We study the process of wealth creation by alliances and relate it to the quality of governance of firms. We argue that alliances increase firm’s operating flexibility, reduce the agency costs related to the free-cash flows as well as the agency costs related to the distortion in the allocation of capital within the firm. Given the constraints on the use of free cash flows, managers at the helm...

The paper analyzes one of the most common life insurance products the so-called participariflg (or with pro@) policy. This type of contract stands in contrast to UnitLinked (UL) products in that interest is credited to the policy periodically according to some mechanism which smoothes past returns on the life insurance company’s (LIC) assets. As is the case for UL products, the participating po...

China’s pension system is facing a large gap of more than one trillion RMB. The investment efficiency of the social security fund therefore receives widespread attention in academic circles. We collected data of stocks held by the Chinese National Council for Social Security Fund (CNCSSF) from 2004 to 2012 to research the stocks’ investment efficiency, distinguishing between direct investment b...

We study how the strategies and performance of an asset management company are affected by its internal organizational structure. Relying on Stein’s (2002) theory of organizations, we argue that a more hierarchical structure reduces the incentives to collect “soft” information and to engage in proximity investment. This should lower portfolio concentration, increase managerial herding and reduc...

We study the impact of style investing on the market for corporate control. We argue that a firm may choose to boost its market value by merging with a firm that belongs to a style that is more favored by the market. By using data on the flows in mutual funds, we construct a measure of neglectedness, which relies directly on the identification of sentiment-induced investor demand, rather than b...

We use quasi-experimental variation due to the introduction of fracking to estimate the impact of a decrease in natural gas prices on marginal air pollution emissions from electricity producers. We find natural gas generation has displaced coal fired generation as the marginal fuel source significantly changing the marginal emissions profile. The impact of cheap natural gas varies across U.S. r...

many reports that appeared during the last 20 years have shown that atmospheric pollution causes serious damage to human health and to environment. electricity generation from fuel fossil is one of the major sources of pollution and considerable share of this damage. the price of electricity in iran, as in many other countries also, includes only the production of private costs and ignores any ...

A time series is estimated of in-ground prices of U.S. oil and natural gas reserve prices for the period 1982–2003, usingmarket transaction data. Reserves sold are considered as proved; errors in this respectmay affect estimates, in either direction. The data are also used to examine the impact of reserve status, production rate, andwell head prices, on reserve prices. Both oil and gas current ...

In 1992, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission created a secondary market for natural gas transportation whereby shippers holding firm transportation capacity on interstate natural gas pipelines can compete with the pipeline in the provision of transportation services. However, if a shipper does not use some of its contracted firm transportation capacity, the pipeline can resell that ca...