Search

The profitability of feeding dried poultry droppings-based diet as a supplement in goat production enterprise was analyzed in this present study. The data generated in the study was analyzed using gross margin analysis and profitability ratio. The result of the budgetary analysis showed that the highest total cost of Rs 855.9/goat was incurred, the highest total revenue of Rs 1254.3/goat, highest gross margin of Rs 773.24/goat and highest net farm income of Rs 713.24/goat were observed for the supplemented treatment groups (T2-T5). The profitability ratio gave the best bene- fit-cost ratio of 4.62, a rate of return of 3.62, a gross ratio of 0.22 and an expense structure ratio of 0.12. This suggests that feeding of dried poultry droppings-based diet to goats is a profitable enterprise. This present study, therefore, recommends the supplementation of sun-dried poultry dropping based diet at 80% inclusion level for maximum profitability of goat production enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the suitability of using overnight returns to measure firm-specific investor sentiment by analyzing whether they possess characteristics expected of a sentiment measure. We document short-term overnight-return persistence, consistent with existing evidence of short-term persistence in the share demand of sentiment-influenced investors. We find that short-term persistence is stronger for harder-to-value firms, consistent with existing evidence that sentiment plays a larger role for such firms. We show that stocks with high (low) overnight returns underperform (outperform) over the longer term, consistent with prior evidence of temporary sentiment-driven mispricing. Overall, our evidence supports using overnight returns to measure firm-specific sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Amidst diminishing federal investment in Adult Basic Education (ABE), there is growing interest in return on investment (ROI) as an economic rationale to support ABE funding. Against this backdrop, we provide an overview of the ROI concept and methods and the empirical evidence on ABE program impacts to broaden the discourse among practitioners and advocates. We point out that the most crucial building blocks necessary for ROI estimations are missing in the literature. We contextualize the current status of the literature by discussing challenges in ABE program evaluations and limitations in ROI methods. We then further our discussions by offering a recommendation for ROI estimation and alternative approaches to ROI. We conclude by calling for an expanded public discourse, beyond ROI, on the social benefits of funding ABE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords International Asset Pricing; Asymmetric Dependence; Country Factors; State-Dependent Return Correlations Highlights * Asymmetric dependence is the only factor consistently priced in all markets examined. * The degree of asymmetric dependence is stronger in economies with faster-growing financial markets. * Policy aimed at improving market competition may help stabilize financial markets. Abstract International investors require additional compensation, charged on top of the systematic risk premium, to hold assets displaying asymmetric dependence in returns. We document that the degree and pricing of asymmetric dependence differs substantially across the 38 markets examined. Asymmetric dependence strengthens in fast-developing equity markets. We propose policy actions aimed at improving firm competition levels through reducing restrictions for new firms to enter financial markets, which may help stabilize markets and reduce conditional risk levels of equities during downturn events. Abbreviations AD, Asymmetric dependence; LTAD, Lower-tail asymmetric dependence; UTAD, Upper-tail asymmetric dependence Author Affiliation: (a) University of Oxford, Said Business School, United Kingdom (b) University of Iowa, Tippie College of Business, United States * Corresponding author at: Tippie College of Business, 108 John Pappajohn Bus. Bldg. Ste S260, Iowa City, IA 52242-1994, United States. (footnote)[white star] We are thankful for the valuable feedback of Robert Faff, Tobias Götze, Anthony Hatherley, Timothy McQuade, David Michayluk, Maureen O'Hara, Andrew Patton, Talis Putnins, Jurij-Andrei Reichenecker, Stephen Satchell, Katherine Uylangco, Kathleen Walsh, Baolian Wang, Guofu Zhou, and seminar participants at University of Technology in Sydney, University of Queensland, Australian National University, the 2018 FMA European Conference, the 30th Australasian Finance and Banking Conference 2017, the 2017 FIRN Annual Conference, the 2017 FMA Annual Meeting, the 10th International Accounting & Finance Doctoral Symposium, and the 2017 Fordham Global PhD Colloquium. We have benefited from and are grateful for comments from two anonymous referees. This research was funded by the Australian Research Council grant ID: DP180104120. Byline: Jamie Alcock (a), Petra Sinagl [petra-sinagl@uiowa.edu] (b,*)

The Federal Reserve's influence on the economy and financial markets is substantial and well-recognized by market participants. Over the past few years, both the financial and popular media have been obsessed with Fed actions and speculation on potential Fed actions. While advisors and clients closely monitor monetary policy actions, there is confusion about the implications these actions have for stock market returns. This analysis documents the association between both general stock market returns and equity sector returns during expansive, indeterminate, and restrictive monetary policy conditions. Advisors can use the results to both condition clients' expectations and make portfolio adjustments to take advantage of historical patterns in equity sector returns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study rating shopping on the MBS market. Outside ofAAA, losses are higher on singlerated tranches than on multi-rated ones, and yields predict future losses for single-rated tranches, but not for multi-rated ones. Conversely, ratings have less explanatory power for single-rated tranches. These results suggest that single-rated tranches have been "shopped," whereby pessimistic ratings never reach the market. For AAA-rated MBS, by contrast, 93% receive two or three such ratings, and those ratings agree 97% of the time. This ratings convergence suggests that agencies "cater" to investors, who cannot purchase a tranche unless it has multiple AAA ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewable-energy technologies have exhibited rapid price drops in recent years, leading to hopes that such technologies will rapidly replace the entire fossil-fuel-energy sector. But renewable-energy systems have been manufactured in a fossil-fueled infrastructure. Renewable energy has been functioning as a relatively minor adjunct to the overall energy system rather than displacing fossil fuels. If we expect renewable energies to replace rather than merely supplement the fossil-fuel infrastructure, 'energy sprawl' will be a major issue. The energy return on investment (EROI) of renewables is likely to be far lower than the EROI of fossil fuels in their heyday. If renewable sources were eventually to produce all required energy, the energy-provision sector would comprise a much larger share of the economy than at present and provide less net energy surplus to other economic-sectors. This article examines key problems for wind- and solar-photovoltaic-energy industries, including: the dependence on fossil fuels to manufacture renewable-energy equipment; the need to move beyond renewable-energy 'sweet spots'; the increasing need for new infrastructure, including storage and long-distance transmission; and the difficulty in providing the types of heat needed for many industrial processes. Because the era of abundant, affordable energy that has fueled economic growth is coming to an end, we will need to look beyond providing our existing services with greater efficiency and question which forms of these services are actually needed for sufficiency.

In biophysical terms, such as energy return on investment (EROI), energy sources for the global economy have grown more expensive over the last few decades. This trend is likely to be more pronounced in the near-term future as conventional oil and gas are depleted and difficult-to-extract unconventional oil and gas become a larger part of the fossil-fuel supply. On the one hand, this will lead to 'energy sprawl'--the growth of the energy sector, as this sector consumes a much larger portion of the energy it extracts--leaving less energy surplus for other sectors. On the other hand, we will see an unsustainable imbalance between the fuel prices that fossil-fuel companies will need to meet their costs and the fuel prices that the larger economy can afford to pay. This article reviews the historical role of inexpensive energy in economic growth, discusses the declining availability of conventional oil resources, and examines the increasing reliance on expensive, unconventional petroleum resources such as shale oil in the United States.

Background: This research study is an economic analysis of a neurotechnology-based translational research and development venture focused on the development of a therapy for patients with epilepsy. In the conceptualization, planning, financing, and execution of neurotechnology ventures, many factors come into play in determining value and ability to secure financing at each stage of the venture. Conventionally, these have included factors that determine the return on investment for the stakeholders of the venture, most notably the investors and the team members, the former investing hard earned capital, and the latter investing significant portions of their professional careers. For a variety of reasons, the positive impact on society is often not quantified and taken into consideration. Methods: To address this, a new term is defined and assessed at a first approximation level using an index technology. The metric is termed the societal return on investment (sROI). Results: Among chronic conditions, neurological disease is virtually unique in the magnitude of economic devastation that it can inflict on a person and a family. Because the device costs do not reflect this value that is lost and subject to restoration, these are missing from this important calculation. The index project is the development of a seizure advisory system, which cost $71.2 million to develop and conduct a First-In-Man (FIM) study (NCT01043406) and which was estimated to require $50 million to complete a pivotal study. Conclusion: Despite the immense costs required to develop, test, and commercialize such a system, the direct and indirect economic costs imposed by uncontrolled seizures are sufficiently staggering that a sROI becomes positive after only 400 patients have been successfully treated and returned to work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enormous progress has been made in the field of rheumatology in the past several decades, historically led by publicly funded academic innovators but in more recent times with much greater involvement of the pharmaceutical industry. This shift in resources has created a complex new model for reinvestment in the medical community in which the vast majority of private funds are redirected towards influencing the prescription behaviour of practitioners through 'key opinion leaders', with the main purpose of enhancing and perpetuating profit rather than innovation and critical thinking, and often at the expense of partnerships with scientists (that is, basic and translational researchers) and academic collaborations. This new episteme brings multiple opportunities to rethink approaches to sustaining long-term critical research in the field, ultimately maximizing the return on investment: scientific knowledge for the benefit of patients and society. Central to such strategies should be the rebalancing of academia-industry partnerships towards academic research and the involvement of 'innovation and knowledge leaders', rather than mostly key opinion leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key question for understanding the cross-section of expected returns of equities is the following: which factors, from a given collection of factors, are risk factors, equivalently, which factors are in the stochastic discount factor (SDF)? Though the SDF is unobserved, assumptions about which factors (from the available set of factors) are in the SDF restricts the joint distribution of factors in specific ways, as a consequence of the economic theory of asset pricing. A different starting collection of factors that go into the SDF leads to a different set of restrictions on the joint distribution of factors. The conditional distribution of equity returns has the same restricted form, regardless of what is assumed about the factors in the SDF, as long as the factors are traded, and hence the distribution of asset returns is irrelevant for isolating the risk-factors. The restricted factors models are distinct (nonnested) and do not arise by omitting or including a variable from a full model, thus precluding analysis by standard statistical variable selection methods, such as those based on the lasso and its variants. Instead, we develop what we call a Bayesian model scan strategy in which each factor is allowed to enter or not enter the SDF and the resulting restricted models (of which there are 114,674 in our empirical study) are simultaneously confronted with the data. We use a Student-t distribution for the factors, and model-specific independent Student-t distribution for the location parameters, a training sample to fix prior locations, and a creative way to arrive at the joint distribution of several other model-specific parameters from a single prior distribution. This allows our method to be essentially a scaleable and tuned-black-box method that can be applied across our large model space with little to no user-intervention. The model marginal likelihoods, and implied posterior model probabilities, are compared with the prior probability of 1/114,674 of each model to find the best-supported model, and thus the factors most likely to be in the SDF. We provide detailed simulation evidence about the high finite-sample accuracy of the method. Our empirical study with 13 leading factors reveals that the highest marginal likelihood model is a Student-t distributed factor model with 5 degrees of freedom and 8 risk factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present a graphical framework based on Subrahmanyam and Thomadakis (1980) that allows to study the impact from firm and market characteristics on systematic risk associated with the return on capital, i.e. Beta risk, for utilities under price control. Within this framework, Beta risk is driven by the magnitude of profit fluctuations following demand shocks. The framework is then applied to airport firm characteristics and airport market environment features. I find that the frequency of price control resets, the level of operating leverage, the extent of capacity constraints, and the degree of market power all have an unambiguous effect on the level of Beta risk. The scope of the regulatory perimeter and the type of traffic mix may also affect Beta risk; however, the magnitude and direction of their impact rely on the specifics of the case. The article may assist policy makers to formulate economically sound recommendations on how the regulatory rate of return for airport operators should be determined. Specifically, my findings suggest criteria that can be used to choose adequate peer companies of comparable systematic risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010–2011, University of Colorado (CU) librarians implemented a multi-campus pilot study to measure the institutional value of library resources used by faculty in their research. The study incorporated quantitative methods including return on investment (ROI), cost benefit analysis (CBA), and citation analysis of journal articles published by faculty; and qualitative methodologies such as in-person interviews with faculty. The study resulted in a CU ROI model that can be used to measure faculty perceptions of value and the economic benefits of electronic journal collections for faculty research in terms of ROI. The CU ROI methodology provides outcomes beyond a single ROI number and led to unexpected benefits for informing collection development decisions and strategies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper evaluates an editorial and seven invaluable and interesting review papers for the Journal of Risk and Financial Management (JRFM). The topics covered include the rising complexity of bank regulatory capital requirements from global guidelines to their United States (US) implementation, connections among big data, computational science, economics, finance, marketing, management and psychology, factors, outcome, and the solutions of supply chain finance, with a review and future directions, time-varying price-volume relationship, adaptive market efficiency, and a survey of the empirical literature, improved covariance matrix estimation for portfolio risk measurement, stock investment and excess returns, with a critical review in the light of the efficient market hypothesis, and a cross section analysis of country equity returns, and a review of the empirical literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State, public, academic, and special libraries are conducting and publishing the results of studies aimed at showing the value of their services and resources. Librarians must be prepared and proactive so when asked to justify budget allocations they have the tools to show their library's value and understand the importance of expressing value in terms familiar to the administrators. By identifying stakeholders and obtaining their buy in, librarians can turn data into evidence of the organization's return on investment (ROI) in the library. ROI is a powerful tool to use when establishing credibility, accountability, and evidence demonstrating the library's value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural Africa lags behind global progress to provide safe drinking water to everyone. Decades of effort and billions of dollars of investment have yielded modest gains, with high but avoidable health and economic costs borne by over 300m people lacking basic water access. We explore why rural water is different for communities, schools, and healthcare facilities across characteristics of scale, institutions, demand, and finance. The findings conclude with policy recommendations to (i) network rural services at scale, (ii) unlock rural payments by creating value, and (iii) design and test performance-based funding models at national and regional scales, with an ambition to eliminate the need for future, sustainable development goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Social Security / SGD-Sosyal Güvenlik Dergisi is the property of Journal of Social Security / SGD-Sosyal Güvenlik Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Financial returns of forest plantations are an important concern around the world. In this research, we focused on South China's timber investments, collected data from the Pingxiang, Guangxi Province, China, which is the demonstration zone of Fast-growing and High-yielding Timber Plantation Base Construction Program and National Timber Strategic Storage and Production Bases Construction Program, and used capital budgeting analysis method and sensitivity analysis to compare different scenarios of planted forest management. The results showed that excluding land costs, (1) the financial returns of Eucalyptus forest managed by small business were excellent, having an IRR of 28% per year and a LEV of $7555 per ha, but it had a high risk with fluctuations of cost, timber price and timber yield; (2) the results for the Experimental Center of Tropical Forests indicate that the Eucalyptus forest and Castanopsis hystrix forest returns were greater than those for Cunninghamia lanceolata forest and Pinus massoniana forest, with having IRRs of 24%, 21%, 13% and 10% per year respectively. The mixed planted forest of Castanopsis hystrix × Eucalyptus and Castanopsis hystrix × Pinus massoniana had the features of high profits and low risks; (3) the forest farmers had lower levels of returns for Eucalyptus forest management in South China, but were still in the middle rank of global comparisons. This study gave a view of China's timber investment and provided more options of improving the economic returns of planted forest management to both small businesses and forest farmers in South China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are a broad challenge for decision-makers. NCDs account for seven out of every 10 deaths globally, with 42 percent occurring prematurely in individuals under age 70. Despite their heavy toll, NCDs are underfunded, with only around two percent of global funding dedicated to the disease set. Country governments are responsible for funding targeted actions to reduce the NCD burden, but among other priorities, many have yet to invest in the health-system interventions and policy measures that can reduce the burden. This article examines “investment cases” as a potential mechanism for catalyzing attention to—and funding for—NCDs. In Jamaica, using the UN inter-agency OneHealth Tool, we conducted an economic analysis to estimate the return-on-investment from scaling up strategic clinical interventions, and from implementing or intensifying policy measures that target NCD risk factors. In addition, we conducted an institutional and context (ICA) analysis, interviewing stakeholders across sectors to take stock of promising policy pathways (e.g., areas of general consensus, political appetite and opportunity) as well as challenges to implementation. The economic analysis found that scaling up clinical interventions that target CVD, diabetes, and mental health disorders, and policy measures that target tobacco and alcohol use, would save over 6,600 lives between 2017–2032, and avert JMD 81.3 billion (USD 640 million) in direct and indirect economic costs that result from mortality and morbidity linked to NCDs. The ICA uncovered government economic growth targets and social priorities that would be aided by increased attention to NCDs, and it linked these targets and priorities to the economic analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uniting diverse stakeholders through communication, education or building a collaborative ‘common vision’ for biodiversity management is a recommended approach for enabling effective conservation in regions with multiple uses. However, socially focused strategies such as building a collaborative vision can require sharing scarce resources (time and financial resources) with the on-ground management actions needed to achieve conservation outcomes. Here we adapt current prioritisation tools to predict the likely return on the financial investment of building a stakeholder-led vision along with a portfolio of on-ground management strategies. Our approach brings together and analyses expert knowledge to estimate the cost-effectiveness of a common vision strategy and on-ground management strategies, before any investments in these strategies are made. We test our approach in an intensively-used Australian biodiversity hotspot with 179 threatened or at-risk species. Experts predicted that an effective stakeholder vision for the region would have a relatively low cost and would significantly increase the feasibility of on-ground management strategies. As a result, our analysis indicates that a common vision is likely to be a cost-effective investment, increasing the expected persistence of threatened species in the region by 9 to 52%, depending upon the strategies implemented. Our approach can provide the maximum budget that is worth investing in building a common vision or another socially focused strategy for building support for on-ground conservation actions. The approach can assist with decisions about whether and how to allocate scarce resources amongst social and ecological actions for biodiversity conservation in other regions worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Return on investments in land restoration can be increased with an understanding of land potential. • High returns on land degradation avoidance are likely on high value land with low resilience. • Analysis requires an understanding of degradation resistance, resilience. • It also requires understanding likely changes in land values driving future land use. • Ignoring these factors may result in negative returns or even increased degradation. The response hierarchy of "Avoid > reduce > reverse" is increasingly acknowledged as the best strategy for prioritizing actions designed to address land degradation at hectare to national scales. This hierarchy is based on the assumption that the economic return on investment (ROI) will usually be higher for actions that help avoid degradation than for those required to restore already degraded land. While a useful first step, the hierarchy fails to account for how differences in land potential, defined as its potential to sustainably generate ecosystem services, may affect the ROI of actions at each level of the response hierarchy. The objective of this paper is to present a strategy for improving ROI at the landscape scale and above by systematically applying a more holistic understanding of land potential to the identification and prioritization of land investments. This objective is addressed in three sections. The first section explains how the potential short- and long-term resistance and resilience of the land can be used together with its potential productivity to prioritize actions designed to avoid, reduce and reverse degradation. In the second section we explain how this prioritization can be further optimized based on an understanding of degradation risk as indicated by the land's potential to generate relatively high short-term profits under management systems that are likely to increase degradation, or result in degradation of restored land. This potential, and land managers' perception of it, depend on a wide variety of factors including markets, infrastructure, and access to technology. Together these first two sections provide a framework for increasing ROI, while reducing the risk of failure at hectare to national scales. In the final section we briefly describe the Land-Potential Knowledge System (LandPKS), a modular mobile app that makes it possible for virtually anyone with a smartphone to make the land potential determinations necessary to apply the framework described in the first two sections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of leveraged buyout firms' bank relationships on the terms of their syndicated loans. We examine a sample of 1,590 loans financing private equity sponsored leveraged buyouts between 1993 and 2005, and find that private equity firms' bank relationships are an important factor in cross-sectional variation in the loan interest rate and covenant structure. Our results indicate that bank relationships formed through repeated interactions reduce inefficiencies from information asymmetry and allow leveraged buyouts sponsored by private equity firms to occur on favorable loan terms. A one-standard-deviation increase in bank relationship strength is associated with an 8-basis-point (3%) decrease in the spread and a 0.21-basis-point (4%) increase in the maximum debt to EBITDA covenant. We also find evidence that banks price loans to cross-sell other fee business. A one-standard-deviation increase in both bank relationship strength and cross-selling potential translates into as much as a 4-percentage-point increase in equity return to the leveraged buyout firm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examine how managerial incentives affect acquisition decisions in the banking industry. We find that higher pay-for-performance sensitivity (PPS) leads to value-enhancing acquisitions. Banks whose CEOs have higher PPS have significantly better abnormal stock returns around the time of the acquisition announcements. On average, acquirers in the high-PPS group outperform their counterparts in the low-PPS group by 1.4% in a three-day window around the announcement. Higher PPS helps reduce the incentives for making value-destroying acquisitions, while at the same time promotes value-enhancing acquisitions. The positive market reaction can be rationalized by post-merger performance. Following acquisitions, banks with higher PPS experience greater improvements in their operating performance. We show that the effect of PPS is mainly evident in small and medium-sized banks, but is not present in large banks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We find a positive cross-sectional relationship between expected stock returns and default risk, contrary to the negative relationship estimated by prior studies. Whereas prior studies use noisy ex post realized returns to estimate expected returns, we use ex ante estimates based on the implied cost of capital. The results suggest that investors expected higher returns for bearing default risk, but they were negatively surprised by lower-than-expected returns on high default risk stocks in the 1980s. We also extend the sample compared with prior studies and find that the evidence based on realized returns is considerably weaker in the 1952–1980 period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the link between the composition of firms’ capital and stock returns. I develop a general equilibrium production economy where firms use two factors: real estate and other capital. Investment is subject to asymmetric adjustment costs. Because real estate depreciates slowly, firms with high real estate holdings are more vulnerable to bad productivity shocks and hence are riskier and have higher expected returns. This prediction is supported empirically. I find that the returns of firms with a high share of real estate capital exceed that of low real estate firms by 3–6% annually, adjusted for exposures to the market return, size, value, and momentum factors. Moreover, conditional beta estimates reveal that these firms indeed have higher market betas, and the spread between the betas of high and low real estate firms is countercyclical. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We study the economic sources of stock-bond return comovements and their time variation using a dynamic factor model. We identify the economic factors employing a semi structural regime-switching model for state variables such as interest rates, inflation, the output gap, and cash flow growth. We also view risk aversion, uncertainty about inflation and output, and liquidity proxies as additional potential factors. We find that macroeconomic fundamentals contribute little to explaining stock and bond return correlations but that other factors, especially liquidity proxies, play a more important role. The macro factors are still important in fitting bond return volatility, whereas the “variance premium” is critical in explaining stock return volatility. However, the factor model primarily fails in fitting covariances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a recently published paper, Edmans, García, and Norli (2007) reveal a strong association between results of soccer games and local stock returns. Inspired by their work, we propose a novel approach to exploit this effect on the aggregate international level with the following three unique features: i) The aggregate effect does not depend on the games' results; hence, the effect is an exploitable predictable effect. ii) The aggregate effect is based on many games; hence, it is very large and highly significant. We find that the average return on the U.S. market over the World Cup's effect period is -2.58%, compared to +1.21% for all-days average returns over the same period length. iii) Exploiting the aggregate effect is involved with trading in a single index for a relatively long period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether comovements between euro area equity returns at national and industry level changed after the introduction of the euro. By adopting a regression quantile-based methodology, we find that after 1999 the degree of comovements among euro area national equity markets was augmented. By explicitly controlling for the impact of global factors, we show that this result cannot be explained by recent worldwide trends. A more refined analysis based on an industry breakdown suggests that the increase in national index comovements is mainly driven by financial, industrial, and consumer services sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the enormous size of projected federal budget deficits, it is likely that federal income tax rates will rise, and perhaps dramatically so, over the next several years in order to reduce or at least slow down the growth rate in U.S. debt. Many taxpayers may consequently find themselves paying a higher rate of tax on required minimum distributions (RMDs) from their tax-deferred retirement accounts (e.g., IRAs, 401(k)s, and 403(b)s) relative to the rate of tax savings generated when contributions were made to the accounts. This article addresses RMD payments in general and when, if ever, a prospective retiree should forgo tax deductible contributions to retirement plans in favor of placing after-tax savings in taxable accounts in order to reduce RMD payments and related tax liabilities. Effective tax rate comparisons are made under various rate-of-return and marginal tax rate scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ang, Hodrick, Xing, and Zhang (2006a) show that stocks with high idiosyncratic return volatility tend to have low future returns. This paper further documents that idiosyncratic volatility is inversely related to future earning shocks, and more importantly, that the return- predictive power of idiosyncratic volatility is induced by its information content about future earnings. We examine various explanations of the triangular relation among idiosyncratic volatility, future earning shocks, and future stock returns. Our results show that the idiosyncratic volatility anomaly is not a simple manifestation of previously documented market anomalies related to excessive extrapolation on firm growth, over-investment tendency, accounting accruals, or investor underreaction to earnings news. On the other hand, there is evidence that the idiosyncratic volatility anomaly is related to corporate selective disclosure, and the anomaly is stronger among stocks with a less sophisticated investor base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a dynamic capabilities framework to explain the effective strategic management of the political environment. We argue that the effectiveness of political strategies will be a function of firms' dynamic political management capabilities and propose four firm-level strategies--proactive, defensive, anticipatory, and reactive--for managing the political environment effectively. We develop propositions to explain how particular dynamic capabilities are associated with the effectiveness of alternative political strategies and conclude with suggestions for future research into effective strategic political management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]