In this study, we intend to examine the information and communication technology (ICT) firms from a financial perspective. The relationship between capital structure and cost of capital (COC) is investigated in a simultaneous equation framework. On the one hand, we relate international diversification to the firm’s capital structure, and on the other, we test their individual and collective inferences on the combined debt and equity COC. We expect a negative correlation between international diversification and higher total and long-term debt ratios, and a reduction in the overall COC.
Many European companies use some type of control-enhancing mechanism, such as dual class shares or a pyramid ownership structure. Such mechanisms cause deviations from the one share-one vote principle, allocating more voting rights than cash flow rights to some shares and, in turn, providing the owners of such shares with more influence than what would be warranted by their investment. However, disproportionate influence may also arise in firms without such mechanisms. In this article, we present a method for disentangling disproportionality, which allows us to more precisely test the effects of deviations from the one share-one vote principle. We argue that previous studies suffer from a measurement problem caused by the use of a simplistic notion of disproportionality, and then we show that the effect of control-enhancing mechanisms on firm value has been overestimated in previous studies.
The paper is concerned with the estimation of labour demand. The model is generalized to incorporate a variane function. A flexible translog functional form is used where the demand labour is a function of wages, outputs, quasi-fixed inputs and a time variable. The variance function appears multiplicatively with the demand function and it accommodates both positive and negative marginal effects with repect to the determinants of employment. The model includes features of the usual panel data models. A multi-step procedure is used to estimate the parameters of the model. Focus is on the estimation of productivity and efficiency of labour in Swedish savings banks. The labour productivity and afficiency in defined in terms of a shift in the labour demand over time and the bank’s distance from the labour demand frontier, respectively. Empirical resuls show that the average labour efficiency is about 96%.
The time-varying behaviour of the market and exchange risk betas of the US sectoral returns are estimated using a random walk process in connection with the Kalman filter. The empirical findings, in general, show that the market risks tend to shrink over longer time horizons, and that during the dot-com bubble burst and during the subprime financial crisis they tended to rise. During these crises they rose most notably in those industries most related to the crisis. Regarding exchange risk, industry returns appear in this study to be positively related to dollar appreciation, but that relationship declines with longer time horizons, in some cases resulting ultimately in a negative relationship between the US dollar and the industry returns. This latter result is consistent with the idea that the effect of a US dollar appreciation on competitiveness of the US exports becomes stronger with the longer time horizons. During the subprime financial crisis, the relation between excess returns and the exchange rate tended to fall, as was notably the case for the Technology sector during the dot-com bubble burst.
According to previous research, standard unit root tests are considered robust to stationary GARCH distortions. These conclusions are in fact correct when the number of observations is extraordinarily high. However, simulation experiments in this study, using more normal sample sizes, reveal that eight of the most commonly applied unit root tests exhibit considerable bias in the size in the presence of fairly moderate GARCH distortions. As a remedy for the disturbances from GARCH, this paper presents size-corrected unbiased critical values for all these examined tests. Nevertheless there is still reduced power in the presence of stationary GARCH distortions. As a solution, a completely new test is formulated which simultaneously models unit roots and the interconnected parameters of GARCH risk. For empirically relevant sample sizes, this new test exhibits superior size and power properties compared with all the traditional unit root tests in the presence of GARCH disturbances.