Many performance measures, such as the classic Sharpe ratio have difficulty in evaluating the performance of mutual funds with skewed return distributions. Common causes for skewness are the use of options in the portfolio or superior market timing skills of the portfolio manager. In this...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a linear programming based method for evaluating performance of comparable production units such as firms. Although the method is already extensively applied in many areas of economics, its use in environmental economics and related fields remains limited. The...

The Commitment to Development Index of the Center for Global Development rates 21 rich countries on the “development-friendliness” of their policies. It is revised and updated annually. In the 2004 edition, the component on foreign assistance combines quantitative and qualitative measures of...

In this paper we argue that pricing is all about price changes, and that the costs of price changes are often simultaneously subtle and substantial. We discuss a framework to deal with the dynamics of changing prices. This framework incorporates customer interpretations of price changes, an...

When, in a supply chain, a supplier and a buyer have the choice of transaction form to do business, the equilibrium transaction form which emerges is much more constrained than previously envisaged in literature. In this paper, two forms of long-term supply contracts and procurement in the spot...

The present paper shows why information asymmetry and bivariate stochastic demand and spot price induce different behaviours and economic inefficiency in a carrier – shipper relationship. An example is offered of a single period, single echelon, shipper-carrier transport model where demand...

The present paper studies the impact of information sharing and contractual instruments on a shipper and her transport suppliers through a monte carlo simulation. After reviewing the literature, we propose a model to measure the benefits in terms of expected transport cost and variance of this...

Transport cost is second in importance after production cost in industry. It is the purpose of the present paper to study the impact of information sharing and contractual instruments between a supply chain and its transport suppliers. After reviewing the literature, we propose a model to...

Agency costs are a cost of production, and firms that do a better job of minimizing these costs should exhibit better performance. This paper tests this hypothesis by calculating the performance elasticity of average employee hourly compensation for U.S. manufacturing firms. This elasticity...

Despite the seminal work of Claessens et al. (2002), who highlighted the role of ownership structure on firm performance in East Asia, the relationship between capital structure and ownership remains much unexplored. This is important, given recent empirical and theoretical work linking capital...