In the context of world economic integration, Vietnam's market-oriented economy is facing many opportunities and also many challenges. Market factors are gradually dominating and dominating economic activities, affecting overall economic achievements and in almost all production and consumption sectors. Shipping in general and shipping by the sea, in particular, is one of the economic sectors most affected by the process of openness and international economic integration. As government intervention in the economy decreases, the fluctuations in the total output of the economy, according to the cycle theory, are considered more. Continuous fluctuations and cyclical themselves are made up of variables related to the results of production and business of economic sectors, which transport goods by sea are one of them. Quantitative analysis is being used in many types of research on economic and financial fields in the world as well as in Vietnam. For a more holistic, comprehensive, and scientific view, the use of a powerful quantitative tool, it allows assessment of multidimensional relationships between macro variables and variables that reflect the industry's production results. The Vector Autoregression (VAR) is one of the reasonably standard quantitative models used to determine the multidimensional relationship between economic factors supposedly related to each other. Use this model to analyze the relationship between some key macroeconomic indicators and the volume of goods transported by sea in Vietnam. The author finds that there is a relatively close relationship between import and export turnover of goods and sea transport output. This result suggests many policy ideas to develop both international trade and shipping activities in Vietnam in the current period. On the other hand, the quantitative model used in the project can be applied at the enterprise level to help managers identify the impact of economic fluctuations on production and business results. On that basis, appropriate decisions will be made in the context of ongoing short-term economic fluctuations.

Purpose: Prior studies empirically examine how financial flexibility is related to required returns by using realized returns and considering cash holdings as net debts, but they fail to find consistent results. Conjecturing that inappropriate proxy of required returns and aggregation of cash and debts caused the inconsistent results, this study revisits this topic by using a refined proxy of required returns and separating cash holdings from debts. Research design, data and methodology: This study uses a multivariate regression model to investigate the relationship between required returns on cash holdings and financial leverage. The required returns are estimated using the return decomposition method by vector autoregression model. Empirical tests use US stock market data from1968 to 2011. Results: Empirical results reveal that both cash holdings and leverage are positively related to required returns. The positive relation is stronger in economic downturns than in economic upturns. Conclusions: Three major findings are drawn. First, risky firms prefer large cash balance. Second, information shocks in the realized returns caused failure of prior studies to find consistent positive relationship between leverage and realized returns. Third, cash and leverage are related to required returns in the same direction; therefore, cash cannot be considered as negative debts.

Purpose: This study reexamines the test on the pricing of accruals quality. Theory suggests that information risk is a priced risk factor. Using accruals quality as the proxy for information risk, researchers have tested the pricing of information risk. The results are inconsistent potentially because of the information shock in the realized returns that are used as the proxy for expected returns. Based on this argument, this study revisits this issue excluding information-shock-free measure of expected returns. Research design, data and methodology: This study estimates expected returns using the vector autoregression model. This method extracts information shocks more thoroughly than the methods in prior studies; therefore, the concern regarding information shock is minimized. As risk premiums are larger in recession periods than in expansion periods, recession and expansion subsamples were used to confirm the robustness of the main findings. For the pricing test, this study uses twostage cross-sectional regression. Results: Empirical results find evidence that accruals quality is a priced risk factor. Furthermore, this study finds that the pricing of accruals quality is observed only in recession periods. Conclusions: This study supports the argument that accruals quality, as well as the pricing of information risk, is a priced risk factor.