This paper examines granularity adjustments to parameter estimators in a default risk model with cohorts. The model is an extension of the Vasicek model (Vasicek, 1991) and includes a general factor and cohort specific factors. The granularity adjustments derived in the paper concern the mean and/or the variance of observed default frequencies and are easy to implement in practice. For illustration, the method is applied to the S&P corporate ratings. The Granularity Adjusted (GA) estimators are compared to the unadjusted estimators in terms of their asymptotic properties and in finite sample.

The recent global financial crisis demonstrates that market liquidity is a prominent systematic risk globally. We find that local liquidity risk, in addition to the local market, value and size factors, demands a systematic premium across stocks in 11 developed markets. This local pricing premium is smaller in countries where the country-level corporate boards are more effective and where there are less insider trading activities. We also discover that global liquidity risk is a significant pricing factor across all developed country market portfolios after controlling for global market, value, and size factors. The contribution of this risk to the return on a country market portfolio is economically and statistically significant within and across regions.

We analyze the impacts of an additional rider incorporated in recent retirement products. The payoff is linked to the performance of a multi asset investment strategy and includes a minimum interest rate guarantee. In addition, the buyer receives the option to decide on the investments dynamically. Prominent examples are so called variable annuities. Due to the embedded guarantee, these products are interesting for risk averse investors who benefit from diversification. However, the price setting of the provider takes into account the most risky strategy. This implies that the investor mitigates optimally between the diversification and the worst case strategy. We analyze the distortion and utility effects caused by the additional rider in the presence of background risk and borrowing constraints. A simulation analysis sheds light on the question if the additional rider is worth its costs.

This paper provides an empirical investigation of both the within-US and international channels of transmission of macroeconomic and financial shocks by means of a 50-country macroeconometric model (estimated over the 1980–2009 period), including measures of excess liquidity and financial fragility, specifically designed in order to evaluate the relevance of the boom-bust credit cycle view put forward as an interpretation of the recent “Great Recession” episode. We find that such a view is consistent with the empirical evidence. Moreover, concerning the real effects of financial shocks within the US, we detect stronger evidence of an asset prices channel, rather than a liquidity channel. Concerning the spillovers to the world economy, we find that while financial disturbances are transmitted to foreign countries through US house and stock price dynamics, as well as excess liquidity creation, the trade channel is the key trasmission mechanism of real shocks.

Although financial development is good for long-term growth, not all countries pursue policies that render full financial development. This paper builds on an extensive political economy literature to construct a theoretical model showing that the intensity of opposition to financial development by incumbents depends on both their degree of credit dependency and the role of governments in credit markets. Empirical evidence for this claim is provided, and the results suggest that lower opposition to financial development leads to an effective increase in credit markets’ development only in those countries that have high government capabilities. Moreover, improvements in government capabilities have a significant impact on credit market development only in those countries where credit dependency is high (thus, opposition is low). This paper therefore contributes to this rich literature by providing a unified account of credit market development that includes two of its main determinants, traditionally considered in isolation.

We explore the relation between family ownership and corporate investment policy. Our analysis centers on two incentives, risk aversion and extended investment horizons, which potentially influence the level and type of investments that family firms undertake. We find that family firms devote less capital to long-term investments than firms with diffuse ownership structures. When dividing long-term investment into its two components of R&D and capital expenditures, we note that family firms, relative to nonfamily firms, prefer investing in physical assets relative to riskier R&D projects. Additional tests indicate that family firms receive fewer patent citations per dollar of R&D investment relative to nonfamily firms. Overall, all empirical results indicate that family preferences for lower firm risk, across all family sub-types, affects corporate R&D spending and capital expenditures.

This paper contributes to the literature on the relation between bank profitability and economic activity. When allowing for stronger co-movement of bank profit with economic activity during deep recessions, we find a much larger impact of output growth on bank profitability than commonly found in the literature. Among the different components of bank profit, loan losses are the main driver of this result. We also find long-term interest rates in previous years to be important determinants of bank profit in times of high economic growth. Our findings are robust to the use of aggregate or individual bank data.

There is a long running debate over whether competition in the mutual fund industry limits the ability of investment advisors to charge fees that are disproportionate to the services they provide. We posit that disproportionately high fees are prevalent in funds with multiple share classes and those with weak governance structures. Using a comprehensive sample of index mutual funds for the from 1998 to 2007, we find that internal governance mechanisms matter primarily for funds with relatively small share classes where investors often face increased search costs and/or restricted access to competitive mutual funds. Additionally, we find that funds managed by publicly held sponsors are associated with disproportionately higher fee spreads (about 28 basis points). The results are robust to the inclusion of board characteristics, share class structure, and investment objectives. Overall, our findings suggest that competition and agency considerations are important determinants in the pricing of mutual funds.

We propose the use of stochastic frontier approach to modelling financial constraints of firms. The main advantage of the stochastic frontier approach over the stylised approaches that use pooled OLS or fixed effects panel regression models is that we can not only decide whether or not the average firm is financially constrained, but also estimate a measure of the degree of the constraint for each firm and for each time period, and also the marginal impact of firm characteristics on this measure. We then apply the stochastic frontier approach to a panel of Indian manufacturing firms, for the 1997–2006 period. In our application, we highlight and discuss the aforementioned advantages, while also demonstrating that the stochastic frontier approach generates regression estimates that are consistent with the stylised intuition found in the literature on financial constraint and the wider literature on the Indian credit/capital market.

We investigate the influence of national culture on corporate debt maturity choice. Based on the framework of Williamson, we argue that culture located in social embeddedness level can shape contracting environments by serving as an informal constraint that affects human actors’ incentives and choices in market exchange. We therefore expect national culture to be related to debt maturity structure after controlling for legal, political, financial, and economic institutions. Using Hofstede’s four cultural dimensions (uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, power distance, and masculinity) as proxies for culture, and using a sample of 114,723 firm-years from 40 countries over the 1991–2006 period, we find robust evidence that firms located in countries with high uncertainty avoidance, high collectivism, high power distance, and high masculinity tend to use more short-term debt. We interpret our results as consistent with the view that national culture helps explain cross-country variations in the maturity structure of corporate debt.