Academy Fellow

Professor Peter Swan AO is in the School of Banking and Finance, UNSW Australai Business School, University of New South Wales. Professor Swan specialises in agency theory and corporate governance, financial economics and security markets.

Other areas of expertise include:

• executive compensation
• competition policy
• industrial organisation
• microeconomic analysis and strategy
• taxation policy
• law and economics

Peter was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales (FRSN) in March 2018, an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the Order of Australia Queen’s Birthday Honours List on June 13, 2016. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the Queen's Birthday Honours List 2003, elected Scientia Professor by the Council UNSW from January 2003 for a period of six year and selected as an ARC Australian Professorial Fellow in 2001 for a period of five years. He has made key submissions leading to the introduction of News Corporation's non-voting shares and the halving of stamp duty on stock exchange transactions in 1995. His work for the NSW Government paved the way for the casino. He was also appointed a Commissioner by the Premier of Victoria to recommend changes to Tattslotto. His has been awarded approximately .5m in competitive ARC Grants and is ranked within the top ten in Australia for citation hits in the economics area according to the Social Sciences Citation Index.

Unanimously elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales (FRSN), March 2018

Order of Australia Queen’s Birthday Honours List on June 13, 2016 as Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). Citation: “For distinguished service to finance and commerce as a leading academic, journalist, and commentator on domestic investment, and on a range of political and economic issues.”

Order of Australia Queen’s Birthday Honours List 9 June, 2003, as Member of the Order of Australia (AM). Citation: “For services to academia as a scholar and researcher and through contributions to public policy in the fields of economics and finance”.

Elected Scientia Professor by the Council UNSW from January 2003 for a period of six year.

Selected as an ARC Australian Professorial Fellow in 2001 for a period of five years.

UNSW Business School Professor Peter Swan AO AM FRSN FASSA

His Fifty-Year Contribution to Australian Economics, 1968-2018

He currently has 3,042 cites in Google Scholar and 603 cites (37 articles) in Web of Science, making him highly cited. He is ranked in the top 2% globally for journal pages in economics and finance weighted by impact factors. RePEc IDEAS. According to Mark Blaug's Who's Who in Economics: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Economists, 2nd ed., 3rd ed., 1999, he is in the top ten most highly cited economics and finance academics in Australia.

He became an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) as part of Queen’s Birthday Honours List June 2016. Citation: ‘distinguished service to finance and commerce as a leading academic, journalist and commentator on domestic investment, and on a range of political and economic issues.’

In the Queen's Birthday Honours List, 9 June 2003, he was appointed as Member of the Order of Australia (AM). Citation: 'For services to academia as a scholar and researcher and through contributions to public policy in the fields of economics and finance'.

Peter was unanimously elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales (FRSN) in March 2018 and elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA) in 1997. UNSW appointed him to the title of Scientia Professor for the period, January 2003 - December 2008, in recognition of international eminence in research.

His 800-page thesis on the Australian automotive industry documenting the harmful effects of protectionism has finally seen fruition in the departure of the automobile manufacturing industry from Australia.

The Campbell Committee of Inquiry into the Financial System commissioned him to undertake seven sizeable studies and his proposal to largely eliminate double taxation of dividends was adopted in the 1987 Budget, taking the form of the present system of franking credits.

Recently, he has shown that these franking credits are close to fully priced, yielding a far lower cost of capital for firms paying franked dividends relative to firms not qualifying for franking credits since they reflect overseas earnings. Most likely, this lowering of the cost of capital to firms investing locally is due to foreign investors reaping capital gains by harvesting franking credits.

Peter’s work on transaction taxes resulted in first the halving and then elimination of the tax on stock market trading and his leadership in the national campaign to prevent the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) being acquired by Singapore’s Exchange was successful.

Apart from extensive policy and empirical research, Peter has made important theoretical contributions to our understanding of the role of monopoly and competition in the market for durable goods, to the theory of Pareto-efficient clubs, and to many aspects of agency theory.

He points out that separation of ownership and control is the main governance problem facing the modern corporation (Adam Smith, 1776, Berle and Means, 1932, Jensen and Meckling, 1976) and provides a new answer in the form of market monitoring by informed investors. Since this explanation seems to be ruled out by the two Nobel Laureates, Holmstrom and Tirole (1993), who find that monitoring gives rise to high- not low-powered incentives, he shows that their very influential findings are incorrect and thus need to be reversed.

A long-held believe is that a tax on one side of a market with an equal and revenue-neutral subsidy on the other side of the market must cancel out. He has recently shown that a tax on market orders providing a subsidy to limit orders does not cancel out since informed speculators are attracted from other venues to improve market efficiency.

His Contribution, 1968-2018

The Royal Society of New South Wales that was founded in 1821 recently elected Peter as a Fellow. This was fitting as its motto is “question everything”, something that Peter has practiced his entire career, which he may have inherited from his father, Trevor Swan, the first recipient of the Economic Society’s Distinguished Fellow Award for his contribution to the economics profession.

Peter cannot be pigeonholed in any specific category such theorist or empiricist and nor can he be tied down to any specific area of economics as he has worked in all areas, from financial economics, agency theory, industrial organisation, economic history, labour economics, market microstructure, taxation theory, and numerous other areas that either take his fancy or offer sizeable evidence of illogic theory or problematic empirical findings. In essence, he attempts to do for the economics profession what the Democrats purported to do for politics: keep the economics profession (bastards) honest!

His first venture into publishing occurred as an ANU undergraduate in which he foundered, edited, and obtained sponsorship for the journal, Econoclast. Peter’s first publication that formed part of his ANU honours thesis in economic history, Swan (1968), re-evaluated Sir Roland Wilson’s capital inflow series for the National Accounts, 1914-1924, and, coincidently, was accepted by Geoff Harcourt. The problem arose because of an error in the way that notional wool exports were accounted for in the National Accounts during WW1.

Perhaps Peter’s single most significant achievement occurred when he was writing his 800-page history of General Motors and the Australian Automobile Industry as a PhD student at Monash. He took time off to write five single-author and one two-author theory articles published in five top journals (American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Bell Journal of Economics) that continue to be heavily cited today, Swan (1970), Swan (1971, a, b), Swan (1972 a, b), and Sieper and Swan (1973).

Basically, he showed, contrary to the conventional wisdom and strongly held beliefs, that a monopolist might try to extract rent from consumers by charging too much but will nonetheless provide consumers with the right durability/quality of good or service. There would appear to be no such thing as “planned obsolescence” if the monopolist is profit maximising and nor will he wish to suppress innovative products and processes. Monopoly and competition differ in that only the monopolist recognises the effect of the aggregate service flow on price while for the competitor it is a parameter. This leads to scale differences, but these do not matter if the cost-minimising durability is independent of scale.

This series of articles was inspired by theory in an American Economic Review article and several similar contributions which implicitly assume that the monopolist possesses a time machine that enables him to reverse previous profit maximising decisions in the interests of current profitability.

The Review of Economic Studies article by Sieper and Swan (1973) also addresses the issue of time inconsistency if consumers initially own some of a product when the monopolist adopts a sales policy but shows that even with consumers having imperfect foresight the monopolist will produce products of the right durability. Their findings contrast with those of Ronald Coase who claimed that a durable good selling-monopolist would effectively price the item at marginal cost, zero in the case of land, due to time inconsistency.

After returning from a year at the University of Chicago Business School at the invitation of George Stigler and a period at the University of Rochester, Peter joined the ANU Economics Department in the Faculties for the period, 1974-1980, where he published two articles in the Journal of Political Economy, Swan (1976) and Swan (1980). The first solved a complex dynamic problem in capital theory to explain the increasing lives of cotton textile machines subject to purely labour-saving technology in the 19th Century English and New England factories. The second empirically tests the famous decision by Judge Learned Hand against the ALCOA company, one of the most celebrated judicial opinions of our time.

Swan (1975) addresses an issue with Y.K. Ng’s statement of the Coase Theorem and Swan (1976b) provides one of the first treatments of the equivalence between cash-flow and consumption taxes, both in The Economic Record.

In the Journal of Public Economics, Hillman and Swan (1983a) was the first article to successfully address the endogeneity in the number of clubs where there are both economies of scale and crowding, e.g., too many members in a swimming lane, in a market setting. They solve the problem of the willingness-to-pay Pareto-efficient club sharing rules that improve on rules derived by Y. K. Ng in a series of papers. They also showed that the optimal membership fee must reflect crowding costs, an idea with applicability to Australia’s current immigration debate. Moreover, introducing a lottery to randomise club entry (or immigrant status) gives rise to efficiency enhancement. Peter also published two articles in Econometrica, Swan (1977) and Swan (1981), over this ANU period. Both were follow-ups to his earlier work on durable goods, this time addressing issues such as taxation. Peter showed that, contrary to the literature at the time, an income tax does not distort the monopolist’s durability choice.

The study written for the Campbell Committee by Harper and Swan (1982) provided the setting for the Campbell Committee's recommendation to deregulate the Australian Financial System to replace a cartel regulated by the Reserve Bank with a far more competitive banking and financial system. Since the recommendations were implemented a complete revolution has undertaken the sector with huge growth, and the entry of mortgage originators and other competitors. Credit was rationed during the regulatory regime, making it virtually impossible for women to obtain a loan. These economic reforms undertaken by the Hawke-Keating Government paved the way for the next 34 years of economic growth and prosperity. Prior to the Campbell recommendations there was not a stand-alone department of finance in any Australian university but now they play a major role at every university due to the huge changes wrought to financial services by deregulation.

Swan (1982a,b,c,d) provides the case for complete integration of personal and corporate taxation in Australia. In response to these analyses, the Campbell Report proposed complete integration of corporate and personal taxation to eliminate double taxation of dividends to implement a fair, equitable, and efficient system based on neutrality. Close to full tax imputation was introduced in 1987 as the system of franking credits and remains in place to this day.

Swan (1983b) in The Economic Record addresses the cost of base load power and the pricing of energy to aluminium smelters. This research had a huge impact on the public debate in Victoria leading to a mass public meeting addressed by Professor Swan, an Inquiry by Professor Donald Cochrane into SECV Tariffs and substantial changes to the tariffs set for aluminium smelters in Victoria, especially at Portland. In a series of follow-up articles, also in The Economic Record, Bateson and Swan (1989) showed for the first time that what many researchers mistook for large economies of plant size are really economies in utilisation and Bateson and Swan (1990) investigated the returns earned on all the major state-owned electricity systems to show that in real terms returns were very low.

Swan (1984a), Swan (1984b), and Swan (1994a) provide an analysis of taxation systems and especially capital gains taxes, income taxes, and cash-flow taxes. In particular, in 1985 the Australian Government adopted precisely Swan’s (1984b) proposal to introduce a capital gains tax at the same rate as the income tax but fully indexed for inflation. Subsequently, the Howard Government modified this scheme by halving the capital gains tax rate in exchange for eliminating inflation indexation. The Howard Government modifications have artificially encouraged negative gearing to convert income into lowly-taxed capital gains.

Garvey and Swan (1992a,b) develop a series of agency theory models explaining managerial incentives, including the “wolf at the door” with management cowed into submission due to the threat of the debt-wolf and its ultimate sanction – bankruptcy – and in hierarchical firms with delegation to lower-level managers they show that less debt is required the deeper the hierarchy, with substantial penalties for default and the presence of passive shareholders.

Swan (1994b) describes work Peter did for the Queensland Treasury that led to the halving of stamp duty on stock exchange transactions with subsequent abolition when the GST was introduced.

Aitken, Garvey, and Swan (1995) extend the Glosten and Milgrom model of asymmetric information to demonstrate, both in theory and empirically, how “facilitation” by major banks keeps market open when they would otherwise fail. While U.S. regulators are attempting to ban deposit-taking banks from assisting their customers by taking the other size of their trades, their paper in the Journal of Business show that such principal trading benefits markets.

In a highly cited Journal of Finance article, Aitken, Frino, McCorry, and Swan (1998) are the first to analyse short-sales on an intraday basis to show that they are both bad news and immediately incorporated into asset prices. Zhou and Swan (2003) show that performance thresholds mitigate agency costs associated with the downside risk and are commonly used in executive compensation contracts. Merhebi, Pattenden, Swan, and Zhou (2006) refute earlier evidence suggesting that Australian firms differ from U.S. firms to show that, like their U.S. counterparts, Australian CEOs also benefit from similar positive pay-for-performance sensitivity. Swan (2009) examines the origins of the 2008 subprime crisis to reveal that what occurred was no accident. All the major parties responsible for the crisis appear to have gained something from what transpired, at least in the short-run.

In 2011, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) proposed that it be acquired by the Singapore Stock Exchange that was under the control of the Singapore Government. Swan and Westerholm’s (2006) global comparison of exchange performance showed that Singapore was one of the worst performers. Following a major newspaper and radio campaign led by Swan (2011a,b,c,d,e), the Treasurer intervened to prevent a takeover that would have greatly harmed the development of Australia’s financial markets and prospects for finance graduates.

Fong, Gallagher, Gardner, and Swan (2011) investigate herding by institutional investors and Fong, Lau, Gallagher, Gardner, and Swan (2013) shows that Australian institutional investors respond to alterations in the tax regime to minimise the burden of taxation on investors when they pass-through income and tax liabilities.

Gallagher, Gardner, and Swan (2013) utilise the highly confidential daily trades of major Australian funds to show that only particular cumulative, i.e. packages, of trades, namely “swing trades” in which they buy-sell-and buy again (or sell-buy-and sell) contain sizeable quantities of information. These trade sequences are not only profitable but generate subsequent sizeable firm outperformance.

Smith and Swan (2014) replicates a famous paper in the Journal of Finance to show that even the most minor alteration, for example, taking the log of firm size, either reverses or removes the claimed finding that concentrated institutional investors, in some unexplained fashion, force boards to raise option-based incentive pay and simultaneously sizeable slash CEO pay. The Journal of Finance authors were proud to boast that their findings were incompatible with any known economic model of agency.

In three recent working papers, Lu, Swan, and Westerholm (2018a), Lu, Swan, and Westerholm (2018b), and Lu and Swan (2018), an entirely new zero-sum methodology trading period invariant methodology is devised to assess trading prowess in which a dollar gain to one player is matched by a dollar loss to the other. This is demonstrated to be superior to the conventional calendar-time methodology that assumes a fixed trading interval of (say) one-day, one-week, or one-month. Since informed traders buy low and sell high and usually appear to be contrarian, buying when prices are falling and selling when rising, the standard calendar-time methodology that has been applied for over 40 years will normally indicate that the informed or astute trader with timing ability is inferior to his trend-following or positive-feedback counterparty. The first paper, Lu, Swan, and Westerholm (2018a), reverses conventional findings, to use 17 years of daily data where the portfolios and trades of all participants are known, to show that households are superior to both domestic and foreign institutional traders.

The second paper, Lu, Swan, and Westerholm (2018b), shows, using the same comprehensive data and every trade between male and female counterparties, that females are the superior traders. A summary of this paper, Swan (2018a), attracted about 28,000 downloads in approximately two days.

The third paper indicates that the daily trades of U.S. hedge funds are similar to females in that they are both informed and strongly contrarian in nature. Standard calendar time methodology applied to hedge funds indicates that while they have some trading ability, their advantage is insufficient to explain their success, given high portfolio and performance fees whereas the holding period invariant methodology indicates sufficient outperformance to explain their success.

For perhaps hundreds of years, economists have held a belief in tax-subsidy neutrality. If an ad valorum tax is applied to one side of the market and an equivalent, revenue-neutral subsidy to the other, then they must, of necessity, cancel out. The working paper by Lin, Swan, and Harris (2018) provides, for the first time a theoretical model that disproves the neutrality result in the presence of informed traders able to locate at one or more venues. The model is tested empirically using a quasi-natural experiment conducted by NASDAQ.

Lin, Swan, and Mollica (2017) investigate an experiment conducted by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in which the minimum spread for smaller companies is raised by 400%, from 1 cent to 5 cents. They find that lit markets in general are harmed to the benefit of dark pools, but in lit markets inverted markets benefit relative to maker-taker markets in which the limit-order-book is subsidised.

Swan (2018b) utilizes a new CAPM Beta methodology based on an unbiased single-pass cross-sectional regression to show that franking credits are almost fully priced relative to stocks that never pay franking credits because they invest off-shore. The most plausible explanation is that ineligible foreign investors harvest franking credits by conversion to capital gains. An important implication of this finding is that the Australian Government’s proposal to cut corporate taxes by 17% over ten years, at a cost to revenue of billion and ongoing, to billion p.a., with the need for commensurate rises in taxes on Australians, is not likely to lead to significant additional investment.

Krug, Swan, and Westerholm (2018) investigate the decision by the Helsinki (NASDAQ) Exchange to provide traders in all but the top five stocks with ex-post broker IDs. Their difference-in-difference analysis shows that institutional selling costs declined very significantly with greater break-up of orders and a puzzling decline in trade volume.

In Swan (2018c), Peter provides a new theory as to why Adam Smith, 1776, Berle and Means, 1932, Jensen and Meckling, 1976, and many other agency theorists were wrong in either predicting the demise of the modern corporation or unable to explain its success. Separation of ownership and control is the main governance problem facing the modern corporation. With no one to care for passive outside investors, large and liquid companies should not exist.

Peter hypothesizes that informed speculators fulfill this role by monitoring management. Indeed, in the manager’s optimal contract, he shows that stock price weight (inside ownership) must fall with more informative stock prices and scale. Holmstrom and Tirole (1993) seems to rule out this monitoring explanation by its (false) finding that market monitoring gives rise to high- not low-powered incentives.

References

Swan (1968). “The Australian Balance of Payments and Capital Imports 1914–15 to 23–24”, Australian Economic Papers, Vol. 7, No. 10 (June 1968): 91–103.

Swan (1970). “Durability of Consumption Goods”, American Economic Review, Vol. 60, No. 5 (December 1970): 884–894.

Swan (1971a). “The Durability of Goods and Regulation of Monopoly”, Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 1971): 347–357.

Swan (1971b). “Market Structure and Technological Progress: The Influence of Monopoly on Product Innovation”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 84, No. 4 (November 1971): 627–638.

Swan (1972a). “The Influence of Monopoly on Product Innovation: Rejoinder”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 86, No. 2 (May 1972): 346–349.

Swan (1972b). “Optimum Durability, Second–Hand Markets and Planned Obsolescence”, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 80, No. 3, Part 1 (May 1972): 575–585.

Sieper and Swan (1973). “Monopoly and Competition in the Market for Durable Goods”, Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 40, No. 3 (July 1973): 333–351. (with E. Sieper).

Swan (1975). “The Coase Theorem and ‘Sequential’ Pareto Optimality”, The Economic Record, Vol. 51 (June 1975): 268–271.

Swan (1976a). “Optimum Replacement of Capital Goods with Labor-saving Technical Progress: A Comparison of the Early New England and British Textile Firm”, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 84, No. 6 (December 1976): 1293–1303.

Swan (1976b). “Income Taxes, Profit Taxes and Neutrality of Optimizing Decisions”, The Economic Record, Vol. 52 (June 1976): 166–181.

Swan (1977). “Product Durability under Monopoly and Competition: Comment”, Econometrica, Vol. 45, No. 1 (January 1977): 229–235.

Swan (1980). “Alcoa: The Influence of Recycling on Monopoly Power”, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 88, No. 1 (February 1980)

Swan (1981). “Durability and Taxes: Market Structure and Quasi–Capital Market Distortion”, Econometrica, Vol. 49(2), March 1981, pp.425–435.

Harper and Swan (1982). “The Welfare Gains from Bank Deregulation”, Australian Financial System Inquiry, Commissioned Studies and Selected Papers, Part 1, AGPS, 1982, pp.475–512 (with I. Harper).

Swan (1982a). “Is There a Case for Complete Integration of Corporate and Personal Income Taxes?”, Australian Financial System Inquiry, Commissioned Studies and Selected Papers, Part 3, AGPS, 1982, pp.1–32.

Swan (1982b). “An Optimum Business Tax Structure for Australia”, Australian Financial System Inquiry, Commissioned Studies and Selected Papers, Part 3, 1982, AGPS, pp.33–89.

Swan (1982c) “A Comment on Professor John G. Head, Company Taxation—Some Further Reflections”, Australian Financial System Inquiry, Commissioned Studies and Selected Papers, Part 3, pp.226–229.

Swan (1982d). “Further Notes on the Integration of Company and Personal Taxation”, Australian Financial System Inquiry, Commissioned Studies and Selected Papers, Part 3, AGPS, 1982, pp.90–100.

Swan (1983a). “Participation rules for Pareto–optimal clubs”, Journal of Public Economics, 20 (1983), 55–76. (With A.L. Hillman).

Swan (1983b). “The Marginal Cost of Base–Load Power: An Application to Alcoa’s Portland Smelter”, The Economic Record, Vol.59 (December 1983), 332–344.

Swan (1984a). “Capital Gains Taxes, Cash Flow Taxes and Corporate Tax Reform”, Australian Tax Forum, Vol.1 No.3 (September 1984), 293–311.

Swan (1984b). “Why the Capital Gains Tax will Backfire”, Australian Business, December 19th, 1984, 15–17.

Bateson and Swan (1989). “Economies of Scale and Utilization: An Analysis of the Multi–Plant Generation Costs of the Electricity Commission of New South Wales, 1970/71–1984/85”, The Economic Record, Vol. 65 (191) (December 1989), 329–344 (with Jeff Bateson).

Bateson and Swan (1990). “Real Rates of Return in Electricity Supply: New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria”, The Economic Record, 66, 193, (June 1990), 93-109.

Garvey and Swan (1992a). “Managerial Objectives, Capital Structure and the Provision of Worker Incentives”, Journal of Labor Economics 10(4), October 1992, 357–379.

Garvey and Swan (1992b). “Optimal Capital Structure for a Hierarchical Firm”, Journal of Financial Intermediation, 2, No. 4, 1992, 376–400 (with Gerald T. Garvey).

Garvey and Swan (1994). The Economics of Corporate Governance: Beyond the Marshallian Firm, Journal of Corporate Finance 1, 1994, 139-174 (with Gerald T. Garvey).

Swan (1994a). “The Taxation of Capital Gains when the Cash Component of Income is Taxed”, Abacus, 30(2), September 1994, 160-174.

Swan (1994b). “Responsiveness of Share Trading to Transaction Costs”, ASX Perspective, Vol. 1, 1994 published by the Australian Stock Exchange, 19-26.

Aitken, Garvey, and Swan (1995). “How Brokers Facilitate Trade for Long-Term Clients in Competitive Securities Markets”, The Journal of Business, 68 (1) January 1995, 1-33.

Aitken, Frino, McCorry, and Swan (1998). “Short Sales are Almost Instantaneously Bad News: Evidence from the Australian Stock Exchange”, Journal of Finance 53, No. 6, December 1998, 2205-2224.

Zhou and Swan (2003). “Performance Thresholds in Incentive Contracts”, Journal of Business 76 (4) 2003, 665-696.

Merhebi, Pattenden, Swan, and Zhou (2006). “Australian chief executive officer remuneration: pay and performance.” Accounting and Finance, 41, 2006, 481-497 (with Rachel Merhebi, Kerry Pattenden and Xianming Zhou).

Swan and Westerholm (2006). Market Architecture and Global Exchange Efficiency: One Design Need Not Fit All Stock Sizes, UNSW Working paper.

Gallagher, Gardner, and Swan (2009). “Portfolio Pumping: An Examination of Investment Manager Quarter-End Trading and Impact on Performance,” Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, 17 (January 2009), 1-27, with David R. Gallagher and Peter Gardner.

Swan (2009). “The political economy of the subprime crisis: Why subprime was so attractive to its creators,” European Journal of Political Economy 25 (March 2009), 124-132.

Swan (2011a). Howard government's failure set scene for ASX-Singapore debacle. The Australian, January 31.

Swan (2011b). Grass greener for local bourse without SGX, Financial Standard, February 16.

Swan (2011c) Lip Gloss on a Pig, The Australian, February 29.

Swan (2011d). Share cap likely to kill ASX-Singapore exchange merger, The Australian, March 2. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/share-cap-likely-to-kill-asx-singapore-exchange-merger/story-e6frg8zx-1226014353422

Swan (2011e). Swan right to reject Singapore takeover of ASX, The Australian, April 12.

Fong, Gallagher, Gardner, and Swan (2011). “Follow the leader: fund managers trading in signal-strength sequence,” Accounting & Finance 51, 684-710, with Kingsley Y. L. Fong, David R. Gallagher, and Peter A. Gardner.

Fong, Lau, Gallagher, and Swan (2013). “Do Active Fund Managers Care About Capital Gains Tax Efficiency?” Pacific-Basin Finance Journal 17 (April, 2009), 257–270. With Kingsley Y.L. Fong, David R. Gallagher, and Sarah S.W. Lau.

Gallagher, Gardner, and Swan (2013). “Governance through Trading: Institutional Swing Trades and Subsequent Firm Performance”. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (JFQA) 48, No. 2, Apr. 2013, 427–458 (with David R. Gallagher and Peter A. Gardner).

Smith and Swan (2014). “Do concentrated institutional investors really reduce executive compensation whilst raising incentives?” Critical Finance Review 2014, 3, 49–83. (with Gavin Smith).

Lu, Swan, and Westerholm (2017). The Gender Face-Off: Do Females Traders come out On-Top, UNSW Working Paper.

Swan (2018a). https://theconversation.com/why-women-make-the-best-stock-traders-74081.

Lu, Swan, and Westerholm (2018). “Other People’s Money”: The Trading Performance of Household Investors vs. Delegated Money Managers, UNSW Working Paper.