What Moves the Discount on Country Equity Funds?

The paper characterizes several empirical regularities of closed- end fund prices and examines the extent to which a 'sentiment' model of asset prices is consistent with the empirical regularities. We find that after controlling for the effect of cross-border investment restrictions, country funds trade at an average discount. Discounts vary substantially and contribute to a variance in country fund weekly returns which is generally three times greater than the returns on the net asset value (NAV). Regression analysis suggests that discounts have predictive power for fund returns but not for NAV returns, suggesting that investor 'sentiment' is a component of the price of a fund and not its NAV. Estimation of an unobserved components model on the discounts of the funds reveals a significant and strongly persistent common component across fund discounts. Regressions of fund and NAV returns on financial variables reveal that fund prices are 'sticky' with respect to movements in the host country's stock market and overly sensitive to variation in the U.S. and world stock markets. This relation is unaffected when we consider separately funds whose host countries restrict cross-border investment and funds which invest in emerging stock markets.

Investor Reaction to Salient News in Closed-End Country Funds

We provide a model of closed-end fund pricing which includes investors who do not form expectations correctly and allows for salient country-specific news to affect this expectation formation process. We use panel data on prices and net asset values of closed- end country funds to examine investor reaction to news that affects fundamentals, and measure the response of the idiosyncratic change in fund prices to the idiosyncratic change in fund asset values. In a typical week, US prices underreact to changes in foreign fundamentals; the (short-run) elasticity of price with respect to asset value is significantly less than one. In weeks with major news (relevant to the specific country) appearing on the front page of The New York Times, prices react much more to fundamentals; the elasticity of price with respect to asset value is closer to one. These results are roughly consistent with the hypothesis that major news events lead some investors who normally lag behind in updating their expectations to temporarily react more quickly.

Event risk, covenants, and bondholder returns in leveraged buyouts

Includes bibliographical references (p. 19-21).HD28 .M414 no.3173-, 90,

Modeling near-wall effects in second-moment closures by elliptic relaxation

SIGLEAvailable from INIST (FR), Document Supply Serviceunder shelf-number : 26165 A, issue : a.1997 n.16 / INIST-CNRS - Institut de l'Information Scientifique et TechniqueFRFranc

The “Web of pros” in the 1990s: The professional acclimation of the World Wide Web in France

peer reviewedThis article, focusing on France, explores the notion of a “Web of professionals” and seeks to establish its factual, epistemological, and methodological implications for the history of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. This research reflects on the promises of the New Economy and the roles of the various controversies, cultures, imaginaries, and forms of mediation affecting the business world in its appropriation of the Web. It also aims to reappraise the individual and collective stakeholders whose active part has been somehow underestimated or obscured by the image of the mass Internet user. The professionalization of Web activities, the development of a new generation of entrepreneurs and the conversion of business models to online practices are all significant parts of the emergent Web culture in France, as well as factors contributing to this emergence.Web9