sign and volatility switching arch models theory and applications to international stock markets summary this paper develops two conditionally heteroscedastic models which allow an asymmetric reaction of the conditional volatility to the arrival of news such a reaction is induced by both the sign of past shocks and the size of past unexpected volatility the proposed models are shown to converge in distribution to

investment uncertainty and liquidity we analyze the dynamic investment decision of a firm subject to an endogenous financing constraint the threat of future funding shortfalls lowers the value of the firm s timing options and encourages acceleration of investment beyond the first best optimal level as well as highlighting another way by which capital market frictions can distort investment behavior this result implies that 1 the sensitivity of investment to cash flow can be greatest for high liquidity firms and 2 greater uncertainty has an ambiguous effect on investment

candidate positioning and voter choice of these criteria in the electorate we then formally derive an exhaustive set of critical tests situations in which the criteria predict different vote choices finally through survey experiments concerning health care policy we administer the tests to a nationally representative sample we find that proximity voting is about twice as common as discounting and four times as common as directional voting furthermore discounting is most prevalent among ideological centrists and nonpartisans who make sophisticated judgments that help align policy with their preferences these findings demonstrate the promise of combining formal theory and experiments to answer previously intractable questions about democracy a key characteristic of democracy dahl 1971 1 noted is the responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens two mechanisms play central roles in promoting responsiveness thereby fostering congruence between the preferences of voters and the policy positions of candidates voters in a democracy can select candidates that represent their views and candidates can compete for votes by strategically taking positions that appeal to the electorate both mechanisms are important each depends on the criteria voters use to judge politicians on the issues a lively debate has focused on three theories about how voters judge the policy stances of candidates the first proximitytheory assumesthatcitizensprefercandidateswhosepositionsareclosesttotheirown forexample avoterwhofavorsa5 increaseingovernment spending on health care will be happiest with a candidate who advocates the same level of spending the more a candidate s position diverges from the voter s the less satisfied the voter will feel the presumed positive relationship between proximity and satisfaction

evidence on corporate hedging policy this paper provides empirical evidence on the determinants of corporate hedging decisions the paper examines the evidence in light of currently mandated financial reporting require ments and in particular the constraints placed on anticipatory hedging data on hedging are obtained from 1992 annual reports for a sample of 3 022 firms out of the 771 firms classified as hedgers 543 firms disclose information in their annual reports on their hedging activities the remaining 228 firms report use of derivatives but no information on hedging activities based on the evidence i draw the following conclusions with respect to the models of hedging evidence is inconsistent with financial distress cost models evidence is mixed with respect to contracting cost capital market imperfections and tax based models and evidence uniformly supports the hypothesis that hedging activities exhibit economies of scale

stock price dynamics and firm size an empirical investigation we show that after controlling for the effects of bid ask spreads and trading volume the conditional future volatility of equity returns is negatively related to the level of stock price this leverage effect is stronger for small as compared to large firms we also document that while the essential characteristics of the relations between stock price dynamics and firm size are stable the strengths of the relationships appear to change over time a number of empirical studies have documented that stock volatility tends to fall subsequent to an increase in stock prices and rise following a decline in stock prices an observation commonly attributed to the leverage effect as explained by black 1976 leverage can induce future stock volatility to vary inversely with the stock price a fall in a firm s stock value relative to the market value of its debt causes a rise in its debt equity ratio and increases its stock volatility for example black 1976 and christie 1982 use individual securities and french schwert and stambaugh 1987 gallant rossi and tauchen 1990 schwert 1990 and nelson 1991 use market indices to provide evidence consistent with the leverage effect however these papers demonstrate a leverage effect either intertemporally or cross sectionally for some assets relatively little work has examined the intertemporal behavior of individual assets by taking into account conditional heteroskedasticity and changing expected returns in this paper we examine and characterize the cross sectional and temporal relations between stock price dynamics and firm size in particular we investigate the possibility of an inverse relation between future stock volatility and stock price and whether this effect varies across time and or across firms with different market capitalization our study uses the exponential garch egarch formulation of nelson 1991 as a model for the timeseries behavior of individual security returns nonparametric methods are

is the investment uncertainty relationship nonlinear an empirical analysis for the netherlands we examine the investment uncertainty relationship for a panel of dutch non financial firms the system generalized method of moments gmm estimates suggest that the effect of uncertainty on investment is nonlinear for low levels of uncertainty an increase in uncertainty has a positive effect on investment while for high levels of uncertainty an increase in uncertainty lowers investment this result is in line with a number of theoretical studies but has never been documented empirically

the ten commandments for managing value at risk under the basel ii accord under the basel ii accord banks and other authorized deposit taking institutions adis are required to communicate their daily market risk estimates to the relevant national monetary authority at the beginning of each trading day using one of a variety of value at risk var models to measure risk the purpose of this paper is to provide a simple explanation and a set of prescriptions for managing var under the basel ii accord the commandments deal with understanding the basel ii colours understanding the risk model before choosing varying the choice of risk model avoiding the green zone and being willing to violate incurring large violations stopping before the red zone avoiding frequent violations avoiding the estimation of large portfolios aggregating portfolios into a single index and interpreting commandments sensibly as guidelines

a floor and ceiling model of us output abstract building on previous nonlinear time series models we further examine the form of nonlinearity in us output we develop a model of us output that allows for floor and ceiling effects to alter the dynamics of output growth the model estimated on post korean war quarterly data displays features similar to nonlinear trade cycle models of the 1940s and 1950s thus as predicted by many of the earlier theoretical models our empirical results suggest that the turning points of the business cycle provide new initial conditions for the ensuing growth process we also find important asymmetries in the responses of output to positive and negative shocks this history and shock dependence property is not present in linear or approximately linear models of the type that arise in the standard implementations of real business cycle theory

the value of corporate risk management we model and estimate the value of corporate risk management we show how risk management can add value when revenues and costs are nonlinearly related to prices and estimate the model by regressing quarterly firm sales and costs on the second and higher moments of output and input prices for a sample of 34 oil refiners we find that hedging concave revenues and leaving concave costs exposed each represent between 2 and 3 of firm value we validate our approach by regressing tobin s q on the estimated value and level of risk management and find results consistent with the model

predisclosure information firm capitalization and security price behavior around earnings announcements several studies on the relationship between earnings reports and security price behavior provide evidence suggesting that a significant portion of the information revealed through earnings reports is reflected in security prices prior to the report month e g ball and brown 1968 and brown and kennelly 1972 this has been attributed at least partly to the existence of other more timely sources of information which allow market agents to forecast earnings prior to their release the evidence above reflects an average finding across all firms one question of interest is whether there are significant systematic crosssectional differences in the security price reactions to earnings announcements of firms which are associated with specific firm characteristics that lead to differential amounts of predisclosure information this study focuses on firm size capitalization as one such characteristic a firm

institutional ownership stability and bhc performance abstract in this study the association between performance of bhcs and institutional ownership stability is investigated and contrasted to those found for the less regulated utility and industrial firms in order to determine whether regulation displaces owner monitoring we employ a simultaneous equations model treating firm performance and institutional ownership stability as endogenous variables several results are obtained first bhc performance is positively associated with institutional ownership stability second this association is weaker for bhcs than for comparable utility and industrial firms possibly because of the substitution of regulation for owner monitoring in banking third this association is stronger in the recent deregulated years and for bhcs with lower likelihood of regulatory intervention

promises or policies an experimental analysis of international agreements and audience reactions a key assumption of audience costs theories of crisis bargaining and international cooperation is that audience members have strong preferences for consistency between their leader s commitments and actual policy choices however audiences also have strong preferences over the policy choices themselves regardless of their consistency with past commitments i conducted a randomized survey experiment to evaluate the magnitude of consistency and policy effects in the context of international agreements over trade policy respondents with expressed policy preferences whether supporting or opposing free trade have muted reactions to learning that their leader has broken an agreement only respondents with no opinion on trade policy are affected by learning that their leader s policy is inconsistent with prior commitments this suggests that constituents underlying preferences limit the degree to which audience costs influence policymakers calculations

uncertainty irreversibility and the likelihood of entry an empirical assessment of the option to defer abstract recent work in the real options approach to investment has argued that firms face significant opportunity costs when entry costs are largely irreversible and these costs equal the value of an option to defer investment this study seeks to examine empirically these claims by investigating the interactive effects of uncertainty and irreversibility on the likelihood of entry into new business by diversified firms we investigate both industry and firm specific factors influencing the degree of investment irreversibility in general we find support for the notion that real option value affects the likelihood of entry

term structure of interest rates in the singapore asian dollar market this paper investigates empirically the term structure of interest rates in the singapore asian dollar market we consider extended versions of the arch m model of engle lilien and robins 1987 the extended models permit autocorrelation skewness and leptokurtosis in the residuals the robustness of the empirical tests with respect to alternative specifications of the arch process is examined it turns out that there is significant time varying term premium and this conclusion is independent of the hypothesized arch model

accounting for the corporate cash increase abstract why do u s firms hold much more cash now than they did 40 years ago i construct a partial equilibrium model of firm dynamics where cash provides a buffer against persistent and transitory cash flow shocks in the presence of costly external finance i find that 57 of the increase in cash holdings of small public firms can be accounted for by the observed decrease in the correlation between revenue and operating expenses the decrease in the correlation between revenue and expenses is then decomposed and explained the model has a corresponding correlation parameter between the shocks on revenue and expenses and allows for the possibility of negative cash flows negative cash flows are frequently observed in the data and the frequency has a significant impact on optimal cash holdings finally a lower corporate tax rate and cash restrictions are imposed on the model as policy experiments

anarchy and identity is there escape from a self help system realists say no they assume states are egoistic actors in anarchy this means states must either look out for themselves or risk destruction structure generates a self help system constructivists think escape is possible because identities are made not given we should not make a priori assumptions of state egoism process generates self help process could also generate an other help security system this article introduces a third approach that uses social identity theory to argue that interstate relations are inherently competitive thus for cognitive and motivated rather than structural or social reasons competition which can be coercive or cooperative characterizes international politics

the economics of corporate social responsibility a firm level perspective survey this paper analyzes the economics of corporate social responsibility csr as a private response to market imperfections in order to satisfy social preferences depending on whether they affect regulation competition or contracts market imperfections driving csr decisions are classified in three categories public goods and bads and altruism imperfect competition and incomplete contracts we successively present these drivers of csr decisions and highlight the nature of incentives external or internal at work and the testable and tested hypotheses in the reviewed studies we finally review the link between csr and financial performance as well as between csr and social and environmental performance a twofold discrepancy appears in the literature opening future research paths a disconnection between our understanding of csr drivers and csr impacts and a knowledge gap between csr financial and social consequences the latter having received little attention

economic consequences of accounting standards the lease disclosure rule change this accounting standard essentially rearranged capital lease disclosures from footnotes to the balance sheet mandated capitalization substantially altered key accounting ratios our results document a systematic substitution from capital leases to operating leases and nonlease sources of financing in addition lessees appear to reduce book leverage by increasing equity and reducing conventional debt the magnitudes of these responses are cross sectionally related to preadoption levels of footnoted capital leases

recent theoretical results for time series models with garch errors this paper provides a review of some recent theoretical results for time series models with garch errors and is directed towards practitioners starting with the simple arch model and proceeding to the garch model some results for stationary and nonstationary arma garch are summarized various new arch type models including double threshold arch and garch arfima garch charma and vector arma garch are also reviewed copyright 2002 by blackwell publishers ltd

sustainability indexes why join in a study of the corporate sustainability index ise in brazil abstract in the past decade indicators have been created to assess the sustainability performance of companies listed in stock exchange markets academics and practitioners expect companies to benefit from being listed in such indexes but evidence of value creation is still scarce since virtually all studies about the corporate sustainability index ise of the sao paulo stock exchange brazil the object of the present study focused on the value of shares we initially looked for answers in the finance theory we collected secondary data about the financial and economic performance of companies forming the ise s theoretical portfolio as these kinds of indexes are also known in a second stage we sought additional motivations for companies to make efforts to be listed in the index we collected additional data and interviewed representatives of key companies listed in the ise as well as industry leaders who chose not to participate in the selection process the results support the main propositions of the institutional theory as well as the pays to be green literature that the intangible value created by voluntary environmental initiatives such as access to knowledge new capabilities and reputational gain better explain the efforts companies make to be listed in the ise index

risk shifting through nonfinancial contracts effects on loan spreads and capital structure of project finance deals we study capital structure negotiation and cost of debt financing between sponsors and lenders using a sample of more than 1 000 project finance loans worth around us 195 billion closed between 1998 and 2003 we find that lenders i rely on the network of nonfinancial contracts as a mechanism to control agency costs and project risks ii are reluctant to price credit more cheaply if sponsors are involved as project counterparties in the relevant contracts and finally iii do not appreciate sponsor involvement as a contractual counterparty of the special purpose vehicle when determining the level of leverage

firm size and the information content of prices with respect to earnings abstract beaver lambert and morse 1980 suggest that prices may be useful in forecasting future earnings we explore the information content of prices with respect to earnings by focusing on firm size and its relation to the predictive accuracy of price based earnings forecasts firm size proxies for the amount of information and for the number of traders and professional analysts processing the available information about an enterprise our empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis that price based earnings will outperform univariate time series forecasts by a greater margin for larger firms than for smaller firms

mandated accounting changes and debt covenants the case of oil and gas accounting abstract the relationships among mandated accounting changes bond covenants and security prices has been the focus of several studies these studies have provided mixed evidence on the existence of a bond covenant effect on security prices this paper suggests that inconclusive prior results are a consequence of inappropriately measuring the default risk of debt using an option pricing framework it is shown that the debt to equity alone is not an adequate measure of default risk in particular both the debt to equity ratio and the total risk of the firm are necessary to adequately model the bond covenant effects of an accounting change these theoretical propositions are supported by the empirical analysis of the security market reaction to changes in oil and gas accounting

patent protection market uncertainty and r d investment the real options investment theory shows that greater uncertainty about market revenues reduces current r d investment by increasing the value of waiting this paper presents empirical evidence that patent protection mitigates the effect market uncertainty on r d investment

tractable dynamic global games and applications abstract we present a family of tractable dynamic global games and its applications agents privately learn about a fixed fundamental and repeatedly adjust their investments while facing frictions the game exhibits many externalities payoffs may depend on the volume of investment on its volatility and on its concentration the solution is driven by an invariance result aggregate investment is in a pivotal contingency invariant to a large family of frictions we use the invariance result to examine how frictions including those similar to the tobin tax affect equilibrium we identify conditions under which frictions discourage harmful behavior without compromising investment volume

temporal aggregation of univariate and multivariate time series models a survey abstract we present a unified and up to date overview of temporal aggregation techniques for univariate and multivariate time series models explaining in detail although intuitively the technical machinery behind the results some empirical applications illustrate the main issues

modelling international tourism and country risk spillovers for cyprus and malta abstract small island tourism economies sites are developing sovereign countries that rely on tourism as a source of exports and need a consistent inflow of foreign investment in order to facilitate economic growth access to international capital markets helps sites smooth out their consumption over time while absorbing adverse domestic production shocks this paper provides a comparison of tourism growth country risk returns and their associated volatilities or uncertainty for 2 sites namely cyprus and malta monthly data are available for both international tourist arrivals and composite country risk ratings compiled by the international country risk guide icrg for the period may 1986 to may 2002 the time varying conditional variances of tourism growth and country risk returns for the 2 sites are analysed using multivariate models of conditional volatility empirical results show that cyprus and malta are complementary destinations for international tourists changes to tourism patterns in cyprus lead to changes to tourism patterns in malta hence tour operators and national tourism promotion authorities in cyprus and malta should collaborate closely in marketing and promoting joint tourism products moreover foreign entities interested in investing in the tourism sectors of cyprus and malta should consider investment projects that span a long period of time the performance of the tourism sector and the associated composite risk are independent of each other for the two countries however there is a direct relationship between the tourism sectors of cyprus and malta and their respective country risk settings

rationalist explanations for war realist and other scholars commonly hold that rationally led states can and sometimes do fight when no peaceful bargains exist that both would prefer to war against this view i show that under very broad conditions there will exist negotiated settlements that genuinely rational states would mutually prefer to a risky and costly fight popular rationalist and realist explanations for war fail either to address or to explain adequately what would prevent leaders from locating a less costly bargain essentially just two mechanisms can resolve this puzzle on strictly rationalist terms the first turns on the fact that states have both private information about capabilities and resolve and the incentive to misrepresent it the second turns on the fact that in specific strategic contexts states may be unable credibly to commit to uphold a mutually preferable bargain historical examples suggest that both mechanisms are empirically plausible

arch models properties estimation and testing abstract the aim of this survey paper is to provide an account of some of the important developments in the autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch model since its inception in a seminal paper by engle 1982 this model takes account of many observed properties of asset prices and therefore various interpretations can be attributed to it we start with the basic arch models and discuss their different interpretations arch models have been generalized in different directions to accommodate more and more features of the real world we provide a comprehensive treatment of many of the extensions of the original arch model next we discuss estimation and testing for arch models and note that these models lead to some interesting and unique problems there have been numerous applications and we mention some of these as we present different models the paper includes a glossary of the acronyms for the models we describe

open door or closed door transparency in domestic and international bargaining in recent years there have been numerous calls for making the opera tions of international organizations more transparent one element in these demands involves the idea that international negotiations should be open to the same level of outside scrutiny that is presumed to prevail with bargaining in domestic contexts while transparency of this sort may have clear benefits by facilitating attempts to hold officials accountable scholars have made less effort to consider whether mak ing international bargaining more public might also have detrimental effects i develop a game theoretic model that provides four hypotheses about the relative benefits of open door versus closed door bargaining and about the preferences of different actors with regard to this type of transparency this model which can be applied to inter national and domestic contexts helps extend positive theories about the design of institutions while also providing insights for the normative question of when trans parency is desirable i show that the hypotheses developed are supported both by historical evidence from eighteenth century disputes about publicity in national par liaments and by evidence from the more recent dispute about making european coun cil of ministers deliberations public

interest rate derivatives at commercial banks an empirical investigation abstract i analyze the effects of bank characteristics and macroeconomic shocks on interest rate risk management behavior of commercial banks my findings are consistent with hedging theories based on cost of financial distress and costly external financing banks with higher probability of financial distress manage their interest rate risk more aggressively both by means of on balance sheet and off balance sheet instruments as compared to the derivative users the derivative non user banks adopt conservative asset liability management policies in tighter monetary policy regimes finally i show that the derivative non user bank s lending volume declines significantly with the contraction in the money supply derivative users on the other hand remain immune to the monetary policy shocks my findings suggest that a potential benefit of derivatives usage is to minimize the effect of external shocks on a firm s operating policies

bond illiquidity and excess volatility we find that the empirical volatilities of corporate bond and cds returns are higher than implied by equity return volatilities and the merton model this excess volatility may arise because structural models inadequately capture either fundamentals or illiquidity our evidence supports the latter explanation we find little relation between excess volatility and measures of firm fundamentals and the volatility of firm fundamentals but some relation with variables proxying for time varying illiquidity consistent with an illiquidity explanation firm level bond portfolio returns which average out bond specific effects significantly decrease excess volatility the author 2013 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oup com oxford university press

investment cash flow sensitivities are useful a comment on kaplan and zingales arecent paper in this journal by kaplan and zingales reexamines a subset of erms from work of fazzari hubbard and petersen and criticizes the usefulness of investment cash eow sensitivities for detecting enancing constraints we show that the kaplan and zingales theoretical model fails to capture the approach employed in the literature and thus does not provide an effective critique moreover we describe why their empirical classiecation system is eawed in identifying both whether erms are constrained and the relative degree of constraints across erm groups we conclude that their results do not support their conclusions about the usefulness of investment cash eow sensitivities in a recent paper in this journal kaplan and zingales 1997 hereinafter kz argue that investment cash eow sensitivities do not provide useful evidence about the presence of enancing constraints because kz use a subset of the same erms and the same regressions as fazzari hubbard and petersen 1988 hereinafter fhp and claim page 176 that fhp can legitimately be considered the parent of all papers in this literature it is appropriate that we respond based on a simple theoretical model kz reach the provocative conclusion page 211 that the investment cash eow sensitivity criterion as a measure of enancial constraints is not well grounded in theory in section i we show that the kz model does not capture the theoretical approach employed in fhp and many subsequent studies most of the kz paper attempts to show that empirical investment cash eow sensitivities do not increase monotonically with the degree of enancing constraints within the 49 low dividend erms from the fhp sample in section ii we explain why the kz classiecation of the degree of constraints is eawed in identifying both whether or not erms are constrained absolute constraints as well as the relative degree of constraints across erms as a result we argue in section iii that there is no expected ex ante pattern for the

domestic audience costs in international relations an experimental approach what makes international threats credible recent theories point to domestic audience costs the domestic price a leader would pay for making foreign threats and then backing down this article provides the first direct evidence of audi ence costs the analysis based on experiments embedded in public opinion surveys shows that audience costs exist across a wide range of conditions and increase with the level of escalation the costs are evident throughout the population and espe cially among politically active citizens who have the greatest potential to shape government policy finally preliminary evidence suggests that audience costs arise because citizens care about the international reputation of the country or leader these findings help identify how and under what conditions domestic audiences make commitments credible at the same time they demonstrate the promise of using ex periments to answer previously intractable questions in the field of international relations

rising power on the mind a prominent explanation of war claims that international conflict can result when shifts in bargaining power induce the declining power to behave aggressively today because the rising power cannot credibly commit to not behave aggressively tomorrow this paper asks whether individuals respond to shifting power in ways assumed by these models rather than use abstract laboratory based bargaining games as in other work i use vignettes describing the united states in an international bargaining situation to explore the microfoundations of power transitions models empirically the vignettes vary whether the individual is a member of a declining or a rising power and whether there are previous public commitments to the status quo division of territory subjects propose a response the united states should make and then explain their decision in their own words i apply new methods for analyzing these open ended responses consistent with predictions from the behavioral literature i find important asymmetries in behavior across these conditions as well as substantial heterogeneities in individuals motivations for their decisions the results of the experiments suggest potential ways that power transition models should be refined to have a firmer behavioral basis

do investors value smooth performance abstract this paper presents empirical evidence that cash flow volatility is negatively valued by investors the magnitude of the effect is substantial with a 1 increase in cash flow volatility resulting in approximately a 0 15 decrease in firm value we show that this increase however is not associated with earnings smoothing resulting from managers accrual estimates our results are consistent with a preference by the market for less volatile cash flows and suggest that managers efforts to produce smooth financial statements add value but only via the cash component of earnings

homo diplomaticus mixed method evidence of variation in strategic rationality psychology is traditionally used in political science to explain deviations from rationality lost in the debate between rationalists and their critics however is a sense of whether the kinds of strategic self interested behavior predicted by these models has psychological microfoundations what would homo economicus look like in the real world we argue that strategic rationality varies across individuals and is characterized by a pro self social value orientation and a high level of epistemic motivation testing our argument in the context of international relations we employ a laboratory bargaining game and integrate it with archival research on german foreign policy making in the 1920s we find in both contexts that even among those interested in maximizing only their own egoistic gains those with greater epistemic motivation are better able to adapt to the strategic situation particularly the distribution of power our results build a bridge between two approaches often considered to be antithetical to one another

accounting quality and the transmission of monetary policy abstract we examine how firms accounting quality affects their reaction to monetary policy the balance sheet channel of monetary policy predicts that the quality of firms accounting reports plays a role in transmitting monetary policy by affecting information asymmetries between firms and capital providers consistent with this prediction we find that accounting quality moderates firms equity market response and future investment sensitivity to unexpected changes in monetary policy moreover the former relation is amplified for firms with more growth opportunities and more financial constraints further consistent with accounting quality moderating the transmission of monetary policy

a dispositional theory of reputation costs politicians frequently turn to reputational arguments to bolster support for their proposed foreign policies yet despite the prevailing belief that domestic audiences care about reputation there is very little direct evidence that publics care about reputation costs and very little understanding of how we propose a dispositional theory of reputation costs in which citizens facing ill defined strategic situations turn to their core predispositions about foreign affairs in order to weigh competing reputational dimensions employing a diverse array of methodological tools from vignette based survey experiments to automated text analysis we show that the mass public has a taste for reputation but understands it in fundamentally different ways with hawks concerned about the negative reputational consequences of inconsistency and doves equally concerned with the negative reputational consequences of belligerence and interventionism in illustrating how reputation costs are in our heads our findings offer both good and bad news for theories of reputation in ir

political uncertainty and corporate debt financing empirical evidence from china we examine the influence of political uncertainty on corporate debt financing under the chinese highly specialized political system a new reasonable and effective alternative indicator official t

an explanation for accounting income smoothing it is widely believed that corporate managers often engage in income smoothing taking actions to dampen fluctuations in their firms publicly reported net income one reason given for this is that managers think that investors pay more for a firm with a smoother income stream see ronen and sadan 1981 while there have been many empirical studies attempting to document whether or not income smoothing actually occurs there has been little exploration of why a manager might rationally want to smooth his firm s income explaining why smoothing might be observed and how it can result in an increased stock price is the focus of this paper in two recent studies lambert 1984 and dye 1988 demonstrate in agency settings that a risk averse manager who is precluded from borrowing and lending in the capital markets has an incentive to smooth his firm s reported income in this paper in contrast it is shown that within a market setting an incentive exists for a manager to smooth income that is independent of either risk aversion or restricted access to capital markets the market setting is also useful in that it allows for the analysis of the effect of income smoothing on stock prices it is shown here that if a manager can choose which of two periods to recognize certain income he may prefer the choice that is expected to

proactive r d management and firm growth a punctuated equilibrium model the external environment is characterized by periods of relative stability interspersed with periods of extreme change implying that high performing firms must practice exploration and exploitation in order to survive and thrive in this paper we posit that r d expenditure volatility indicates the presence of proactive r d management and is evidence of a firm moving from exploitation to exploration over time this is consistent with a punctuated equilibrium model of r d investment where shocks are induced by reactions to external turbulence using an unbalanced panel of almost 11 000 firm years from 1997 to 2006 we show that greater fluctuations in the firm s r d expenditure over time are associated with higher firm growth developing a contextual view of the relationship between r d expenditure volatility and firm growth we find that this relationship is weaker among firms with higher levels of corporate diversification and negative among smaller firms and those in slow clockspeed industries

what drives investment cash flow sensitivity around the world an asset tangibility perspective motivated by ongoing debates on investment cash flow sensitivity icfs and its documented decline and disappearance in the u s we investigate the determinants of icfs using firm level data across 41 countries for the 1993 2013 period we document an important role of asset tangibility in explaining the patterns in icfs asset tangibility affects icfs through two channels investment intensity and cash flow persistence as the share of tangible capital investment and cash flow persistence has fallen in developed economies icfs has declined in contrast as developing economies operate with more tangible capital have higher investment rates and more persistent cash flows their icfs is more stable the results support our explanation of icfs as a reflection of capital investment intensity and income predictability rather than a measure of financial constraints

research bets and behavioral ir behavioral ir faces a fundamental challenge the actors in most ir models and theories are not individuals they are aggregates like states ministries interest groups political parties and rebel factions there are two broad approaches to attempting to integrate behavioral research about individuals the first a quasi behavioral approach makes nonstandard assumptions about the preferences beliefs or decision making processes of aggregate actors the second tries to build theories in which the key actors are individuals pursuing the former means that the assumptions about actors will be only weakly linked to the empirical findings propelling behavioral research the second approach faces formidable obstacles that international relations theory has confronted for a long time and for the most part has not overcome

measuring risk in environmental finance abstract environmental sustainability indices such as the dow jones sustainability indexes and the ethibel sustainability index quantify the development and promotion of sustainable social ethical and environmental values in the community moreover such indices provide a benchmark for managing sustainability portfolios and developing financial products and services that are linked to sustainable economic environmental social and ethical criteria this paper reviews the existing data and risk indices in environmental finance the main purpose of the paper is to analyse existing sustainability and ethical indices in environmental finance and evaluate empirical environmental risk by estimating conditional volatility clustering that is inherent in these indices financial volatility models are estimated to analyse the underlying conditional volatility or time varying risk that is inherent in alternative environmental sustainability indices volatility clustering is observed for most series but some extreme observations are also evident the log and second moment conditions suggest that valid inferences can be drawn for purposes of sensible empirical analysis

the effect of repeated play on reputation building an experimental approach what effect does repeated play have on reputation building the liter ature on international relations remains divided on whether when and how reputa tion matters in both interstate and intrastate conflict we examine reputation building through a series of incentivized laboratory experiments using comparative statics from a repeated entry deterrence game we isolate how incentives for reputation build ing should change as the number of entrants changes we find that subjects in our experiments generally build reputations and that those investments pay off but we also find that some subjects did not react to incentives to build reputation in ways our model had predicted in order to explain this we focus on the heterogeneity of preferences and cognitive abilities that may exist in any population our research suggests that rational choice scholars of international relations and those using more psychologically based explanations have more common ground than previously articulated

corporate structure liquidity and investment evidence from japanese industrial groups this paper presents evidence suggesting that information and incentive problems in the capital market affect investment we come to this conclusion by examining two sets of japanese firms the first set has close financial ties to large japanese banks that serve as their primary source of external finance and are likely to be well informed about the firm the second set of firms has weaker links to a main bank and presumably faces greater problems raising capital investment is more sensitive to liquidity for the second set of firms than for the first set the analysis also highlights the role of financial intermediaries in the investment process

conditional cooperation and climate change it is widely believed that international cooperation can arise through strategies of reciprocity in this paper we investigate whether citizens in the united states and 25 other countries support reciprocity to deal with climate change we find little public enthusiasm for intrinsic reciprocity in which countries restrain their consumption of fossil fuels if and only if other countries do the same in contrast we find significant support for extrinsic reciprocity in which countries enforce cooperation by linking issues citizens support economic sanctions against polluters and are willing to shame them in international forums especially when the polluters are violating a treaty cooperation could therefore emerge from efforts to link climate with other issues and to embed climate commitments in international law

the economic determinants of the market reaction to proposed mandatory accounting changes in the oil and gas industry a cross sectional analysis abstract this paper examines the economic reasons for the observed negative abnormal common stock performance of firms whose reported earnings and stockholders equity were negatively affected by the proposed elimination of full cost accounting in the oil and gas industry four explanations of the market effects of this mandatory accounting change are examined 1 naive investor theory 2 modified naive investor theory 3 contracting cost theory and 4 estimation risk theory these hypotheses are developed in detail and used to generate variables for a cross sectional model which explains observed return behavior the effect of the accounting change on total stockholder s equity the existence of financial contracts denominated in terms of accounting numbers and to a lesser extent firm size are shown to be important explanatory variables the importance of these variables is consistent with both the contracting cost and estimation risk theories

relative valuation roles of equity book value and net income as a function of financial health abstract this study tests predictions that pricing multiples on and incremental explanatory power of equity book value net income increase decrease as financial health decreases tests using a sample of 396 bankrupt firms and tests using a larger pooled sample both yield inferences consistent with predictions findings are robust to inclusion of controls for industry size return on equity and volatility of equity returns equity book value and net income multiples and incremental explanatory power vary predictably across three illustrative industries selected based on the likely extent of unrecognized intangible assets

the impact of climate risk on firm performance and financing choices an international comparison increasingly adverse climatic conditions have created greater systematic risk for companies throughout the global economy few studies have directly examined the consequences of climate related risk on financing choices by publicly listed firms across the globe we attempt to do so using the global climate risk index compiled and published by germanwatch kreft eckstein 2014 which captures at the country level the extent of losses from extreme weather events as expected we find the likelihood of loss from major storms flooding heat waves etc to be associated with lower and more volatile earnings and cash flows consistent with policies that attempt to moderate such effects we show that firms located in countries characterized by more severe weather are likelier to hold more cash so as to build financial slack and thereby organizational resilience to climatic threats those firms also tend to have less short term debt but more long term debt and to be less likely to distribute cash dividends in addition we find that certain industries are less vulnerable to extreme weather and so face less climate related risk our results are robust to using an instrumental variable approach a propensity score matched sample and path analysis and remain unchanged when we consider an alternative measure of climate risk finally our conclusions are invariant to the timing of financial crises that can affect different countries at different times

semiparametric econometrics a survey summary semiparametric econometric models contain both parametric and nonparametric components reflecting in some fashion what has been learned from economic theory and previous empirical experience and what remains unknown they raise such questions as how well the parametric component can be estimated and how to construct rules of inference with good statistical properties the paper attempts to survey the econometric and most relevant statistical literature on semiparametric inference and includes a partial bibliography

the costs of going public abstract this paper presents evidence regarding the two quantifiable components of the costs of going public direct expenses and underpricing together these costs average 21 22 of the realized market value of the securities issued for firm commitment offers and 31 87 for best efforts offers for a given size offer the direct expenses are of the same order of magnitude for both contract types but the underpricing is greater for best efforts offers an explanation of why some firms choose to use best efforts offers in spite of their apparent higher total costs is given

executive compensation and the cost of debt this study examines how different components of executive compensation affect the cost of debt we find that debt like and equity like pay components have differing effects an increase in defined benefit pensions is associated with lower bond yield spread while higher share holdings lead to higher spreads in addition we find that stock options have a mixed impact on the cost of debt whereas cash bonus has no significant impact overall our results indicate that corporate bondholders are fully aware of both risk taking and risk avoiding incentives created by various executive pay components

investment and competition this paper examines how industry structure affects corporate investment patterns real options theory shows that deferring irreversible investment in the face of uncertainty is valuable theory also shows that the value of waiting to invest falls if investment opportunities are contestable consistent with these theories we find that firms in monopolistic industries exhibit lower investment q sensitivity and are slower to invest than firms in competitive industries however we find that investment q sensitivity and investment speed are highest in oligopolistic industries suggesting that the value of investing strategically can outweigh the value of waiting indeed oligopolistic industries experience less entry and more exit than other industries

the impact of cash flow volatility on discretionary investment and the costs of debt and equity financing abstract we show that higher cash flow volatility is associated with lower average levels of investment in capital expenditures r d and advertising this association suggests that firms do not use external capital markets to fully cover cash flow shortfalls but rather permanently forgo investment cash flow volatility also is associated with higher costs of accessing external capital moreover these higher costs as measured by some proxies imply a greater sensitivity of investment to cash flow volatility thus cash flow volatility not only increases the likelihood that a firm will need to access capital markets it also increases the costs of doing so

on the determinants of corporate hedging finance theory indicates that hedging increases firm value by reducing expected taxes expected costs of financial distress or other agency costs this paper provides evidence on these hypotheses using survey data on firm s use of forwards futures swaps and options combined with computstat data on firm characteristics of 169 firms in the sample 104 firms use hedging instruments in 1986 the data suggest that firms which hedge face more convex tax functions have less coverage of fixed claims are larger have more growth options in their investment opportunity set and employ fewer hedging substitutes