At the end of a two-day investment conference sponsored by Dimensional Fund Advisors in Los Angeles last month, I couldn’t stop squirming. The final workshop included a slide show highlighting articles from major business publications across the country conveying a range of dire investment messages. Some spouted warnings of impending market calamity. Others urged investors…
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Abstract We examine all S&P 500 firms over 1999-2014 that publicly characterize their annual performance with extreme positive language. We find that only 18% of such firms increase shareholder value, while nearly 75% have insignificant performance, and the remaining 7% actually destroy shareholder value. Our evidence suggests that firms often base their positive claims on…
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The old aphorism of a picture paints a thousand words is like most sayings chronically overused but sometimes a simple graphic comes along that explains the future with remarkable clarity. The following chart is one such image. Source – Medium The fall in both jobs and oil rigs in 2015 was a function of the…
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WHEN HRISTOS DOUCOULIAGOS was a young economist in the mid-1990s, he got interested in all the ways economics was wrong about itself—bias, underpowered research, statistical shenanigans. Nobody wanted to hear it. “I’d go to seminars and people would say, ‘You’ll never get this published,’” Doucouliagos, now at Deakin University in Australia, says. “They’d say, ‘this is bordering on libel.’”…
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Whilst wading through all the associated bibs and bobs that accumulate when you are away, this article popped into my feed this morning. For those too lazy to read it and I wouldn’t blame you it is a mild hysteria piece by Fairfax on the collapse of China’s state owned energy producers – PetroChina. Apparently,…
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STOCKHOLM—This is a high-tax, high-spend country, where employees receive generous social benefits and ample amounts of vacation time. Economic orthodoxy would suggest the dynamics of a welfare state like Sweden would be detrimental to entrepreneurship: Studies have found that the more a country’s government spends per capita, the smaller the number of start-ups it tends to have…
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I have a theory that the easiest job in Australia is to be the head of one of big four banks. On day one of my employment as CEO I would do two things. First and foremost make certain they had the correct banking details so that my grossly inflated salary went into the right…
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Since the 2008 financial crisis, colleges and universities have faced increased pressure to identify essential disciplines, and cut the rest. In 2009, Washington State University announced it would eliminate the department of theatre and dance, the department of community and rural sociology, and the German major – the same year that the University of Louisiana…
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