a note on foreigners trading and price effects across firms abstract we study the investment behavior of foreign investors in association with an equity market liberalization and find a strong link between foreigners trading and local market returns in the period following the liberalization net purchases by foreign investors induced a permanent increase in stock prices suggesting that local firms reduced their cost of equity capital we also find a strong link between a firm s fraction of foreign ownership and the magnitude of the cost reduction foreign investors seem to prefer large and well known firms and these firms realize the largest reduction in capital cost furthermore our analysis suggests that foreigners increase their net holding in firms that have recently performed well analyzing foreigners performance we find very little evidence of informed trading suggesting that risk sharing is the most plausible explanation for the reduction of the cost of equity capital

home bias in foreign investment decisions we analyze the us equity holdings of more than 3000 non us based mutual funds from 22 countries and find robust evidence that fund managers strongly prefer to invest in stocks of us firms that have presence in their home country this home bias is independent of the degree of global involvement and visibility of these us firms while these firms have significantly greater exposure to local equity markets their local presence offers little information advantage to local fund managers our findings suggest that the lack of international diversification is more serious than currently documented in the literature

public employment and the welfare state in sweden this is a nontechnical summary of a much longer study which will appear with the same title in richard freeman birgitta swedenborg and robert topel eds forthcoming i am especially indebted to henry ohlsson and birgitta swedenborg and to stan engerman vic fuchs assar lindbeck stephen lundgren and agnar sandmo for comments on initial drafts i alone am responsible for the views expressed here

international evidence on the determinants of foreign exchange rate exposure of multinational corporations in this paper we explore some of the potential determinants of foreign exchange fx exposure and firm value we contribute to previous research on stock returns and firm value as we have access to a unique survey database and can include as determinants in our empirical analysis the objectives and emphasis on risk management as well as considering previous factors including the nature of the business environment we can also examine any regional influences as our sample includes uk us and asia pacific multinational companies mncs as predicted by theory we find some evidence that mncs with greater foreign operations have a larger magnitude of fx exposure however our proxy for the emphasis of fx management does not have the predicted negative association with the magnitude of fx indicating that managers may focus on short term cash flows in their fx management rather than firm value with regard to the potentially differential regional role of our variables a range of interesting results is found arguably in our most notable such finding we see that the contribution of overseas business to total revenues has no association with the magnitude of fx exposure for us mncs it has a positive role for uk mncs consistent with theory and a negative role for asia pacific mncs which could be explained by macroeconomic and or financial characteristics of the mncs in the sample

bargaining in the shadow of power abstract often a bargainer can use some form of power legal military or political to impose a settlement how does the outside option of being able to impose a settlement albeit at some cost affect the bargaining and how does the probability that the bargaining will break down vary with the distribution of power between the bargainers these questions are examined by adding the option of imposing a settlement to rubinstein s game of dividing a pie each actor can accept an offer make a counteroffer or try to impose a solution imposing a settlement is however costly and each bargainer has private information about its cost journal of economic literatureclassification number c72

women s work sibling competition and children s school performance this research offers an interpretation of the relationship between fertility child spacing family resources and market work by mothers and the subsequent cognitive skills of grade schoolers as reported by their teachers first an approach to fertility as the outcome of a deliberate choice process is developed and then empirical evidence from a small panel of u s households first interviewed in 1975 76 when they had preschool children is presented in a 1981 82 reinterview a supplementary project was that of obtaining teacher ratings of school performance of individual children large family size as measured by the number of siblings of given age and sex in the household during preschool years in 1975 76 has an important negative impact on the child s subsequent grade school performance boy siblings in nearby age ranges have the most negative impact on performance while teenage siblings of either sex have no systematic adverse effect parental resources as measured by income education child care time and a mother s reduced market time are associated with greater cognitive skills and can offset the apparent disadvantage of having siblings in nearby age intervals there appears to be a significant tradeoff between a market career and a home career for women women who have more children spaced over wider age intervals and who devote more time to child care and less to market work presumably get more benefits from their home career in the form of enhanced child development on the other hand full time market work i e hours in the labor market for pay is important for earnings growth of the mother mary corcoran greg duncan and michael ponza 1983 and family income has a favorable effect on school performance so the apparent choices facing women are more equivocal

a comparison of managers perceptions of short termism in sweden and the u s u s and u k firms have been thought to invest in a more short term manner than japanese and german firms this article uses a questionnaire and interviews to compare u s and swedish top executiv

tests of the specification of univariate and bivariate ordered probit this note presents tests of the specification of univariate and bivariate ordered probit the test is sensitive to deviations from either normality or the exogeneity of the explanatory variables as an example the ownership of dogs and televisions both sources of time intensive entertainment is studied the specification for dogs is not rejected the specification for televisions is rejected at the 2 0 level and the specification of both together is rejected at the 1 3 level

foreign ownership and corporate income taxation an empirical evaluation abstract foreign ownership allows countries to effectively export part of their corporate tax burden hence countries with high foreign ownership are expected to impose relatively high corporate taxes the findings of this paper suggest that there indeed is an economically significant positive relationship between foreign ownership and tax burdens in europe already significant foreign ownership levels in europe offer an explanation for the absence of a race to the bottom in corporate tax levels

on the choice of pricing policies ex ante commitment and prisoners dilemma abstract i study the endogenous formation of pricing policies posted uniform versus negotiated pricing by using a version of a two stage pricing game in a duopoly context the model explains the prevalence of uniform pricing in some markets countries and identifies a typical prisoners dilemma in these cases the sellers commitment to a pre announced price under uniform pricing mitigates the fear of buyers that they might be exploited once they start price negotiations while such buyers anticipation induces sellers to adopt uniform pricing in an attempt to capture more buyers it results in intensified competition with lower seller payoffs

do institutional factors influence cross border portfolio equity flows new evidence from emerging markets abstract we exploit a proprietary database containing foreign trading data from 20 stock exchanges for the 2006 2018 period to expand the existing evidence on cross border equity flows towards emerging markets in particular after briefly assessing the relevance of push and pull factors we study whether explicit and implicit barriers to investment corporate governance standards and market structure features influence cross border equity inflows we find that pull factors are an important determinant of foreign inflows while push factors have a smaller influence more importantly we find that removing explicit barriers to investment and adopting stricter corporate governance practices has a long run positive relation with inflows conditional on push and pull factors removing information barriers also matters but relatively less market structure features have instead little influence on cross border flows towards emerging markets

sports sentiment and stock returns this paper investigates the stock market reaction to sudden changes in investor mood motivated by psychological evidence of a strong link between soccer outcomes and mood we use international soccer results as our primary mood variable we find a significant market decline after soccer losses for example a loss in the world cup elimination stage leads to a next day abnormal stock return of 49 basis points this loss effect is stronger in small stocks and in more important games and is robust to methodological changes we also document a loss effect after international cricket rugby and basketball games this paper employs a novel mood variable international soccer results to investigate the effect of investor sentiment on asset prices using a cross section of 39 countries we find that losses in soccer matches have an economically and statistically significant negative effect on the losing country s stock market for example elimination from a major international soccer tournament is associated with a next day return on the national stock market index that is 38 basis points lower than average we also document a loss effect after international cricket rugby and basketball games on average the effect is smaller in magnitude for these other sports than for soccer but is still economically and statistically significant we find no evidence of a corresponding effect after wins for any of the sports that we study controlling for the pre game expected outcome we are able to reject the hypothesis that the loss effect after soccer games is driven by economic factors such as reduced productivity or lost revenues we

on representative social capital abstract this paper analyzes the behavior of subjects randomly drawn from the dutch population who reveal their capacity to provide and sustain social capital by their propensity to invest and reward investments in an economic experiment we find that heterogeneity in behavior is characterized by several asymmetries men the young and elderly and low educated individuals invest relatively less but reward significantly more investments the age effects are found to corroborate existing findings whereas those of gender and education do not higher expected levels of investments by others are found to have a positive and significant effect on own investments finally a laboratory experiment with student subjects is found to provide a lower bound of the population level of social capital

trying to explain home bias in equities and consumption investors hold a substantially larger proportion of their wealth portfolios in domestic assets than standard portfolio theory would suggest a phenomenon called equity home bias in the absence of this bias investors would optimally diversify domestic output risk using foreign equities therefore consumption growth rates would tend to co move across countries even when output growth rates do not empirically however consumption growth rates tend to have a lower correlation across countries than do output growth rates a phenomenon i call consumption home bias in this paper i discuss these two biases and their potential relationship as suggested by the literature

price setting power vs private information an experimental evaluation of their impact on holdup abstract this paper investigates the extent of the holdup problem in a buyer seller relationship in which the seller has private information about his alternative opportunities theory predicts that compared to a situation in which outside options are publicly observed the seller obtains an informational rent whereas the buyer bears an informational loss as a result the seller is predicted to invest more while the buyer is expected to invest less in contrast to this private information has no impact on the investment levels observed in the experiment but actual investments do increase with the price setting power of the investor these findings are roughly consistent with a model in which agents are inequality averse overall the results question some recent theoretical suggestions that private information rents might substitute for price setting power in mitigating holdup

tourists spending and adherence to shopping plans the case of the christmas market in merano italy abstract the present paper investigates the determinants of tourists expenditure by categorizing tourists based on their mental budgets individuals can be divided into three categories based on the difference between their mental budget and actual expenditure underspenders on budget spenders and overspenders estimation of the empirical model is performed based on data collected through a survey of visitors to the christmas market in merano italy during advent in 2011 the estimation is performed with the heckman estimator ordered probit selection rule and linear regression we find that the spending patterns of visitors belonging to the three identified categories differ significantly analyzing visitors expenditure based on the proposed categorization allows us to identify category specific factors and develop management strategies for each category the managerial and theoretical implications of the results are discussed

the impact of foreign board membership on firm value abstract this study examines the effect of foreign anglo american board membership on corporate performance measured in terms of firm value tobin s q using a sample of firms with headquarters in norway or sweden the study indicates a significantly higher value for firms that have outsider anglo american board member s after a variety of firm specific and corporate governance related factors have been controlled for we argue that this superior performance reflects the fact that these companies have successfully broken away from a partly segmented domestic capital market by importing an anglo american corporate governance system such an import signals a willingness on the part of the firm to expose itself to improved corporate governance and enhances its reputation in the financial market

price commitment in search markets abstract this paper studies the formation of pricing rules in search markets at a cost each seller can commit himself to a fixed price if he takes no actions to preclude haggling his sales price is determined through bilateral negotiations with the buyer the selection of pricing rules exhibits strategic complementarities that may give rise to multiple equilibria differences in trading practices across countries and cultures may thus be consistent with equilibrium behavior in bazaar markets where the buyer s cost of switching sellers is relatively low most of the trade is conducted via bargaining and prices are close to the perfectly competitive outcome

the returns to schooling a selectivity bias approach with a continuous choice variable the essence of selection bias is that we do not observe nonoptimal choices this applies whether the choice variable is discrete or continuous this paper extends the selection bias methodology to the case where the choice variable is continuous and the choice set is ordered the leading practical application of this analysis is the schooling choice problem schooling is treated as a continuous choice variable and selectivity corrected rates of return are estimated the findings suggest selectivity is of considerable importance and support the comparative advantage hypothesis of willis and rosen 18

outside options and the failure of the coase conjecture a buyer wishes to purchase a good from a seller who chooses a sequence of prices over time each period the buyer can also exercise an outside option abandoning their search or moving on to another seller we show there is a unique equilibrium in which the seller charges a constant price in every period equal to the monopoly price contravening the coase conjecture we then embed the singleseller model into a search framework and show the result provides a foundation for the usual no haggling assumption jel c78 d42 d43 l12 l13 the coase conjecture is a cornerstone of modern microeconomic theory informing monopoly theory and providing a canonical example of the problem of commitment the idea is that for any given price high value buyers are more likely to purchase than low value buyers leading to negative selection in the demand pool accordingly the seller cuts its price over time causing high value buyers to delay their purchases the seller s inability to commit thus leads its later selves to exert a negative externality on its former selves reducing its overall profit gul sonnenschein and wilson 1986 this idea of negative selection is robust versions of it hold when costs are nonlinear kahn 1986 when goods depreciate over time bond and samuelson 1984 when there is entry of new buyers sobel 1991 and when the buyers face future competition fuchs and skrzypacz 2010 in this article we show that the coase conjecture fails in a natural environment where buyers have an outside option they can choose to exercise we consider a seller who faces a buyer or a continuum of buyers with unknown value for the good and unknown outside option each period the seller chooses price p t the buyer then chooses to buy wait or exercise his option and terminate the game the outside option may come from the possibility of buying another product for example when waiting for the price of the iphone to fall a customer could instead buy a comparable phone from a competitor similarly when bargaining over the price of a car a buyer may abandon negotiations and move on to the next dealer the outside option may also come from pursuing other objectives once the negotiation has terminated for example after he finishes bargaining at a bazaar a tourist could start seeing local attractions

resource allocation in a few industries determinants and trends when the major corporations divisionalised their organisation after the second world war they devised a performance measurement system to monitor the development of their business units and a capital budgeting system to control the direction of investments the appraisal of investments was decentralised and capital budgeting became a bottom up process standardised through written routines and supervised via a pre approval control system since then investments in training rd indeed it rarely exists in professional service groups notwithstanding the industry does not invest less but concentrates on intangible types of investments the purpose of this article is to describe and identify the factors which dictate the design of the resource allocation system in a few industries and thereby perceive the direction in which the development is heading the analysis identifies five factors which determine the design of the resource allocation system and shows how this affects the resource allocation system in six industries it also discusses different means of control and the future trends and explains why the capital budgeting system becomes less important as industry becomes more knowledge intensive

home bias in equity portfolios inflation hedging and international capital market equilibrium we test whether the home bias in equity portfolios is caused by investors trying to hedge inflation risk the empirical evidence is consistent with this motive only if investors have very high levels of risk tolerance and equity returns are negatively correlated with domestic inflation we then develop a model of international portfolio choice and equity market equilibrium that integrates inflation risk and deadweight costs using this model we estimate the levels of costs required to generate the observed home bias in portfolios consistent with different levels of risk aversion for a level of risk aversion consistent with standard estimates of the domestic equity market risk premium these costs are about a few percent per annum greater than observable costs such as withholding taxes thus the home bias cannot be explained by either inflation hedging or direct observable costs of international investment unless investors have very low levels of risk aversion article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

bargaining with arrival of new traders we study dynamic bargaining with asymmetric information and arrival of exogenous events which represent arrival of traders or information we char acterize the unique limit of stationary equilibria with frequent offers the possi bility of arrivals changes equilibrium dynamics there is delay in equilibrium and the seller slowly screens out buyers with higher valuations the seller pay off equals what he can achieve by simply awaiting an arrival in applications when buyer valuations fall average prices drop and delay increases surplus division depends on relative arrival rates of buyers sellers and expected time to trade is a nonmonotonic function of the arrival rate

screening in a matching market contract design under incomplete information is often analysed in a bilaterally monopolistic setting if the informed party s reservation value does not depend on its private information its type it is a standard result that the uninformed side offers low types distorted contracts to reduce the information rent left to high types we challenge this result by embedding contract design in a matching market environment we consider a market where players meet pairwise and where in each match either side may be chosen to make a take it or leave it offer as frictions become sufficiently low we find that the set of equilibria is independent of whether there is complete or incomplete information in particular all contracts are free of distortions

investment financing and the role of roa and wacc in value creation abstract evaluating an industrial opportunity often means to engage in financial modeling which results in estimation of a large amount of economic and accounting data which are then gathered in an economically rational framework the pro forma financial statements while the standard net present value npv condenses all the available pieces of information into a single metric we make full use of the crucial information supplied in the pro forma financial statements and give a more detailed account of how economic value is created in particular we construct a general model allowing for varying interest rates which decomposes the project into investment side and financing side and quantifies the value created by either side an equity debt decomposition is also accomplished which enables to appreciate the role of debt in adding or subtracting value to equityholders further the major role of accounting rates of return as value drivers is highlighted and new relative measures of worth are introduced the project roa and the project wacc which aggregate information deriving from the period rates of return to achieve these results we make use of the average internal rate of return airr approach recently introduced which rests on capital weighted arithmetic means and sets a direct relation between holding period rates and npv

foreign investors and corporate social responsibility evidence from the career advancement of women in japan i examine whether foreign investors invest in firms that encourage the career advancement of women by using data from a sample of japanese firms during the period 2008 2011 first i find that corporate governance reform and work life balance practices facilitate the promotion of women to higher positions in firms furthermore i find that foreign investors hold more shares of firms that encourage the career advancement of women overall these results indicate that the career advancement of women as a part of corporate social responsible activities benefits foreign investors

the effect of income taxation on the labor supply of married men in sweden abstract this paper presents labor supply functions estimated on a sample of prime age swedish males the model used takes account of the nonlinear character of individuals budget sets caused by the progressive income tax it also allows preferences to vary between individuals calculations with the estimated functions using a partial equilibrium framework indicate a sizeable effect of the income tax on hours of work the average expected deadweight loss of the income tax is found to be approximately 20 percent of tax revenue

firm size wage differentials in the netherlands an unsolved problem in modern labor economics is the positive relation between the size of the firm in which a worker is employed and his wage one line of research that has been developed quite recently in this field is the application of endogenous switching regression models in this paper we utilize such a model to investigate firm size wage differentials in the netherlands the principal findings are that larger firms pay higher returns on schooling whereas smaller firms tend to reward iq combined with the finding that high iq workers are sorted into the largest firms the results are consistent with a model of job screening furthermore we find that employed sons of self employed fathers are more likely to work in small firms and that wage prospects for all types of workers are indeed most favorable in larger firms

from bottom of the barrel to cream of the crop sequential screening with positive selection in a number of interesting environments dynamic screening involves positive selection in contrast with coasian dynamics only the most motivated remain over time the paper provides conditions under which the principal s commitment optimum is time consistent and uses this result to derive testable predictions under permanent or transient shocks it also identifies environments in which time consistency does not hold despite positive selection and yet simple equilibrium characterizations can be obtained

the earnings impact of training duration in a developing country an ordered probit selection model of colombia s servicio nacional de aprendizaje sena this study estimates the earnings impact of one of the most extensive in service training programs in the developing world colombia s sena through a comparison of nongraduates and graduates earnings profiles the possible influence of selection is corrected through the use of an ordered probit model to determine participation in short and long courses the correction causes a significant decline in sena s earnings effect the results are robust with respect to alternative specifications of the selection model

corporate ownership and managerial short termism results from a finnish study of management perceptions abstract increased media exposure to layoffs and corporate quarterly financial reporting have created arguable a common perception especially favored by the media itself that the companies have been forced to improve their financial performance from quarter to quarter academically the relevant question is whether companies themselves feel that they are exposed to short term pressure to perform even if it means that they have to compromise company s long term future this paper studies this issue using results from a survey conducted among the 500 largest companies in finland the results indicate that companies in general feel moderate short term pressure with reasonable dispersion across firms there seems to be a link between the degree of pressure felt and the firm s ownership structure i e we find some support for the existence of potentially short term versus long term owners we also find significant ownership related differences in line with expectations in how such short term pressure is reflected in actual decision variables such as the investment criteria used

on the effects of barriers to international investment a simple model is presented in which it is costly for domestic investors to hold foreign assets the implications of the model for the composition of optimal portfolios at home and abroad are derived it is shown that all foreign assets with a beta larger than some beta plot on either one of two security market lines some foreign assets with a beta smaller than are not held by domestic investors even if their expected return is increased slightly while it is obviously not true that asset markets are completely segmented between countries there is evidence of barriers to international investment although reality seems to lie in that grey area between complete segmentation and no segmentation at all most international asset pricing models are concerned with the extreme case of no barriers to international investment no effort seems to have been made to study the effect on portfolio choice of such barriers which make it costly to hold foreign securities as opposed to domestic securities but which do not in general render international diversification so onerous that investors avoid foreign securities completely casual empiricism suggests that models without barriers to international investment should be suspect those models cannot explain why it appears that in every country investors on average hold more domestic securities than would be required if they held the world market portfolio 2 this paper constructs a model of international asset pricing in which there is a cost associated with holding either long or short risky foreign securities for the sake of simplicity in most of the paper we assume that while domestic investors face barriers to international investment foreign investors face no such barriers it turns out that nothing significant is lost with such an assumption the main conclusions of this paper for the case in which foreign investors face no barriers to international investment are 1 in the presence of barriers to international investment some risky foreign

does investor recognition predict returns abstract merton 1987 a simple model of capital market equilibrium with incomplete information journal of finance 42 483 510 shows that stocks about which not all investors are informed should yield a return premium this premium depends on the shadow cost of incomplete information which in turn depends on the shareholder base relative market size and idiosyncratic risk utilizing a comprehensive database of swedish shareholdings we demonstrate that stock returns are positively related to the shadow cost we also find that the shareholder base is negatively related to returns when controlling for size and idiosyncratic risk zero cost portfolios based on the shadow cost shareholder base yield substantial trading profits that are never positively correlated with the market and are only modestly explained by the four factor model

portfolio preferences of foreign institutional investors the authors examine the relationship between foreign investment and the attributes of emerging market countries and firms in which investment is made their findings indicate that countries with higher levels of economic development and floating exchange rate regimes tend to have greater ability to obtain foreign capital after controlling for the country s level of economic development they find that firms in countries with stronger shareholder rights and legal framework attract more foreign capital the authors also find that foreign institutions allocate more of their assets to firms with better corporate governance after controlling for other country and firm attributes the main firm level measures of corporate governance are derived from accounting quality variables their results imply that steps can be taken both at the country and the firm level to create an environment conducive to foreign portfolio investment the analysis is based on a unique dataset consisting of equity positions of u s mutual funds in emerging markets

muslim family law prenuptial agreements and the emergence of dowry in bangladesh we explain trends in dowry levels in bangladesh by drawing attention to an institutional feature of marriage contracts previously ignored in the literature the mehr or traditional islamic brideprice we develop a model of marriage contracts in which mehr serves as a barrier to husbands exiting marriage and a component of dowry as an amount that ex ante compensates the groom for the cost of mehr we investigate how mehr and dowry respond to exogenous changes in the costs of polygamy and divorce and show that our model gives a dierent set of predictions than traditional models we show that major changes in dowry levels took place precisely after the legal changes corresponding to simultaneous changes in levels of mehr

corporate capital expenditure decisions and the market value of the firm abstract this paper is an event time study of the common stock prices of a sample of 658 corporations around the dates on which they publicly announced their future capital expenditure plans for industrial firms announcements of increases decreases in planned capital expenditures are associated with significant positive negative excess stock returns for public utility firm neither increases nor decreases in planned capital expenditures are associated with significant excess stock returns we interpret the evidence as being consistent with the hypothesis that managers seek to maximize the market value of the firm in making their corporate capital expenditure decisions

cultural influences on home bias and international diversification by institutional investors abstract we investigate determinants of international diversification in institutionally managed portfolios from more than 60 countries survey based country specific variables on cross cultural behaviors help to explain both home bias and diversification among foreign equities in particular investment funds from countries characterized by higher uncertainty avoidance behavior display greater home bias and are less diversified in their foreign holdings portfolios from countries with higher levels of masculinity and long term orientation display lower levels of home bias and portfolios from countries with higher levels of masculinity are more diversified abroad portfolios from culturally distant countries invest less abroad and underweight culturally distant target markets the economic significance of cultural variables is high and comparable in magnitude to geographical distance a consistent influence on foreign diversification in prior studies culture impacts investor behavior directly and not merely though indirect channels such as legal and regulatory framework

incomplete information bargaining with outside opportunities we consider two kinds of outside opportunity that a seller of an indivisible good might have selling to a different buyer and consuming the good herself in both models the seller is uncertain about the buyer s valuation and becomes more pessimistic over time when the seller becomes sufficiently pessimistic she prefers the outside opportunity so she will not bargain indefinitely with the current buyer despite the resulting finite horizon nature of negotiations the link between the buyer s willingness to accept an offer and the seller s eagerness to go outside generates multiple equilibria

investments and investment processes in professional service groups this article describes and analyses the size and character of investments the investment criteria and the investment processes in some professional service groups the focus is on means of control used by the corporate level to influence the volume and direction of investments in groups of companies comparisons are made with standardized service and manufacturing groups professional service groups are of special interest because theirs is a growth industry moreover many manufacturing groups have become more knowledge intensive and have adopted project based structures similar to those found in professional service groups the article shows that professional service groups invest just as heavily as do manufacturing firms but concentrate their investments on training and the development of new knowledge the principles of investment planning and control are the same as in manufacturing groups but the means and the weight attached to them differ investment requests are initiated on the business unit level and major investment requests are channelled through the executive team system for approval however there is no system of defining requesting and reviewing intangible investments rather review is by projects and units the focus is on market and social not administrative means of control

determinants of sovereign wealth fund investment in private equity vs public equity this paper examines the investments of 19 sovereign wealth funds swfs in 424 firms both public and private around the world from 1991 through 2010 the data indicate that swfs similar to other institutional investors are less likely to invest in private equity than in public equity internationally however the economic significance of this impact is surprisingly low unlike other institutional investors swfs are more likely to invest in private equity compared with public equity in target nations where investor protection is low and where the bilateral political relations between the swf and the target nation are weak surprisingly cultural differences play a marginally positive role in the choice to invest in private equity investment outside an swf s own sovereign nation comprehensively we find that swfs act distinctively from other traditional institutional investors when investing in private equity

equity home bias a review essay this paper reviews the relatively more recent literature on equity home bias the empirical finding that people overinvest in domestic stocks relative to the optimal investment portfolio implied by the modern portfolio theory it reviews six broad classes of explanation of this puzzling phenomenon 1 hedging home risks 2 barriers to foreign investments 3 information asymmetries and 4 behavioral factors the consensus is that none of the explanations can account for the full extent of the bias by itself thus the home bias should be explained by a combination of rational and behavioral factors

aggregate return on investment for investments under uncertainty abstract this paper deals with capital budgeting decisions under uncertainty we present an aggregate return on investment aroi obtained as the ratio of total undiscounted cash flow to total invested capital and show that it is a genuine rate of return which compared with the risk adjusted cost of capital correctly signals wealth creation for choosing between two mutually exclusive projects we derive an incremental aroi and an incremental risk adjusted cost of capital by means of which two unequal risk projects can be correctly compared iterating the incremental procedure we show that the aroi approach correctly ranks any bundle of different risk competing projects relations with other criteria such as modified internal rate of return average irr cash multiple and profitability index are provided theoretically the aroi approach constitutes a link between arbitrage choice theory and corporate investment theory and shows that explicit discounting is not necessary for measuring economic profitability practically the aroi is a user friendly easy to compute rate of return derived from the same set of data required by the net present value npv also it does not incur the difficulties met by the internal rate of return irr in particular it is unique and it is based on economically significant capital values i e market driven values as such the aroi significantly expresses the efficiency of the project s invested capital

the dynamics of pretrial negotiation it is shown that many cases proceed to court despite ample opportunity for interaction and much of the settlement takes place on the courthouse steps the deadline effect when fixed costs of bargaining are introduced a u shaped pattern of settlement appears with a greater chance of settlement at the beginning and at the end of negotiations than in the middle these characteristics persist even as the time between offers approaches zero the theoretical predictions are consistent with the stylized facts a large proportion of the lawsuits that are settled out of court are settled very close to the trial date or in the first several days of the trial 3 although the deadline effect appears in many other settings as well it has little theoretical support 4

equity home bias and corporate disclosure abstract i show that more comprehensive corporate disclosure reduces investors uncertainty about domestic companies payoffs at no cost thereby decreasing investors equity home bias toward a country since investors should base their investment decisions on valid and easily interpretable company information only more comprehensive disclosure will reduce the home bias only if domestic securities law is sufficiently stratified and domestic companies use international accounting standards using panel data for 38 countries from 2003 to 2008 i find that more comprehensive disclosure reduces investors home bias though significantly only for countries that sufficiently enforce their securities law and implement international accounting standards

a note on three player noncooperative bargaining with restricted pairwise meetings abstract a three player bargaining game where only the central player can negotiate with two different partners has a unique perfect equilibrium outcome we discuss when the a priori favored position of the central player is really advantageous in terms of equilibrium payoffs

do domestic and foreign fund managers have similar preferences for stock characteristics a cross country analysis using a new unique data set on mutual fund stockholdings we identify several interesting similarities and differences in the stock preferences of domestic and foreign fund managers from 11 developed countries results show that both groups of managers prefer stocks with high return on equity large turnover and low return variability and that they also exhibit differential investment behavior domestic managers also favor firms that pay large dividends have low financial distress and high growth potential whereas foreign managers prefer to invest in corporations that are globally well known the demand for globally visible stocks by foreign managers is especially strong when their fund mandate is to diversify globally or across regions and is weakened when their stock holdings are concentrated mainly in a specific local market the results also show no difference in the stock preferences of american european and asian based funds in general our overall evidence suggests that the differential mandates of fund managers and hence the geographic allocations of their fund investments influence their stock preferences but not the geographic location of the managers

gambling reputation repeated bargaining with outside options we study the role of incomplete information and outside options in determining bargaining postures and surplus division in repeated bargaining between a long run player and a sequence of short run players the outside option is not only a disagreement point but reveals information privately held by the long run player in equilibrium the uninformed short run players offers do not always respond to changes in reputation and the informed long run player s payoffs are discontinuous the long run player invokes inefficient random outside options repeatedly to build reputation to a level where the subsequent short run players succumb to his extraction of a larger payoff but he also runs the risk of losing reputation and relinquishing bargaining power we investigate equilibrium properties when the discount factor goes to 1 and when the informativeness of outside options diffuses in both cases bargaining outcomes become more inefficient and the limit reputation building probabilities are interior publication abstract

international equity flows and returns a quantitative equilibrium approach this paper models trading by foreign and domestic investors in developed country equity markets the key assumptions are that i both the foreign and domestic investor populations contain investors of different sophistication and ii investor sophistication matters for performance in both public equity and private off market investments a quantitative model with these assumptions delivers a unified explanation for three stylized facts about us investors international equity trades that have been documented in the literature i trading by us investors occurs in bursts of simultaneous buying and selling ii americans build and unwind foreign equity positions gradually and iii us investors increase their market share in a country when stock prices there have recently been rising

gender differences in bargaining outcomes a field experiment on discrimination abstract relying on a commonly used fixed offer bargaining script we examine gender differences in bargaining outcomes in a highly competitive and frequently used market the taxi market in lima peru our bargaining script secures that only the seller can change prices and terminate negotiations thus we are able to examine differences in the seller s entire path of negotiation and in the reservation price at which they are willing to trade we find that male and female passengers who use the same bargaining script are not treated equally men face higher initial prices final prices and rejection rates these differences are consistent with male drivers being more reluctant to give in to demanding negotiations by male passengers and with male passengers being perceived as having high valuations to identify whether taste based or statistical discrimination drives the inferior treatment of men we conduct an experiment where passengers send a signal on valuation before negotiating the signal eliminates gender differences and the response is shown only to be consistent with statistical discrimination thus in the limiting case of a highly competitive market with experienced traders we do not find evidence of taste based discrimination the differential observed is however consistent with statistical discrimination

foreign institutional investment is governance quality at home important abstract this paper examines the investment preferences of foreign institutional investors investing in the u s market we analyse both firm and country level determinants that influence the foreign institutional investors allocation choices at the country level we find that the governance quality in a foreign institutional investor s home country is a determinant of their decision to invest in the u s market our findings indicate that investors who come from countries with governance setups similar to that of the u s invest more in the united states the investment levels though are more pronounced for countries with governance setups just below that of the u s our results are consistent with both the flight to quality and familiarity arguments and help reconcile prior contradictory empirical evidence at the firm level we present unequivocal evidence in favour of the familiarity argument foreign institutional investors domiciled in countries with high governance quality prefer to invest in u s firms with high corporate governance quality this effect is primarily driven by grey non monitoring institutional investors

confidence in the familiar an international perspective one striking feature of intemrnational portfolio investment is the extent to which equity portfolios are concentrated in the domestic equity market of the investor the home bias puzzle i examine the role of investors perception of foreign investment risk on their portfolio choices the expected retumrns and risk of foreign investment are specified through an asset pricing model with the home portfolio being the benchmark asset pastor s 2000 domestic capm the model serves as a reference point around which investors can center their prior beliefs i focus on investors prior beliefs that are consistent with the literature on confidence in the familiar foreign equities in terms of both expected returns and risk being viewed less favorably than domestic equities these prior beliefs are then combined with the data on g7 equities and the revised beliefs are used to obtain the global optimal asset allocation to hold predominantly domestic equities each g7 investor has to believe that the risk of foreign investment is several times higher than the actual risk the home bias is more of a puzzle for a u s investor during the 1970s specifying investors prior beliefs around the world capm does not help resolve the puzzle

home bias foreign mutual fund holdings and the voluntary adoption of international accounting standards we test the assertion that a consequence of voluntarily adopting international accounting standards ias is the enhanced ability to attract foreign capital using a unique database that reports firm level holdings of over 25 000 mutual funds from around the world our multivariate tests find that average foreign mutual fund ownership is significantly higher among ias adopters we also find that ias adopters in poorer information environments and with lower visibility have higher levels of foreign investment consistent with firms using ias adoption to provide more information and or information in a more familiar form to foreign investors taken together our findings are consistent with voluntary las adoption reducing home bias among foreign investors and thereby improving capital allocation efficiency

price competition short termism and environmental performance this paper studies the relationships between the intensity of price competition time horizon and environmental performance we hypothesize that more intense price competition discourages environmental performance by inducing short termism in companies we test the hypotheses on a sample of 3152 companies from twelve european countries using structural equation modeling test results show that price competition significantly shortens the time horizon that companies apply in strategic decisions and that long time horizon significantly increases their environmental performance however the net negative effect of the intensity of price competition on environmental performance is small in absolute terms the policy implication is that there is no serious dilemma between fostering environmental performance on one hand and increasing consumer surplus by encouraging price competition on the other hand

crossborder dividend taxation and the preferences of taxable and nontaxable investors evidence from canada abstract we consider how fund managers respond to the conflicting preferences of their investors we focus on the conflict between the taxable and retirement accounts of international funds which face different tradeoffs between dividends and capital gains in principle managers could resolve this conflict through dividend arbitrage but a proprietary database of dividend arbitrage transactions shows that in practice they cannot thus managers must resolve it through their investment policies we find robust evidence that managers with more retirement money favor the preferences of retirement investors and further evidence for this view in the difference between u s and canadian funds portfolio weights

efficiency and its determinants in pharmaceutical industries ownership r d and scale economy the purpose of this article is to measure the efficiency of pharmaceutical firms and identify their determinants using korean and american samples from 1992 to 2004 we document some stylized facts in the patterns and sources of efficiency change in korean and american pharmaceutical firms the evidence shows that ownership structure can substantially influence the efficiency of pharmaceutical firms especially institutional ownership rate affects corporate efficiencies negatively corroborating the myopic institutional investor hypothesis the hypothesis is supported by both korean and american samples however we find evidence that foreign ownership in korea promotes efficiency of pharmaceutical firms it is shown that r d intensity is positively related to contemporaneous largest ownership rate and prior foreign ownership rate in korean pharmaceutical firms in contrast little evidence is found on the relationship between ownership structure and r d intensity in the american pharmaceutical industry

average rates of return working capital and npv consistency in project appraisal a sensitivity analysis approach abstract in project appraisal under uncertainty the economic reliability of a measure of financial efficiency such as a rate of return depends on its strong npv consistency meaning that the performance metric i supplies the same recommendation in accept reject decisions as the npv ii ranks competing projects in the same way as the npv iii has the same sensitivity to perturbations in the input data as the npv in real life projects financial efficiency is greatly affected by the management of the working capital using a sensitivity analysis approach and taking into explicit account the role of working capital we show that the average return on investment roi is not strongly npv consistent in accept reject decisions if the working capital is uncertain and changes under changes in revenues and costs also it is not strongly npv consistent in project ranking we also show that the internal rate of return irr is not strongly npv consistent and economic analysis may even turn out to be impossible owing to possible nonexistence and multiplicity caused by perturbations in the input data as well as to possible shifts in the financial meaning of irr under changes in the project s value drivers we introduce the straight line rate of return slrr based on the notion of average rate of change which overcomes all the problems encountered by average roi and irr it always exists is unique strongly npv consistent for both accept reject decisions and project ranking and has an unambiguous financial nature

the long side of the market and the short end of the stick bargaining power and price formation in buyers sellers and balanced markets the determinants of bargaining power and price formation in a dynamic exchange market where new traders enter randomly over time are studied when agents on the long side of the market possess the option to wait for the arrival of future partners the terms of trade in the spot market must honor the value of this option the equilibrium terms of trade are expressed in intuitive closed form equations that highlight the distinct influences of short run spot market conditions and long run market demographics i introduction few concepts in economics are as intuitive as the idea that traders on the long side of a market wind up holding the short end of the stick that is they receive little or none of the gains from trade consider for instance the classic setting in which b identical buyers each with unit demands for an indivisible homogeneous good face s identical sellers each with one unit of the good for sale it is well known that in a broad class of one shot trading games all of the surplus in this setting goes to the short side of the market in equilibrium that is if b s buyers bid the price up to their reservation value often it is only when b s that market institutions the rules of the game have any bearing on the equilibrium division of surplus this classic result is somewhat brittle because of the discontinuity in the terms of trade when moving from positive to negative levels of excess demand its logic is familiar however from bertrand competition and it is very compelling the option value to an agent frozen out of a trade in a one shot market game is his reservation payoff of zero any outcome that confers nonzero surplus to a long side agent cannot be sustained in equilibrium because all of the long side agents who would otherwise be frozen out possess a strict incentive to undercut

calvin s restrictions on interest guidelines for the credit crisis calvin s view on the legitimacy of interest has had a great impact on the economic development of western society although calvin took a fundamentally positive attitude to interest he also proposed several restrictions on the charging of interest in this article we investigate the relevance of these restrictions to the current credit crisis we find that each of them provides a relevant interpretation of what went wrong in the buildup of the credit crisis and gives directions to improve policies of banks and governments as well

increasing goal congruence in project evaluation by introducing a strict market depreciation schedule abstract the economic accuracy of accrual based managerial performance measures is most essential for value added investment decisions in decentralised firms contemporary eva literature often lends support to annuity based depreciation schedules for accomplishing congruence between capital budgeting criteria like npv and accounting measures like roi and ri this is incongruent with the principal agent literature aiming at designing managerial incentive contracts we introduce a strict market based depreciation schedule which is shown to be superior to ordinary straight line annuity based or irr based depreciation schedules it gives the right managerial investment incentives also in the case of growth inflation or technological development

the pecking order of cross border investment abstract is there a pecking order of cross border investment in that countries become financially integrated through some types of investment rather than others using a novel database of bilateral capital stocks for all types of investment fdi portfolio equity securities debt securities as well as loans for a broad set of 77 countries we show that such a pecking order indeed exists the paper focuses on two key determinants of this pecking order information frictions and the quality of host country institutions overall we find that in particular fdi and to some extent also loans are substantially more sensitive to information frictions than investment in portfolio equity and debt securities we also show that the share as well as the size of fdi that a country receive are largely insensitive to institutional factors in host countries while portfolio investment is by far the most sensitive to the quality of institutions this provides new evidence in favor of some hypotheses but contradicts others put forward in the literature on trade in financial assets

sequential bargaining with correlated values the paper analyzes an infinite horizon sequential bargaining game with one sided offers between a buyer and a seller when the buyer s valuation depends on the seller s the seller knows the value of the object and the buyer does not the influence of relative discount factors on the solution is studied it is shown for example that an impasse may result if the buyer offeror is too impatient relative to the seller the buyer makes a single take it or leave it offer

bilateral trading in networks in many markets goods flow from initial producers to final customers travelling through many layers of intermediaries and information is asymmetric we study a dynamic model of bargaining in networks that captures these features we show that the equilibrium price demanded over time is non monotonic but the sequence of transaction prices declines over time with the possible exception of the last period the price dynamic is therefore reminiscent of fire sales and hot potato trading traders who intermediate the object arise endogenously and make a positive profit the profit earning intermediaries are not necessarily traders with many connections for the case of multilayer networks they belong to the path that reaches the maximum number of potential buyers using the minimal number of intermediaries this is not necessarily the path of the network that maximizes the probability of consumption by traders who value the most the object i e welfare

capital budgeting methods among sweden s largest groups of companies the state of the art and a comparison with earlier studies abstract this study presents a general description of the state of the art of capital budgeting methods used by swedish corporations it is based on a questionnaire sent to 528 companies selected from 500 of the largest swedish corporations and some from the o list of companies the response rate is 24 4 the study shows that the public sector companies are most frequent users of discounted cash flow dcf methods the payback method is the most used in all industries also matters size of company the use of the net present value method has increased over the years although the use of dcf methods is generally unchanged value based management models have been introduced in the listed companies another conclusion is that tradition is an important factor explaining the choice of capital budgeting method large companies within the manufacturing industry use dcf methods more often than other companies in general the companies seem unconcerned with the tax consequences of capital budgeting decisions it would appear as if the public companies have not adopted capital budgeting practices supporting shareholder value increases

the euro and corporate valuations in this paper we study the changes in corporate valuations induced by the adoption of the euro as the common currency in europe we use corporate level data from seventeen european countries of which eleven adopted the euro we show that the introduction of the euro has increased tobin s q ratios by 17 1 in the euro area countries that previously had weak currencies part of the increase in corporate valuations is explained by the decrease in interest rates and by the decrease in the cost of equity the increases in tobin s q are larger for firms that would be harmed by currency devaluations the author 2008 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oxfordjournals org oxford university press

does corporate governance risk at home affect investment choices abroad abstract disparity between control and ownership rights gives rise to the risk of tunneling by the controlling shareholder and is prevalent in many emerging market economies and present in some developed countries at the same time international investors come from different countries whose home markets are characterized by varying degrees of control ownership disparity this paper studies whether this difference in investors home countries affects their portfolio choice in an emerging market it combines two unique data sets on ownership and control in business groups and investor stock level foreign investment in korea a key finding is that investors from low disparity countries disfavor high disparity stocks in korea but investors from high disparity countries are indifferent moreover investors from low disparity countries became averse to disparity only after the asian financial crisis these results suggest that the nature of corporate governance in international investors home countries affects their portfolio choice abroad and therefore these investors should not be lumped together in the analyses of their portfolio choice

why did the equity home bias fall during the financial panic of 2008 investors tend to put most of their wealth in local stocks theories of portfolio choice and uncertainty aversion jointly predict that this home bias should increase during a financial crisis yet using a sample of 45 countries i document that the equity home bias fell during the financial panic of 2008 exploiting bilateral stock holdings i find that investors actively increased their home bias but large valuation changes subsumed these trades across countries the change in home bias is consistent with partial portfolio rebalancing and increased information asymmetries during the crisis

international evidence on the impact of adopting english as an external reporting language this study investigates the economic consequences of non english speaking companies adopting english as an external reporting language we examine a sample of european companies that initiate the voluntary issuance of an annual report in english in addition to the local language annual report to control for self selection we use a difference in differences design with a propensity score matched control sample we find that adoption of english as an external reporting language is associated with increased foreign ownership decreased information asymmetry and increased analyst following we also find that these benefits are not conditional on the use of ifrs for financial reporting our findings hold if we run a number of robustness checks to control for correlated events creation of an investor relations service provision of conference calls and or changes in management these results are consistent with the language used in the annual report acting as a barrier to investment for some investors and with annual reports issued in english reducing investors information processing costs

asymmetric information bargaining and unemployment fluctuations we construct a dynamic general equilibrium model where wages are determined by bilateral bargaining and the firm has superior information the asymmetry of information introduces unemployment fluctuations and dynamic wage sluggishness because the information of the firm is only revealed gradually wages fall slowly in response to a negative shock and unemployment exhibits additional persistence it is shown that high job destruction will generally be followed by a period of higher than average job destruction that the presence of common shocks introduces an informational externality and that bargaining is an inefficient method of wage determination as compared to implicit contracts

bargaining and search with incomplete information about outside options abstract this paper considers a model of bargaining in which the seller makes offers and the buyer can search at a cost for an outside option the outside option cannot be credibly communicated and the seller s offer is recallable by the buyer for one period there are essentially two equilibrium regimes for sufficiently high search cost the game ends immediately otherwise the search occurs in equilibrium compared to the case where the buyer can communicate his outside option the seller is worse off and the game results in search for a smaller set of values of the search cost i e less equilibrium delay c72

testing for short termism in the uk stock market this paper uses data on the stock market valuations of a large sample of uk companies to assess if that market displays short termism tests are undertaken of whether discount rates implicit in market valuations applied to cash flows which accrue in the longer term are too high both absolutely and relative to the rates applied to cash flows in the near term i find prima facie evidence that these longer term discount rates are too high a result consistent with the existence of short termism an alternative interpretation of the results is that risk premia applied to expected cash flows systematically increase with the maturity of those flows whether this interpretation is consistent with asset pricing theories is questionable copyright 1993 by royal economic society

foreign equity trading and average stock return volatility we examine whether there is a relationship between foreign equity trading and average total volatility measured as the value weighted average of stock return variance in the istanbul stock exchange we employ foreign equity purchase and sale data to track changes in foreign equity trading which not only enable us to capture effective foreign investor participation but also to observe the potential asymmetric effects of incoming and outgoing funds on the average total volatility consistent with the implications of the asymmetric information hypothesis we find that net equity flow is positively associated with average total volatility furthermore we show that net equity flow affects the average total volatility through the local and idiosyncratic volatilities suggesting that foreign investors engage in the production of firm specific and market wide information

the determinants of international investment and attention allocation using internet search query data abstract this paper explores the joint determination of home bias and attention allocation we overcome the typical challenge associated with evaluating attention allocation theories by using a new internet search query dataset to measure how much information investors decide to process employing an instrumental variables approach we find empirical evidence of a two way causality between home bias and attention our estimates suggest that if all countries were to receive the same level of attention as the u s then the average home bias by u s investors would fall from 85 2 to 57 3

child care subsidies and labor supply in sweden this paper utilizes data from a swedish household survey for 1984 the hus data in combination with data on public child care fees and spaces per child by community we argue that the subsidy rate and availability of spaces determined by the political leaders of the community is to a large extent exogenous to the household the joint out of home child care and labor supply decision is analyzed by logit and ordered probit choice models we find that the high quality public child care in sweden encourages labor market activity of women with preschoolers even when the spouse s income is high and that when spaces are not rationed a lower price encourages use

the effects of legal reforms on the ownership structure of listed companies a general view in the corporate governance literature is that corporate ownership structures are rather stable in time and change slowly however even if changes in ownership structures are difficult due to path dependence anecdotal evidence indicates that some sort of transition towards the us style corporate ownership could be occurring in civil law countries the aim of this article is to test the so called law and finance view which predicts that this convergence will only happen if the appropriate regulatory framework is in place we test this prediction using longitudinal data from italian listed companies assessing the effects of recent legal reforms our results show that an increase in the protection of investors rights is associated with a lower use of control enhancing mechanisms and a lower separation of control and cash flow rights while it is less evident if it is associated with a more dispersed ownership these findings carry important implications for theory and practice

direct foreign ownership institutional investors and firm characteristics in this paper we characterize foreign ownership using a dataset of ownership and attributes of swedish rms the analysis reveals that foreigners show a preference for large rms rms paying low dividends and rms with large cash positions on their balance sheets when we further analyze the preference for large rms we nd that market liquidity and presence in international markets measured through export sales or listings on other exchanges seem to characterize foreign holdings better than rm size alone foreigners also tend to underweight rms with a dominant owner importantly we demonstrate that most of the features associated with foreign ownership are driven by the fact that foreign investors typically are mutual funds or other institutional investors hence we identify an institutional investor bias rather than a foreign investor bias finally using ownership data on a country level we conclude that the results are particularly strong among u s investors who comprise the largest institutions among foreign investors 2001 elsevier science s a all rights reserved jel classixcation g1 g15

international diversification during the financial crisis a blessing for equity investors abstract this paper empirically investigates international equity investors foreign portfolios before and during the financial crisis by estimating a gravity model for 22 source and 42 destination countries during 2001 2009 the results show a significant negative relationship between foreign equity holdings and stock market correlations during the financial crisis while there is no relationship before the crisis when distinguishing between active and passive rebalancing the results clearly indicate a significantly negative relationship between active rebalancing and correlations during the crisis these findings hold as well at the individual country level when allowing for source country specific coefficients an analysis from the perspective of each source country s representative investor who optimizes mean variance utility shows that active rebalancing provides sizeable utility gains during the crisis finally there is even a significantly negative relationship between future correlations and active rebalancing since 2007 suggesting that prior to the crisis investors already repositioned their country weights to markets with lower correlation during 2008 2009