“Implicit Religion?”: What Might That Be?
The term “Implicit Religion” was (effectively) first coined in 1969, when it was adopted in preference to its predecessor, “secular religion.” The historical and ideological contexts of the concept will be sketched, before three definitions (or, better, “descriptions”) of the intended meaning are offered. Three studies, undertaken as test-cases for the utility of the concept, will be briefly reported, along with the subsequent development of study in the area of implicit religion, and its relationship with explicit religion and spirituality.
This paper empirically analyses how investors with private material information decide in which regulatory regime, set by governments in different countries, to trade. We study put–call deviations (which indicate informed trading) for options written solely on US-listed companies and for those with dual listings/headquarter in China. We argue that informed traders actively choose the regulatory regime with the lowest level of regulatory rigorousness in order to exploit private information. We find that the informational content of put–call parity deviations is detectable for companies listed solely in the USA, but not for Chinese companies. Our evidence suggests that informed traders do not tend to exploit their private information where regulatory rigorousness is high (e.g. a high likelihood of detection and subsequent enforcement). They will instead opt to trade where regulatory rigorousness is low.