Knowledge that Transforms

This study examines how holding voting shares in banks can impact the improvement of firms’ investment efficiency in the Chinese capital market. We found that bank ownership improved firms’ investment efficiency by mitigating both overinvestment and underinvestment and by improving investment sensitivity to investment opportunities. We further found that alleviation of overinvestment in firms was driven by the enhancement of corporate governance (disclosure channels). The better corporate governance in bank holding firms reduced corporate cash holdings and controlling shareholder expropriations. Moreover, we found that this bank-firm connection reduced underinvestment by mitigating financial constraints (financing channels), through the raising of more bank loans and the reduction of the cash flow sensitivity of cash holdings. This connection also served as a buffer when bank lending is tightened. Finally, we found that bank ownership had a more pronounced impact on improving investment efficiency in non-SOEs, in firms located in provinces with low marketization, and in firms without institutional investors.

We model deposit insurance as a European put option on the value of the bank in which bank assets follow a displaced lognormal diffusion process. We derive closed-form solutions for the value of the bank for bank equity holders, depositors, and the deposit insurer under three deposit insurance schemes that are representative of deposit insurance around the world. Doing so allows us to compute actuarially fair insurance premiums that are risk adjusted, include market information, and explicitly account for the diverging effects of safe versus risky assets on bank risk. We illustrate the use of the model on a sample of 212 U.S. bank holding companies and discuss practical considerations for implementing the model. Implications for our model as a market-based, early indicator of bank risk are considered.

We use data from betting markets to analyze the sensitivity of stock returns to potential outcomes of political events such as elections. By classifying stocks into expected conditional winners and losers prior to such an event, we form portfolios that generate large positive returns after the event date, conditional on correctly anticipating the outcome. The approach is illustrated using data from the 2016 US presidential election and the 2016 Brexit referendum. We show that these sensitivities contain information about event-related returns beyond that of firm characteristics whose predictive power has been documented in the literature.

In Das et al. (2010), an agent divides his or her wealth among mental accounts that have different goals and optimal portfolios. While the moments of the distribution of asset returns are exogenous in their normative model, they are endogenous in our corresponding positive model. We obtain the following results. First, there are multiple equilibria that we parameterize by the implied risk aversion coefficient of the agent’s aggregate portfolio. Second, equilibrium asset prices and the composition of optimal portfolios within accounts depend on this coefficient. Third, altering the goal of any given account affects the composition of each portfolio.

We examine the effect of a pre-IPO audit committee on IPO pricing from the perspectives of information asymmetry and agency problems. We propose a bargaining power hypothesis to disentangle the information asymmetry explanation (financial reporting quality) from the agency problems explanation (underwriter bargaining power) on IPO pricing. IPO underpricing can be reduced by increasing the financial reporting quality under information asymmetry and/or by decreasing the underwriter bargaining power under agency problems. An audit committee can raise the quality of financial reporting and reduce the bargaining power of underwriters. With a pre-IPO market, the IPO markets in Taiwan have little information asymmetry, thus leading to the weak importance of reducing information asymmetry. We show that the establishment of a pre-IPO audit committee improves IPO pricing efficiency by reducing underwriter bargaining power rather than by raising the quality of financial reporting in Taiwan.

This paper studies the mechanism of adverse selection in the credit market using a sample of mortgage applications that are approved by lenders but rejected by applicants. We find that a low-risk applicant is more likely to reject a loan offer, except when the offer is made by an informed lender. Using jumbo mortgage and loan acceptance rate data to proxy for the information advantage, we find that lenders with a lower likelihood of being rejected are indeed better informed than others.

This study explores the extent to which a firm's debt maturity structure affects the cost of bank loans. By examining the U.S. syndicated loans from 1990 and 2014, we find that debt maturity structure is a major determinant of loan spreads, after accounting for firm- and loan-specific variables and firm and year fixed effects. A one standard deviation increase in the ratio of short-term debt to total assets is associated with an increase of 11.44 basis points in loan spread, representing an additional $0.644 million in interest expenses. The results support the rollover risk hypothesis, which predicts that short-term debts intensify the shareholder and bondholder conflicts and lead to greater credit risk. In addition, high-growth firms experience significantly smaller increases in their loan spreads than low-growth firms when the short-term debt ratio increases. This finding is consistent with the asset substitution theory that short-term debt mitigates the managerial/shareholders’ risk-taking incentives, leading to a decrease in firm risk. Our results remain strong when we use alternative short-term debt proxies, address endogeneity concerns, and perform various robustness tests.

We study whether the presence of major customer-supplier relationships affects a supplier's cost of debt. Using 5,704 U.S. corporate bonds issued from 1983 to 2013, we find that the cost of debt tends to be reduced when there are major customer-supplier relationships. This finding is robust to alternative measures of major customer-supplier relationships, subsample analyses, a propensity score matched sample analysis, and an instrumental variables approach. The results are consistent with the certification hypothesis, where a major customer serves as a monitoring and certifying entity for its supplier, thereby reducing information asymmetry between the supplier and its creditors. Moreover, the supplier's cost of debt is further reduced if the issuing supplier has higher asset specificity, whereas suppliers in more competitive industries do not incur the benefits of the validation.

We investigate whether and how the uniqueness of banking activities affects the performance and systemic risk of U.S. banks. We find that banks performing more unique activities exhibit higher profitability and lower risk, controlling for size, diversification, and other key characteristics. We further find that banks’ sensitivity to systemic risk displays an inversely U-shaped relation with activity uniqueness. We interpret the impact of uniqueness in analogy to recent theories showing that systemic diversity promotes financial stability. Our study highlights the role of uniqueness in banking and has important implications for policy makers and banking regulators.

When almost all underlying assets suddenly lose a certain part of their nominal value in a market crash, the diversification effect of portfolios in a normal market condition no longer works. We integrate the crash risk into portfolio management and investigate performance measures, hedging and optimization of portfolio selection involving derivatives. A suitable convex conic programming framework based on parametric approximation method is proposed to make the problem a tractable one. Simulation analysis and empirical study are performed to test the proposed approach.