Dynamics of Equity Market Integration in Europe: Evidence of Changes over time and with events.

This paper examines the integration of European equity markets over the 1985-2002 period using a relatively new cointegrating technique that assesses how the level of integration in equity price levels changes over time. This procedure is supplemented by two other dynamic techniques that also measure the extent of time-varying integration from complementary perspectives. The three methods are in agreement that there has been an increased degree of integration among European equity markets especially during the 1997-98 period. This evidence seems to indicate that despite several years of demonstrating political willingness by European leaders to integrate their economies, it was not until the establishment of the EMU and the ECB during the 1997-98 period that the markets deemed that European integration would in fact occur. The evidence presented in this study also indicates that Frankfurt is the dominant market for equities in Europe.

Theory and Applications for Advanced Text Mining

Due to the growth of computer technologies and web technologies, we can easily collect and store large amounts of text data. We can believe that the data include useful knowledge. Text mining techniques have been studied aggressively in order to extract the knowledge from the data since late 1990s. Even if many important techniques have been developed, the text mining research field continues to expand for the needs arising from various application fields. This book is composed of 9 chapters introducing advanced text mining techniques. They are various techniques from relation extraction to under or less resourced language. I believe that this book will give new knowledge in the text mining field and help many readers open their new research fields

Idiosyncratic Risk and the Creative Destruction in Japan

The dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese equity market provides a unique opportunity to examine market-and firm-specific risks over different market conditions. The price behavior of Japanese equities in the 1990s is found to resemble that of U.S. equities during the Great Depression. Both show increasing market volatility and a prolonged large co-movement in equity prices. What is unique about the Japanese case is the surprising fall in firm-level volatility and turnover in Japanese stocks after its market crash in 1990. This large decrease in firm-level volatility may have impeded Japan's capital formation process as it has become more difficult over the past decade for both investors and managers to separate high quality from low quality firms. Using data on firm performance fundamentals and corporate bankruptcies, we show that the fall in firm-level volatility and turnover in Japanese stocks could be attributed to the sharp increase in earnings homogeneity among Japanese firms and the lack of corporate restructuring.

Toward higher effectiveness for recall-oriented information retrieval: A patent retrieval case study

Research in information retrieval (IR) has largely been directed towards tasks requiring high precision. Recently, other IR applications which can be described as recall-oriented IR tasks have received increased attention in the IR research domain. Prominent among these IR applications are patent search and legal search, where users are typically ready to check hundreds or possibly thousands of documents in order to find any possible relevant document. The main concerns in this kind of application are very different from those in standard precision-oriented IR tasks, where users tend to be focused on finding an answer to their information need that can typically be addressed by one or two relevant documents. For precision-oriented tasks, mean average precision continues to be used as the primary evaluation metric for almost all IR applications. For recall-oriented IR applications the nature of the search task, including objectives, users, queries, and document collections, is different from that of standard precision-oriented search tasks. In this research study, two dimensions in IR are explored for the recall-oriented patent search task. The study includes IR system evaluation and multilingual IR for patent search. In each of these dimensions, current IR techniques are studied and novel techniques developed especially for this kind of recall-oriented IR application are proposed and investigated experimentally in the context of patent retrieval. The techniques developed in this thesis provide a significant contribution toward evaluating the effectiveness of recall-oriented IR in general and particularly patent search, and improving the efficiency of multilingual search for this kind of task

Corporate Governance and Control

Corporate governance is concerned with the resolution of collective action problems among dispersed investors and the reconciliation of conflicts of interest between various corporate claimholders. In this survey we review the theoretical and empirical research on the main mechanisms of corporate control, discuss the main legal and regulatory institutions in different countries, and examine the comparative corporate governance literature. A fundamental dilemma of corporate governance emerges from this overview: regulation of large shareholder intervention may provide better protection to small shareholders; but such regulations may increase managerial discretion and scope for abuse.

An overview of decision table literature.

The present report contains an overview of the literature on decision tables since its origin. The goal is to analyze the dissemination of decision tables in different areas of knowledge, countries and languages, especially showing these that present the most interest on decision table use. In the first part a description of the scope of the overview is given. Next, the classification results by topic are explained. An abstract and some keywords are included for each reference, normally provided by the authors. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. Other examined topics are the theoretical or practical feature of each document, as well as its origin country and language. Finally, the main body of the paper consists of the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.

Analiza znaczeniowa praktyk raportowania zrównoważonego rozwoju: perspektywa światowa

This study examines the sustainability reports (SRs)of 200 firms in both developed and emerging economies in order to identify the words most frequently used in disclosing sustainability practices within the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) approach to reporting (which emphasizes economic, environmental, and social dimensions). Its aim is to evaluate these sustainability reports under the umbrella of the GRI framework. It adopts a semi-automated Text-Mining (TM) technique to evaluate the corporate SRs of select firms from the top ten economies by GDP at current prices. Based on the GRI Standards guidelines, a total of 208 keywords were identified for analysis. The disclosures were then awarded points based on the appearance of these keywords so that the appearance of one resulted in the awarding of a score of one; if a keyword did not appear then the report was scored a zero for that word. Furthermore, a wordcloud was also generated in order to better understand the inclination of reporting language towards various TBL reporting categories. This analysis of the SRs of 200 firms from the top ten economies of the world sheds light on the differences in reporting practices and priorities as they relate to various aspects of the GRI Standards guidelines. The results indicate that SR practices have grown rapidly in the last half decade of the period selected for study (2013-2017) as compared to the first half (2008-2012). Canada ranked highest for its disclosure practices in this analysis followed by the UK, Germany, US, Japan, France, Italy, Brazil, India, and China. This study found that all included countries improved their sustainability performance over the period 2008-2017.W niniejszym artykule przeanalizowano raporty dotyczące zrównoważonego rozwoju (SR) z 200 firm, zarówno w gospodarkach rozwiniętych, jak i wschodzących, w celu zidentyfikowania słów najczęściej używanych przy ujawnianiu praktyk zrównoważonego rozwoju w ramach podejścia do raportowania treaple bottom line (TB, które kładzie nacisk na ekonomię, środowisko i wymiary społeczne. Celem jest ocena raportów dotyczących zrównoważonego rozwoju w ramach GRI. Przyjęto półautomatyczną technikę Text-Mining (TM) do oceny korporacyjnych praktyk na rzecz zrównoważonego rozwoju (SR) wybranych firm z dziesięciu największych gospodarek według PKB w cenach bieżących. W oparciu o wytyczne standardów GRI do analizy wytypowano łącznie 208 słów kluczowych. Przyznano im następnie punkty w oparciu o częstotliwość ich występowania, tak że pojawienie się jednorazowe skutkowało przyznaniem jednej punktacji; jeśli słowo kluczowe nie pojawiło się, raport był oceniany jako zero dla tego słowa. Ponadto utworzono chmurę słów, aby lepiej zrozumieć skłonność języka raportowania do różnych kategorii raportów TBL. Ta analiza rekomendacji 200 firm z dziesięciu największych gospodarek świata rzuca światło na różnice w praktykach i priorytetach raportowania, które odnoszą się do różnych aspektów wytycznych GRI. Wyniki wskazują, że praktyki zrównoważonego rozwoju (SR) gwałtownie wzrosły w ostatniej połowie dekady wybranej do badania (2013-2017), w porównaniu z pierwszą połową (2008-2012). W tej analizie Kanada zajęła najwyższe miejsce pod względem praktyk ujawniania informacji, a następnie Wielka Brytania, Niemcy, Stany Zjednoczone, Japonia, Francja, Włochy, Brazylia, Indie i Chiny. Badanie wykazało, że wszystkie uwzględnione kraje poprawiły swoje wyniki w zakresie zrównoważonego rozwoju w latach 2008–2017

ACCOUNTING STANDARDS AND EARNINGS MANAGEMENT AROUND THE WORLD

This study investigates the relation between accounting standards and earnings management around the world. I find that international accounting standards, accrual-based accounting standards, accounting standards with increased disclosure requirements, and separating tax and financial reporting all constrain earnings management. Following previous studies, I treat accounting standard measures as being endogenous, and use instrumental variables to re-estimate the model. I find consistent results. I conclude that accounting standard policy is an important institution in determining the quality of reported financial information. Different from prior international earnings management studies, I directly test whether international firms are managing earnings using the distribution method. I find evidence that firms are managing reported earnings around the world. I also document that high-quality accounting standards decrease analyst forecast error