Given the cross-sectional and temporal variation in their liquidity, emerging equity markets provide an ideal setting to examine the impact of liquidity on expected returns. Our main liquidity measure is a transformation of the proportion of zero daily firm returns, averaged over the month. We find that it significantly predicts future returns, whereas alternative measures such as turnover do not.
This paper studies the application of fair value accounting in bank holding companies in the United States with the purpose of evaluating the effects of expanding fair value accounting in the banking industry.
In this paper, we propose a method of accounting for stock options that tracks the effect of the options on shareholder value. The accounting approach we outline can be applied not only to employee stock options but to all claims that are effectively convertible into common shares, including convertible preferred stock, warrants, and call and put options on the firm's own stock. Our proposal also aims to make accounting consistent with stock prices, since the market surely takes account of the (potential) valuation effects of these claims when setting stock prices.
We consider stock markets in 20 countries to investigate whether the accrual anomaly (Sloan 1996), characterized by U.S. stock prices overweighting the role of accrual persistence, is a local manifestation of a global phenomenon. We explore whether the occurrence of the anomaly is related to country differences in accounting and institutional structures, and examine alternative explanations for its occurrence. We find stock prices overweight accruals in general, with accruals overweighting occurring in countries with a common law relative to a code law tradition.
This paper proposes a simple back testing procedure that is shown to dramatically improve a panel data model's ability to produce out of sample forecasts. Here the procedure is used to forecast mutual fund alphas. Using monthly data with an OLS model it has been difficult to consistently predict which portfolio managers will produce above market returns for their investors. This paper provides empirical evidence that sorting on the estimated alphas populates the top and bottom deciles not with the best and worst funds, but with those having the greatest estimation error.
Results from two groups of biculturals (Hong Kong undergraduates, Chinese Americans) and a group of European Americans in two studies showed that in the presence of applicable cues of a culture, individuals with expert knowledge in the culture spontaneously make inferences about the culture's moral values, producing a Stroop-like effect. Although both biculturals and European Americans made spontaneous cultural inferences from American cultural cues, only biculturals made spontaneous inferences from Chinese cultural cues.
We consider organizations that optimally choose the level of adaptation to a changing environment when coordination among specialized tasks is a concern. Adaptive organizations provide employees with flexibility to tailor their tasks to local information. Coordination is maintained by limiting specialization and improving communication. Alternatively, by letting employees stick to some pre-agreed action plan, organizations can ensure coordination without communication, regardless of the extent of specialization.
This paper revists two basic questions that are critical for understanding and controlling DB pension risk: How should the value of DB pension liabilities be computed; and how should pension assets be allocated? In particular, we reexamine the role of stocks in valuing and hedging pension obligations. Our approach differs from others in the literature in at least two ways. First, it is one of the few that focuses on market value, and does so by using a derivative approach.
Weak public institutions, including high levels of corruption, characterize many developing countries. We demonstrate that this feature has important implications for the design of monetary policymaking institutions. We find that a pegged exchange rate or dollarization, while sometimes prescribed as a solution to the credibility problem, is typically not appropriate for countries with poor institutions. Such an arrangement is inferior to a Rogoff-style conservative central banker, whose optimal degree of conservatism is proportional to the quality of institutions.