This paper documents order submission strategies during the Toronto Stock Exchange’s pre-opening session. I find that the registered trader (RT) actively participates in the market opening despite not being able to set the opening price directly and not having an apparent informational advantage. I find that RT opening trades are profitable, are able to moderate overnight price changes, and may...

This study examines profits and speculation in the USD/EUR trading of a bank in Germany over a four-month period. Dealing activity at the bank generates profits but speculation does not seem to contribute to this. We find that speculative positions fail to become profitable within a 30-minutes' horizon. Also, the suggestion that exchange rate volatility would foster speculative profits cannot b...

In the South African National Water Act (NWA, No 36 of 1998), the ecological Reserve is defined as the quality and quantity of water required to ensure appropriate protection of water resources, so as to secure ecologically sustainable development and use. Aquatic ecosystems are recognised as the core location of water resources, and although considerable progress has been made in developing me...

As with most water companies in the world UK water companies face very little competition for the delivery of water within their area. However, recently both the government and the regulator, Ofwat, have indicated that they wish to see a major change in the industry through a significant growth of competition. The pricing of common carriage of water will be central to whether this objective can...

This paper examines how robust economic, political, and demographic variables are related to water and air pollution. Employing Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE) for a cross section of up to 74 countries, 33 variables and 3 proxies for air and water pollution over a period from 1980 to 1995 we confirm the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis, highlight the relevance of efficien...

This paper tests empirically the hypothesis that the greater the intangibility of a firm’s resources, the greater the sustainability of its competitive advantage. Resource intangibility is measured by: (1) Tobin’s q and (2) the predicted value from a hedonic regression of q on several accounting measures of intangibles. Sustainability is measured by the persistence of firm-specific profits. Usi...

This note offers a general proof of the converse of Hartwick’s rule, namely that — in an economy with stationary instantaneous preferences and a stationary technology — an efficient constant utility path is characterized by the value of net investments being zero at each point in time. In a one consumption economy with two stocks — a stock of a natural resource and a stock of man-made capital —...

Recent papers show that imperfect property rights to a natural resource–a sector-specific factor– can be a source of comparative advantage. In these models, weaker property rights attract labor–the only mobile factor– to the resource sector, increasing the country’s comparative advantage for that sector. If capital in addition to labor is mobile, and if the benefits of capital are non-excludabl...

data envelopment analysis (dea) is a non-parametric method for assessing relative efficiency of decision-making units (dmus). every single decision-maker with the use of inputs produces outputs. these decision-making units will be defined by the production possibility set. resource allocation to dmus is one of the concerns of managers since managers can employ the results of this process to all...

As a first step towards understanding the evolution of small groups in firms, this paper develops and tests a simple decision-theoretic model of research-unit evolution in which, as managers resolve their uncertainty over time, they shut down under-performing units and remove under-performing unit heads. The selection process generates several testable hypotheses about how unit and head charact...