Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

This study investigated the extent of corporate social responsibility (CSR) Web reporting and the variations in CSR indicators among publicly traded, multinational corporations in the US and South Korea. The study supports previous research in CSR Web reporting across countries and regions of the world that CSR development is more advanced in the Western world where CSR as a concept was originated. Indeed, the U.S. companies in this study showed greater depth and scope of CSR information disclosure compared to the less developed country of South Korea.

This study examines the association between dual dividend changes and future profitability. A fundamental characteristic of dual dividend payouts is that both components, cash dividends and stock dividends, emit separate dividend signals for subsequent profitability. To analyze dividend signal theories, this study partitions the sample into three sub-samples according to the ratio of cash to stock dividends. Empirical evidence strongly indicates that dual dividend changes are positively associated with future profitability in the balanced dividend subsample. The results of this study are generally robust in terms of accommodating the factors of stock repurchases, investment growth opportunities, and business cycles.

The first motivation of the creation of derivatives is hedging risk but unfortunately this motivation has changed over the decades since more conventional contracts are used for speculation. The purpose of this study is to use derivatives solely for hedging while respecting principles of profit and risk sharing. According to previous work about the pricing of Waad Bil Mourabaha and using the conventional expression of the contingent premium option, we will propose a model of Participating CPO.

This work aims to inspect the common debate about the implication of derivative instruments in amplifying the last financial crisis. To reach this goal, the study chooses a sample of banks entirely from emerging countries — over the whole period 2003–2011 — in which we examine the impact of derivatives simultaneously on performance, risk and stability during the ordinary period “the pre-crisis period”, 2003–2006, and the unstable period “the crisis and post crisis period”, 2007–2011. The regressions are estimated by generalized methods of moments (GMM) as developed by Blundell and Bond (1998). The major conclusion reveals that only swaps can be considered as implicated in the intensification of the last financial crisis. Therefore, the rest of derivatives instruments cannot be responsible in the amplification of the recent financial crisis. Indeed, the widespread idea accusing all derivatives to be in part responsible of the intensification of the last financial crisis should be revised.

In this paper, we investigate the applicability of the comonotonicity approach in the context of various benchmark models for equities and commodities. Instead of classical Lévy models as in Albrecher et al. we focus on the Heston stochastic volatility model, the constant elasticity of variance (CEV) model and Schwartz’ 1997 stochastic convenience yield model. We show how the technical difficulties of inverting the distribution function of the sum of the comonotonic random vector can be overcome and that the method delivers rather tight upper bounds for the prices of Asian Options in these models, at least for strikes which are not too large. As a by-product the method delivers super-hedging strategies which can be easily implemented.

The public controversies over the implementation of Statement of Financial Accounting Standard No. 157 (SFAS 157) and its impact on the recent financial crisis motivate us to examine the association between fair values and reporting lags. With a sample of U.S. banking institutions, we find that less verifiable fair value information is associated with longer earnings announcement lag and audit report lag. Longer earnings announcement lags resulting from less verifiable fair value information are due to the additional time of managerial estimations. Less verifiable fair values may also result in longer audit report lags due to the added training for auditors. Our study extends the current literature on fair values and reporting lags. Our findings contribute to the contemporary research on the timeliness of financial information disclosures which promotes the efficient functioning of the economy. Moreover, the findings of our study may be of interest to the global regulators, investors and other financial statement users.