Corporate governance in Vietnam 2014

Thông tin quản trị công ty: Điểm yếu trong báo cáo thường niên
http://tinnhanhchungkhoan.vn/chung-khoan/thong-tin-quan-tri-cong-ty-diem-yeu-trong-bao-cao-thuong-nien-99724.html

ACMF phát hành báo cáo Thẻ điểm Quản trị Công ty ASEAN lần 2

http://tinnhanhchungkhoan.vn/chung-khoan/acmf-phat-hanh-bao-cao-the-diem-quan-tri-cong-ty-asean-lan-2-97574.html

The ACMF scorecard report

http://www.theacmf.org/ACMF/upload/adbcg2014_7th.pdf

Executive "timely" trades: Tesco

Tesco's Clarke should have stopped executive's share sale

Bad volatility & Good volatility

Kitces said, investors will avoid what he describes as bad volatility and reap the benefits of good volatility

Was the Sarbanes-Oxley Act Good News for Corporate Bondholders?

Published on Accounting Horizons

Authors: Mark L. DeFond, Mingyi Hung, Emre Carr, and Jieying Zhang


We investigate the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on corporate bondholder value by examining the bond market reaction to news events leading up to the passage of SOX.

The net impact of SOX on bondholder value is difficult to predict, and there are many reasons why it may be viewed as either good or bad news. Our primary analysis reveals a significant decline in average bondholder value around these events.

In addition, cross-sectional tests find that the decline is significantly larger among riskier bonds and among bonds held by firms that are expected to experience the greatest changes under SOX. Thus, our findings are consistent with the bond market expecting the exogenously imposed changes under SOX to make bondholders worse off.

BRICS , TIMBIS or "growth market"?

Rise of the TIMBIs - Foreign Policy

How the BRICs were baked

Predicting the distant future is forbiddingly difficult. Predicting the near future is no easier. - So insightful.

Chinese equities: sectors vs stocks

Sector selection is more important than stock selection when it comes to investing in Chinese equities, according to HSBC.

Decomposing Short-Term Return Reversal

Our decomposition suggests that short-term return reversal is pervasive, much greater than previously documented, and driven by investor sentiment on the short-side and liquidity shocks on the long-side.

Another decomposition paper by Da and Schaumburg's team

Twitter predicts future of stocks

A study conducted by a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich found that investors following stock market tweets could have achieved an average return rate of 15%.

It is similar to somehow rumours study. But tweets is fashionable.

And BBC likes this.

Nobel Economics 2011 - Causality Tests

Christopher Sims and Tests for Causality


Cause and effect research wins Nobel FT

Professors take academic road to the east

Asia is becoming the hotspot for the top management thinkers

Will this trend last? I don't know. But I think the job markets for business academics are truly attractive (but competitive as well) in Singapore, Australia and China. Not Vietnam at present (unfortunately). We need real sponsors to our academic research.

Do Firms Adjust Their Timely Loss Recognition in Response to Changes in the Banking Industry?

TODD A. GORMLEY, BONG HWAN KIM, XIUMIN MARTIN

Published on JAR

This paper investigates the impact of changes in the banking sector on firms’ timely recognition of economic losses.

In particular, we focus on the entry of foreign banks into India during the 1990s, which likely causes an exogenous increase in lender demand for timely loss recognition. Analyzing variation in both the timing and the location of the new foreign banks’ entries, we find that foreign bank entry is associated with more timely loss recognition and this increase is positively related to a firm's subsequent debt levels. The change appears driven by a shift in firms’ incentives to supply additional information to lenders and lenders seem to value this information. The increase in timely loss recognition is also concentrated among firms more dependent on external financing: private firms, smaller firms, and non-group firms. Overall, our evidence suggests that a firm's accounting choices respond to changes in the banking industry.

Historical Index constituents

A good post from Mark Greenwood to explain the way to find a historical constituent list of an index on Datastream.

International macro-finance

Anna Pavlova - Roberto Rigobon

VOXEU - link

Paper

Investors’ Reliance on Analysts’ Stock Recommendations

Published on CAR

Regulators express concerns with investors’ unquestioning reliance on analysts’ recommendations, which prior research has shown to be associated with lower trading returns. Thus, regulators have published investor guides advising investors to conduct independent research and required analyst firms to disclose their distribution of recommendations in order to alert investors to potential bias in analysts’ recommendations.

We conduct three experiments to investigate whether and why investors rely on analysts’ recommendations, and how to mitigate overreliance on these recommendations. In Experiments 1 and 2, holding all other information constant, investors who receive a buy (sell) recommendation judge a company to have higher (lower) investment potential, indicating that regulators’ concerns are justified.

Further, explicitly warning participants about bias in recommendations and requiring them to form independent recommendations successfully reduce a buy (but not a sell) recommendation’s effect on investment judgments. However, Experiment 3 indicates that showing investors an analyst firm’s recommendation distribution that is skewed toward buys does not reduce a buy recommendation’s effects. Having a distribution is effective only when accompanied by either an explicit warning about possible bias in overly-skewed distributions, or a warning plus a requirement to form an independent recommendation. Our results suggest that current regulations about distribution disclosures may not sufficiently mitigate investors’ overreliance on analysts’ optimistic recommendations, and that more explicit warnings are required. Lastly, we find that the mitigating mechanisms work by tempering participants’ beliefs about the analyst’s ability to generate trading interest, expertise in evaluating information, and access to information.

Do State Enterprises Manage Earnings More than Privately Owned Firms?

Do State Enterprises Manage Earnings More than Privately Owned Firms? The case of China

Liu Wang, Kenneth Yung - JBFA

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of state ownership on earnings management. In contrast with the conventional belief that state ownership is the root of corporate inefficiency, we find lower levels of earnings management among state-owned enterprises than privately-owned firms in China even after controlling for the effect of tunneling. Further investigation suggests that the protection of state enterprises by the government might have played an important role in mitigating the pressure on managers to manipulate firm-specific information. Moreover, we find that the divergence in earnings quality between state-owned and privately-owned firms becomes less evident as the economy becomes more and more market driven.

Why Wireless Markets Are Concentrated

Why Wireless Markets Are Concentrated - interesting, shared on Viet-studies.

... benefits that flow from competition — lower prices, more choices and more innovation.

BUT


... the wireless markets in most nations are highly concentrated

WHY?

... forces that lead toward “natural monopolies,” or at least oligopolies: high fixed costs — the investment needed to build out networks — and the efficiencies that come from providing services to millions of customers.

SO WHAT?

if markets are inevitably concentrated ... The three options, Mr Noam explained, are regulation, antitrust and DOING NOTHING— betting that technological change will shake up markets.

The Justice Department is betting on options two and three.

Suy thoái kinh tế thế giới - Will this time be different?

Kinh tế Mỹ đang phục hồi rất "đặc biệt"

S&P nhận định rủi ro kinh tế châu Âu suy thoái lần 2 đang tăng lên

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My bet: Big firms hoard cash (1.1 trillion cash and shorterm investments), small firms lack of funds.

In the US, so many people are losing jobs in the public sector.

Question: Which one, big or small firms, are job creators? I guess small ones. But I think only when large firms expand, then small firms can survive. So, it is not about expanding credits, but it is about create incentives for large firms to invest. Now they don't because they see weak demand and growth opportunities.

People will not spend if their job prospects are in danger and when they cannot pay off their mortgage.

Overall, uncertainty matters.

Tư tưởng kinh tế: Rituals of rigour & I-world

Economics: Rituals of rigour

The I-word

Using PROC COPULA in a more volatile market

Using PROC COPULA in a more volatile market - for SAS 9.3

Oil price & Economy

Economic consequences of recent oil price changes

Hamilton refers to this paper Nonlinearities and the Macroeconomic Effects of Oil Prices

His message is not optimistic:

Even using the 1-year threshold, the above relation still says that the 2010-2011 oil price increases would not be enough by themselves to bring about a recession, but would only mean slow growth for the end of this year and beginning of next. But of course, the concern is that this is not the only shock that may be hitting the economy. I continue to worry a great deal about possible consequences of credit disruptions and fiscal contraction from the unsettled situation in Europe.

It's worries about these developments, and what they would mean for world petroleum demand, that have been the most important factors bringing oil prices down. And that most assuredly should not be read as good news for the U.S. economy.

Brilliant, but sadly, pessimistic.

Recession risk unless oil prices fall further