Jeffrey Hobbs

E-Government Utilization: Understanding the Impact of Reputation and Risk

The implementation of Information and Communication Technologies ICT in the public sector has numerous benefits. Government administrators are aggressively seeking ways to enhance the development and implementation of more effective and efficient government services. One electronic government initiative that is growing in importance and popularity is electronic tax filing. This study explores the factors that contribute to e-file utilization. To test the proposed model a survey is administered to 152 taxpayers in the United States. Results of structural equation modeling indicate that performance expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, optimism bias, perceived reputation and risk all have a significant impact on e-government usage. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Terrorism, militarism, and stock returns

Purpose – This study aims to examine the effect on stock returns of 28 terrorist and military events occurring between 1963 and 2012. The authors divide the sample and examine these attacks on the basis of industry, country targeted, location, terrorism versus militarism and predicted overall impact. Design/methodology/approach – The authors measure the effects of the events in our sample along several dimensions: in the aggregate; comparatively across industries; by each event’s predicted level of impact; by the type of event (terrorist versus military); by the location of the attack (USA or outside the USA); and by whether the USA was, directly or by proxy, the primary target of the attack. Findings – Stock returns are significantly lower for those industries predicted to be most hurt than for other industries. Events that the authors predict to be of high impact to the market are followed by significantly lower returns than events we predict to be of low impact. Stocks perform significantly worse on th...

A Survey Data Response to the Teaching of Utility Curves and Risk Aversion.

In many finance and economics courses as well as in practice, the concept of risk aversion is reduced to the standard deviation of returns, whereby risk-averse investors prefer to minimize their portfolios’ standard deviations. In reality, the concept of risk aversion is richer and more interesting than this, and can easily be conveyed through theoretical or applied examples. The authors offer an example of a 2-asset choice problem in which risk-averse investors ought to prefer the asset with not only a higher standard deviation but also a lower expected return. A corresponding survey of 131 respondents confirmed this preference.

Short Selling Behavior and Mad Money

We examine 1,234 buy recommendations from Jim Cramer’s Mad Money television show. Consistent with prior research, we report positive abnormal returns immediately after buy recommendations, followed by a reversal, indicative of an overpricing event. We also find a marked increase in short selling. Our results show a positive association between shorting and the buy recommendations even after controlling for factors shown in the literature to influence shorting. We do not find similar effects after sell recommendations. These results suggest that short sellers act to exploit short-term overpricing arising from behavioral biases of some investors.