8/1/2011 — Using a large sample of nonfinancial firms from 47 countries, we examine the effect of derivative use on firm risk and value. We control for endogeneity by matching users and nonusers on the basis of their propensity to use derivatives. We also use a new technique to estimate the effect of omitted variable bias on our inferences. We find strong evidence that the use of financial derivatives reduces both total risk and systematic risk. The effect of derivative use on firm value is positive but more sensitive to endogeneity and omitted variable concerns. However, using derivatives is associated with significantly higher value, abnormal returns, and larger profits during the economic downturn in 2001–2002, suggesting that firms are hedging downside risk.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• global business
• private equity

7/15/2011 — Combining a Monte Carlo simulation with a statistical model of player skill and random variation in scoring, we estimate the seeding and selection efficiency of the PGA TOUR's FedExCup, a very complex multi-stage golf competition, which distributes $35 million in prize money, including $10 million to the winner.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• earnings

6/1/2011 — The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), mainly descendants of those who managed to avoid being forced on the Trail of Tears evacuation to Oklahoma in the 1830s, is based within the 56,000 acre Qualla Boundary, located in Jackson, Swain, and Haywood Counties. According to tribal estimates, the EBCI has approximately 14,500 members. Approximately 60 percent of those live within the Boundary. Directly and indirectly, the EBCI is dependent upon Harrah’s Cherokee Casino, located in Jackson County near Cherokee, for much of its income. The casino has an important economic impact upon the region which extends beyond the Qualla Boundary and beyond the enrolled members of the tribe. This report describes the impact of the casino on the region and analyzes the routes of its economic impact.

• KEYWORD(S):
• inclusive development
• north carolina

6/1/2011 — Public health surveillance systems routinely process massive volumes of data to identify health adverse events affecting the general population. Surveillance and response to foodborne disease suffers from a number of systemic and other delays that hinder early detection and confirmation of emerging contamination situations. In this paper we develop an answer set programming (ASP) application to assist public health officials in detecting an emerging foodborne disease outbreak by integrating and analyzing in near real-time temporally, spatially and symptomatically diverse data. These data can be extracted from a large number of distinct information systems such as surveillance and laboratory reporting systems from health care providers, real-time complaint hotlines from consumers, and inspection reporting systems from regulatory agencies. We encode geographic ontologies in ASP to infer spatial relationships that may not be evident using traditional statistical tools. These technologies and ontologies have been implemented in a new informatics tool, the North Carolina Foodborne Events Data Integration and Analysis Tool (NCFEDA). The application was built to demonstrate the potential of situational awareness—created through real-time data fusion, analytics, visualization, and real-time communication—to reduce latency of response to foodborne disease outbreaks by North Carolina public health personnel.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• economic development
• healthcare

6/1/2011 — The challenge for public health officials is to detect an emerging foodborne disease outbreak from a large set of simple and isolated, domain-specific events. These events can be extracted from a large number of distinct information systems such as surveillance and laboratory reporting systems from health care providers, real-time complaint hotlines from consumers, and inspection reporting systems from regulatory agencies. In this paper we formalize a foodborne disease outbreak as a complex event and apply an event-driven rule-based engine to the problem of detecting emerging events. We define an evidence set as a set of simple events that are linked symptomatically, spatially and temporally. A weighted metric is used to compute the strength of the evidence set as a basis for response by public health officials.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare
• innovation
• policy
• risk management

5/1/2011 — The NCFOODSAFE project bridges existing gaps in current North Carolina food safety systems by developing a new informatics tool, the North Carolina Foodborne Events Data Integration and Analysis (NCFEDA) tool, that provides situational awareness and intelligence about an intrinsically complex and dynamic process—the detection of and response to a foodborne disease outbreak. The project is informed by an understanding of the information sharing and communication structures among government agencies and other personnel responsible for regulating and overseeing the state’s food safety system.

• KEYWORD(S):
• knowledge management
• policy
• risk management
• technology

3/15/2011 — We identify a setting in which there is a predictable incentive for short sellers to manipulate prices, and we find patterns consistent with short sellers manipulating prices. Specifically, we find that stocks with high shortinterest experience abnormally low returns on the last trading day of the year. This effect is strongest among stocks that are easily manipulated and during the last hour of trading. Further, this effect reverses at the beginning of the year, consistent with the temporary nature of price manipulation.

• KEYWORD(S):
• asset pricing
• finance
• hedge funds

3/1/2011 — Most Americans purchase food for their family’s dinner table with a high level of assurance that the food is safe. However, recent contaminations have brought into sharp focus gaps in our current food safety system and drawn attention to needed changes.

• KEYWORD(S):
• innovation
• policy
• risk management

1/1/2011 — Financial openness is often associated with higher rates of economic growth. We show that the impact of openness on factor productivity growth is more important than the effect on capital growth. This explains why the growth effects of liberalization appear to be largely permanent, not temporary. We attribute these permanent liberalization effects to the role financial openness plays in stock market and banking sector development, and to changes in the quality of institutions.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economics
• finance
• global business

1/1/2011 — We see six clear trends that Census 2010 will likely confirm with hard and reliable data. In this report, we describe these emergent trends and discuss their implications for business, consumer markets, and the nation’s competitiveness in the global marketplace via analyses of intercensal statistics and reviews of scholarly demographic research. Because the specific population shifts discussed here will dramatically transform all of the nation’s social, economic, and political institutions, we refer to them collectively as disruptive demographic trends—borrowing and broadening the application of a term coined by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Joseph Coughlin.

• KEYWORD(S):
• disruptive demographics

1/1/2011 — A unique dataset of over 70,000 firms, most of which are small, in over 100 countries, is utilized to systematically study the use of different financing sources for new and young firms. Consistent age-related patterns emerge. Across all countries younger firms rely less on bank financing and more on informal financing.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• finance
• global business
• strategy and entrepreneurship

12/1/2010 — “When are you going to change this Children’s Safe Drinking Water program and make money for your company? Surely Procter & Gamble wants you to profit on the water purification technology—you can’t sustain your program as a non-profit!” Greg Allgood sighed internally at this question, as it seemed to surface frequently despite the continued and rapid growth of the Children’s Safe Drinking Water (CSDW) program at P&G. Allgood (Director of the CSDW program) was not actually frustrated with the query, as he had an easy answer ready. Rather, he wished that people could more easily see how his team’s non-profit work was adding greater value to the $80 billion dollar company than a for-profit sales model ever could. Procter & Gamble is a data-driven company, and after 24 years as a “Proctoid” he knew this better than anyone. Greg had significant qualitative and some quantitative information to support the idea that, in some cases, a non-profit business model could do much more for the bottom line than could a for-profit model. However, he knew that he needed to do even more to clarify this point for others.

• KEYWORD(S):
• global business

11/14/2010 — In this paper we present a framework for linking smart products (with embedded real-time diagnostics and prognostics based health management capabilities) to a service provisioning system to create a system of ―self-aware product-centric systems. The framework includes a powerful ―learning engine capable of monitoring, analyzing and interpreting patterns of system/product behavior in real-time. The learning engine provides the capability of information feedback for real-time, ―in-the-loop control. This concept enables the service-provisioning network to provide customer services such as product health management at reduced maintenance costs, improved responsiveness to customer needs during use, and generally more efficient operations.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare
• innovation
• operations
• technology

11/1/2010 — We analyze the contribution of returns around earnings announcements to typical estimates of the “prices lead earnings” relation. We find that prior returns' ability to explain earnings is concentrated disproportionally in returns on earnings announcement dates, suggesting that a substantial portion of the estimated timeliness of returns in previous studies is empirically indistinguishable from the information content of earnings.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• earnings

10/1/2010 — Three-tiered private-label (PL) portfolio strategies (low-quality tier: economy PLs, mid-quality tier: standard PLs, and top-quality tier: premium PLs) are gaining interest around the world. Drawing on the context-effects literature, the authors postulate how the introduction of economy and premium PLs may affect the choice of mainstream-quality and premium-quality national brands (NBs) and the choice of the retailer's existing PL offering.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing

7/1/2010 — This research utilizes data from the World Bank Investment Climate Survey to examine the use of external capital for almost 70,000 small and medium-sized firms in 103 developing and developed countries.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• economic development
• finance
• global business
• investments
• strategy and entrepreneurship

3/17/2010 — We analyze why companies that receive private equity investments outperform their rivals. We show that rivals experience a decrease in their stock prices and their operating performance around private equity (PE) investments in their industry.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• private equity

1/1/2010 — Applied financial econometrics subjects are featured in this second volume, with papers that survey important research even as they make unique empirical contributions to the literature. These subjects are familiar: portfolio choice, trading volume, the risk-return tradeoff, option pricing, bond yields, and the management, supervision, and measurement of extreme and infrequent risks.

• KEYWORD(S):
• asset pricing
• portfolio analysis

12/1/2009 — The investigations following the attacks of September 11, 2001, showed that our ability to verify a person’s identity is crucial to our national security. As pointed out by The 9/11 Commission Report (National Commission on Terrorists Attacks Upon the United States, 2004), travel documents are as important as weapons for terrorists. To carry out an attack on American soil, foreign terrorists must cross our borders—which requires passing an identification screening. A valid passport also allows a terrorist to obtain other valid documents (e.g., driver’s license, credit cards, health insurance card) that are important to performing normal life activities while maintaining a low profile and avoiding detection. Four projects, currently in different stages of implementation, use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or Machine-Readable Zones (MRZ) technologies for verification and validation of identity in the United States. These programs are (1) e-Passport, (2) PASS Card, (3) Real ID, and (4) Enhanced Driver’s License. The use of RFID enables data to be stored electronically in chips embedded in identification documents and shared quickly in digital format by law enforcement personnel. Documents with RFID chips and a secure networking environment to exchange data are deemed more secure and less prone to counterfeiting than conventional, non-electronic documents. However, there is still debate about how to best balance the security benefits from RFID-enabled identification documents with concerns about privacy.

• KEYWORD(S):
• innovation
• risk management
• technology

11/16/2009 — We model the threat of such liquidation through the intermediation of an activist shareholder. Among other things, our model predicts that MDPs are more likely to be adopted by funds that appear to be less effective in providing portfolio services to their investors and that are relatively easy to liquidate or ‘attack’. We test the model on a panel of 236 CEFs and find good agreement with our model.

10/26/2009 — We investigate bivariate regime‐switching in daily futures‐contract returns for the US stock index and ten‐year Treasury notes over the crisis‐rich 1997–2005 period.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• investments

8/1/2009 — Our national security depends on a safe and secure food supply that is free of contamination, whether unintentional or the result of a terrorist act. In December 2006, Congress and the White House passed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), establishing the goal of near-real-time electronic situational awareness to enhance early detection of, rapid response to, and management of public health threats in order to minimize their impact. Meeting this challenge for food safety depends on our ability to collect, interpret, and disseminate electronic information across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. While events such as 9/11 have elevated the need to share critical intelligence related to security threats, these events have also promoted the proliferation of multiple data systems and tools whose lack of interoperability hinders effective intelligence gathering and timely response. Further, most of the public health and food safety informatics work in the United States—from early detection of food-related outbreaks by local and state health departments to confirmation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) through “fingerprinting” of pathogenic contaminants—takes place at different local, state, and federal jurisdictional levels. As a result, large gaps exist in our ability to meet the challenge of food safety in the United States with regard to PAHPA.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare
• supply chain

12/11/2007 — This study explores the process of organizational change by examining localized social learning in organizational subunits. Specifically, we examine participation in university technology transfer, a new organizational initiative, by tracking 1,780 faculty members, examining their backgrounds and work environments, and following their engagement with academic entrepreneurship.

• KEYWORD(S):
• workforce development

9/1/2006 — In its original conception the Kerr Tar Hub was broadly envisioned as a tech-intensive, locally driven regional park potentially providing a wide variety of infrastructure and service offerings intended to attract and support the location of emergent firms from within selected RTRP targeted industries.

3/1/2005 — We examine whether time variation in the comovements of daily stock and Treasury bond returns can be linked to measures of stock market uncertainty, specifically the implied volatility from equity index options and detrended stock turnover.

• KEYWORD(S):
• investments
• private equity

1/15/2005 — Multinational companies increasingly rely upon the work of virtual teams to manage their global intellectual assets and encourage innovation. Spanning functional, geographical and corporate boundaries, virtual team members work together on various projects but are based in different locations nationwide or worldwide.

• KEYWORD(S):
• global business
• strategy and entrepreneurship
• technology

4/1/2004 — We propose a class of two factor dynamic models for duration data and related risk analysis in finance and insurance. Empirical findings suggest that the conditional mean and (under) overdispersion of times elapsed between stock trades feature various patterns of temporal dependence.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• finance

9/1/2003 — This paper evaluates the role of various volatility specifications, such as multiple stochastic volatility (SV) factors and jump components, in appropriate modeling of equity return distributions.

• KEYWORD(S):
• asset pricing

7/1/2003 — Simulation-based estimation methods have become more widely used in recent years. We propose a set of tests for structural change in models estimated via simulated method of moments (see Duffe and Singleton (Econometrica 61 (1993) 929).

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• finance

2/1/2003 — To enhance our understanding of emerging markets, we study a data set from the Casablanca stock exchange containing all the transaction records over a long span. The exchange was included in 1996 in the International Finance Corporation (IFC) data base roughly 3 years after important market reforms.

• KEYWORD(S):
• emerging markets

1/1/2003 — We examine several autoregressive-based estimators for the parameters of a moving average process, including the estimators initially proposed by Galbraith and Zinde-Walsh [1994] and Gouriéroux, Monfort and Renault [1993]. We also propose over-identified asymptotic-least-squares based variants of the former, and extensions of the latter based on Gallant and Tauchen's [1996] simulated method of moments.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• finance

12/16/2002 — Time series are demeaned when sample autocorrelation functions are computed. By the same logic it would seem appealing to remove seasonal means from seasonal time series before computing sample autocorrelation functions. Yet, standard practice is only to remove the overall mean and ignore the possibility of seasonal mean shifts in the data.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• finance

10/28/2002 — The paper evaluates the performance of several recently proposed tests for structural breaks in the conditional variance dynamics of asset returns. The tests apply to the class of ARCH and SV type processes as well as data‐driven volatility estimators using high‐frequency data.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• finance
• global business

6/1/2002 — We use panel data on ISO 9000 quality certification in 85 countries between 1993 and 1998 to better understand the cross-national diffusion of an organizational practice. Following neoinstitutional theory, we focus on the coercive, normative, and mimetic effects that result from the exposure of firms in a given country to a powerful source of critical resources, a common pool of relevant technical knowledge, and the experiences of firms located in other countries. We use social network theory to develop a systematic conceptual understanding of how firms located in different countries influence each other's rates of adoption as a result of cohesive and equivalent network relationships.

• KEYWORD(S):
• global business
• operations
• organizational behavior

2/1/2002 — In this paper we examine the prevalence of data, specification, and parameter uncertainty in the formation of simple rules that mimic monetary policymaking decisions. Our approach is to build real-time data sets and simulate a real-time policy-setting environment in which we assume that policy is captured by movements in the actual federal funds rate, and then to assess what sorts of policy rule models and what sorts of data best explain what the Federal Reserve actually did.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• finance
• policy

6/1/1996 — The importance of geographic location to different types of industries is tested for by linking the geographic concentration in manufacturing industries to industry specific characteristics, most notably the relative importance of knowledge spillovers. The spatial distribution of innovative capacity as well as the geographic concentration of production are examined.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economics
• innovation
• knowledge management
• supply chain