The Impact of Hedging on Stock Return and Firm Value: New Evidence from Canadian Oil and Gas Companies

This paper analyzes the impact of hedging activities of large Canadian oil and gas companies on their stock returns and firm value. Differing from the existing literature this research finds that some of these relationships are nonlinear based on the framework of nonlinear generalized additive models. The research based on this more general methodology reveals some interesting findings on oil and gas hedging activities. The large Canadian oil and gas firms are able to use hedging to protect downside risk against the unfavorable oil and gas price changes. But oil hedging appears to be more effective in protecting stock returns than gas hedging is when downside risk presents. In addition, oil and gas reserves are more likely to play a positive (negative) role when the oil and gas prices are increasing (decreasing). Finally, hedging, in particular hedging on gas, together with profitability, investment and leverage, has certain impacts on firm value.oil; gas; hedging; return; firm value; general additive models ; Canada

Modelling International Tourist Arrivals and Volatility: An Application to Taiwan

International tourism is a major source of export receipts for many countries worldwide. Although it is not yet one of the most important industries in Taiwan (or the Republic of China), an island in East Asia off the coast of mainland China (or the People’s Republic of China), the leading tourism source countries for Taiwan are Japan, followed by USA, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, UK, Germany and Australia. These countries reflect short, medium and long haul tourist destinations. Although the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong are large sources of tourism to Taiwan, the political situation is such that tourists from these two sources to Taiwan are reported as domestic tourists. Daily data from 1 January 1990 to 30 June 2007 are obtained from the National Immigration Agency of Taiwan. The Heterogeneous Autoregressive (HAR) model is used to capture long memory properties in the data. In comparison with the HAR(1) model, the estimated asymmetry coefficients for GJR(1,1) are not statistically significant for the HAR(1,7) and HAR(1,7,28) models, so that their respective GARCH(1,1) counterparts are to be preferred. These empirical results show that the conditional volatility estimates are sensitive to the long memory nature of the conditional mean specifications. Although asymmetry is observed for the HAR(1) model, there is no evidence of leverage. The QMLE for the GARCH(1,1), GJR(1,1) and EGARCH(1,1) models for international tourist arrivals to Taiwan are statistically adequate and have sensible interpretations. However, asymmetry (though not leverage) was found only for the HAR(1)model, and not for the HAR(1,7) and HAR(1,7,28) models.

News Text Classification Based on an Improved Convolutional Neural Network

With the explosive growth in Internet news media and the disorganized status of news texts, this paper puts forward an automatic classification model for news based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In the model, Word2vec is firstly merged with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to generate an effective text feature representation. Then when an attention mechanism is combined with the proposed model, higher attention probability values are given to key features to achieve an accurate judgment. The results show that the precision rate, the recall rate and the F1 value of the model in this paper reach 96.4%, 95.9% and 96.2% respectively, which indicates that the improved CNN, through a unique framework, can extract deep semantic features of the text and provide a strong support for establishing an efficient and accurate news text classification model

Modelling the Consumption Behaviour of Heterogeneous Consumers: A Duty-Free Shop Case Simulation Analysis

Duty-free shops, which have emerged in major airports, first-tier cities, free trade zones and other places, have become ideal places for not only facilitating people to buy goods but also promoting the development of the local economy, which makes the study of the heterogeneous consumer purchase behavior in duty-free stores of great importance and great practical significance. Based on this, the agent model is used to study the purchase behavior of heterogeneous consumers in duty-free stores, the structure of the agent model is proposed, the consumer submodel and situation submodel are designed, and a service recommendation is made. On this basis, the consumer behavior is simulated and analyzed both with and without considering situational factors. The following conclusions are drawn: (1) The display, the month, holidays, and other factors have an important impact on the heterogeneous consumers of duty-free stores and affect consumers\u27 consumption behavior. (2) Salespeople\u27s recommendation rules and consumers\u27 purchase preferences affect consumers\u27 purchase behavior, which has an important impact on the types and quantity of goods consumers buy

Age-related association of venom gene expression and diet of predatory gastropods

Abstract Background Venomous organisms serve as wonderful systems to study the evolution and expression of genes that are directly associated with prey capture. To evaluate the relationship between venom gene expression and prey utilization, we examined these features among individuals of different ages of the venomous, worm-eating marine snail Conus ebraeus. We determined expression levels of six genes that encode venom components, used a DNA-based approach to evaluate the identity of prey items, and compared patterns of venom gene expression and dietary specialization. Results C. ebraeus exhibits two major shifts in diet with age—an initial transition from a relatively broad dietary breadth to a narrower one and then a return to a broader diet. Venom gene expression patterns also change with growth. All six venom genes are up-regulated in small individuals, down-regulated in medium-sized individuals, and then either up-regulated or continued to be down-regulated in members of the largest size class. Venom gene expression is not significantly different among individuals consuming different types of prey, but instead is coupled and slightly delayed with shifts in prey diversity. Conclusion These results imply that changes in gene expression contribute to intraspecific variation of venom composition and that gene expression patterns respond to changes in the diversity of food resources during different growth stages.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116871/1/12862_2016_Article_592.pd

Effectiveness of Online Consumer Product Review: The Role of Experiential Information

Product reviews as consumer-generated information have drawn great attention from researchers and practitioners. A substantial academic effort has been made to comprehend factors influencing the helpfulness of reviews, largely centering on a few quantitative factors (e.g., star rating, review length). However, research investigating qualitative aspects of product reviews still lags, though product reviews consist mainly of peer consumers’ experiences and opinions. In this study, we use the smartphone reviews to investigate consumers’ experiences and opinions in relation to review helpfulness. By statistical analysis, we demonstrate that consumers’ experiential information plays a significant role to make product reviews helpful. We furnish additional evidence of the statistical results by predictive analytics. Our findings suggest that consumers’ experiential information conveys meaningful implication to better understand the nature of product reviews. Therefore, this study contributes to the extant literature of e-commerce and to practitioners to utilize the consumer reviews of their products