學術論文

We propose that investor beliefs frequently “cross” in the sense that an investor may like company A but dislike company B, whereas another investor may like company B but dislike company A. Such belief-crossing makes it almost impossible to construct a portfolio that is composed solely of every investor’s most favored companies. This causes the level of excitement for portfolios to be generally lower than the levels of excitement that individual companies generate among their most fervent supporters. Coupled with short-sale constraints, wherein prices are set by the most optimistic investors, this causes portfolios to trade at discounts. Utilizing several settings whereby the value of a portfolio and the values of the underlying components can be evaluated separately (e.g., closed-end funds), we present evidence supporting our proposition that, in financial markets, the “whole” is often less than the “sum of its parts.”

We evaluate the impact of the African slave trade between 1400 and 1900 on modern household finance. Exploiting cross-country and cross-ethnic group differences in the intensity with which people were enslaved and exported from Africa, we find that slave exports during the 1400–1900 period are negatively associated with current measures of household (a) access to financial services, (b) access to credit, (c) use of mobile finance, and (d) trust in financial institutions, suggesting that the slave trade has had an enduring, deleterious effect on household finance.

以時間為單位量度客戶的耐性並計算危機率，已成為運營管理中重要的一環。這項技術能幫助企業優化客戶服務中心的運作，如人手分配及編更事宜等等。當客戶申請服務時，他們的耐性將會隨時間推移產生改變。現行的數據收集系統有時候無法觀察到客戶服務中心提供服務的確切時間，故此我們開發了一個TunT（Transform-unTransform）的估計程式，把這個複雜的難題簡化為迴歸分析的問題。我們為客戶服務中心不同的服務時間進行分類，並使用均值匹配轉換，對相關的數據進行轉換，從而使我們能簡單地表現出異方差－變異數函數。然後我們把非參數迴歸分析的技術應用在轉換後的數據上。最後，我們會對估計出來的迴歸函數進行轉換，計算出原始危機率。在我們的模擬計算中，我們利用客戶服務中心的數據（實驗組）與醫療保險計劃中的數據（控制組）進行對比。研究證明，與現行方法相比，我們的模型能得出更準確的危機估計值，幫助企業優化人手安排。

Using a comprehensive sample of credit card data from a leading Chinese bank, we show that government bureaucrats receive 16% higher credit lines than non-bureaucrats with similar income and demographics, but their accounts experience a significantly higher likelihood of delinquency and debt forgiveness. Regions associated with greater credit provision to bureaucrats open more branches and receive more deposits from the local government. After staggered corruption crackdowns of provincial-level political officials, the new credit cards originated to bureaucrats in exposed regions do not enjoy a credit line premium, and bureaucrats’ delinquency and reinstatement rates are similar to those of non-bureaucrats.

We consider a firm consisting of two divisions, one responsible for designing and manufacturing new products and the other responsible for remanufacturing operations. The firm will sell these new and remanufactured products either directly to the consumer (direct selling) or through an independent retailer (indirect selling). Our study demonstrates that a firm’s organizational structure can affect its marketing decisions. Specifically, a decentralized firm with separate manufacturing and remanufacturing divisions can benefit from indirect selling with higher firm profit, supply chain profit, and total consumer demand than direct selling. Moreover, this structure also induces a remanufacturable product design. In contrast, a centralized firm in which the manufacturing and remanufacturing divisions are consolidated is intuitively better off by choosing direct selling than indirect selling. Furthermore, we show that, surprisingly, when the focal firm sells through an independent retailer, a decentralized internal structure can result in higher supply chain profit than a centralized internal structure. We further investigate the case of dual dedicated channels and conclude that, while direct selling of remanufactured products and indirect selling of new products can better induce a remanufacturable product design and higher supply chain profit, it is not in the best interest of the firm in terms of total sales and firm profit.

We analyze optimal auction mechanisms when bidders base costly entry decisions on their valuations, and bidders pay with a fixed royalty rate plus cash. With sufficient valuation uncertainty relative to entry costs, the optimal mechanism features asymmetry so that bidders enter with strictly positive but different (ex-ante) probabilities. When bidders are ex-ante identical, higher royalty rates—which tie payments more closely to bidder valuations—increase the optimal degree of asymmetry in auction design, further raising revenues. When bidders differ ex-ante in entry costs, the seller favors the low cost entrant; whereas when bidders have different valuation distributions, the seller favors the weaker bidder if entry costs are low, but not if they are high. Higher royalty rates cause the seller to favor the weaker bidder by less, and the strong bidder by more.

Using a large panel of more than 140,000 state-owned enterprises (SOEs), this study examines SOEs’ investment behavior surrounding 82 national elections in 25 European countries between 2001 and 2015. We find that SOEs increase their corporate investment by about 29% of the sample average during national election years. This effect is more pronounced in fixed timing and closely contested elections. The effect is also stronger in countries with low institutional quality, more centralized political systems, and state-controlled banking systems. In contrast, we find the matched non-SOEs significantly decrease their corporate investment during national election years.

鑑於社會上對具有吸引力的人持正面印象，網上賣家有理由擔心消費者對其個人資料相片的觀感。儘管現有文獻強調「美貌溢價」 和「醜陋懲罰」，但本研究分析了於各個消費者對消費者的電商平台的賣家頭像，發現相貌的吸引力與產品銷量之間存在 U 型關係（即美麗與醜陋的長相導致溢價，而平凡的長相則被懲罰）。通過分析兩組大型數據，我們發現長相具吸引力以及不具吸引力的人，均比長相平凡的人出售更多產品。兩項網上實驗指出，長相具吸引力的賣家，因消費者認為其具有更高的社交能力而享有更高的可信度；而長相缺乏吸引力的賣家亦被視為較可信。雖然與外觀相關產品的「美容溢價」很明顯，但對於專業相關產品以及在女消費者評估男賣家的情況下，「醜陋溢價」更為明顯。這些發現指出外觀成為網上平台印象形成的關鍵工具，以及其於電子商務和營銷中所帶來的影響。

We propose a functional censored quantile regression model to describe the time-varying relationship between time-to-event outcomes and corresponding functional covariates. The time-varying effect is modeled as an unspecified function that is approximated via B-splines. A generalized approximate cross-validation method is developed to select the number of knots by minimizing the expected loss. We establish asymptotic properties of the method and the knot selection procedure. Furthermore, we conduct extensive simulation studies to evaluate the finite sample performance of our method. Finally, we analyze the functional relationship between ambulatory blood pressure trajectories and clinical outcome in stroke patients. The results reinforce the importance of the morning blood pressure surge phenomenon, whose effect has caught attention but remains controversial in the medical literature. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.