Brown Bag Seminars
All seminars are held from 12:00-1:00 pm in the Carlson School of Management 4-300V unless otherwise noted.
|2/26/14||Ashraf Al Zaman|
Cash holdings and technological development: Evidence from IT mediated improvement in inventory management
Since 1980s US manufacturing firms are holding more cash relative to their assets. In this paper, we investigate whether improvements in information technology (IT) and its use have contributed to this increase. We establish that IT contributed to the improvement through inventory channel. IT has enabled firms redeploy their current assets: substituting cash for inventory, engendering an era of sustained higher level of cash holdings. In addition, we also establish that some observed heterogeneity in cash holdings can be explained by the industries firms operate in, the type of inventories they hold, and the financial constraints they face.
|3/5/14||Jianfeng Yu||Short- and Long-Run Business Conditions and Expected Returns|
(joint with Qi Liu, Libin Tao, and Weixing Wu)Numerous studies argue that the market risk premium is associated with economic conditions and show that proxies for business conditions indeed predict aggregate market returns. By directly estimating short- and long-run expected economic growth, we show that short-run expected economic growth is negatively related to future returns, whereas long-run expected economic growth is positively related to aggregate market returns. At an annual horizon, short- and long-run expected growth can jointly predict aggregate excess returns with an R2 of 17-19%. Our ndings indicate that the risk premium has both high- and low-frequency fluctuations and highlight the importance of distinguishing short- and long-run economic growth in macro asset pricing models.
|3/19/14||Spring Break||No Seminar|
|4/9/14||Kee Seon Nam||TBD|