Measuring the Water Level Datum Relative to the Ellipsoid During Hydrographic Survey

Hydrographic surveys are referenced vertically to a local water level “chart” datum. Conducting a survey relative to the ellipsoid dictates a datum transformation take place before the survey is used for current navigational products. Models that combine estimates for the tide, sea surface topography, the geoid, and the ellipsoid are often used to transform an ellipsoid referenced survey to a local water level datum. Regions covered by these vertical datum transformation models are limited and so would appear to constrain the areas where ellipsoid referenced surveys can be conducted. Because areas not covered by a vertical datum transformation model still must have a tide model to conduct a hydrographic survey, survey‐ time measurements of the ellipsoid to water level datum can be conducted through the vessel reference point. This measured separation is largely a function of the vessel ellipsoid height and the standard survey tide model and thus introduces limited additional uncertainty than is typical in a water level referenced survey. This approach is useful for reducing ellipsoid reference surveys to the water level datum, examining a tide model, or for evaluating a vertical datum transformation model. Prototype tools and a comparison to typical vertical datum transformation models are discussed

Corporate Governance, Competition, and Finance: Re-thinking Lessons from the Asian Crisis

This paper critically examines the Greenspan-Summers-IMF thesis concerning the Asian crisis, which suggested that the fundamental causes of the Asian crisis lay in the microeconomic behavior of economic agents in these societies--in the Asian way of doing business. The paper concentrates on corporate governance and competition in emerging markets and outlines the international significance of these issues in the context of the New International Financial Architecture and the Doha Development Agenda at the WTO. It reviews new analyses and fresh evidence on corporate governance, on corporate finance, and on competition in emerging and mature markets, to suggest that the basic thesis above is not valid and the consequent policy proposals are therefore deeply flawed.Corporate Control; Finance

Corporate Governance, Competition And Finance: Re-Thinking Lessons From The Asian Crisis

This paper critically examines the Greenspan-Summers-IMF thesis concerning the Asian crisis, which suggested that the fundamental causes of the Asian crisis lay in the microeconomic behavior of economic agents in these societies - in the Asian way of doing business. The paper concentrates on corporate governance and competition in emerging markets and outlines the international significance of these issues in the context of the New International Financial Architecture and the Doha Development Round at the WTO. It reviews new analyses and fresh evidence on corporate governance, corporate finance and on competition in emerging and mature markets, to suggest that the basic thesis above is not valid and the consequent policy proposals are therefore deeply flawed.Corporate governance, competition, emerging markets

Liquidity, Volatility, and Equity Trading Costs Across Countries and Over Time

Actual investment performance reflects the underlying strategy of the portfolio manager and the execution costs incurred in realizing those objectives. Execution costs, especially in illiquid markets, can dramatically reduce the notional return to an investment strategy. This paper examines the interactions between cost, liquidity, and volatility, and analyzes their determinants using panel-data for 42 countries from September 1996 to December 1998. We document wide variation in trading costs across countries; emerging markets in particular have significantly higher trading costs even after correcting for factors affecting costs such as market capitalization and volatility. We analyze the inter-relationships between turnover, equity trading costs, and volatility, and investigate the impact of these variables on equity returns. In particular, we show that increased volatility, acting through costs, reduces a portfolio's expected return. However, higher volatility reduces turnover also, mitigating the actual impact of higher costs on returns. Further, turnover is inversely related to trading costs, providing a possible explanation for the increase in turnover in recent years. The results demonstrate that the composition of global efficient portfolios can change dramatically when cost and turnover are taken into account.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39706/3/wp322.pd

Corporate profitability and the dynamics of competition in emerging markets: a time series analysis

The paper presents time-series analyses of corporate profitability in seven leading developing countries (DCs) using the common methodology of the persistence of profitability (PP) studies and systematically compares the results with those for advanced countries (ACs). Surprisingly, both short- and long-term persistence of profitability for DCs are found to be lower than those for ACs. The paper concentrates on economic explanations for these findings. It also reports the results on the persistence of the two components of profitability - capital-output ratios and profit margins. These too raise important general issues of economic interpretation for PP studies which are outlinedCompetition, profitability, persistence, emerging markets

Liquidity, Volatility, and Equity Trading Costs Across Countries and Over Time

Actual investment performance reflects the underlying strategy of the portfolio manager and the execution costs incurred in realizing those objectives. Execution costs, especially in illiquid markets, can dramatically reduce the notional return to an investment strategy. This paper examines the interactions between cost, liquidity, and volatility, and analyzes their determinants using panel-data for 42 countries from September 1996 to December 1998. We document wide variation in trading costs across countries; emerging markets in particular have significantly higher trading costs even after correcting for factors affecting costs such as market capitalization and volatility. We analyze the inter-relationships between turnover, equity trading costs, and volatility, and investigate the impact of these variables on equity returns. In particular, we show that increased volatility, acting through costs, reduces a portfolio's expected return. However, higher volatility reduces turnover also, mitigating the actual impact of higher costs on returns. Further, turnover is inversely related to trading costs, providing a possible explanation for the increase in turnover in recent years. The results demonstrate that the composition of global efficient portfolios can change dramatically when cost and turnover are taken into account.privatization, government priorities, auctions, revenue maximization, probit analysis, selection bias.

The cross-section of stock returns : evidence from emerging markets

Cross-sectional tests of asset returns have a long tradition in finance. The often-used capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the arbitrage pricing theory both imply cross-sectional relationships between individual asset returns and other factors, and tests of those models have done much to increase understanding of how markets price risk. But much about the way assets are priced remains unclear. After much testing, numerous empirical anomalies about the CAPM cast doubt on the central hypothesis of that theory: that on a cross-sectional basis a positive relationship exists between asset returns and assets'relative riskiness as measured by their Bs (beta being the ratio of the covariance of an asset's return with the market return to the variance of the market return). As tenuous as the relationship between B and returns may be, other risk factors apparently influence U.S. equity market returns significantly: market capitalization (or size), earnings-price ratios, and book-to-market value of equity ratios. Once these factors are included as explanatory variables in the cross-sectional model, the relationship between B and returns disappears. Much"international"empirical work has focused on more developed markets, especially Japan and the United Kingdom, with some evidence from other European markets as well. The international evidence largerly confirms the hypothesis that other factors besides B are important in explaining asset returns. The authors expand the empirical evidence on the nature of asset returns by examining the cross-sectional pattern of returns in the emerging markets. Using data from the International Finance Corporation for 19 developing country markets, they examine the effect on asset returns of several risk factors in addition to B. They find that, in addition to B, two factors - size and trading volume - have significant explanatory power in a number of these markets. Dividend yield and earnings-price ratio are also important, but in slightly fewer markets. For several of the markets studied, the relationship between all four of these variables and returns is contrary to the relationship documented for U.S. and Japanese markets. In several countries, exchange-rate risk is a significant factor. With independent new empirical evidence introduced into the asset-pricing debate, future research must now cope with the idea that any theory hoping to explain asset pricing in all markets must explain how factors can be priced differently simply by crossing an international border. Is it market microstructure that causes these substantial differences? Or (perhaps more likely) do regulatory and tax regimes force investors to behave differently in various countries? As a final hypothesis, can any of these results be attributed to the segmentation or increasing integration of financial markets? The authors offer little evidence on these questions but hope their results will spur further work on the cross-sectional relationship of markets and of assets in testing asset pricing theories.Banks&Banking Reform,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Economic Theory&Research,Access to Markets,Markets and Market Access,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Intermediation

Shareholder value maximisation, stock market and new technology: should the US corporate model be the universal standard

In 1992 a blue-ribbon group of US economists led by Michael Porter concluded that the US stock market-based corporate model was misallocating resources and jeopardising US competitiveness. The faster growth of US economy since then and the supposed US lead in the spread of information technology has brought new legitimacy to the stock market and the corporate model, which is being hailed as the universal standard. Two main conclusions of the analysis presented here are: (a) there is no warrant for revising the blue-ribbon groupÕs conclusion; and (b) even US corporations let alone developing country ones would be better off not having stock market valuation as a corporate goal.Shareholder wealth, Information technology, Stock-market efficiency