In this paper, we showed that patent pools can generate the highest welfare levels among different licensing arrangements. If the patents are blocking, the patentees are not in a horizontal relationship with respect to those patents. Therefore, the Antitrust Agency would be unlikely to challenge this arrangement.

The allocation of public resources is an important concern of developed economies in modern societies and there are many studies that aim at measuring their efficiency. This work presents an efficiency assessment of public elementary schools in Andorra, a small country where there are three public educational systems (Andorran, Spanish – congregational and non-congregational-, and French). Therefore, the aim of this study is to compare the efficiency of public elementary schools among the different educational systems existing in Andorra. The methodology used to measure the efficiency of the educational process is the DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis), a nonparametric frontier method, introduced by Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes in 1978. In this study the DEA technique is applied with bootstrap (Simar and Wilson, 2000), which corrects the bias by generating successive evaluations with changed data in order to obtain a new distribution of efficiency levels representative of the original (correct but unknown) distribution.  Then, Li test (Li, 1996) is used to establish the comparison of efficiency results between different educational systems and identify which system is the most efficient. Results show a decrease in efficiency along the years and suggest that there are significant differences between different schools depending on their educational system. These results seem to confirm the benefits of decentralization in efficiency of schools.

This study tries to examine the export competitiveness of selected telecommunication products by using indicators like Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) and Constant Market Share (CMS) analysis and Shift-share method and these are used for identifying potential export markets. The selected four categories of telecommunication products are taken into account on the basis of three digit level Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) for the period between 2000 and 2011.The RCA calculation clearly indicates an increasing strength of comparative advantage of Malaysia, except for the products (SITC- 763) and (SITC- 764). This is mainly due to the negligible import for these products. The CMS results suggest that export gains of Malaysia for telecommunication products are largely attributed to the size of the market and also to its competitiveness effects. The CMS analysis also depicts that the competitiveness effect of telecommunication products are subsequently improved in general during the period III and I (2008-11and 200003) as compared to those of the period I and II (2000-03 and 2004-07) and period II and III (2004-07 and 2008-11). The shift- share indicates that the USA, UK, Netherlands, Switzerlands, Japan and Germany are biggest importing countries of Malaysian telecommunication products although major challenges are the asian countries here.

This paper examines the long run relationship between the financial development, stock market development and economic growth in Japan. Johansen Co-integration Technique and Vector Error Correction Model are used to investigate the relationships. The results demonstrate that there is a long-run equilibrium relationship between the financial development, stock market development and economic growth in Japan and that financial development and stock market development causes economic growth, but there is no evidence of causality from economic growth to financial development or stock market development. Further analyses show that, although bank based financial development and stock market development leads economic growth, stock market development plays important role during the period 1974-2011 in Japan. Therefore, we conclude that stock market development is matter for the economic growth of Japan after 1974.

This study aims to explore the impact of firm specific factors on cash dividend payment decisions for a sample of 41 non financial firms listed in Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) in Bangladesh during 2007-2011. This study tests a null hypothesis that none of the firm specific factors namely profitability, size, liquidity, growth, earnings volatility, and managerial ownership has significant effects on cash dividend  payments using fixed-effect regression model under the assumption that intercepts vary for each firm and the slope coefficients are constant across firms. Checking multicollinearity, cross-sectional dependence, autocorrelation and controlling heteroskedasticity in the regression analysis it is found that profitability has statistically significant positive effects on cash dividend payments. This study has discovered a significant negative effect of earnings volatility and managerial ownership on dividend payments which were unfolded before this study. On the other hand, size, growth and liquidity were not found to be significant explanatory variables of dividend payments. Thus, profitability, earnings volatility and managerial ownership are functioning as the key determinants of cash dividend payments in Bangladesh.

The paper outlines a study undertaken to identify the types of impact that prior experience, the decision environment and the decision type could have upon the performances and outcomes of the decisions made. The objective was to portray the relationships between decision performances, prior experience, decision environments and decision types in order to offer advice in the building of decision support systems. Survey data was collected in a large Bangladeshi pharmaceutical company which supported the hypotheses that managers’ prior experience is positively related to the decision performance. Moreover, decision performance is affected by uncertainty in the business environment where the decisions are made and the level of un-structuredness of the business decisions. These findings from a developing country correspond to research in developed countries. The implications of this study are that organizations need to actively consider who is taking the decisions within the organization and how likely they are to be able to make effective decisions based upon their career history and levels of experience.

International trade in the developing countries amounts to about half of their gross national income (GNI). Commercial banks support smooth trading of goods by financing international traders which is broadly defined as International Trade Finance. Although it is widely recognized that commercial banks have a major role in international trade, there exists no systematic study that indicate the contribution of trade financing by commercial banks in the growth of international trade of the least developed countries (LDCs). Such study is also non-existent in the case of   Bangladesh. This paper investigated the role of commercial banks of Bangladesh in supporting enhancement of trade volume by providing trade finance to their client. The paper is based on a case study on Pubali Bank Ltd. (PBL) where the PBL is one of the largest commercial banks of Bangladesh. The panel data collected from 20 client firms conducting international trade via the Bank for 3 consecutive financial years from 2009 to 2011, supports the hypothesis of positive role of the bank. The findings of this study suggest that trade finance by the commercial banks like the PBL has a positive effect in enhancing volume of the international trade of their clients.

Corporate financial structure and financing resources are very important for a firm in their investment decisions and value enhancement. Firms may seek for the cheapest financing resources while maximizing their return from investment. By using panel data analysis, this paper demonstrated the investment-cash flow sensitivity and the others factors affecting the firm’s investment decisions. Result shows that there is significant negative investment-cash flow sensitivity. This implied that firms underinvest due to information asymmetry. This study also found others factors such as the former year’s firm’s tangibility, size, dividend, investment opportunity as well as debt level can significantly affect the firm’s investment decisions. Depreciation and financial constraint were found no impact on the firm’s investment decisions. These findings have significant implications for firm’s value enhancement in financing and investment decisions.

The problem of poverty is particularly severe in Bangladesh. To achieve the national development goals and especially to reduce poverty, the Government of Bangladesh has started to experiment with cooperative approaches involving the private sector and NGOs. Public Private Partnership (PPP) has been introduced as one of these novel approaches to poverty alleviation in Bangladesh. The Rural Micro Credit (RMC) program of the Palli Karma Shahayak Foundation (PKSF) is one of important PPP initiatives in Bangladesh. Although, the RMC programs are being implemented from 1991 as a partnership program, it is yet to be evaluated. This research thus attempts to evaluate the effects of the RMC PPP for the first time. This paper reports the results of the RMC program from the survey of 68 RMC households from eighteen Unions of five Districts. The survey results show an insignificant improvement in income levels. It also found that just over half of the participants did not receive any Income Generating Activities (IGA) skills training, though it was a part of that program. The research also discovered dissatisfaction amongst beneficiaries about the rates of interest and most RMC participants believed that the rates of interest were very high and thus the rates should be reduced. However, the survey results reveal that the RMC is effective for improving food intake. The program also demonstrates noteworthy attainments in improving the rates of school enrolments of children and; also in health consciousness such as immunisation of children, and access to safe drinking water and hygienic sanitation.

The importance of loans to the banking industry is undeniable and is one of the main contributors to banks’ profits. However, high loan growth and large concentration of loan to certain economic sector would increase banks vulnerabilities and expose banks to financial shocks which eventually would affect the bank stability. Realizing the risks faced by the banking institutions, this study examines the effects of loan activities of Malaysian banks to the bank stability. This study hypothesizes that bank stability is dependent on loan activities of the bank. As banking industry is bound to capital regulation, this study also investigates the moderating effect of capital regulation on the relationship between loan activities and bank stability. Confined to Malaysian commercial banks over the period of 2000-2012, this study provides mixed results on the effect of loan activities to bank stability. The results revealed that although loan growth of the banks is below the international benchmark for excessive lending, the loan growth increased the banks vulnerabilities and risk of failure. High concentrations of loans to certain economic sector increased bank stability while the results on capital regulation evidence the importance of this regulation, where it is found that capital regulation moderates the relationship between loan concentration and bank stability. Overall, the results suggest that Malaysian banks under the new banking structure exercised good loan activities, and the loan activities together with the existing capital regulation increased the banks’ stability.

Earning management prediction is one of the salient issues that help stockholders and other users in accurate evaluation of financial position and performance of the firm and it becomes more and more important in preparing and reporting the useful information for decision makings regarding the highlighted importance of recent worldwide financial crisis. In this paper, researchers attempt to provide an optimum model for predicting the earning management.The main goal of this paper is to compare the power of artificial neural network model with the multiple linear regression one in earning management prediction. The sample pool consists of 107 firms in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) for the time period 2002 - 2010. The results of this study show that artificial neural network is more powerful than multiple-linear regression in predicting earning management.

This paper investigates the impacts of index revisions on the return and liquidity of Shariah-compliant Australian shares, using a sample of companies added to and deleted from the Dow Jones Islamic Market Index. In contrast to the findings of conventional index revision studies, and index revision studies in Muslim countries, our results show that these stock prices respond negatively to index additions, and positively to index deletions. Furthermore, our study provides overwhelming evidence in support of long-term decline in the returns and liquidity of added shares, and long-term improvement in the returns of the deleted shares. Results for changes in the liquidity of deleted firms are mixed and no clear pattern can be determined.

It is often argued that savings behavior of a country is suffered from aggregation bias. This paper shows that results obtained from previous studies can be improved by decomposing the aggregate saving trend in urban and rural sector. It considers time series data to shed light on the saving behavior of Bangladesh in long run horizon and short run dynamic adjustment by employing cointegration test and vector error correction model. Findings of the study suggest that, there is a great deal of diversity between urban and rural sector. Deposit rate is not the only factor that stimulates depositors to save, although it has received noticeable attention. Rather, high volatility regarding income, banking facilities and inflation influence savers to increase interestbearing deposit. This study recommends that diversity between urban and rural sector should be taken into consideration before forming policies. In addition, to motivate poor people to deposit their savings in the financial institution this research proposes adequacy of institutional structure and flexible savings instruments.

This study examines the factors driving the choice of the actuarial assumptions, such as the discount rate, the salary growth rate, and the expected rate of return on asset, under pension accounting disclosures required for defined-benefit pension plans (DBPP, hereafter) for a sample of 190 Canadian firms over the period 2000-2006. We use a system of panel data simultaneous equations of the actuarial assumptions. We tackle the endogeneity problem of the actuarial choices using a system GMM approach. The evidence shows that the choice of the actuarial rates is mainly driven by the magnitude of leverage and the size of the sponsoring firms. Unlike previous studies, we find no significant relationship between the level of pension funding and the choice of actuarial assumptions.