product market competition and managerial slack this article analyzes the effect of product market competition on managerial incentives in contrast to hart 1983a i show that competition may actually exacerbate the incentive problem the difference in results derives from our different assumptions about managerial preferences the importance of assumptions about preferences suggests that we do not yet understand the precise mechanism through which competition affects incentives

competition risk and managerial incentives this paper examines how the degree of competition among firms in an industry affects the optimal incentives that firms provide to their managers a central assumption is that there is free entry and exit in the industry which implies that changes in the nature of competition lead to changes in the equilibrium market structure the main result is that as the intensity of product market competition increases as a result of greater product substitutability or greater market size principals unambiguously provide stronger incentives to their agents to reduce costs at the same time more intense competition also leads to more volatile firm level profits consequently managers incentives are positively correlated with firm level risk consistent with empirical evidence a decrease in the cost of entering the market has the opposite effect on incentives but still induces a positive correlation between risk and incentives

common persistence in conditional variances since the introduction of the autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic arch model in engle 1982 numerous applications of this modeling strategy have already appeared a common finding in many of these studies with high frequency financial or monetary data concerns the presence of an approximate unit root in the autoregressive polynomial in the univariate time series representation for the conditional second order moments of the process as in the so called integrated generalized arch igarch class of models proposed in engle and bollerslev 1986 in the igarch models shocks to the conditional variance are persistent in the sense that they remain important for forecasts of all horizons this idea is readily extended to a multivariate framework even though many time series may exhibit persistence in variance it is likely that several different variables share the same common long run component in that situation the variables are naturally defined to be co persistent in variance and the co persistent linear combination is interpretable as a long run relationship conditions for co persistence to occur in the multivariate linear garch model are presented these conditions parallel the conditions for linear co integration in the mean as developed by engle and granger 1987 the presence of co persistence has important implications for asset pricing relationships and in optimal portfolio allocation decisions an empirical example relating to the time series properties of nominal u s dollar exchange rates for the deutschemark and the british pound provides a simple illustration of the ideas

multiscale behaviour of volatility autocorrelations in a financial market abstract we perform a scaling analysis on nyse daily returns we show that volatility correlations are power laws on a time range from one day to one year and more important that the exponent is not unique consistently with a multiscale behaviour

the effect of long memory in volatility on stock market fluctuations abstract recent empirical evidence demonstrates the presence of an important long memory component in realized asset return volatility we specify and estimate multivariate models for the joint dynamics of stock returns and volatility that allow for long memory in volatility without imposing this property on returns asset pricing theory imposes testable cross equation restrictions on the system that are not rejected in our preferred specifications which include a strong financial leverage effect we show that the impact of volatility shocks on stock prices is small and short lived in spite of a positive risk return tradeoff and long memory in volatility

industry product market competition and managerial incentives abstract while some studies suggest that industry product market competition can substitute for managerial incentives other studies suggest a complementary relation the underlying assumption behind these studies is that competition can be uni dimensionally proxied for by industry concentration however recent studies suggest that competition can reflect several dimensions product substitutability market size and entry costs given the level of industry concentration using these determinants of competition this study contributes to the literature by showing that a firms provide stronger incentives when industry competition is greater b competition is multi dimensional in its relation to incentives and c industry characteristics play a major role in influencing incentives

a differential game approach to investment in product differentiation abstract we consider a dynamic oligopoly where firms invest to increase product differentiation and an externality effect operates in the r d activity via the demand functions in the fully noncooperative setting we find that the degree of differentiation resulting from r d effort is higher the larger is the population of firms in the industry if firms cooperate in the r d activity by setting up an r d cartel aggregate investment is larger and product substitutability is lower than in the decentralised case

the spillover effects of md a disclosures for real investment the role of industry competition abstract we explore whether disclosures in the management discussion analysis mda it is stronger when firms operate in industries that have lower entry costs are larger and have less substitutable products we obtain similar results for investment efficiency overall our evidence suggests that md a disclosures have spillover effects for investment that can improve investment efficiency and that spillover effects are moderated by industry competition

large sample evidence on firms year over year md a modifications the securities and exchange commission sec has expressed concern about the informativeness of firms management discussion and analysis mda the price reaction to md a modification scores has also weakened suggesting a decline in md a usefulness

equilibrium in a market with sequential bargaining this paper considers a market where pairs of agents who are interested in carrying out a transaction are brought together by a stochastic process and upon meeting initiate a bargaining process over the terms of the transaction the basic bargaining problem is treated with the strategic approach the paper derives the steady state equilibrium agreements analyzes their dependence on market conditions such as the relative numbers of agents of different types and discusses their relations with the competitive equilibrium outcome and other results in the search equilibrium literature this paper considers a market that operates in the following way pairs of agents who have mutual interest in carrying out a transaction are brought together by a stochastic process when two agents meet they initiate a bargaining process over the terms of the transaction if two agents reach an agreement a transaction takes place and they leave the market of course the bargaining positions and hence the agreement reached in any particular meeting will be affected by the conditions prevailing in the market these will include the chances that each of the negotiating parties have of meeting other partners in the event that the agreement in the current negotiations is delayed also the expected length of time required to achieve an alternative transaction and the expected behavior of alternative partners the study of such a market mechanism is of interest for two reasons firstly it captures some realistic aspects of the trade in certain specific markets e g asset markets such as housing and some labor markets secondly it contributes to an understanding of the micro mechanisms of price formation and their role in shaping market outcomes in both cases the features studied are largely neglected in the traditional market equilibrium analyses the related literature includes the articles by diamond 4 5 diamond and maskin 6 mortensen 8 9 and zusman and bell 13 these articles consider markets of the type described above in which transactions are concluded at pairwise meetings of agents the major difference between our work and these articles is in the approach to the basic bargaining problem in the cited articles it is assumed that a meeting is concluded with an instantaneous agreement which divides the associated surplus in an arbitrary predetermined way when the surplus is assumed to be divided equally the division rule is in fact nash s axiomatic bargaining solution in contrast the present paper treats the basic bargaining problem with the strategic approach see rubinstein 19 which constitutes an attempt to look into the bargaining black box this approach explicitly models the time dimension of the bargaining process describes in detail the bargaining procedure and justifies the agreement as a perfect equilibrium in

volatility of stock market indexes an analysis based on semifar models by applying semifar models we examine long memory in the volatility of worldwide stock market indexes our analysis yields strong evidence of long memory in stock market volatility either in terms of stochastic long range dependence or in the form of deterministic trends in some cases both components are detected in the data thus at least partially there appears to be even stronger and more systematic long memory than suggested by a stationary model with long range dependence

long memory and persistence in aggregate output abstract we examine persistence in u s aggregate output by estimating fractionally integrated arima models these models provide better low frequency approximations to the wold representation than previous stochastic specifications and earlier results on the importance of a permanent component emerge as special cases we find evidence of long memory which induces persistence though this long memory need not be associated with a unit root our point estimates indicate that macroeconomic shocks while persistent are distinctly less persistent than many earlier studies suggest however confidence intervals associated with the long run response are quite wide

long range dependence in the international diamond market abstract this work endeavors to study the long range dependence of the international diamond market the results from the modified r s statistic suggest that diamond returns do not have long memory while strong evidence is found for long memory in diamond volatilities

a measure of competition based on 10 k filings in this paper we develop a measure of competition based on management s disclosures in their 10 k filing and find that firms rates of diminishing marginal returns on new and existing investment vary significantly with our measure we show that these firm level disclosures are related to existing industry level measures of disclosure e g herfindahl index but capture something distinctly new in particular we show that the measure has both across industry variation and within industry variation and each is related to the firm s future rates of diminishing marginal returns as such our measure is a useful complement to existing measures of competition we present a battery of specification tests designed to explore the boundaries of our measure and how it varies with the definition of industry and the presence of other measures of competition

bidding structure market efficiency and persistence in a multi time tariff setting the purpose of this study is to examine the fractal dynamics of day ahead electricity prices by using parametric and semi parametric approaches for each time zone in a multi time tariff setting in the framework of bidding strategies market efficiency and persistence of exogenous shocks we find that that electricity prices have long term correlation structure for the first and third time zones indicating that market participants bid hyperbolically and not at their marginal costs market is not weak form efficient at these hours and exogenous shocks to change the mean level of prices will have permanent effect and be effective on the other hand for the second time zone we find that price series does not exhibit long term memory this finding suggests the weak form efficiency of the market in these hours and that market participants bid at their marginal costs furthermore this indicates that exogenous shocks will have temporary effect on electricity prices in these hours these findings constitute an important foundation for policy makers and market participants to develop appropriate electricity price forecasting tools market monitoring indexes and to conduct ex ante impact assessment

on money as a medium of exchange we analyze economies in which individuals specialize in consumption and production and meet randomly over time in a way that implies that trade must be bilateral and quid pro quo nash equilibria in trading strategies are characterized certain goods emerge endogenously as media of exchange or commodity money depending both on their intrinsic properties and on extrinsic beliefs there are also equilibria with genuine fiat currency circulating as the general medium of exchange we find that equilibria are not generally pareto optimal and that introducing fiat currency into a commodity money economy may unambiguously improve welfare velocity acceptability and liquidity are discussed

the degree of spillovers and the number of rivals for maximum effective r d abstract the amount of cost reduction or effective r d that results in a symmetric sequential nash equilibrium with quadratic payoffs and differentiated goods is shown to increase with spillovers in oligopolies with a few rivals and to achieve a maximum for spillovers that are not perfect in industries with many firms similar tendencies apply for consumer surplus profits and static welfare more rivals typically lead to reduced investments output and profitability while consumer surplus and welfare increase or at least do not decrease limited entry in markets with a few rivals may enhance innovative investments profitability and consumer surplus if only product differentiation and spillovers are sufficiently high and r d costs sufficiently low too many rivals will then again lead to reductions and a decrease in static welfare

the role of supplementary statements with management earnings forecasts we investigate managers decisions to supplement their firms management earnings forecasts we classify these supplementary disclosures as qualitative soft talk disclosures or verifiable forward looking statements we find that managers provide soft talk disclosures with similar frequency for good and bad news forecasts but are more likely to supplement good news forecasts with verifiable forward looking statements we examine the market response to these forecasts and find that bad news earnings forecasts are always informative but that good news forecasts are informative only when supplemented by verifiable forward looking statements supporting our argument that these statements bolster the credibility of good news forecasts

a theory of a generally acceptable medium of exchange and barter abstract this paper develops a model that accounts both for the existence of money defined as a generally acceptable medium of exchange and for the survival of some barter exchange in economies in which money exists in contrast to jones 1976 seminal article in which individuals are restricted to fix trading strategies before entering the market the present model assumes that individuals have conditional trading strategies that allow them to effect exchange according to the types of trades they encounter in the market the analysis shows how decentralized market forces generate money and lead to a unique level of monetization

trade secrets law and corporate disclosure causal evidence on the proprietary cost hypothesis this study exploits the staggered adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine idd by u s state courts as an exogenous shock that generates variations in the proprietary costs of disclosure we find that firms respond to idd adoption by reducing the level of disclosure regarding their customers identities supporting the proprietary cost hypothesis our results are stronger for firms in industries with a higher degree of entry threats for firms in more volatile industries and for firms with a lower degree of external financing dependence overall this study represents one of the first efforts in identifying the causal effect of proprietary costs of disclosure on the supply of disclosure this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

managerial incentives and product market competition are imperfectly competitive leibenstein 1966 claims that there may be a substantial amount of x inefficiency where x inefficiency measures the degree to which actual profits depart from the maximum of profits that could be obtained if all operations in the firm were carried out at minimal costs he offers empirical evidence from case studies showing that the welfare loss due to organizational slack is of an order of magnitude bigger than the welfare loss due to monopolistic price distortions on imperfectly competitive markets these results support the common presumption that increasing competition reduces organizational and in particular managerial slack however this early literature does not offer a theoretical explanation for the link between competition and managerial incentives in particular it ignores the fact that managerial incentives can be affected by the design of an incentive scheme in this paper i derive the optimal incentive scheme for a manager as a function of the competitiveness of the environment in which his firm operates the basic impact of increased competition is that it reduces the profits of a firm this has two effects in the model first if a firm has high costs then the reduction of profits may be sufficient to render the firm unprofitable so the probability that it has to be liquidated goes up this unambiguously induces the manager of the firm to work harder for a cost reduction in order to avoid liquidation and to keep his job second the reduction in profits may affect

flexible modeling of dependence in volatility processes this article proposes a novel stochastic volatility sv model that draws from the existing literature on autoregressive sv models aggregation of autoregressive processes and bayesian nonparametric modeling to create a sv model that can capture long range dependence the volatility process is assumed to be the aggregate of autoregressive processes where the distribution of the autoregressive coefficients is modeled using a flexible bayesian approach the model provides insight into the dynamic properties of the volatility an efficient algorithm is defined which uses recently proposed adaptive monte carlo methods the proposed model is applied to the daily returns of stocks

on the detection of extreme movements and persistent behaviour in mediterranean stock markets a wavelet based approach we combine the global hurst exponent and morlet wavelet multi resolution analysis mra to investigate the dynamic behaviour of six selected stock markets in the mediterranean region specifically we employ the resonance coefficients and their power spectra to identify potential extreme movements and long term dependence in stock returns using weekly data for the period 2005 to 2010 our results reveal that the wavelet mra is able to reconstruct the effects of major extreme shocks on stock returns of studied markets such as the asian financial crisis the 9 11 terrorist attacks and the 2007 2009 financial crisis moreover the wavelet based global hurst exponent indicates the presence of long term dependencies in stock returns of all the considered markets except for france where the anti persistent behaviour is detected overall our findings are useful to assess the stock market efficiency and provide new insights into stock market dynamics over different time scales

hicks and the classics i there is an old fashioned resonance to this book s title a market theory of money sounds a little like money and the mechanism of exchange and not entirely by accident when jevons 1875 and his classical contemporaries enumerated the functions of money they emphasized its role as means of exchange and unit of account in this his last book henceforth mtm sir john hicks treats money as an integral part of the institutional framework within which goods and services are traded and as something that cannot properly be understood independently of a careful study of that framework quite self consciously then he places himself in a tradition of monetary analysis that seemed to have died out in the 1930s there is considerable irony here because hicks himself surely stands second only to keynes in his influence on the monetary economics of that decade his 1935 suggestion for simplifying the theory of money antedates the general theory 19361 though not the treatise 19301 as a landmark in the evolution of the theory of liquidity preference the particular is lm version of keynesian economics which dominated the post war textbooks and which provided the analytic framework for much of the monetarist controversy too was not hicks s creation alone but its most influential exposition was his 1937 mr keynes and the classics whatever hicks may have intended these two papers helped to set monetary economics moving in what he later came to regard as the wrong direction the book under review here is the third in a sequence which began with the critical essays in monetary theory 1967 and continued with the crisis irz keynesian economics 1974 like those it deals with ideas not just outside but also critical of the contemporary mainstream which their author had helped to start flowing also like those it will probably be received respect

an operational measure of liquidity embedding the process of selling an asset in a search environment enables one to provide an exact definition of liquidity an asset s liquidity is the expected time until it is sold while pursuing an optimal in the sense of maximization of expected discounted net proceeds policy this analysis reveals that this definition is compatible with most other notions of liquidity and in particular with those of john maynard keynes impatience the discount associatedwith a quick sale predictability and flexibility copyright 1986 by american economic association

long range dependence in the conditional variance of stock returns abstract we examine persistence in the conditional variance of u s stock returns indexes our results show evidence of long memory in high frequency data suggesting that models of conditional heteroskedasticity should be made flexible enough to accommodate these empirical findings

finite sample properties of a qml estimator of stochastic volatility models with long memory abstract we analyse the finite sample properties of a qml estimator of lmsv models we show up its poor performance for realistic parameter values we discuss an identification problem when the volatility has a unit root an empirical analysis illustrates our findings

a microsimulation of traders activity in the stock market the role of heterogeneity agents interactions and trade frictions we propose a model with heterogeneous interacting traders which can explain some of the stylized facts of stock market returns in the model synchronization effects which generate large fluctuations in returns can arise purely from communication and imitation among traders the key element in the model is the introduction of a trade friction which by responding to price movements creates a feedback mechanism on future trading and generates volatility clustering the model also reproduces the empirically observed positive cross correlation between volatility and trading volume

how does industry affect firm financial structure we examine the importance of industry to firm level financial and real decisions we find that in addition to standard industry fixed effects financial structure also depends on a firm s position within its industry in competitive industries a firm s financial leverage depends on its natural hedge its proximity to the median industry capital labor ratio the actions of other firms in the industry and its status as entrant incumbent or exiting firm financial leverage is higher and less dispersed in concentrated industries where strategic debt interactions are also stronger but a firm s natural hedge is not significant our results show that financial structure technology and risk are jointly determined within industries these findings are consistent with recent industry equilibrium models of financial structure copyright 2005 oxford university press