The pricing of closed-end funds in the United States has been a focus of debate aboutmarket efficiency. Institutional ownership of closed-end fund shares in the UnitedKingdom is much greater than in the U.S., yet share prices display similar evidence ofnoise trading...

Living standard indicators are complex nonlinear statistics based on fundamen-tal components (income or consumption data, prices, household characteristics andenvironment). The statistical distributions of these components, which are oftenincompletely obseved, are central to study utilitarian...

Internal inconsistencies are so commonplace in studies using the contingent valuation method(CVM) that it has been argued that that method should be abandoned as a means of preferenceelicitation in favour of other methods such as standard gambles (SG). The experiment described inthis paper finds...

We explore the extension of James-Stein type estimators in a direction that enables them topreserve their superiority when the sample size goes to infinity. Instead of shrinking a base estimatortowards a fixed point, we shrink it towards a data-dependent point. We provide an analytic expression...

Sharpe style regression has become a widespread analytic tool in the financial community. Thestyle regression allows one to investigate such interesting issues as style composition, style sensitivity, andstyle change over time. All previous methods to obtain the distribution and confidence...

Much of the recent literature on price transmission focuses on whether price changesoccurring at one stage of the food sector are fully transmitted in changes to retail prices. Therole of market structure in determining the degree of price transmission is often emphasised,the presumption being...

This paper provides a framework with which to model one of the key links between universities andindustry – the undertaking of applied research. We assume that the fundamental objective of universities isto undertake fundamental research and that they receive public funding to do so....

It has been widely suggested that since the early 1980s many diversified firms narrowed the scopeof their activities by refocusing on their core businesses, primarily through divestment activity.This study examines the extent and determinants of divestment across a large sample of UK firmsover...

The service industries in general and financial services in particular have been disproportionatelylarge investors in information technology. However, critics have suggested that the productivityeffects of this investment have been negligible, a serious outcome given the importance of the...

The embedding effect has frequently been observed in willingness to pay (WTP) studies.Since policy implications of valuation studies can be very sensitive to the composition of thepackage being valued, respondents’ apparent insensitivity to such fundamental characteristicssuggests that it is...