Search

In a series of experiments, we provide evidence that people pay special attention to the probability of losing. We first analyze this behavior in the typically used one-shot choice tasks. We then extend our analysis to repeated decisions in choice tasks, as well as allocation and investment tasks. Additionally, we test both decision making under risk and under gradually removed uncertainty, as with decisions from experience. Our findings of explicit attention to loss probabilities contradict the predictions of normative and descriptive decision theories, such as Expected Utility Theory and (Cumulative) Prospect Theory. We suggest a value function with a jump rather than a kink at the reference point, which separates gains and losses.

https://ssrn.com/abstract=3202916; We show that banker bonuses cannot be understood exclusively as incentive contracts, but also incorporate a significant risk sharing dimension between bank shareholders and bank employees. This contrasts with the conventional view whereby diversified shareholders fully insure risk averse employees. However, financial frictions imply that shareholder value is concave in a bank's cash reserves---making shareholders effectively risk averse. The optimal contract between shareholders and employees then involves some degree of risk sharing. Using extensive payroll data on 1.26 million bank employee years in the Austrian, German, and Swiss banking sectors, we show that the structure of bonus pay within and across banks is compatible with an economically significant risk sharing motive, but difficult to rationalize based on incentive theories of bonus pay only.

This article demonstrates that low bank capital carries a negative externality because it amplifies local shock spillovers. We exploit a natural disaster that is transmitted to firms in nondisaster areas via their banks. Firms connected to a strongly disaster-exposed bank with lowest-quartile capitalization significantly reduce their total borrowing by 6.6% and tangible assets by 6.9% compared to similar firms connected to a well-capitalized bank. These findings translate to negative regional effects on GDP and unemployment. Additionally, following a disaster event, banks reduce their exposure to currently unaffected but generally disaster-prone areas.

When confronted with new information, rational decision makers should update their beliefs through Bayes’ rule. In economics, however, new information often includes win-loss feedback (profits vs. losses, success vs. failure, upticks vs. downticks). Previous research using a well-established belief-updating paradigm shows that, in this case, reinforcement learning (focusing on past performance) creates high error rates, and increasing monetary incentives fails to elicit higher performance. But do incentives fail to increase effort, or rather does effort fail to increase performance? We use pupil dilation to show that higher incentives do result in increased cognitive effort, but the latter fails to translate into increased performance in this paradigm. The failure amounts to a “reinforcement paradox:” increasing incentives makes win-loss cues more salient, and hence effort is often misallocated in the form of an increased reliance on reinforcement processes. Our study also serves as an example of how pupil-dilation measurements can inform economics.

Economic theories posit conflicting hypotheses on how wealth inequality affects entrepre-neurial dynamism. We investigate the impact of wealth inequality on business dynamics by constructing local measures of household wealth inequality based on financial rents, home equity, and 1880 farmland. We then identify the effect of wealth inequality on entrepre-neurship by instrumenting it with land distribution under the 1862 Homestead Act. Wealth inequality decreases firm entry and exit, and the proportion of high-tech businesses across metropolitan statistical areas. Wealth inequality also lowers the supply of public goods, such as education. Growth in income per capita consequently lags.

The literature on the economics of science and technology shows that academic universities—institutions focusing on basic research—positively affect innovation activities in regional economies. Less is known about the innovation effects of universities of applied sciences (UASs)—bachelor-granting three-year colleges teaching and conducting applied research. Furthermore, the evidence for positive innovation effects is predominantly based on average effects, while heterogeneity in innovation effects due to the economic environment is far less considered. By exploiting a public policy development in Switzerland that led to the quasi-random establishment of UASs, we investigate the regional heterogeneity in innovation effects of these UASs. We rely on patent and business census data and analyze the influence and importance of three economic preconditions—labor market size, labor market density and high tech intensity—on innovation effects of UASs. Our results show that only regions with a large or a dense enough labor market or with an above average high tech intensity experience significant innovation effects of UASs. Comparing the relative importance of the three economic preconditions, we find that labor market size is the most important factor that drives heterogeneity in innovation effects of UASs.

Do credit ratings help enforce market discipline on banks? Analyzing a uniquely comprehensive data set consisting of 1,081 rating change announcements for 154 international financial institutions between January 2004 and December 2015, we find that rating downgrades for internal reasons, such as adverse changes in the operating performance or capital structure of banks, are associated with a significant credit default swap spread widening. However, this widening only occurs for banks that are not perceived as to be Too-Big-to-Fail (TBTF). Our findings question the reliability of credit ratings as a tool to discipline TBTF banks and suggest that regulatory monitoring should remain the main mechanism for disciplining these banks.

Small and micro-enterprises are usually majority-owned by entrepreneurs. Using a unique sample of loan applications from such firms, we study the role of owners’ gender in bank credit decisions and post-credit-decision firm outcomes. We find that, ceteris paribus, female entrepreneurs are more prudent loan applicants than are males because they are less likely to apply for credit or to default after loan origination. The relatively more aggressive behavior of male applicants pays off, however, in terms of higher average firm performance after loan origination.

In an environment of accelerating technological change and increasing digitalization, firms need to adopt new technologies faster than ever before to stay competitive. This paper examines whether updates of education curricula help to bring new technologies faster into firms’ workplaces. We study technology changes and curriculum updates from an early wave of digitalization (i.e., computer-numerically controlled machinery, computer-aided design, and desktop publishing software). We take a text-as-data approach and tap into two novel data sources to measure change in educational content and the use of technology at the workplace: first, vocational education curricula and, second, firms’ job advertisements. To examine the causal effects of adding new technology skills to curricula on the diffusion of these technologies in firms’ workplaces (measured by job advertisements), we use an event study design. Our results show that curriculum updates substantially shorten the time it takes for new technologies to arrive in firms’ workplaces, especially for mainstream firms.

Influential economic approaches as random utility models assume a monotonic relation between choice frequencies and “strength of preference,” in line with widespread evidence from the cognitive sciences, which also document an inverse relation to response times. However, for economic decisions under risk, these effects are largely untested, because models used to fit data assume them. Further, the dimension underlying strength of preference remains unclear in economics, with candidates including payoff-irrelevant numerical magnitudes. We provide a systematic, out-of-sample empirical validation of these relations (both for choices and response times) relying on both a new experimental design and simulations.

Supplemental material files: supporting information: online appendix; replication file Do financial crises radicalize voters? We study Germany's 1931 banking crisis, collecting new data on bank branches and firm-bank connections. Exploiting cross-sectional variation in precrisis exposure to the bank at the center of the crisis, we show that Nazi votes surged in locations more affected by its failure. Radicalization in response to the shock was exacerbated in cities with a history of anti-Semitism. After the Nazis seized power, both pogroms and deportations were more frequent in places affected by the banking crisis. Our results suggest an important synergy between financial distress and cultural predispositions, with far-reaching consequences. This project has received funding from the ERC (648398). Peydró also acknowledges financial support from the ECO2015-68182-P (MINECO/FEDER, EUE) grant and the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness (SEV-2015-0563).

We investigate the compensation of counterparty exposure in the prices of structured products. Our analysis reveals that product issuers did not compensate retail investors for counterparty exposure before the Lehman default. Post‐Lehman, retail prices have no longer neglected this risk. We also measure retail investor attention towards issuer credit risk. For a given level of issuer credit risk, counterparty exposure is compensated more when attention is higher. Furthermore, issuers tend to construct products with larger counterparty exposure. Overall, our results shed light on the conditions under which financial engineering generates neglected risk.

Strong regulatory actions are needed to combat climate change, but climate policy uncertainty makes it difficult for investors to quantify the impact of future climate regulation. We show that such uncertainty is priced in the option market. The cost of option protection against downside tail risks is larger for firms with more carbon-intense business models. For carbon-intense firms, the cost of protection against downside tail risk is magnified at times when the public’s attention to climate change spikes, and it decreased after the election of climate change skeptic President Trump.

This study examines how firm value (measured via stock prices) is related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and how the institutional environment influences this relationship. To test our hypotheses, we apply textual analysis to our data on firms listed in the STOXX Europe 600 for the period 2008–2016. Our investigation of topic-specific CSR disclosure indicates that when firms shifted from voluntary to mandatory reporting, following the announcement of Directive 2014/95/EU, the association between their share price and CSR disclosure became significantly negative. For the period before the announcement, this relationship is either positive or statistically insignificant. We also show that the institutional environment can impact this relationship in four distinct ways: the level of CSR awareness, the level of employee protection, the degree of enforcement and the strength of the legal environment. We find that the first two have a negative impact on the incremental value relevance of specific CSR disclosure, whereas the last two have a positive impact. Lastly, our results also indicate that the magnitude of (a) the relationship between a firm’s CSR disclosure and its value and (b) the impact that the firm’s institutional environment has on this relationship depends on the specific CSR topics.

We study local loan conditions when, under external pressure, banks close branches. After the closure of nearby branches of their credit granting banks, firms that locally and hurriedly transfer to other banks receive an equivalent interest rate. However, and in stark contrast, where branch closures do not take place firms that purposely switch banks receive a 63 basis points discount. At the same time, the loan default rate for the (more expensive) transfer loans is on average a full percentage point lower than that for the (cheaper) switching loans. This suggests that firms that establish new relationships after their bank branch closes are “better” than regular switchers in terms of unobservable characteristics. Taken together, these findings provide evidence of losses for firms when banks close branches, even if local markets remain competitive.

In a capital adequacy framework, risk measures are used to determine the minimal amount of capital that a financial institution has to raise and invest in a portfolio of prespecified eligible assets in order to pass a given capital adequacy test. From a capital efficiency perspective, it is important to be able to do so at the lowest possible cost and to identify the corresponding portfolios, or, equivalently, their payoffs. We study the existence and uniqueness of such optimal payoffs as well as their behavior under a perturbation or an approximation of the underlying capital position. This behavior is naturally linked to the continuity properties of the set‐valued map that associates to each capital position the corresponding set of optimal eligible payoffs. Upper continuity can be ensured under fairly natural assumptions. Lower continuity is typically less easy to establish. While it is always satisfied in a polyhedral setting, it generally fails otherwise, even when the reference risk measure is convex. However, lower continuity can often be established for eligible payoffs that are close to being optimal. Besides capital adequacy, our results have a variety of natural applications to pricing, hedging, and capital allocation problems.

Purpose An outcome bias occurs when performance is evaluated based upon the outcome of the decision rather than upon the quality of the decision itself. The purpose of this paper is to test experimentally whether advisors eliminating the uncertainty in the quality of decisions as a potential driver of the outcome bias can eliminate this bias in judgements. Additionally, the paper analyses whether such advisors can attenuate the emotional experience after decisions’ outcomes by supporting the cognitive understanding of these outcomes. Design/methodology/approach The paper employs a between-subject experimental setting where decision makers are asked to make investment decisions. The two variables manipulated were advice (receiving advice vs deciding without an advice) and state (loss vs neutral vs gain state). Participants were randomly assigned to each group. One group completed all tasks while receiving advice before making a final decision. Another group completed all tasks without any advice. After completing each investment task, participants were randomly assigned to one of three possible states that determine their payoff. Findings The results reveal that advisors eliminating the uncertainty in the quality of decision can eliminate the outcome bias in the judgements of decision quality, especially after bad outcomes. Nevertheless, after controlling for the perceived quality of the decisions, advised individuals show a greater emotional sensitivity to bad outcomes than non-advised decision makers. These observations suggest that advisors eliminating the uncertainty in the decision quality can improve the understanding that good decisions can lead to bad outcomes just by chance, but they are not able to prevent affective reactions after bad outcomes; on the contrary, they may even reinforce them. Research limitations/implications The observation that, after bad outcomes, advised decision makers are less willing to decide the same way than non-advised decision makers is consistent with empirical findings on the risk-taking behaviour of self-directed and mutual fund investors. Self-directed investors are less likely to revise their decision and sell an investment at a loss than mutual fund investors (Chang et al., 2016). While investors might sell funds because they are unable to observe the decision process of the manager and use the outcome to judge the manager’s skills, this study shows that such learning from decision outcomes is not necessary for observing the risk-taking behaviour of the investors. Even if the decision process of the advisor is observable (as in this study), the decision makers’ willingness to decide the same way is influenced by the losses – an effect that goes beyond the assessed quality of advice as the results of this study show. Practical implications The results of this study have important implications for advisors aiming to maintain a positive relationship with their clients. Convincing clients that an advice is optimal supports their understanding that a good advice can have bad outcomes. However, this understanding may not prevent affective reactions after bad outcomes. On the contrary, the affective response after bad outcomes is even stronger with the advice than without it. Hence, advisors should address not only issues related to the quality of the provided advice, but also emotional aspects, which could be related to what clients expect from following the advice. Originality/value This study is one of the few that account for the possibility that the outcome bias may arise because there is uncertainty regarding the optimal choice. In particular, this paper uses a much more powerful criterion to define an optimal choice than the expected value criterion used in previous studies. The criterion represents a minimal requirement for rational behaviour in expected utility theory and many non-expected utility theories.

Donald Trump's surprise election shifted expectations: corporate taxes would be lower and trade policies more restrictive. Relative stock prices responded appropriately. High-tax firms and those with large deferred tax liabilities (DTLs) gained; those with significant deferred tax assets from net operating loss carryforwards (NOL DTAs) lost. Domestically focused companies fared better than internationally oriented firms. A price contribution analysis shows that easily assessed consequences (DTLs, NOL DTAs, tax rates) were priced faster than more complex issues (net DTLs, foreign exposure). In sum, the analysis demonstrates that expectations about tax rates greatly impact firm values.

Purpose This study aims to present a brief overview of developments in management accounting research and practice in German-speaking countries, locate the contributions of this special issue in historical trajectories and provide an outlook of expected future developments in this area. Design/methodology/approach This study reviews the literature and draws a critically reflective approach. Findings A century after Schmalenbach, Germanic management and cost accounting have significantly changed, even though the roots of the cost accounting tradition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are still visible in practice and teaching, which is true for both organisational practice and research. In both cases, an encroachment of the global on the local can be seen but, paradoxically, as Hopwood (1999) noted, the seemingly globally standardised accounting systems allow for local idiosyncrasies to specifically stand out. The anchoring of management accounting in financial accounting, the country-specific ownership and financing models, the importance of capital and labour markets (e.g. strong codetermination) for companies, regulations on corporate governance and the determination of the tax base are examples of institutions that can shape the behaviour of management and, thus, also idiosyncrasies of management accounting in a country. Originality/value The contributions of this special issue provide insight into developments in management accounting research and practice in German-speaking countries and, thus, enhance our understanding of the different historical trajectories and traditions in management accounting. The papers by Weber and Wiegmann and by Gisch et al. demonstrate how specific idiosyncratic practices and understandings of management accounting in German-speaking countries mediate global influences on management accounting in private- and public-sector organisations. The papers by Endenich et al. and by Kreilkamp et al. show that the influence of international developments in management accounting research has become stronger in German-speaking management accounting academia.

This contribution evokes Orio Giarini’s courage to think ‘outside the box’. It proposes a practical way to bridge the gap between risk (where probabilities of occurrence are fully known) and uncertainty (where these probabilities are unknown). However, in the context of insurance, neither extreme applies: the risk type of a newly enrolled customer is not fully known, loss distributions (especially their tails) are difficult to estimate with sufficient precision, the diversification properties of a block of policies acquired from another company can be assessed only to an approximation, and rates of return on investment depend on decisions of central banks that cannot be predicted too well. This contribution revolves around the launch of an innovative insurance product, where the company has a notion of whether a favourable market reception is more likely than an unfavourable one, of the chance of obtaining approval from the regulatory authority and the risk of a competitor launching a similar innovation. Linear partial information theory is proposed and applied as a particular practical way to systematically exploit the imprecise information that may exist for all of these aspects. The decision-making criterion is maxEmin, an intuitive modification of the maximin rule known from games against nature.

The focus of this paper is on UK Code compliance and the contests and confusions that have surrounded its principle of ‘comply or explain’. In contrast to many agency theory‐informed studies, the paper suggests that visible compliance with the Code cannot itself be taken as a reliable proxy for board effectiveness. Instead, drawing upon Foucault's account of governance as subjection, we argue that, as a form of board accountability, visible compliance can only support the Code's primary objective of establishing norms which shape the conduct of directors within boards. The contests and confusions as to the meaning of comply or explain are then explored in terms of the challenge regulators have faced, throughout the subsequent life of the Code, in respecting the freedom of action of directors, whilst nevertheless seeking to influence how this is exercised. The paper first explores three key moments in the evolution of the UK Code: the initial Cadbury committee two‐page ‘Code of Best Practice’ in 1992, the more prescriptive 2003 post‐Enron changes to the UK Combined Code following the Higgs review, and the retreat from such prescription in the 2010 changes to the Code. This is complemented by drawing on qualitative empirical research to describe three very different ‘subject positions’—refusal, cynical distance, and willing embrace—which directors have come to adopt in response to the Code. The paper concludes by pointing to the very different consequences for actual board effectiveness implied by these contrasting, but largely invisible, responses to the Code.

Does democratization reduce the cost of credit? Using global syndicated loan data from 1984 to 2014, we find that democratization has a sizable negative effect on loan spreads: a 1-point increase in the zero-to-ten Polity IV index of democracy shaves at least 19 basis points off spreads, but likely more. Reversals to autocracy hike spreads more strongly. Our findings are robust to the comprehensive inclusion of relevant controls, to the instrumentation with regional waves of democratization, and to a battery of other sensitivity tests. We thus highlight the lower cost of loans as one relevant mechanism through which democratization can affect economic development.

The Bitcoin system keeps its ledger consistent in a blockchain by solving cryptographic problems, in a method called "Proof-of-Work". The conventional wisdom asserts that the mining protocol is incentive-compatible. However, Eyal and Sirer in 2014 have discovered a mining attack strategy called selfish mining (SM), in which a miner (or a mining pool) publishes the blocks it mines selectively instead of immediately. SM strategy would have the impact of wasting resources of honest miners. Scholars proposed various extensions of the SM strategy and approaches to defense the SM attack. Whether selfish mining occurs in practice or not, has been subject of extensive debate. For the first time, in this paper we propose a method to identify selfish miners by detecting anomalies in the properties of consecutive blocks’ statistics. Furthermore, we extend our method to detect the mining cartels, in which miners secretly get together and share timely information. Our results provide evidence that these strategic behaviors take place in practice.

We study how friendly boards design the structure of optimal compensation contracts in favor of powerful CEOs. Our study yields unexpected results. First, powerful managers receive higher pay and a contract with a higher pay-performance sensitivity (PPS) if firm performance is low and vice versa. Moreover, we identify conditions where expected pay and expected PPS are both increasing in the friendliness of the board. Second, we show that friendly boards provide managers with higher salaries, more shares, but less options. Third, friendly boards offering contracts with a higher PPS also make more intensive use of relative performance evaluation (RPE). Overall, our results suggest that frequently used indicators of poor (or sound) compensation practices should be interpreted with care. Extending the scope of our model beyond executive pay, we show that powerful managers underinvest in capital but have less incentives to manage earnings.

The negativity of managerial word choice (managerial tone) in conference calls is a telltale indicator of a company’s future. Specifically, increases in negativity–what we term “bleak tone changes”...

We show that executives cut investment when their incentives become more short term. We examine a unique event in which hundreds of firms eliminated option vesting periods to avoid a drop in income under accounting rule FAS 123-R. This event allowed executives to exercise options earlier and thus profit from boosting short-term performance. Our identification exploits that FAS 123-R’s adoption was staggered almost randomly by firms’ fiscal year-ends. CEOs cut investment and reported higher short-term earnings after option acceleration, and they subsequently increased equity sales.

Cost of capital and valuation differ in the private and public sectors, because taxes are a cost to the private sector but are only a transfer to the private sector. We show how to transform the after-tax private sector cost of capital into its pre-tax equivalent, for comparison with the public sector cost of capital. We establish the existence of a tax induced wedge between these two costs of capital. The wedge introduces a preference on the part of the private sector for assets with rapid tax depreciation, high debt capacity, and low risk. We show that, in circumstances where an asset has identical public and private sector valuation in the absence of taxes, the tax induced difference in valuation is identical to the change in government tax receipts that results from having the asset owned by the private rather than the public sector. We provide some examples of distortions that result from failure to adjust for changes in tax revenues, and show how to effect such adjustment.

Using a sample of non-financial domestic firms in transition economies from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, we examine whether and how inter-industry spillovers from FDI in the banking sector occur. Our findings show that the innovation pursued by domestic firms benefits from foreign bank penetration. However, these positive inter-industry spillovers surprisingly (and in contrast to conventional wisdom) do not seem to work through enhanced credit access. Our theory suggests that they may occur through the improvement of the local market of fee-based banking services and the transfer of knowledge to domestic firms in non-contractual interactions. These positive spillovers occur mainly for foreign banks that use relationship lending, domestic firms that do not export, and host countries that are less open to the global market.

National audience; We study an optimal dividend problem under a bankruptcy constraint. Firms face a trade�off between potential bankruptcy and extraction of profits. In contrast to previous works, general cash flow drifts, including Ornstein–Uhlenbeck and CIR processes, are considered. We provide rigorous proofs of continuity of the value function, whence dynamic programming, as well as comparison between discontinuous sub� and supersolutions of the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation, and we provide an efficient and convergent numerical scheme for finding the solution. The value function is given by a nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) with a gradient constraint from below in one direction. We find that the optimal strategy is both a barrier and a band strategy and that it includes voluntary liquidation in parts of the state space. Finally, we present and numerically study extensions of the model, including equity issuance and gambling for resurrection.

Tactical asset allocation decisions are often based on (and justified by) macroeconomic developments and valuation ratios. However, why should using such publicly available information provide an investment edge? This article investigates whether a simple combination approach based on popular indicators can improve a multi-asset portfolio’s performance. The author developed a method to assess each asset class’s attractiveness using standard and economically motivated indicators from four scientifically valid areas (valuation, trend, risk, and macroeconomics). Each indicator was evaluated relative to its own history, assigned a percentile score, and over- or underweights per asset class were determined based on the combined, equal-weighted score. This intuitive method generated high information ratios and a significant outperformance for a portfolio invested in stocks and bonds in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Eurozone, and Japan. The results held up in various robustness checks and were stronger for riskier assets. The individual indicators as well as the resulting scores can be presented in a dashboard. TOPICS:Portfolio management/multi-asset allocation, portfolio theory, portfolio construction Key Findings • Tactical asset allocation decisions are often based on (and justified by) macroeconomic developments and valuation ratios. • This article shows that a simple combination approach based on percentile scores of standard indicators from four scientifically valid areas (valuation, trend, risk, and macroeconomics) can significantly improve a multi-asset portfolio’s performance and generate high information ratios. • The individual indicators and the resulting scores can be presented in a dashboard.

Two tests can help asset managers to develop more robust investment strategies: an impact test and a survival test. Both tests complement the backtest, in which one checks how a proposed investment strategy would have performed in the past. The impact test considers the performance of the strategy when assets under management grow (crowdedness), and it checks the impact that growth in assets under management in competing strategies has on the proposed strategy (cross impact). The survival test considers the effect of the long-term evolution of assets under management in competition for market capital. Using Shiller’s S&P 500 index and bond market data, we show that time-series momentum (relative strength) performs best in the backtest and the impact test but that an expected relative cash-flow rule (relative dividend yield) has the best long-term survival properties. TOPICS:Statistical methods, simulations Key Findings • Robustness checks of investment strategies require more than backtesting. • An impact test is proposed to measure the effects of crowdedness and cross impact on investment strategies. • A survival test is proposed to assess the long-term effects of investment strategies’ competition for market capital.

We study the difference between the returns to the integrated approach to investing and those to the mixed approach to investing. Unlike the mixed approach, the integrated approach aggregates factor characteristics at the security level. Recent literature finds that the integrated approach dominates the mixed approach. Using statistical tools for robust performance testing, we demystify these findings as a statistical fluke. We do not find any evidence in favor of the integrated approach. What we do find is that the integrated approach exhibits a higher sensitivity to the low-risk anomaly. However, this reduction in risk does not lead to an improvement in performance.

The aim of this paper is to put forward a new family of risk measures that could guide investment decisions of private companies. But at the difference of the classical approach of Artzner, Delbaen, Eber, and Heath and the subsequent extensions of this model, our risk measures are built to reflect the risk perception of shareholders rather than regulators. Instead of an axiomatic approach, we derive risk measures from the optimal policies of a shareholder value-maximizing company. We study these optimal policies and the related risk measures that we call shareholder risk measures. We emphasize the fact that due to the specific corporate environment, in particular the limited shareholders' liability and the possibility to pay out dividends from cash reserves, these risk measures are not convex. Also, they depend on the specific economic situation of the firm, in particular its current cash level, and thus they are not translation invariant. This paper bridges the gap between two important branches of mathematical finance: risk measures and optimal dividends.

A major obstacle for research in international asset pricing and corporate finance has been a lack of reliable and publicly available data on international common risk factors and portfolios. To address this gap, we provide a step-by-step description of how appropriately screened data from Thomson Reuters Datastream and Thomson Reuters Worldscope can be used to construct high-quality systematic risk factors. We provide common risk factors for 23 countries across the globe. To demonstrate the use of this dataset, we present evidence of an “extreme” size premium in a large number of countries. These premia, however, are often not realizable or at least significantly eroded due to transaction costs.

Public blockchains in support of Smart Contracts (SC), like Ethereum enable everyone to represent scarce, valuable resources (like cryptocurrencies) as so-called tokens. Token issuing and management was the first blockchain use case. However, programming languages and runtime systems used in the current blockchains for their SCs lack a secure and straightforward way to implement and handle tokens. The unnecessary complexity in doing so can lead to erroneous implementation of tokens and applications built on top of these, including the loss or theft of tokens as it happened. The most known attack was "TheDAO" attack which led to the "loss" of tokens, valued at that time at approximately 60 M US Dollar. A better and secure token representation directly embedded into a SC runtime and SC programming language could prevent loss of tokens. Thus this paper presents an approach including parts of a programming language using it. The core of the model is to use opaque and substructural data types together with an onchain soundness checker to generically represent tokens securely as values similar to integers and booleans. Such opaque data types enforce that only a designated piece of code can create values of that type. The substructural data types allow arbitrary values to express scarcity by preventing the duplication and elimination of values. The on-chain soundness checker ensures that the deployed code does not violate guarantees given by the type system, which includes opaque and substructural data types.

This article examines Cornelia Woll’s book on the “power of collective inaction” in which she argues that banks could extract favorable bailouts in the recent global financial crisis by remaining collectively inactive. Collective inaction forces governments to bear the brunt of the crisis resolutions. While this book provides an illuminating account of banking bailouts in several countries, its argument neglects the power of governments and of individual banks. Governments did not have to wait for banks’ (in)action but could impose punitive conditions on banks. And the resistance by banks did not originate from an incapacity to act collectively but from deliberate actions by individual banks to obstruct government intrusion. Rather than inaction on the part of banks, these interactions between governments and banks involved deliberate action and their outcome depended on more conventional notions of state-business power relations.