No abstract

We examine the role that secondary mathematics plays in the performance of students in introductory business courses. Students who pass more advanced secondary mathematics subjects perform significantly better in introductory business courses. This 'mathematics effect' is significantly stronger than the effect of other business-related secondary subjects, such as economics or accounting. Our findings also confirm previous studies showing that secondary accounting is beneficial for studying first-year tertiary accounting. Interestingly though, we find that studying secondary economics can detract from a student's introductory tertiary results in some courses. Our findings have implications for educators and administrators as well as current secondary students. Copyright (c) The Authors. Journal compilation (c) 2008 AFAANZ.

We examine the determinants of debt maturity in the Australian capital market with the Top 400 firms listed on the Australian Securities Exchange for the period 1989-2006. We find that Australian firms not only exhibit a positive leverage-maturity relationship but also use short-term debt to signal their high quality to the market. Our results are robust to different estimation methods that control for endogeneity and error-dependence. We also find that ignoring the interaction between leverage and maturity can lead to erroneous conclusions about the support for the matching principle, the agency costs hypothesis and the transaction costs hypothesis.

Recently the Balanced method was introduced as a class of quasi-implicit methods for solving stiff stochastic differential equations. We examine asymptotic and meansquare stability for several implementations of the Balanced method and give a generalized result for the mean-square stability region of any Balanced method. We also investigate the optimal implementation of the Balanced method with respect to strong convergence. (2000): 65C30, 65L07. AMS subject classification

2014). Joint leverage and maturity choices in real estate firms: The role of the REIT status [Electronic version]. Retrieved [insert date], from Cornell University, School of Hotel Administration site: Abstract AbstractWe explore the interdependence of leverage and debt maturity choices in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and unregulated listed real estate investment companies in the U.S. for the period 1973-2011. We find that the leverage and maturity choices of all listed real estate firms are interdependent, but in contrast to industrial firms, they are not made simultaneously. Across the different types of real estate firms considered, we find substantial differences in the nature of the relationship between leverage and maturity. Leverage determines maturity in non-REITs, whereas maturity is a determinant of leverage in REITs. We suggest that the observed differences reflect the effects of the REIT regulation, rather than solely being a function of real estate as the underlying asset class. We also present novel evidence that the relationship between leverage and maturity in both firm types can be used to moderate the effects of other exogenous financing policies.

We investigate whether Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) managers actively manipulate performance measures in spite of the strict regulation under the REIT regime. We provide empirical evidence that is consistent with this hypothesis. Specifically, manipulation strategies may rely on the opportunistic use of leverage. However, manipulation does not appear to be uniform across REIT sectors and seems to become more common as the level of competition in the underlying property sector increases. We employ a set of commonly used traditional performance measures and a recently developed manipulation-proof measure (MPPM, Goetzmann, Ingersoll, Spiegel, and Welch (2007)) to evaluate the performance of 147 REITs from seven different property sectors over the period 1991-2009. Our findings suggest that the existing REIT regulation may fail to mitigate a substantial agency conflict and that investors can benefit from evaluating return information carefully in order to avoid potentially manipulative funds.

No abstract

introduce a nonparametric method for pricing American-style options, that is derived from the canonical valuation developed by Stutzer (1996, The Journal of Finance, 51, 1633-1652. Although the statistical properties of this nonparametric pricing methodology have been studied in a controlled simulation environment, no study has yet examined the empirical validity of this method. We introduce an extension to this method that incorporates information contained in a small number of observed option prices. We explore the applicability of both the original method and our extension using a large sample of OEX American index options traded on the S&P100 index. Although the Alcock and Carmichael method fails to outperform a traditional implied-volatility-based Black-Scholes valuation or a binomial tree approach, our extension generates significantly lower pricing errors and performs comparably well to the implied-volatility Black-Scholes 510 Alcock and Auerswald Journal of Futures Markets