corporate finance in developing countries new evidence for india abstract recent work by singh and hamid 1992 corporate financial structures in developing countries and singh 1995 corporate financial patterns in industrializing economies a comparative international study has suggested that large firms in a number of developing countries including india use much more external finance in general and equity finance in particular than those in developed countries however the contrast is in part a product of methodological differences and india is much less different from countries such as france and italy the singh results are not due merely to bias arising from the focus on the largest companies since the rest of the indian corporate sector also issues large amounts of equity via informal networks rather than organized stock exchanges the importance of such issues suggests the need for further research before policy conclusions can be drawn

the backward incidence of pollution control a dual approach abstract the backward incidence of pollution control is reexamined using the techniques of duality theory the simple geometry used establishes the results and clarifies them without the complicated mathematical manipulations required in earlier works thereby making the material more attractive for classroom presentation

survival look ahead bias and the persistence in hedge fund performance we analyze the performance persistence in hedge funds taking into account look ahead bias multi period sampling bias we model liquidation of hedge funds by analyzing how it depends upon historical performance next we use a weighting procedure that eliminates look ahead bias in measures for performance persistence in contrast to earlier results for mutual funds the impact of look ahead bias is exacerbated for hedge funds due to their greater level of total risk at the four quarter horizon look ahead bias can be as much as 3 8 depending upon the decile of the distribution we find positive persistence in hedge fund quarterly returns after correcting for investment style the empirical pattern at the annual level is also consistent with positive persistence but its statistical significance is weak

the effects of china s split share reform on firms capital structure choice abstractchina s split share structure reform in 2005 2006 mitigates agency conflicts between controlling shareholders and minority shareholders and thus may bring substantial changes to corporate financing behaviour this article examines the impact of that reform on the capital structure decisions of firms by applying a variety of trade off and pecking order models using data from 1176 non financial chinese listed firms during the period 2000 2012 we present empirical evidence indicating that equity tracks the financing deficit better than debt in chinese firms a finding which is not consistent with pecking order theory this phenomenon is more prominent after 2006 as share reform increases trading activity in the secondary stock market and improves the transparency of financial markets in addition chinese firms have an optimal leverage ratio and they adjust below target leverage ratios faster than above target leverage ratios after the implementation of share structure reform although they make sy

generalized runs tests to detect randomness in hedge funds returns the major contribution of this paper is to make use of generalized runs tests cho and white 2011 to analyze the randomness i e the lack of persistence in both absolute and relative returns of hedge funds we find that about 42 of the hfr universe exhibit iid absolute returns over the period spanning 2000 to 2012 these funds are mainly found in proportions within the macro and equity hedge strategies a similar result holds for relative returns we also find that funds having non iid returns often exhibit arch effects and structural breaks with largest breaks located within financial crises also only a small percentage displays persistence in their relative performance 8 2 to 16 7 of the universe mainly found in proportions within the relative value and event driven strategies the robustness of results is challenged by implementing the tests on a crisis free period we find similar results for absolute returns for relative ones differences appear across strategies and benchmarks but still both arch and breaks are present our work contributes to the hedge fund literature in terms of methodology portfolio allocation and performance measurement

unemployment and the backward incidence of pollution control abstract this paper reexamines the backward incidence of pollution control using duality theory for a two sector general equilibrium model in which the economy experiences large scale unemployment and perfect capital mobility with a sector specific rigid wage in the polluting sector in this context it is shown that with stricter pollution controls the wage rate in the nonpolluting sector rises while the common rental rate falls in addition stricter pollution controls are shown to have an uncertain impact on national income

an econometric model of serial correlation and illiquidity in hedge fund returns the returns to hedge funds and other alternative investments are often highly serially correlated in sharp contrast to the returns of more traditional investment vehicles such as long only equity portfolios and mutual funds in this paper we explore several sources of such serial correlation and show that the most likely explanation is illiquidity exposure i e investments in securities that are not actively traded and for which market prices are not always readily available for portfolios of illiquid securities reported returns will tend to be smoother than true economic returns which will understate volatility and increase risk adjusted performance measures such as the sharpe ratio we propose an econometric model of illiquidity exposure and develop estimators for the smoothing prole as well as a smoothing adjusted sharpe ratio for a sample of 908 hedge funds drawn from the tass database we show that our estimated smoothing coecien ts vary considerably across hedge fund style categories and may be a useful proxy for quantifying illiquidity exposure

wage subsidies and distortionary taxes in a mobile capital harris todaro model in prescribing policy to eliminate or mitigate the effects of labour market distortions some form of wage subsidy is usually among the highest ranking options rarely is the source of revenues for these subsidies treated as an explicit issue this omission has special significance for the harris todaro h t model of the labour market since the policy most frequently recommended whether capital is sector specific or intersectorally mobile is an across the board wage subsidy 2 this effectively eliminates the possibility of taxing one subset of sectors rather than subsidizing its complement an option often favoured by those theorists who concern themselves with revenue considerations the next section of this paper sets forth the model of a small open h t economy with mobile capital that is the basis for this analysis section ii re examines three wage subsidies on manufacturing wages on agricultural wages or on both sectors assuming that resources for the subsidies are raised by an across the board tax on profits this is in the tradition of cordenfindlay and we replicate their results though stating them in more precise form so that we might have a standard for later comparison the subsequent sections examine the effects of these subsidies on unemployment and resource allocation if they are financed by a tax on profits in the manufacturing sector section iii or by import tariffs section iv owing to the second best nature of the h t model it will be demonstrated that taxes normally considered distortionary in their own right can be superior to an across the board tax if revenues are constrained and can be very useful instruments if it is the variety of policy tools that is limited section v concludes with a ranking of the various subsidy tax packages

multi period performance persistence analysis of hedge funds since hedge funds specify significant lock up periods we investigate persistence in the performance of hedge funds using a multi period framework in which the likelihood of observing persistence by chance is lower than in the traditional two period framework under the null hypothesis of no manager skill no persistence the theoretical distribution of observing wins or losses follows a binormial distribution we test this hypothesis using the traditional two period framework and compare the findings with the results obtained using our multi period framework we examine whether persistence is sensitive to the length of return measurement intervals by using quarterly half yearly and yearly returns we find maximum persistence at the quarterly horizon indicating that presistence among hedge fund managers is short term in nature

urban unemployment and the gains from trade a welfare ranking of alternative commercial policies is constructed for the mobile capital harris todaro economy it is sh own that despite the presence of unemployment most noninterventioni st policies suggested by the competitive model of gains from trade ca rry over to the mobile capital harris todaro economy yet in contradi ction to the competitive model it is shown that all forms of trade i ntervention are not detrimental to welfare only those that reduce th e volume of trade are the export promotion policies so copiously fol lowed by developing countries are vindicated but their import substi tution policies are shown to be without justification copyright 1987 by the review of economic studies limited

a note on the stability of the harris todaro model with capital mobility the present note derives the exact stability condition for the harris todaro model with intersectoral capital mobility where land is explicitly included as a third scarce factor in agriculture while the previous study by neary states the difficulty of deriving a clear cut result in such a case this note demonstrates that if capital and land are never technologically substitutes in the agriculture production neary s condition that the urban sector is more capital abundant than the rural sector becomes a sufficient condition for local stability in an important article in this journal neary 1981 considered the stability of the harris todaro model with intersectoral capital mobility among other things neary showed that when relative commodity prices are fixed and capital and labour are subject to constant returns to scale in agriculture an unspecialized equilibrium is dynamically stable if and only if the urban sector is capital abundant relative to the rural sector however in the original work by harris and todaro 1970 the fixed availability of land is included in the agriculture production function hence strictly speaking the stability condition quoted above is not for the original harris todaro model with intersectoral capital mobility on this point neary concluded that the introduction of a third scarcefactor land in agriculture greatly complicates the analysis and makes it impossible to derive simple and clear cut results the present note argues that a definite result can be derived if the normality property of factors of production which was utilized by rader 1968 and suzuki 1985 is assumed

stability of the mobile capital harris todaro model some further results a necessary and sufficient condition for stability is derived for the mobile capital harris todaro model of rural to urban migration in developing countries when land is a scarce factor in agriculture the stability condition when land is ignored that the urban sector comprising manufacturing industry and the urban unemployed be more capital abundant is no longer either necessary or sufficient for stability nevertheless this condition always enhances stability and it is sufficient though not necessary for stability in many circumstances e g when land is separable in production from labour and capital intuitive explanations of these conditions are provided excerpt

survivorship bias and attrition effects in measures of performance persistence we simulate standard tests of performance persistence using alternative returngenerating processes survival criteria and test methodologies when survival depends on performance over several periods survivorship bias induces spurious reversals despite the presence of cross sectional heteroskedasticity in performance look ahead biased methodologies and missing nal returns typical of u s mutual fund datasets can also materially a ect persistence measures our results reinforce previous ndings that u s mutual fund performance is truly persistent when fund performance is truly persistent fund attrition a ects persistence measures even when the sample includes all nonsurvivor returns we also examine the speci cation and power of the various persistence tests 1999 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

do hedge funds deliver alpha a bayesian and bootstrap analysis abstract using a robust bootstrap procedure we find that top hedge fund performance cannot be explained by luck and hedge fund performance persists at annual horizons moreover we show that bayesian measures which help overcome the short sample problem inherent in hedge fund returns lead to superior performance predictability sorting on bayesian alphas relative to ols alphas yields a 5 5 per year increase in the alpha of the spread between the top and bottom hedge fund deciles our results are robust and relevant to investors as they are neither confined to small funds nor driven by incubation bias backfill bias or serial correlation

pecking order or trade off hypothesis evidence on the capital structure of chinese companies this study tests the pecking order and trade off hypotheses of corporate financing decisions using a cross section of the largest chinese listed companies the study is built on allen 1993 baskin 1989 and adedeji 1998 to set up three models in which trade off and pecking order theories give distinctively different predictions 1 the determinants of leverage 2 the relationship between leverage and dividends and 3 the determinants of corporate investment in model 1 a significant negative correlation is found between leverage and profitability in model 2 a significant positive correlation between current leverage and past dividends is found these results broadly support the pecking order hypothesis over trade off theory however model 3 is inconclusive overall the results provide tentative support for the pecking order hypothesis and demonstrate that a conventional model of corporate capital structure can explain the financing behaviour of chinese companies

labour turnover cost and the curious properties of the mobile capital harris todaro model abstract as corden and findlay 1975 have shown the mobile capital harris todaro model has certain curious properties viz that capital accumulation unambiguously increases unemployment whereas labour force growth reduces unemployment in this paper we show that introduction of labour turnover cost in the manufacturing sector dampens the above paradoxical results on one hand and strengthens the interesting properties of the model on the other

performance characteristics of hedge funds and commodity funds natural vs spurious biases it is well known that the pro forma performance of a sample of investment funds contains biases these biases are documented in brown goetzmann ibbotson and ross 1992 using mutual funds as subjects the organization structure of hedge funds as private and often offshore vehicles makes data collection a much more onerous task amplifying the impact of performance measurement biases theis paper reviews these biases in hedge funds we also propose using funds of hedge funds to measure aggregate hedge fund performance based on the idea that the investment experience of hedge fund investors can be used to estimate the performance of hedge funds

the backward incidence of pollution control in a rigid wage economy abstract the backward incidence of pollution controls onto the polluting and nonpolluting industries is examined in a two sector rigid wage economy characterized by unemployment in both the short run and the long run as expected more restrictive pollution controls result in contraction in the polluting sector and expansion in the nonpolluting sector somewhat unexpectedly national income may rise with stronger pollution controls if the polluting industry is relatively capital intensive

on the harris todaro model with intersectoral capital mobility n b professor neary was based at trinity college dublin when this article was first published the full text of the article is not available in ora at this time citation neary j p 1981 on the harris todaro model with intersectoral capital mobility economica 48 191 219 234

urban unemployment and non immiserizing growth abstract one purpose of this paper is to show that in the harris todaro economy economic expansion can not be immiserizing another purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of economic expansion for urban unemployment as well as sectoral outputs for the case of non neutral technical change finally it is shown that a damaging property of the harris todaro model that capital accumulation causes unemployment to rise whereas labor growth causes it to fall is at least partially rectified by the incorporation of land as a scarce factor in the agricultural sector

testing static tradeoff against pecking order models of capital structure a critical comment abstract in a recent paper shyam sunder and myers 1999 introduce a new test of the pecking order model this comment shows that their elegantly simple test generates misleading inferences when evaluating plausible patterns of external financing our results coupled with the power problem with the static tradeoff model documented by shyam sunder and myers indicate that their empirical evidence can evaluate neither the pecking order nor static tradeoff models alternative tests are needed that can identify the determinants of capital structure and can discriminate among competing hypotheses

hedge fund risk dynamics implications for performance appraisal accurate appraisal of hedge fund performance must recognize the freedom with which managers shift asset classes strategies and leverage in response to changing market conditions and arbitrage opportunities the standard measure of performance is the abnormal return defined by a hedge fund s exposure to risk factors if exposures are assumed constant when in fact they vary through time estimated abnormal returns may be incorrect we employ an optimal changepoint regression that allows risk exposures to shift and illustrate the impact on performance appraisal using a sample of live and dead funds during the period january 1994 through december 2005