The Attractiveness of Harmonized Investment Funds Evidence on Romanian Investment Fund Market
This paper explores the latest trends in Romanian investment fund industry by examining the investors’ prudentially behavior before and after the crisis. We focus our study on a data set from the Romanian National Securities Commission (abr. CNVMR), with evidence on quarterly data on net sales value, number of units of funds and number of investors. This study provides two contributions. First, it presents the newest UCITS regulations to maintain investors’ trust in these investment vehicles. On the other hand, it provides a comparative analysis on open-end and close-end funds evidence. As a result, the paper concludes that open funds are more attractive for the domestic capital as compared to closed funds, but their evolution according to the preference for certain types is rather similar, in the sense that money market or diversified funds are preferred, as they offer a higher degree of certainty during crisis periods.
Shifting investments strategy from equity funds to money market funds – the case of Romanian open - end fund market during the financial crisis
Mutual funds are one of the key suppliers of liquidity in Romanian capital market. This paper uses quarterly data on Romanian openend funds starting with 2006 until 2010. We find that significant negative flows (outflows) were registered beginning with the end of 2007 (equity funds), during 2008 (equity funds, balanced funds, other funds and bond funds in the last 2 quarters of the year) and from 2009 to 2010 (in the case of money market funds). There is evidence that the changing market conditions attract differently the incoming flows in these mutual funds. This is the reason why such perturbations affect investors’ confidence for these investment vehicles and impose the reorientation of the investment funds and of their investors to other alternatives in order to preserve their capital.
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.