The Triple Bottom Line in Buffalo: Standards for Economic, Social, and Ecological Success

In respect to human capital, or people, the triple bottom line requires fair and beneficial business practices towards employees, the community, and the region. Such practices include offering fair salaries, safe working conditions, decent hours, healthcare, and educational opportunity. In terms of the environment, or the planet, the triple bottom line requires businesses to engage in sustainable environmental practices. Businesses aim to reduce their carbon footprint by carefully managing their energy consumption and disposal methods while also ensuring that limited resources are maintained in order to preserve the environment for subsequent generations

The prevalence and risks of injury for masters athletes : current findings

textRegular physical activity and exercise are important clinical tools that can be used to improve our health. This is especially true due to the prolonged lifespan of the average adult and the declines in physical function that are attributed to advancing age. Those functional detriments can be controlled or reversed via regular exercise, and as a result, the growth of competitive sports targeted to the elderly is on the rise. These events have created generations of Masters athletes. However, continued growth of and successful participation in these competitions may be limited by an unfounded belief that an increased risk of sports injury occurs as we age. This notion is not supported by the available scientific literature. The preponderance of epidemiological evidence demonstrates no age-associated increase in injury for Masters athletes. This remains true even when the research has focused on specific injury types such as connective tissue. To unequivocally answer question of whether elderly athletes are at a high risk of injury, future research will need to focus on providing more rigorous controls over activity levels and training status as both of these variables are likely confounding the current conclusions that can be drawn when comparing young and old athletes. It will also be beneficial to specifically study the association between altered muscle function, age and injury. This association has not been addressed within the Masters athlete population, but could provide potent insight into the aging process of habitual exercisers.Kinesiology and Health Educatio

Investor Sentiment in the Stock Market

Real investors and markets are too complicated to be neatly summarized by a few selected biases and trading frictions. The "top down" approach to behavioral finance focuses on the measurement of reduced form, aggregate sentiment and traces its effects to stock returns. It builds on the two broader and more irrefutable assumptions of behavioral finance -- sentiment and the limits to arbitrage -- to explain which stocks are likely to be most affected by sentiment. In particular, stocks of low capitalization, younger, unprofitable, high volatility, non-dividend paying, growth companies, or stocks of firms in financial distress, are likely to be disproportionately sensitive to broad waves of investor sentiment. We review the theoretical and empirical evidence for these predictions.

The Durham difference: considering our context

This article reflects on the experience of Durham University Library staff in promoting services as part of undergraduate induction. It challenges the perception that all methods of marketing are equally valuable to all institutions and explores some alternatives

The Effect of Dividends on Consumption

Classical models predict that the division of stock returns into dividends and capital appreciation does not affect investor consumption patterns, while mental accounting and other economic frictions predict that investors have a higher propensity to consume from stock returns in the form of dividends. Using two micro data sets, we show that investors are indeed far more likely to consume from dividends than capital gains. In the Consumer Expenditure Survey, household consumption increases with dividend income, controlling for total wealth, total portfolio returns, and other sources of income. In a sample of household investment accounts data from a brokerage, net withdrawals from the accounts increase one-for-one with ordinary dividends of moderate size, controlling for total portfolio returns, and also increase with mutual fund and special dividends. We comment on several potential explanations for the results.

Global, local, and contagious investor sentiment

We construct indexes of investor sentiment for six major stock markets and decompose them into one global and six local indexes. Relative market sentiment is correlated with the relative prices of dual-listed companies, validating the indexes. Both global and local sentiment are contrarian predictors of the time series of major markets' returns. They are also contrarian predictors of the time series of cross-sectional returns within major markets: When sentiment from either global or local sources is high, future returns are low on various categories of difficult to arbitrage and difficult to value stocks. Sentiment appears to be contagious across markets based on tests involving capital flows, and this presumably contributes to the global component of sentiment.International finance ; Financial markets ; Stock market

When Does the Market Matter? Stock Prices and the Investsment of Equity-Dependent Firms

We use a simple model to outline the conditions under which corporate investment will be sensitive to non-fundamental movements in stock prices. The key cross-sectional prediction of the model is that stock prices will have a stronger impact on the investment of firms that are “equity dependent†– firms that need external equity to finance their marginal investments. Using an index of equity dependence based on the work of Kaplan and Zingales (1997), we find strong support for this prediction. In particular, firms that rank in the top quintile of the KZ index have investment that is almost three times as sensitive to stock prices as firms in the bottom quintile. We also verify several other predictions of the model.

When Does the Market Matter? Stock Prices and the Investment of Equity-Dependent Firms

We use a simple model of corporate investment to determine when investment will be sensitive to non-fundamental movements in stock prices. The key cross-sectional prediction of the model is that stock prices will have a stronger impact on the investment of firms that are 'equity dependent' - firms that need external equity to finance their marginal investments. Using an index of equity dependence based on the work of Kaplan and Zingales (1997), we find strong support for this prediction. In particular, firms that rank in the top quintile of the KZ index have investment that is almost three times as sensitive to stock prices as firms in the bottom quintile. We also verify several other predictions of the model.

The Stock Market and Investment: Evidence from FDI Flows

Foreign direct investment offers a rich laboratory in which to study the broader economic effects of securities market mispricing. We outline and test two mispricing-based theories of FDI. The cheap assets' or fire-sale theory views FDI inflows as the purchase of undervalued host country assets, while the cheap capital' theory views FDI outflows as a natural use of the relatively lowcost capital available to overvalued firms in the source country. The empirical results support the cheap capital view: FDI flows are unrelated to host country stock market valuations, as measured by the aggregate market-to-book-value ratio, but are strongly positively related to source country valuations and negatively related to future source country stock returns. The latter effects are most pronounced in the presence of capital account restrictions, suggesting that such restrictions limit cross-country arbitrage and thereby increase the potential for mispricing-driven FDI.