movements over any horizon copyright the american finance association 2002

endogenous participation risk in speculative markets abstract this paper analyses the dynamic implications of an asset pricing model with incomplete participation due to entry costs it is shown that heterogeneity in entry costs can lead to the existence of multiple stochastic sunspot equilibria whereby the number of agents in the market and asset prices fluctuate endogeneously over time in the absence of fundamental uncertainty such asset price fluctuations occur despite the uniqueness of the deterministic equilibrium and thus bear no link to the usual notion of steady state indeterminacy in addition to excess volatility the equilibria exhibit predictable and conditionally heteroskedastic returns

does fomc news increase global fx trading does global currency volume increase on federal open market committee fomc days to test hypotheses of abnormal currency volume on fomc days a new data set from the continuous linked settlement cls bank is used the cls measure captures more than half of the global trading volume in foreign exchange fx markets the evidence shows that fx trading volume increases about 5 in the spot and the spot next market following fomc deliberations the novelty of this result is that the aggregated cls data controls for responses in various derivatives markets a feature that existing studies based on intradaily data for specific trading platforms do not consider

large block transactions the speed of response and temporary and permanent stock price effects abstract the paper investigates how quickly prices attain new equilibrium levels after large block transactions and measures the associated temporary and permanent price effects we find that prices adjust within at most three trades with most of the adjustment occurring in the first trade the temporary price effect for seller initiated transactions is related to block size but the temporary price effect observed for buyer initiated transactions is no larger than that observed in 100 share trades most of the price effect associated with block trades is permanent and is related to block size regardless of the initiating party

deutsche mark dollar volatility intraday activity patterns macroeconomic announcements and longer run dependencies this paper provides a detailed characterization of the volatility in the deutsche mark dollar foreign exchange market using an annual sample of five minute returns the approach captures the intraday activity patterns the macroeconomic announcements and the volatility persistence arch known from daily returns the different features are separately quantified and shown to account for a substantial fraction of return variability both at the intraday and daily level the implications of the results for the interpretation of the fundamental driving forces behind the volatility process is also discussed the efficient market hypothesis contends that financial asset prices provide rational assessments of fundamental values and future payoffs by implication price changes should reflect the arrival and processing of all relevant new information however the proportion of return variability that can be ascribed to public news announcements is low for example cutler poterba and summers 1989 find that even the largest daily price changes in the stock market generally cannot be associated with any significant economic news 1 moreover proxies for the flow of public information e g the number of news items released by reuter s news service berry and hiowe 1994 or dow jones company mitchell and mulherin 1994 explain little of the overall variation thus if private information is ruled out proponents of rational price formation have to assert the existence of important news items

liquidity credit quality and the relation between volatility and trading activity evidence from the corporate bond market this paper investigates the roles of illiquidity and credit risk in determining the relations between price volatility of a bond and its trading frequency and trade size based on a large transaction dataset from october 2004 to june 2012 we find a positive relation between volatility and trading frequency and a negative relation between volatility and trade size consistent with the prediction of the search based theory the relations are much stronger for illiquid and risky bonds furthermore both liquidity and credit risk become more important in times of stress and their effects are reinforcing results strongly suggest that search frictions and credit risk are important factors driving the relation between volatility and trading activity in the corporate bond market

response of hourly stock prices and trading volume to economic news this paper examines hourly stock returns and trading volume response to announcements about the money supply consumer price index cpi producer price index industrial production and the unemployment rate the empirical results indicate that surprises in announcements about money supply and cpi are significantly associated with stock price changes the announcements of the other three variables do not affect stock prices significantly trading volume is not affected by any of the five economic variable announcements indicating that market participants do not differ substanti ally in the interpretations of the effects of announcements the spee d of adjustment analysis indicates that the effect of information on stock prices is reflected in a short period of one hour or so copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

corporate environmental responsibility in polluting industries does religion matter using a sample of chinese listed firms in polluting industries for the period of 2008 2010 we empirically investigate whether and how buddhism china s most influential religion affects corporate environmental responsibility cer in this study we measure buddhist variables as the number of buddhist monasteries within a certain radius around chinese listed firms registered addresses in addition we hand collect corporate environmental disclosure scores based on the global reporting initiative gri sustainability reporting guidelines using hand collected buddhism data and corporate environmental disclosure scores we provide strong and robust evidence that buddhism is significantly positively associated with cer this finding is consistent with the following view buddhism can serve as social norms to evoke the consciousness of social responsibility and thereof strengthen cer our findings also reveal that the positive association between buddhism and cer is attenuated for firms with higher law enforcement index the results are robust to various measures of buddhism and a variety of sensitivity tests

endogeneity and the dynamics of internal corporate governance abstract we use a well developed dynamic panel generalized method of moments gmm estimator to alleviate endogeneity concerns in two aspects of corporate governance research the effect of board structure on firm performance and the determinants of board structure the estimator incorporates the dynamic nature of internal governance choices to provide valid and powerful instruments that address unobserved heterogeneity and simultaneity we re examine the relation between board structure and performance using the gmm estimator in a panel of 6 000 firms over a period from 1991 to 2003 and find no causal relation between board structure and current firm performance we illustrate why other commonly used estimators that ignore the dynamic relationship between current governance and past firm performance may be biased we discuss where it may be appropriate to consider the dynamic panel gmm estimator in corporate governance research as well as caveats to its use

portfolio choice and trading volume with loss averse investors this paper presents a model of portfolio choice and stock trading volume with lossaverse investors the demand function for risky assets is discontinuous and non monotonic as wealth rises beyond a threshold investors follow a generalized portfolio insurance strategy this behavior is consistent with the evidence in favor of the disposition effect in addition loss averse investors will not hold stocks unless the equity premium is quite high the elasticity of the aggregate demand curve changes substantially depending on the distribution of wealth across investors in an equilibrium setting the model generates positive correlation between trading volume and stock return volatility but suggests that this relationship should be non linear

executive turnover and firm performance in china executive turnover and its link to firm performance can provide a crucial measure of how effectively a firm solves the two sets of principal agent problems a the diverging interests between top management and shareholders which may result in managerial entrenchment and b the diverging interests between controlling shareholders and minority shareholders which may lead to the expropriation of the latter by the former or tunneling as referred to in the literature tying the personal fortune of top executives to the firm s performance aligns the interests of shareholders and those of management it also breaks up the insider alliance between the controlling shareholder and management thereby helping protect the interests of minority shareholders although there is a large literature on executive turnover in western firms research on executive turnover in non western firms is limited and this paper is the only one on china a closer look at the executive turnoverperformance link in china one of the two major internal discipline mechanisms in corporate governance is particularly relevant since effective markets for corporate control are missing in china the largest developing and transitional economy in the world furthermore china is an interesting case because both types of agency problems are acute due to poorly defined property rights and weak investor protection which result largely from its command economy legacy

a further investigation of the weekend effect in stock returns this study uses a longer time period and additional stocks to further investigate the weekend effect we find consistently negative monday returns 1 for the s p composite as early as 1928 2 for exchange traded stocks of firms of all sizes and 3 for actively traded over the counter otc stocks the otc results are based on bid prices and therefore appear to reject specialist related explanations for the 30 individual stocks of the dow jones industrial index the average correlation between friday and monday returns is positive and the highest of all pairs of successive days the latter finding is inconsistent with fairly general measurement error explanations some of the most puzzling empirical findings reported in recent years indicate that the distribution of common stock returns varies by day of the week most notably the average return for monday close friday to close monday is significantly negative cross 3 and french 6 find negative monday returns using the standard and poor s composite index and gibbons and hess 7 find negative monday returns for the 30 individual stocks of the dow jones industrial index 1 this negative monday return or weekend effect has yet to be explained this study undertakes a further investigation of the weekend effect in stock returns we examine additional time periods extending the total period covered to 55 years we examine additional stocks such as those of small low capitalization firms and those traded over the counter in all cases the data exhibit a weekend effect that is at least as strong as that reported in previous studies the study also readdresses potential explanations for the effect such as measurement error but concludes that none of these explanations is satisfactory the first section presents a history of the weekend effect from 1928 through 1982 based on the standard and poor s composite index we essentially double the length of the period beginning in 1953 examined by french 6 the results indicate consistently negative monday returns throughout the 55 year period during much of the 25 year period from 1928 through 1952 the new york stock exchange was open on saturdays so monday s return is then computed from saturday s close to monday s close 2 these returns for one day weekends are consistently negative and not significantly different from the two day weekend

environmental assessment for corporate sustainability by resource utilization and technology innovation dea radial measurement on japanese industrial sectors abstract this study proposes a new use of dea data envelopment analysis radial approach to examine the corporate sustainability of japanese industrial sectors the concept of corporate sustainability is measured by its subcomponent measures including uen unified efficiency under natural disposability uem unified efficiency under managerial disposability uenm unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability uei unified efficiency for intermediate measurement and uenm dc unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability with desirable congestion among the five measures the uei examines a degree of how each firm can efficiently utilize its resources the uenm dc examines a degree of how the firm can reduce an amount of undesirable outputs by technology innovation and or managerial change such a combined use between uei and uenm dc has been never explored in dea environmental assessment the empirical results obtained from the proposed approach have identified two important implications one of the two implications is that the japanese energy industry has been long under governmental regulation so that energy firms do not have corporate governance capabilities at the level of other industrial sectors which are competing in a global market in particular the implication is applicable to japanese electric power firms it is necessary for them to change their corporate governances e g by adding new executive board members who have international experience and or woman executives as widely found in american and european energy industries so that they can pay attention to consumers not regulatory agencies of the japanese government the other implication is that technology innovation can more effectively improve the performance of the energy sector employing high efficiency and low carbon generation technologies to achieve desirable fuel mix is essential for improving the corporate sustainability of the japanese energy sector

government intervention and strategic trading in the u s treasury market we study the impact of permanent open market operations pomos by the federal reserve on u s treasury market liquidity using a parsimonious model of speculative trading we conjecture that i this form of government intervention improves market liquidity contrary to conclusions drawn by existing literature and ii the extent of this improvement depends on the market s information environment evidence from a novel sample of federal reserve pomos during the 2000s indicates that bid ask spreads of on the run treasury securities decline when pomos are executed by an amount increasing in proxies for information heterogeneity among speculators fundamental volatility and pomo policy uncertainty consistent with our model

what determines individual trade policy preferences abstract this article provides new evidence on the determinants of individual trade policy preferences using individual level survey data for the united states there are two main empirical results first we find that factor type dominates industry of employment in explaining support for trade barriers second we find that home ownership also matters for individuals trade policy preferences independent of factor type home ownership in counties with a manufacturing mix concentrated in comparative disadvantage industries is correlated with support for trade barriers this finding suggests that in addition to current factor incomes driving preferences as in standard trade models preferences also depend on asset values

measurement effects and the variance of returns after stock splits and stock dividends this article examines the relation between two factors affecting stock returns the bid ask spread and price discreteness and the increase in return variance after ex dates of stock splits and stock dividends controlling for these effects the variance of daily returns still increases significantly the variance of weekly returns also increases significantly and the variance of returns for a control sample of nonsplitting firms shows no significant increase variance ratio tests show that bid ask errors are small for these stocks and therefore cannot explain the large increase in variance spreads and price discreteness do not explain increased variance after stock distributions article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

liquidity surprise volume and return premia in the oil market abstract we investigate oil market price dynamics in the context of the mixture of distributions hypothesis mdh our econometric model addresses autoregressive properties in returns the impact of surprise volume and conditional oil market return volatility as well as oil market liquidity in the conditional return equation surprise volume as a proxy of private information flow is shown to be unrelated to a set of standard market liquidity proxies oil return heteroscedasticity is found to be partly explained by surprise volume a finding that is consistent with the mdh our findings further show that both oil market liquidity as well as surprise volume shocks are priced in the oil market as such lower levels of lagged market liquidity relate to above average conditional returns surprise volume shocks are associated with lower conditional oil market returns jointly with higher contemporaneous conditional return volatility lagged market liquidity dominates conditional volatility in predicting conditional oil price returns

market crashes and informational avalanches this paper analyses a security market with transaction costs and a sequential trading structure transaction costs may prevent many traders from revealing their private information if they trade in a sequential fashion due to the information aggregation failure hidden information gets accumulated in the market which may be revealed by a small trigger yielding a high volatility in the absence of an accompanying event the paper first characterizes the optimal trading strategy of the agent which constitute the unique equilibrium further properties of the price sequence are obtained using the concepts of informational cascade and informational avalanche the results are applied to the explanation of market crashes in particular the dynamics of market crashes are illustrated as evolving through the following four phases 1 boom 2 euphoria 3 trigger and 4 panic where the euphoria corresponds to the informational cascade and the panic corresponds to the informational avalanche

the informational role of stock and option volume this article analyzes the intraday interdependence of order flows and price movements for actively traded nyse stocks and their chicago board options exchange cboe traded options stock net trade volume buyer initiated volume minus seller initiated volume has strong predictive ability for stock and option quote revisions but option net trade volume has no incremental predictive ability this suggests that informed investors initiate trades in the stock market but not in the option market on the other hand both stock and option quote revisions have predictive ability for each other thus while information in the stock market is contained in both quote revisions and trades information in the option market is contained only in quote revisions copyright 2002 oxford university press

political connections and corporate environmental responsibility adopting or escaping abstract corporate environmental responsibility cer is increasingly viewed as an important business strategy by researchers investors and society as a whole while prior research has emphasized the role of social pressures firm specific factors as well as ceo characteristics in cer little attention has been paid to the impacts of political connections we propose a mechanism based framework to study how political connections affect firm s propensity to engage in cer using comprehensive environmental information disclosure data on china s listed firms augmented by unique data on political connections we find that political connections have a positive effect on cer this effect is more pronounced for state owned firms and in cities with stringent environmental regulations with respect to the channels through which political connections increase cer we further find that political connections help firms to receive government grants subsidies and tax reduction related to the environment protection and implement government environmental policies

the impact of short selling on the price volume relationship evidence from hong kong this paper considers the relationship between traded volume and volatility allowing for the impact of short sales the evidence supports a nonlinear bidirectional relationship between volume and volatility short selling is found to have a significant impact on this relationship and our results suggest i that the hong kong market displays greater volatility following a period of short selling and ii that asymmetric responses to positive and negative innovations to returns appear to be exacerbated by short selling

the political economy of imf lending in africa why has imf lending achieved such poor results in africa is it because the fund imposes the wrong conditions or because it fails to enforce them analysis of monthly data on 53 african countries from 1990 to 2000 shows that the imf s loans for reform contract lacks credibility because donor countries intervene to prevent rigorous enforcement countries that have influence with developed country patrons as measured by u s foreign aid membership in postcolonial international institutions and voting profiles in the un are subject to less rigorous enforcement shorter program suspensions they have more frequent program suspensions because they violate their conditions more often the imf will have to become more independent in order to become an effective champion of reform

money talks supplementary financiers and international monetary fund conditionality what explains the changes in international monetary fund imf conditionality i argue that imf conditionality agreements are influenced by supplementary financiers the imf regularly relies on external financing to supplement its loans to countries facing payments imbalances as a result these supplementary financiers are able to exercise leverage over the imf and the design of its conditionality programs i consider the influence of one type of supplementary financier private financial institutions on imf conditionality conclusions are supported by a data set of 249 conditionality arrangements coded according to their terms and two case studies

liquidity provision and the organizational form of nyse specialist firms we examine the influence of nyse specialist firm organizational form on the nature of liquidity provision we compare closely held firms whose specialists provide liquidity with their own capital to widely held firms whose specialists provide liquidity with diffusely owned capital we argue that specialists using their own capital have a greater incentive and ability to reduce adverse selection costs but face a greater cost of capital differences in the proportion of spreads due to adverse selection costs large trade frequency the sensitivity between depth and spreads and price stabilization support this argument recent studies by cao choe and hatheway 1997 and corwin 1999a document differences across specialist firms in execution costs trading halts due to order imbalances and market stabilization why these differences in liquidity provision exist however is not well understood we argue that differences in liquidity provision arise from differences in specialist firm organizational form firms that make markets with capital supplied by their specialists owner specialist firms offer economies with respect to asymmetric information costs while firms that make markets with diffusely owned capital employee specialist firms offer economies with respect to capital costs our empirical results support this argument since march 1997 the nyse has allowed listing firms to choose which specialist firm handles their stock from a pool provided by the nyse allocations committee new york stock exchange 1997 like the choice of debt dividend or compensation policies the choice of a specialist firm po

stock prices and volume the authors undertake a comprehensive investigation of price and volume co movement using daily new york stock exchange data from 1928 to 1987 they adjust the data to take into account well known calendar effects and long run trends to describe the process they use a seminonparametric estimate of the joint density of current price change and volume conditional on past price changes and volume four empirical regularities are found 1 positive correlation between conditional volatility and volume 2 large price movements are followed by high volume 3 conditioning on lagged volume substantially attenuates the leverage effect and 4 after conditioning on lagged volume there is a positive risk return relation article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

the impact of trades on daily volatility this article proposes a trading based explanation for the asymmetric effect in daily volatility of individual stock returns previous studies propose two major hypotheses for this phenomenon leverage effect and time varying expected returns however leverage has no impact on asymmetric volatility at the daily frequency and moreover we observe asymmetric volatility for stocks with no leverage also expected returns may vary with the business cycle that is at a lower than daily frequency trading activity of contrarian and herding investors has a robust effect on the relationship between daily volatility and lagged return consistent with the predictions of the rational expectation models the non informational liquidity driven herding trades increase volatility following stock price declines and the informed contrarian trades reduce volatility following stock price increases the results are robust to different measures of volatility and trading activity jel c30 g11 g12 stock return volatility is fundamental to finance contingent claims pricing risk management asset allocation and market efficiency tests use volatility as a basic building block consequently volatility has been widely studied along several dimensions volatility clustering in financial data has been well documented and extensively modeled by the autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch of engle 1982 and the generalized arch extension of bollerslev 1986 1 shiller 1981 leroy and porter 1981 roll 1984 1988 french and roll 1986 and cutler poterba and summers 1989 have all documented a significant amount of volatility that cannot be explained by changes in fundamentals and thus may be attributable to mispricing schwert 1989 has studied the variation in stock market volatility over time and has analyzed the

macroeconomic news order flows and exchange rates under rational expectations and efficient markets the news contained in public information announcements is directly impounded into prices with there being no role for trades in this process of information assimilation this paper directly tests this assertion using transaction level exchange rate data and a sample of scheduled macroeconomic announcements the main result of the paper is that even information that is publicly and simultaneously released to all market participants is largely impounded into prices via the key micro level price determinant order flow we quantify the role that order flow plays and find that between a half and two thirds of price relevant information is incorporated into prices via the trading process

origins of the federal reserve system international incentives and the domestic free rider problem from the civil war to 1914 the united states had one of the worst e nancial systems in the world the dominant institutional feature of the system was the absence of a central bank and its most salient performance characteristics were the recurrence of banking panics and severe seasonal interest rate e uctuations these e nancial problems were economically costly panics were accompanied by sharp declines in the money supply reduced economic activity and increased unemployment and business failures in 1913 congress created the federal reserve system to safeguard the nation from panics and smooth out interest rate seasonals in more general terms the federal reserve was established to provide the national public good of e nancial system stability in this study i explain how american society overcame the collective action problems that normally constrain the production of public goods to inadequate levels in other words the article is about the political effort that produced an infrastructural cornerstone of the modern u s economy in the face of incentives that should have left few people with sufficient motivation to pay for the improvement i bring to bear a joint products selective incentives argument to explain the voluntary collective action behind the federal reserveact 1 the lobbying effort was aboutsolving thepanic problem tobe sure but becausethisexpected benee t approximated a societywide public good it did not on its own motivate collective action instead the united states faced a second problem of e nancial organization before 1914 and it was this problem that created a private inducement to lobby for the federal reserve the structure of the domestic e nancial machinery contributed not only to instability at home but also to the near complete absence of the u s dollar in global e nancial affairs indeed the united states was the only major trading country whose currency did not function as an international currency before 1914 the new this article is a revision of a paper delivered at the 1996annual convention of the southern economic association washington d c 23 25 november i thank michael bordo marc busch william r clark benjamin j cohen barry eichengreen jeffry frieden william keech stephen krasner charles lipson jameslivingston louispauly georgeselgin bethsimmons richardtimberlake danielverdier eugene n white and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments 1 see olson 1965 and sandler 1992

the high politics of imf lending analysts have long suspected that politics affects the lending patterns of the international monetary fund imf but none have adequately specified or systematically tested competing explanations this paper develops a political explanation of imf lending and tests it statistically on the developing countries between 1985 and 1994 it finds that political realignment toward the united states the largest power in the imf increases a country s probability of receiving an imf loan a country s static political alignment position has no significant impact during this period suggesting that these processes are best modeled dynamically an analysis of two subsamples rejects the hypothesis that the imf has become less politicized since the end of the cold war and suggests that the influence of politics has actually increased since 1990 the behavior of multilateral organizations is still driven by the political interests of their more powerful member states

transactions volume and volatility we show that the positive volatility volume relation documented by numerous researchers actually reflects the positive relation between volatility and the number of transactions thus it is the occurrence of transactions per se and not their size that generates volatility trade size has no information beyond that contained in the frequency of transactions our results suggest that theoretical research needs to entertain scenarios in which 1 both the frequency and size of trades are endogenously determined yet 2 the size of trades has no information content beyond that contained in the number of transactions article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

price and trading volume reaction surrounding earnings announcements a closer examination the process of information dissemination and interpretation in securities markets is very complex and mostly unobservable while changes in prices and the amount of trading that takes place at the market level provide evidence of information processing verrecchia 1981 demonstrated that these are not sufficient to describe completely the dissemination of information and its interpretation by investors a descriptive study of price changes and trading volume however may still provide some insights into how investors react to information this paper is an empirical investigation of price changes and trading volume during the days surrounding the announcement of quarterly and annual earnings in the wall street journal wsj in the original paper investigating trading volume and price changes surrounding earnings announcements beaver 1968 was primarily concerned with whether the annual earnings announcement had information content i e led to changes in investors assessments of the probability distribution of future returns if there were any significant price changes and or trading volume during the week of the announcement then the annual earnings announcement was assumed to have had

the mortality cost of political connections we study the relationship between the political connections of chinese firms and workplace fatalities in our preferred specification we find that the worker death rate for connected companies is two to three times that of unconnected firms depending on the sample employed a pattern that holds for within firm estimations the connections mortality relationship is attenuated in provinces where safety regulators promotion is contingent on meeting safety targets in the absence of fatalities connected firms receive fewer reports of major violations for safety compliance whereas in years of fatal accidents the rate of reported violations is identical moreover fatal accidents produce negative returns at connected companies and are associated with the subsequent departure of well connected executives these results provide suggestive evidence that connections enable firms to avoid potentially costly compliance measures rather than using connections to avoid regulatory response after accidents occur our findings emphasize the social costs of political connections and suggest that appropriate regulatory incentives may be useful in mitigating these costs

do lenders favor politically connected firms rent provision in an emerging financial market corruption by the politically connected is often blamed for economic ills particularly in less developed economies using a loan level data set of more than 90 000 rms that represents the universe of corporate lending in pakistan between 1996 and 2002 we investigate rents to politically connected rms in banking classifying a rm as political if its director participates in an election we examine the extent nature and economic costs of political rent provision we nd that political rms borrow 45 percent more and have 50 percent higher default rates such preferential treatment occurs exclusively in government banks private banks provide no

a discrete state continuous time model of financial transactions prices and times financial transaction prices typically lie on a discrete grid of values and arrive at random times this paper proposes an econometric model with this structure the distribution of each price change is a multinomial conditional on past information and the time interval between the transactions the proposed autoregressive conditional multinomial acm model is not restricted to be markov or symmetric in response to shocks however such restrictions can be imposed the duration between trades is modeled as an autoregressive conditional duration acd model following engle and russell 1998 maximum likelihood estimation and testing procedures are developed the model is estimated with 12 months of tick data on a moderately frequently traded nyse stock airgas the preferred model is estimated with three lags for the acm model and two lags for the acd model both price returns and squared returns influence future durations and present and past durations affect price movements the model exhibits revers

block trading and information revelation around quarterly earnings announcements the author investigate the empirical importance of information revelation in the pricing of block trades in particular he examine whether block prices are correlated with the unexpected part of firms quarterly earnings for his sample of block trades information revelation does indeed appear to be a significant factor shortly before earnings announcements article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

congressional politics of financing the international monetary fund we address the question of how international public goods are financed by analyzing voting in the u s congress on legislation to increase the u s contri bution to the international monetary fund imf we argue that legislators are more likely to vote in favor of an increase 1 the more campaign contributions they obtain from banks that specialize in international lending and 2 the greater the share of high skilled proglobalization workers in their districts the first argu ment supports the inference that a financially strong imf mitigates the risks of international lending to the benefit of the lending banks the second reflects our claim that voters view the imf as a positive force for global economic integration that following stolper samuelson reasoning benefits high skilled workers lastly we analyze imf loan decisions and find modest support for the claim that imf policy reflects the interests of major international banks overall our results sug gest that private actors within the united states have individual stakes in funding the imf the primary mandate of the international monetary fund imf or fund is to safeguard the stability of the global financial system an international public good the imf obtains the resources it needs for its stabilization operations from mem ber governments with large members contributing most of the funds in this arti cle we analyze the politics of funding the imf from the perspective of its largest contributor the united states rather than treating the united states as a single entity with a unified national interest at the fund we consider the preferences of political actors within the united states who exert power over financing the

the origins of central banking solutions to the free rider problem certain domestic institutions are sources of international power by way of their abilities to encourage investment and to mobilize social resources in wartime for example states with democratic institutions almost always win the wars they e ght a regularity known as the democratic advantage 1 this result is intriguing since it rests on intuition about the effects of military competition on domestic institutions rivalry among states may put pressure on sovereigns to provide the political foundations for secure markets in order to enlarge future military capabilities in this article i address the role of war in inducing domestic institutions that allowed governments to credibly commit to promises to pay their debts a probable source of democracies edge in war rather than investigate the entire range of protections affected by democratic institutions a life s endeavor as the work of douglass north attests i focus on a single e nancial element of the reforms the innovation of central banking britain s superior e nancial economic and military performance after 1689 rested in large part on the establishment of the bank of england 2 the central bank provided a commitment technology that improved the government s ability to borrow a need impelled by intense military competition 3 my motivation derives from puzzles concerning the origins and the diffusion of credibility enhancing institutions like central banks institutions resolve collective action problems but institutions themselves are public goods meaning that their origins are subject to the same dilemmas they are meant to resolve 4 what then explains the incentives of self interested and free riding individuals to contribute to

international bailouts moral hazard and conditionality international bailouts the imf s role the large international bailouts of the 1990s have been criticized for generating moral hazard at the expense of the global taxpayer we argue that this criticism is misleading because international bailouts create no or very few costs to the international community instead the problem is to ensure that bailouts are not used to facilitate bad domestic policies thus creating moral hazard at the expense of domestic taxpayers this may require a shift towards ex ante conditionality in the sense that the availability and size of official crisis lending need to be conditional on government policies before the crisis olivier jeanne and jeromin zettelmeyer

the relation between price changes and trading volume a survey this paper reviews previous and current research on the relation between price changes and trading volume in financial markets and makes four contributions first two empiri cal relations are established volume is positively related to the magnitude of the price change and in equity markets to the price change per se second previous theoretical research on the price volume relation is summarized and critiqued and major insights are emphasized third a simple model ofthe price volume relation is proposed that is consis tent with several seemingly unrelated or contradictory observations and fourth several directions for future research are identified

whether top executives turnover influences environmental responsibility from the perspective of environmental information disclosure we have empirically examined the relationship between top executives turnover and the corporate environmental responsibility by identifying the influence of ten specific turnover reasons resulting in the chairman s departure and two important types of chairman s succession using a sample of 782 manufacturing listed companies across 3 years in china we find that the corporate environmental responsibility is negatively associated with the involuntary and negative turnover i e dismissal health and death and forced resignation and positively associated with improving corporate governance and not associated with the normal turnover i e retirement and contract expiration and the types of chairman s succession i e independence and internal or external promotion our study significantly contributes to research in environmental disclosure by revealing the relationship between chairman s turnover and the corporate environmental responsibility a feasible way is suggested to regulators and other stakeholders in monitoring or assessing the possible abnormality of environmental responsibility when firms experience involuntary and negative chairman s turnover in the emerging economies

why markets should not necessarily reduce the tick size abstract this paper studies the consequences of a tick size change on the paris bourse thus providing a natural experiment on an order driven market the change raised the tick size for some stocks and lowered it for other in contrast with us exchanges results this generated neither a reduction in liquidity provision for large trades nor a change in the spread based on this paper and on us results it appears an increasing but convex relationship between the relative tick size and the relative spread thus it implies that a new pricing grid does not necessarily lead to change execution costs but it changes the level of transparency in the liquidity supply

order imbalance liquidity and market returns traditionally volume has provided the link between trading activity and returns we focus on a hitherto unexplored but intuitive measure of trading activity the aggregate daily order imbalance on the new york stock exchange signed order imbalances increase decrease following market declines rises which reveals that investors are contrarians on aggregate order imbalances in either direction either excess buy or sell orders reduce liquidity market wide returns are strongly affected by contemporaneous and lagged order imbalances market wide returns reverse themselves after high negative imbalance large negative return days the magnitude of this reversal is partially predictable from the level of the imbalance and return even after controlling for aggregate market volume and liquidity market returns are affected by order imbalance

official credits to developing countries implicit transfers to the banks this paper investigates the impact on the wealth of bank share holders on the transfer of official resources to the debtor countries the main aim was to derive actual estimates of increases in shareholder wealth following important news concerning future transfers from the multilaterals to the debtor nations the main result is that stock market expects virtually all additional resources provided to debtor countries to be used for debt service to commercial banks while the estimated magnitude of these effects are informative the emphasis should be on the direction of these effects as they are robust to overestimation problems clearly official resources provided to debtor countries do devolve to creditor banks however the debtor countries should at least gain in so far as the reduction of a debt overhang eliminates investment distortions the results stem from the fact that some of the monies provided by the multilaterals are specifically earmarked for debt service or are in the form of general balance of payments support that the developing countries can use for private debt service official creditor resources that are specially provided to finance development projects are less likely to be allocated to bank debt service

who supports global economic engagement the sources of preferences in american foreign economic policy in this article we bring together opposing international relations theories to better understand u s foreign policy in particular foreign trade and aid using votes in the u s house of representatives from 1979 2004 we explore different theoretical predictions about preferences for foreign economic policy we assess the impact of domestic factors namely political economy and ideological preferences versus foreign policy pressures our three main results highlight the differential effect of these factors in the two issue areas first aid preferences are as affected by domestic political economy factors as are trade preferences second trade preferences but not economic aid ones are shaped by the president s foreign policy concerns for economic aid domestic political economy factors matter more than foreign policy ones third aid preferences are shaped more by ideological factors than are trade ones but ideology plays a different substantive role in each different constituencies support aid and trade this finding has implications for foreign policy substitutability the internationalist coalition in u s foreign policy statist theories of foreign policy and the connection between public opinion and legislative voting

on the volatility volume relationship in energy futures markets using intraday data this paper investigates the relationship between trading volume and price volatility in the crude oil and natural gas futures markets when using high frequency data by regressing various realized volatility measures with without jumps on trading volume and trading frequency our results feature a contemporaneous and largely positive relationship furthermore we test whether the volatility volume relationship is symmetric for energy futures by considering positive and negative realized semivariances we show that i an asymm etric volatility volume relationship indeed exists ii trading volume and trading frequency significantly affect negative and positive realized semivariance and iii the information content of negative realized semivariance is higher than for positive realized semivariance

volatility volume causality across single stock spot futures markets in india abstractthis study examines the causal relationships between volatility and volume across spot and futures market for the 50 constituent stocks of the cnx nifty index granger non causality tests implemented using vector autoregression var and asymmetric var models indicate the presence of significant causal relations from both the spot and futures volume to both the spot and futures volatility bidirectional causal relationships between spot and futures volume were observed for almost all stocks but few stocks displayed a similar relationship between volatilities the results highlight the importance of volume in absorbing information and its behaviour as the conduit of information

multilateral aid and domestic economic interests existing studies of foreign aid suggest that donor countries economic groups such as exporters should be generally opposed to multilateral aid because multilateral flows do not allow donor countries to tie their aid implicitly or explicitly to the promotion of their domestic economic interests however economic groups can actually benefit from some types of multilateral aid and this serves as an incentive for donor governments to support international organizations generating the benefits i test my argument using data on aid allocated to the multilateral fund for the implementation of the montreal protocol and the global environment facility and international trade by commodity i find robust empirical support for the argument that when donors domestic economic groups are likely to gain from opportunities created by international environmental organizations programs donor governments increase aid allocations to these organizations

international institutions and domestic compensation the imf and the politics of capital account liberalization certain governments have been faster than others in relaxing their restrictions on the cross border movement of capital how can we explain the timing and extent of financial liberalization across countries since the 1970s we argue that imf stabilizationprogramsprovideawindowofopportunityforgovernmentstoinitiatefinancialreforms butthatpolicymakers are more likely to seize this opportunity when welfare expenditures are high large loans from the imf shield policy makers from the costs of financial reform while welfare expenditures provide credibility to the government s ex ante promises of compensation to individuals who are harmed by the reforms we test this hypothesis on data for 87 countries from 1975 to 2002 we employ a spatial autoregressive error sample selection model which accounts for the nonrandom participation of countries in imf programs as well as the processes of international policy diffusion the results provide strong support for the interactive effect of imf programs and domestic welfare expenditures on financial liberalization

long lived private information and imperfect competition we develop a multi period auction model in which multiple privately informed agents strategically exploit their long lived information we show that such traders compete aggressively and cause most of their common private information to be revealed very rapidly in the limit as the interval between auctions approaches zero market depth becomes infinite and all private information is revealed immediately these results are in contrast to those of kyle 1985 in which the monopolistic informed trader causes his information to be incorporated into prices gradually and when the interval between auctions is vanishingly small market depth is constant over time fama 1970 defines a strong form efficient market as one in which security prices fully reflect all available information including both publicly and privately held information in a pioneering and influential article kyle 1985 develops a model in which a single privately informed trader with long lived information optimally exploits his monopoly power over time kyle s 1985 main results are i the informed trader trades in a gradual manner so that his information is incorporated into prices at a slow almost linear rate and ii when auctions are held continuously the depth of the market is constant over time however kyle s 1985 assumption of a single informed trader is strong in the sense that in actual financial markets it is reasonable to expect that at least a few players will have access to private information and will trade in the knowledge that they will face competition with other informed agents in the market 1 we develop a multi period auction model in which multiple strategic informed traders optimally exploit their long lived informational advantage we thus explore the restrictiveness of kyle s assumption of a single informed trader and also examine

the price variability volume relationship on speculative markets this paper concerns the relationship between the variability of the daily price change and the daily volume of trading on the speculative markets our work extends the theory of speculative markets in two ways first we derive from economic theory the joint probability distribution of the price change and the trading volume over any interval of time within the trading day and second we determine how this joint distribution changes as more traders enter or exit from the market the model s parameters are estimated by fiml using daily data from the 90 day t bills futures market the results of the estimation can reconcile a conflict between the price variability volume relationship for this market and the relationship obtained by previous investigators for other speculative markets this paper concerns the relationship between the variability of the daily price change and the volume of trading on speculative markets previous empirical studies 2 3 6 12 14 16 of both futures and equity markets always find a positive association between price variability as measured by the squared price change ap2 and the trading volume 2 there are two explanations for the relationship clark s 2 explanation which is secondary to his effort to explain why the probability distribution of the daily price change is leptokurtic emphasizes randomness in the number of within day transactions in clark s model the daily price change is the sum of a random number of within day price changes the variance of the daily price change is thus a random variable with a mean proportional to the mean number of daily transactions clark argues that the trading volume is related positively to the number of within day transactions and so the trading volume is related positively to the variability of the price change the second explanation is due to epps and epps 6 their model examines the mechanics of within day trading the change in the market price on each within day transaction or market clearing is the average of the changes in all of the traders reservation prices epps and epps assume there is a positive relationship between the extent to which traders disagree when they revise their reservation prices and the absolute value of the change in the market price that is an increase in the extent to which traders disagree is associated with a larger absolute price change the price variability volume relationship arises then because the volume of trading is positively related to the extent to which traders disagree when they revise their reservation prices

pure jump levy processes for asset price modelling abstract the goal of the paper is to show that some types of levy processes such as the hyperbolic motion and the cgmy are particularly suitable for asset price modelling and option pricing we wish to review some fundamental mathematic properties of levy distributions such as the one of infinite divisibility and how they translate observed features of asset price returns we explain how these processes are related to brownian motion the central process in finance through stochastic time changes which can in turn be interpreted as a measure of the economic activity lastly we focus on two particular classes of pure jump levy processes the generalized hyperbolic model and the cgmy models and report on the goodness of fit obtained both on stock prices and option prices

legislators and interest groups how unorganized interests get represented this paper derives a supply price for public policy using a constrained maximization model in the model three sets of agents each have preferences over outcomes organized interest groups offer campaign contributions to improve their own wealth voters offer votes to obtain outcomes closer to their most preferred outcomes and legislators seek both campaign contributions and votes to obtain reelection a given legislator s supply price for policy is shown to depend on the productivity of his effort as determined by committee assignments priority and ability and by the preferences of his unorganized constituency in the home district two extreme assumptions about the effectiveness of campaign spending in eliciting votes are used to illustrate the comparative statics properties of the model the prediction of the model is that interest groups will in general seek out legislators whose voters are indifferent to the policy the interest group seeks thus voters who do have preferences over policy are in effect represented even though they are not organized

liquidity and the law of one price the case of the futures cash basis deviations from no arbitrage relations should be related to market liquidity because liquidity facilitates arbitrage at the same time a wide futures cash basis may trigger arbitrage trades and in turn affect liquidity we test these ideas by studying the dynamic relation between stock market liquidity and the index futures basis there is evidence of two way granger causality between the short term absolute basis and liquidity and liquidity granger causes longer term absolute bases shocks to the absolute basis predict future stock market liquidity the evidence suggests that liquidity enhances the efficiency of the futures cash pricing system copyright 2007 by the american finance association

why are some people and countries more protectionist than others we analyze two cross country data sets that contain information on attitudes toward trade as well as a broad range of socio demographic and other indicators we nd that pro trade preferences are signi cantly and robustly correlated with an individual s level of human capital in the manner predicted by the factor endowments model preferences over trade are also correlated with the trade exposure of the sector in which an individual is employed individuals in non traded sectors tend to be the most pro trade while individuals in sectors with a revealed comparative disadvantage are the most protectionist third an individual s relative economic status has a very strong positive association withpro trade attitudes finally non economic determinants in the form of values identities and attachments play an important role in explaining the variation in preferences over trade high degrees of neighborhood attachment and nationalism patriotism are associated withprotectionist tendencies c

interest group competition and the organization of congress theory and evidence from financial services political action committees we develop a positive theory of how interest group competition shapes the organization of congress and use it to explain campaign contribution patterns in financial services since interest groups cannot enforce fee for service contracts with legislators legislators have an incentive to create specialized standing committees which foster repeated dealing between interests and committee members the resulting reputational equilibrium supports high contributions and high legislative effort for the interests contribution patterns by competing interests in the congressional battle over whether banks can enter new businesses support the theory which also has implications for term limits and campaign reform

heteroskedasticity in stock return data volume versus garch effects this paper provides empirical support for the notion that autoregressive conditional heterqskedasticity arch in daily stock return data reflects time dependence in the process generating information flow to the market daily trading volume used as a proxy for information arrival time is shown to have significant explanatory power regarding the variance of daily returns which is an implication of the assumption that daily returns are subordinated to intraday equilibrium returns furthermore arch effects tend to disappear when volume is included in the variance equation the autoregressive conditiqnal heteroskedasticity arch process of engle 1982 has been shown to provide a good fit for many financial return time series 1 arch imposes an autoregressive structure on conditional variance allqwing volatility shocks to persist over time this persistence captures the propensity of returns of like magnitude to clu ter in time and can explain the well documented nonnormality and nonstability of empirical asset return distributions see especially fama 1965 an appealing explanation for the presence of arch is based upon the hypothesis that daily returns are generated by a maiture of distributions in which the rate of daily information arrival is the stochastic mixing variable as suggested by diebold 1986 gallant hsieh and tauchen 1988 and stock 1987 1988 arch might capture the time series properties e g serial correlation of this mixing variable hqwever this linkage has not been broadly documented with the datia the objective of this study is to examine the validity of this explanation for daily stock returns the empirical strategy exploits the implication of the mixture model that the variance of daily price increments is heteroskedastic specifically positively related to the rate of daily information arrival using daily trading volume as a proxy for the mixing variable we show that for a sample of 20 common stocks arch effects vanish when volume is included as an explanatory variable in the conditional variance equation

environmental investment and firm performance a network approach abstract this study examines the role of investment in environmental production practices for both environmental performance and energy efficiency over time we employ a network dea approach that links successive production technologies through intertemporal investment decisions with a period by period estimation this allows us to estimate energy efficiency and environmental performance separately as well as productivity change and its associated decompositions into efficiency change and technology change incorporating a network model also allows us to account for both short term environmental management practices and long term environmental investments in each of our productivity measures we apply this framework to a panel of detailed plant level production data for swedish manufacturing firms covering the years 2002 2008

an analysis of trade size clustering and its relation to stealth trading abstract nyse and nasdaq trades increasingly cluster on multiples of 500 1 000 and 5 000 shares such clustering varies over time and across stocks and tends to increase with the level of trading activity furthermore rounded trades tend to have more persistence both in occurrence and in trade initiation finally medium sized rounded trades tend to have greater relative price impact than large rounded trades from these observations we surmise that trade size clustering is consistent at least in part with the actions of stealth traders who tend to use medium sized rounded transactions in an attempt to disguise their trades