Ownership Strucure ad the Performance of Belgian Listed Firms

In this study we investigate empirically the relationship between ownership structure of Belgian listed firms, and their performance measured by Tobin’s Q. We focus on the management and the largest shareholders equity ownership. We use first a cross-sectional estimation from 1991 to 1996. Second, we use panel data estimation to control whether the results found cross-sectionally are not due to unobserved firm heteroeneity. The use of panel data confirms the results obtained cross-sectionally for managerial ownership, that is, the relationship between the fraction of equities held by managers and Tobin’s Q is negative. However, panel data results for the relationship between largest sharholders equities ownership and Tobin’s Q become positive, while it is negative cross-sectionally. These results indicate that there is firm heterogeneity which is not captured in the cross-section estimation.Corporate governance, managerial ownership,largest shareholders ownership,firm performance,Tobin’sQ,cross-sectional models,panel data

On the global well-posedness of the critical quasi-geostrophic equation

We prove the global well-posedness of the critical dissipative quasi-geostrophic equation for large initial data belonging to the critical Besov space $\dot B^0_{\infty,1}(\RR^2).

Internal Capital Market Efficiency of Belgian Holding Companies

In this paper, we raise the following two questions : (1) do Belgian holding companies operate an internal capital market to transfer financial resources in between their subsidiaries ? And if yes, (2) is the internal capital market efficient ? To answer the first question, we check if the group cash flow is a determinant of the investment’s spending of group members. The answer is positive if the holding’s subsidiary is affilliated to a coordinate center and negative otherwise. To answer the second question, we evaluate if internal transfers are driven by efficiency. From our estimations, we cannot conclude that Belgian Holding companies have an efficient internal capital market.Investment; Holding; Internal capital market

Learning for Dynamic subsumption

In this paper a new dynamic subsumption technique for Boolean CNF formulae is proposed. It exploits simple and sufficient conditions to detect during conflict analysis, clauses from the original formula that can be reduced by subsumption. During the learnt clause derivation, and at each step of the resolution process, we simply check for backward subsumption between the current resolvent and clauses from the original formula and encoded in the implication graph. Our approach give rise to a strong and dynamic simplification technique that exploits learning to eliminate literals from the original clauses. Experimental results show that the integration of our dynamic subsumption approach within the state-of-the-art SAT solvers Minisat and Rsat achieves interesting improvements particularly on crafted instances

Incentives, Informational Economies of Scale, and Benchmarking

In this paper, we analyze the problem of providing incentives when there are more than one project. A principal has access to two (possibly correlated) projects which are managed by a single agent. Before undertaking a project, the agent-manager can spend some resources to investigate its quality, namely its probability of success. Only projects with a high probability of success are profitable, and therefore should be invested in. There are two classes of strategies. First, the manager may investigate only one project to save on investigation costs, but still use the acquired information to make an investment decision on the noninvestigated project. Second, the manager could investigate both projects, and make the investment decision based on the acquired information on each project. Comparing these two strategies, it would seem that the more correlated are the projects, the better it is to investigate only one project and use the acquired information to learn about the other project. And, when correlation is low, both projects should be investigated. There is, however, a third strategy that the principal could use. He could hire two agents, each managing one project. By making each agent's compensation dependent on the outcome of the project of the other agent, the principal creates some form of competition between them. When projects are highly correlated, endogenous competition provides incentives but duplicate investigation costs, while having one manager investigating only one project exploits informational economies of scale by economizing on investigation costs, but does not always yield the best investment decision since information on the noninvestigated project is not perfect. We assume that the investigation decision is private to the manager (moral hazard), as well as the information obtained doing so (adverse selection). We then show that the optimal structure depends, among other things, on the degree of correlation between the returns of the two projects. In general, delegating to one manager and investigating both projects is optimal when the projects are weakly correlated; delegating to two managers is optimal for intermediate values of the correlation coefficient, while delegating to one manager and investigating only one project may be optimal when projects are strongly correlated, depending on parameter values. We show that, for some parameter values, it may never be optimal to delegate to one manager and investigate only one project, and this even when projects are perfectly correlated. Endogenous competition is then optimal as it minimizes the cost of providing incentives to the managers, even though investigation costs are duplicated. In that case, delegating to two managers becomes optimal for intermediate and high values of the correlation coefficient.

Illusionary Finance and Trading Behavior

One important aspect of financial market is that there might be some traders that intentionally mislead other market participants by creating illusions in order to obtain a profit. We call this new concept illusionary finance. We present an analysis of how illusions can be created and disseminated in financial markets based on certain psychological principles that explain agents’ decisions under time pressure and polysemous signals. We develop a simple model that incorporates the illusions in the price formation process. Furthermore, using powerful simulations, we show how illusions can be incorporated, directly or indirectly, in the expected prices of the traders.Illusionary Finance; Behavioral Finance; Evolutionary Finance; Neuroeconomics

DESAGREGATION DES ACCRUALS DISCRETIONNAIRES ET PERTINENCE DU BENEFICE COMPTABLE

International audienceDe nombreux travaux récents ont mis en évidence le rôle informationnel des accruals en général et ceux des accruals discrétionnaires en particulier. Certains ont testé cette relation d'une manière directe en étudiant l'effet des accruals sur la pertinence des bénéfices. D'autres l'ont fait d'une manière indirecte en étudiant leur effet sur les cash flows futurs ou sur la valeur de l'entreprise. Toutefois, aucune recherche ne s'est posée la question de voir si la désagrégation des accruals discrétionnaires augmenterait le pouvoir explicatif et prédictif du bénéfice. Les résultats de notre étude ont montré que les accruals discrétionnaires sont valorisés par les investisseurs français et que la désagrégation de ce type d'accruals améliore la pertinence du bénéfice comptable