Sarbanes-Oxley and the Search for Accountable Corporate Governance

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Accountability And Ethics: Reconsidering the Relationships

ABSTRACT While a relationship between accountability and ethics has long been assumed and debated in Public Administration, the nature of that relationship has not been examined or clearly articulated. This article makes such an effort by positing four major forms of accountability (answerability, blameworthiness, liability and attributability) and focusing on the ethical strategies developed in response to each of these forms

Spectral analyses of satellite geopotential missions

A new, geometrical, first order, nonresonant, frozen orbit theory was developed based on Orlov's uniformly rotating plane of constant inclination. Perturbation spectra generated from a 90th order subset of OSU86F are shown for the ill-fated 1984 JHU/APL SAGE proposal for a pair of TRANSIT satellites at 400 km altitude with a 93.5 deg inclination

Public Accountability: Performance Measurement, The Extended State, And The Search For Trust

In an Academy partnership with the Kettering Foundation, National Academy of Pubic Administration Fellows Melvin J. Dubnick and H. George Frederickson have completed a study of accountability. The study, Public Accountability: Performance Measurement, The Extended State, and the Search for Trust, is a treatment of the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary applications of accountability to public affairs. The working title of the study was Public Accountability: From Ambulance Chasing to Accident Prevention, but that title was thought to lack the dignity such an important subject deserves. Dubnick and Frederickson challenge the often assumed relationship between performance measurement and accountability. They give special attention to accountability challenges associated with the outsourcing of government work, what they call the Extended State. And, they provide examples of effective public accountability in the context of high trust public-private partnerships

A New Tool for Detecting Intraday Periodicities with Application to High Frequency Exchange Rates

In this paper we investigate the claim that hedge funds offer investors a superior risk-return trade-off. We do so using a continuous time version of Dybvig’s (1988a, 1988b) payoff distribution pricing model. The evaluation model, which does not require any assumptions with regard to the return distribution of the funds in question, is applied to the monthly returns of 77 hedge funds and 13 hedge fund indices over the period May 1990 – April 2000. The results show that as a stand-alone investment hedge funds do not offer a superior risk-return profile. We find 12 indices and 72 individual funds to be inefficient, with the average efficiency loss amounting to 2.76% per annum for indices and 6.42% for individual funds. Part of the inefficiency cost of individual funds can be diversified away. Funds of funds, however, are not the preferred vehicle for this as their performance appears to suffer badly from their double fee structure. Looking at hedge funds in a portfolio context results in a marked improvement in the evaluation outcomes. Seven of the 12 hedge fund indices and 58 of the 72 individual funds classified as inefficient on a stand-alone basis are capable of producing an efficient payoff profile when mixed with the S&P 500. The best results are obtained when 10-20% of the portfolio value is invested in hedge funds.Spectral Analysis, Periodicities, Seasonality, Forecasting Exchange Rates, Trading Rules

Cross-temporal universality of non-linear dependencies in Asian stock markets

This study utilizes the Hinich portmanteau bicorrelation test in conjunction with the windowed testing procedure to examine the cross-temporal universality of non-linear dependencies in the returns series for Asian stock market indices. As a whole, the detected non-linear dependencies do not appear to be persistent or stable across time for all the stock markets. In particular, the underlying process is of a switching type, with the pure noise process from time to time switches to a non-linear dependent stochastic process for some unknown length of time, and then switches back to pure-noise. This provides a plausible explanation for the disappointing forecasting performance of many non-linear models, as these existing models do not take note of the episodic transient nature of the non-linear dependency structures.

Non-linear Market Behavior: Events Detection in the Malaysian Stock Market

This paper advocates a reverse from of event studies that is data-dependent to determine endogeneously the events that trigger non-linear market behavior. Using the Malaysian stock market as our case study, coupled with the ‘windowing' approach proposed by Hinich and Patterson (1995), the present study is able to identify major political and economic events that contributed to the short bursts of non-linear behavior. The present framework can be extended to individual firm to examine the adjustment of its stock price to firm-specific events, which will provide deeper insight into issues on corporate finance.