Career concerns and investment maturity in mutual funds

An important puzzle in financial economics is why fund managers invest in short-maturity assets when they could obtain larger profits in assets with longer maturity. This work provides an explanation to this fact based on labor contracts signed between institutional investors and fund managers. Using a career concern setup, we examine how the optimal contract design, in the presence of both explicit and implicit incentives, affects the fund managers decisions on investment horizons. A numerical analysis characterizes situations in which young (old) managers prefer short-maturity (long-maturity) positions. However, when including multitask analysis, we find that career concerned managers are bolder and also prefer assets with long maturity

S-Duality in Gauge Theories as a Canonical Transformation

We show that S-duality in four dimensional non-supersymmetric abelian gauge theories can be formulated as a canonical transformation in the phase space of the theory. This transformation is the usual interchange between electric and magnetic degrees of freedom. It is shown that in phase space the modular anomaly emerges as the result of integrating out the momenta degrees of freedom. The generalization to d dimensional abelian gauge theories of p forms is also considered. In the case of non-abelian gauge theories a careful analysis of the constraints implied by the canonical transformation shows that it does not relate Yang-Mills theories with inverted couplings. In fact the dual theory is shown to be of Freedman- Townsend's type, also with ${\tilde \tau}=-1/\tau$, $\tau=\frac{\theta}{2\pi}+\frac{4\pi i}{g^2}$.Comment: 13 pages, latex file, important changes in the non-abelian case. Some references adde

Audit contracts and reputation

This paper characterizes the contractual relationship between an external auditor and a manager of a client firm when the incentives for both agents are implicit as in the career concerns framework. The main result is that the earning management and the audit effort are decreasing over time because the incentives to build a reputation also decline for both agents in spite of a managers first mover advantage. This suggests that the audit effort should be higher when the auditor is an emerging firm and the future employment opportunities for the client firm?s manager are larger

[Review of] Maria P. P. Root, The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier

Maria Root\u27s collection of readings cognitively and emotionally engage the reader in the psychosocial experience of being multiracial. These readings also foster a critical awareness of the implications of rising numbers of multiracial persons for issues of inter-group race relations and national identity. This awareness forces readers to re-examine the meanings and construction of race beyond the traditional five monoracial categories traditionally used to gather census data

The Use of Twitter by Luxury and Midscale Hotels

Twitter has demanded a presence in company brands since its start up in 2008, including the hotel industry. As an up and coming marketing tool, the social media website is still new to both hotels and their guests. Observing the different strategies incorporated by luxury and midscale hotels, the paper provides explanations on how these two segments differ in utilizing Twitter. Through direct interviews with US luxury and midscale hotels and analyzing individual Twitter feeds, it was found that luxury hotels and their target market are much more active on Twitter than the midscale hotel segment. Implications suggest that although there is no current expectation from midscale hotel travelers to follow a Twitter feed, the rising presence of Twitter will demand midscale hotels to actively participate on the social media site in the near future

Career concerns and investment maturity in mutual funds

An important puzzle in financial economics is why fund managers invest in short-maturity assets when they could obtain larger profits in assets with longer maturity. This work provides an explanation to this fact based on labor contracts signed between institutional investors and fund managers. Using a career concern setup, we examine how the optimal contract design, in the presence of both explicit and implicit incentives, affects the fund managers decisions on investment horizons. A numerical analysis characterizes situations in which young (old) managers prefer short-maturity (long-maturity) positions. However, when including multitask analysis, we find that career concerned managers are bolder and also prefer assets with long maturity.Contract theory, Career concerns, Financial equilibrium, Investment maturity

Propagating shocks in the corona

High resolution observations performed with the Decimeter spectrograph and the multichannel receiver at Nancay were analyzed in the range of 25-75 MHz. Sixty Type II bursts were selected. In this frequency range, type II events are generally associated with other radio emissions (such as storms of type III-U-I bursts); they are preceeded or followed by groups of U-bursts. One third of type II events show a nonuniform frequency drift, usually a steep decrease followed by an abrupt increase. This phenomenon can be explained by the propagation of an extended disturbance through the ambient corona when the density gradient is enhanced. An empirical coronal model is proposed to interpret these observations. The observations at fixed frequency of Type II bursts including fundamental and harmonic components are analyzed. It is shown that the spectrum of the intensity fluctuations differs with the fundamental and the harmonic components. The origin of these differences is discussed

Uncovering neutrinos from cosmic ray factories: the Multi Point Source method

We present a novel method for the search of high energy extraterrestrial neutrinos in extended regions. The method is based on the study of the spatial correlations between the events recorded by neutrino telescopes. Extended regions radiating neutrinos may exist in the Galaxy due to the hierarchical clustering of massive stars, the progenitors of all the Galactic accelerators known so far. The neutrino emission associated to such extended regions might be faint and complex due to both the escape of cosmic rays and the intricate distribution of gas in the environment of the accelerators. We have simulated extended neutrino emission over an area of 10deg x 10deg, where the intensity fluctuations across the region are modelled as a Gaussian random field with a given correlation structure. We tested our proposed method over realizations of this intensity field plus a uniform random field representative of the spatial distribution of the atmospheric neutrino background. Our results indicate that the method proposed here can detect significant event patterns that would be missed by standard search methods, mostly focused in the detection of individual hot spots.Comment: 8 pages, 16 figures, accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physic