Knowledge that Transforms

The staged financing hypothesis of Mayers [Mayers, D., 1998. Why firms issue convertible bonds: The matching of financial and real investment options. Journal of Financial Economics 47, 83–102] predicts that investment and financing activity will increase following in the money convertible bond calls. The prediction for out of the money convertible calls is different: no increase is expected. We study the rate of both corporate investment and external financing around forced conversions using benchmarks that are analogous to those recommended by Barber and Lyon [Barber, B., Lyon, J., 1996. Detecting abnormal operating performance: The empirical power and specification of test statistics. Journal of Financial Economics 41, 359–400]. We also examine the cross-section of changes in investment and financing activity. Conversion-forcing firms exhibit an increase in both capital expenditures and debt financing around the year of the convertible bond call; however, the same result holds for the sample firms that conducted out-of-the-money convertible calls. Further, there is no relation between changes in investment activity and changes in debt issuance at the firm level. The evidence is inconsistent with the notion that forced conversions serve as a catalyst for staged financing and investment.

This paper examines the responsiveness of external bank liabilities to deposit insurance policies for a sample of developed countries. External bank liabilities held by non-banks are found to increase after the introduction of explicit deposit insurance. Deposit insurance schemes tend to exclude interbank deposits from coverage and the response of external interbank liabilities to deposit insurance appears to be varied. Neither external non-bank nor external interbank liabilities are found to be materially affected by deposit insurance design. This suggests that international competition in the area of deposit insurance design – as possible under the EU deposit insurance directive of 1994 – would be fruitless.

We analyze if the value-weighted stock market portfolio is stochastic dominance (SD) efficient relative to benchmark portfolios formed on size, value, and momentum. In the process, we also develop several methodological improvements to the existing tests for SD efficiency. Interestingly, the market portfolio seems third-order SD (TSD) efficient relative to all benchmark sets. By contrast, the market portfolio is inefficient if we replace the TSD criterion with the traditional mean–variance criterion. Combined these results suggest that the mean–variance inefficiency of the market portfolio is caused by the omission of return moments other than variance. Especially downside risk seems to be important for explaining the high average returns of small/value/winner stocks.

When identifying optimal portfolios, practitioners often impose a drawdown constraint. This constraint is even explicit in some money management contracts such as the one recently involving Merrill Lynch’ management of Unilever’s pension fund. In this setting, we provide a characterization of optimal portfolios using mean–variance analysis. In the absence of a benchmark, we find that while the constraint typically decreases the optimal portfolio’s standard deviation, the constrained optimal portfolio can be notably mean–variance inefficient. In the presence of a benchmark such as in the Merrill Lynch–Unilever contract, we find that the constraint increases the optimal portfolio’s standard deviation and tracking error volatility. Thus, the constraint negatively affects a portfolio manager’s ability to track a benchmark.

Using ‘American depository receipt’ (ADR) data on various countries, this paper sets out to investigate the relationship between investor protection and firm liquidity. Since weak investor protection leads to greater expropriation by managers, and thus greater asymmetric information costs, liquidity providers will incur relatively higher costs and will therefore offer higher bid–ask spreads. The empirical results demonstrate that the liquidity costs of poor investor protection were more significant during the period of the Asian financial crisis when the expected agency costs were particularly severe. This issue is further analyzed by investigating whether there is any evidence of increases in the vulnerability of ADRs of firms operating in countries with relatively poor investor protection mechanisms during periods of financial crisis.

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the short-term interest-rate dynamics based on three different data sets and two flexible parametric specifications. The significance of nonlinearity in the short-rate drift declines with increasing maturity for the interest-rate series used in the study. Using a flexible diffusion specification and incorporating GARCH volatility and non-normal innovation reduce the need for a nonlinear drift specification. Finally, the nonlinear drift specification performs better than the linear drift specification only when the short-term interest-rate levels reach historical highs.

This paper analyzes the systematic relationship between the stock market valuations, the nominal GDPs and the interest rates of six Asian countries, using not “single equation regression”, but an alternative methodology based on complete, multidirectional, least squares projections in the tradition of Frisch (1934). We compare the results with the spectral analysis of the information matrices and determine the noise levels. The objective is to extract the multidimensional economic system structures from the noisy empirical observations. This complete methodology sharply contrasts with the incomplete methodology of Fama [Fama, E.F., 1990. Stock returns, expected returns, and real activity. Journal of Finance 45, 1089–1108] and Schwert [Schwert, G.W., 1990. Stock returns and real activity: A century of evidence. Journal of Finance 45, 1237–1257], etc., who presume planal relations, fit them to the multidimensional data by only one prejudiced unidirectional projection, thereby ignoring between 75% and 92% of the available covariance information and not publishing all possible model projections. The results in this paper show that the analyzed countries are better analyzed using such complete multidirectional LS projections, even though the analysis is combinatorially much more complex. All six Asian financial-economic systems are high data noise environments, in which it is very difficult to separate the systematic signals from the noise. Because of these high noise levels, spectral analysis is very unreliable. We identify Taiwan’s stock market, economy and financial market to be rationally coherent. In contrast, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Indonesia show only partially coherent systems, while no coherent system can be identified among Japan’s data.

We argue that changes in the monetary and financial regimes over the last twenty years or so have been subtly altering the dynamics of the economy and hence the challenges that monetary and prudential authorities face. In particular, the current environment may be more vulnerable to the occasional build up of financial imbalances, i.e. over-extensions in (private sector) balance sheets, which herald economic weakness and unwelcome disinflation down the road, as they unwind. As a result, achieving simultaneous monetary and financial stability in a lasting way may call for refinements to current monetary and prudential policy frameworks. These refinements would entail a firmer long-term focus, greater symmetry in policy responses between upswings and downswings, with greater attention to actions during upswings, and closer coordination between monetary and prudential authorities.

This paper investigates the market structure of Arab GCC banking industry during the years of 1993–2002 using the most frequently applied measures of concentration k-bank concentration ratio (CRk) and Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) and evaluates the monopoly power of banks over the ten years period using the ‘H-statistic’ by Panzar and Rosse. The results show that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and UAE have moderately concentrated markets and are moving to less concentrated positions. The measures of concentration also show that Qatar, Bahrain and Oman are highly concentrated markets. The Panzar–Rosse H-statistics suggest that banks in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE operate under perfect competition; banks in Bahrain and Qatar operate under conditions of monopolistic competition; and we are unable to reject monopolistic competition for the banking market in Oman.