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In this paper, we theoretically examine the optimal hedge strategy for a natural gas company. The use of natural gas derivatives to minimize consumers' per unit cost of natural gas consumed, or to minimize the upside risk associated with extreme bills would be the strategy being considered by local distribution companies (LDCs) and regulators. The objective is, therefore, to stabilize the summer and the winter months' natural gas prices as well as to improve the level of customers' welfare. In general, during the summer injection period, April through October, utility companies purchase a certain amount of natural gas and keep in storage facilities and, hence, during the winter withdrawal months, November through March, utility companies supply natural gas at a predetermined minimal fuel cost rate to residential and commercial customers. Therefore, to manage these conflicts of interests efficiently should natural gas companies be supported by accurate forecast of the natural gas price for the winter months. Otherwise, natural gas companies will trade natural gas derivatives in order to reduce costs charged to customers. The results show that customers benefit from the use of natural gas derivatives. If the natural gas market is deregulated, the typical risk-return trade off shows that natural gas derivatives would provide the most efficient tools for utility companies to minimize the natural gas price volatilities.

In response to recent financial corporate scandals, this study aims to provide a helpful understanding for investors and accounting regulators on how firms manage their reported earnings. This leads to a better firm valuation by financial intermediaries and more useful accounting standards.

Estimating discretionary accruals and opportunistic special purpose entities and using a simultaneous equation approach, the aim is to check how managers trade off between such tools of earnings management. Based on real earnings manipulation and accruals management of earnings, the goal is to understand if such tools are used simultaneously or as substitute by firms.

After controlling for each cost determinants of such earnings management tool, firms use discretionary accruals and financial engineering with special purpose entities as substitutes. Additional analyses show that managers use such tools in a sequential process. Indeed, they first use special purpose entities during the course of the year but they manipulate discretionary accruals especially at the end of the year.

Despite sensitivity checks, measurement error in discretionary accruals proxy and opportunistic SPE estimation model remains an alternative explanation for the results. The sample size and the lack of accurate information about the size of special purpose entities may limit the extent of the findings.

It is a very useful tool for regulators when they plan to disclose new accounting standards. For investors, this study can help them in assessing the firm's value more accurately for investing and financing purposes.

Providing a new methodology and new models to detect pervasive earnings management strategies adopted by firms.

This paper aims to investigate price responses and volatility spillovers between commodity spot and futures markets. The study ultimately seeks the evidence-based claims on the efficiency of the long run and short run horizontal price transmissions from futures markets to spot markets.

This study used the most recent daily price series of pepper, cardamom and rubber, during the period 2004–2019, use “cointegration-ECM-GARCH framework” and verify the persisting validity of the “expectancy theory” of commodity futures pricing.

The results offer overwhelming evidence of futures market dominance in the price discoveries and volatility spillovers in spot markets. However, this paper finds asymmetric responses between cash and futures prices across markets. The hedging efficiency of futures contracts is commodities specific’ where spices futures are more efficient than the rubber futures.

The study passes on vital information to the producers and traders of spices and rubber who have a potential interest in the use of futures contracts to make profits from arbitrage between futures and cash markets.

The paper is unique in terms of understanding asymmetric price linkages in markets for plantation crops.

The purpose of this is paper is to pay a closer look at the 2008-2009 financial crisis (and its aftermath) and analyzes stock returns of nine major US oil companies as well as the oil and gas sector under daily data from January 1992 to April 2012.

The authors adopt the arbitrage pricing theory model to examine the relationship between stock returns and their influences including oil price return, yield spreads, and US dollar index return. The authors also provide a test for structural changes in each regression model of return series to capture for multiple breaks. To examine the asymmetric effect of oil price returns on stock returns, the authors separate oil price returns series into two series: positive changes in oil price and negative changes in oil price.

The authors find stock returns of oil companies as well as the oil and gas sector are positively affected by oil prices and have stronger effects in the downward direction. Interestingly, The authors find the effects of oil price movements on stock returns increase over time. The authors examine the possibility that investors wishing to hedge against a weakening USD invest in US oil companies and find that more than half of these companies benefit from a weaker USD against the JPY, while all strongly benefit from a weaker USD against major currencies.

The authors employ daily data for two-decade period including the last global financial crisis. Due to the long-term period covered in this study, sequential Bai-Perron tests are used to detect structural breaks of stock return series. In addition, the data-dependent procedures result in good specifications throughout with white-noise processes in almost all cases.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of hedging with options and cardinality constraints in multi‐period portfolio management systems.

The paper focuses on a recursive multi‐period portfolio management formulation (SHAREX) subject to hedging with cardinality constraints and options. The problem formulation is tested with observed and simulated data.

The yield of the multi‐period cardinality constrained option hedging framework under integer‐valued transactions and fixed and variable transactions costs exceeds the riskless return predicted by the Black‐Scholes model in equilibrium.

The paper demonstrates that the multiple representations framework constructed to generate optimal predictions provides accurate forecasts with obvious value for portfolio management.

This research aims to ascertain the extent to which the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic affected the relationship between inflation and real estate investment trusts (REITs) returns in South Africa.

This research used the Johansen cointegration test and effective test in establishing if there is a long-run cointegrating equation between the variables. To ascertain if COVID-19 resulted in a different relationship regime between inflation and REITs returns, the sequential Bai–Perron method was used.

Between December 2013 and July 2022, there was no evidence of a long-run relationship between inflation and REITs returns, and a restricted vector autoregressive (VAR) model with a period lag for each variable best describing the relationship. Using the sequential Bai–Perron method, for one break, the results show February 2020 as a structural break in the relationship. A cointegrating equation is also found for the period before the structural break and another after the break. Interestingly, the relationship is negative before the break and a new positive relationship (regime) is confirmed after the noted break.

This research helps REITs stakeholders to position themselves in light of any changes to macroeconomic activity within South Africa.

This is one of the first studies to test inflation relationship with REITs returns in South Africa and the effects of COVID-19 thereof. This research helps REITs stakeholders to position themselves in light of any changes to macroeconomic activity within South Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the recession effects in market efficiency of natural rubber futures contracts traded in India.

The research draws inferences from Granger causality and Engle–Granger cointegration tests, which are administered separately on 14 year daily price data spanning into two distinct, non-overlapping time series of 2004–2008 and 2009–2017.

Analysis shows that rubber futures market is informationally efficient in price discovery. The results of cointegartion tests indicate that a long-term relationship does exist between futures and spot prices of the natural rubber in India. The recession effects in the market efficiency of rubber futures contracts are evident from the increase in optimal hedge ratios estimated with the cointegration methodology.

The study pursues a simple cointegration methodology to assess the causal relations between spot and futures market prices in the Indian context. Future studies investigating the long-run causal relations, with error correction framework, between spot and future prices of rubber from other leading rubber producing countries can validate the findings more on this issue.

The research expects to pass on vital information inputs on the implications of future contracts to rubber traders for managing their portfolios. The study of this kind definitely will be a great help to farmers and exporters who are potentially interested in gaining access to a hedging vehicle.

The paper is unique in terms of understanding the effects of economic recession in information efficiency of futures market. Moreover, a limited number of studies have explored the functional utilities of rubber futures in emerging market context.

It is assumed that the production system responds to planned demand at the end of the expected life of each individual piece of equipment and unplanned demand triggered by equipment failures. The difficulty of controlling this type of production system resides in the variable nature of the remanufacturing process. In practice, remanufacturing operations for planned demand can be executed at different rates, referring to different component replacement and repair strategies. A sub‐optimal control policy in which inventory thresholds trigger the use of different execution modes has been formulated in previous research to address this problem when unplanned demands are processed under an exponential time distribution. The aim of this study is to extend this control policy to more realistic unplanned demand arrival and processing times distributions.

The proposed approach is based on a combination of analytical modeling, simulation experimentation and regression analysis. The model was validated by comparing the obtained simulation results with those obtained under an exponential processing time distribution.

The results demonstrate that the structure of optimal control can be approximated by the sub‐optimal multiple hedging point policy with non‐significant cost variations.

The simulation results demonstrate that hedging point control policies could be applicable to a wide variety of complex remanufacturing problems in which analytical solutions are not easily obtained.

The paper extends the concept of hedging point policy to the control of real‐word repair and remanufacturing operations. Once calculated, the sub‐optimal policy parameters can be simply implemented by practitioners through the definition of stock‐level parameters.

The purpose of this paper is to find the optimal hedging strategy when an investor has budget constraints on both the initial capital and the future cash flow.

The paper follows the utility minimization of the total cost, using convex utility functions on both initial capital and future cash flows.

Closed‐form solutions of optimal hedging strategies are found in some specific but popular cases. It is also found that this method corresponds to the local risk minimization method in quadratic hedging.

Hedging strategies are calculated for only two popular choices. One may want to calculate hedging strategies for other popular utility functions such as power utility or HARA utility.

When a trader has some budget constraint in both initial capital and future cash flows, this paper gives a simple alternative.

Budget constraints on both initial capital and future cash flow are new to this kind of study. Connection to the local risk minimization strategy is original too.

Growth enterprise market (GEM) in Hong Kong is acknowledged as one of the world’s most successful examples of small and medium enterprise (SME) stock market. The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolving efficiency and dual long memory in the GEM. This paper also explores the joint impacts of thin trading, structural breaks and inflation on the dual long memory.

State-space GARCH-M model, Kalman filter estimation, factor-adjustment techniques and fractionally integrated models: ARFIMA–FIGARCH, ARFIMA–FIAPARCH and ARFIMA–HYGARCH are adopted for the empirical analysis.

The results indicate that the GEM is still weak-form inefficient but shows a tendency towards efficiency over time except during the global financial crisis. There also exists a stationary long-memory property in the market return and volatility; however, these long-memory properties weaken in magnitude and/or statistical significance when the joint impacts of the three aforementioned factors were taken into account.

A forecasts of the hedging model that capture dual long memory could provide investors further insights into risk management of investments in the GEM.

The findings of this study are relevant to market authorities in improving the GEM market efficiency and investors in modelling hedging strategies for the GEM.

This study is the first to investigate the evolving efficiency and dual long memory in an SME stock market, and the joint impacts of thin trading, structural breaks and inflation on the dual long memory.