Knowledge that Transforms

Over the past decade, financial companies have merged diverse areas including investment banking, insurance, retail banking, and trading operations. Despite this diversity, many global financial firms suffered severe losses during the recent recession. To reduce enterprise risks and increase profits, we apply a decentralized risk management strategy based on a stochastic optimization model. We extend the decentralized approach with the CVaR risk-metric, showing the advantages of CVaR over traditional risk measures such as value-at-risk. An example taken from the earthquake insurance area illustrates the concepts.

This paper examines the role of private support institutions in determining small and medium enterprise (SMES) growth and performance in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It finds that SMES in SSA get around market failures and lack of formal institutions by creating private governance systems in the form of long-term business relationships and tight, ethnically based, business networks. There are important links between these informal governance institutions and SME performance. Networks raise the performance of “insiders” and, in the sparse business environments of the SSA region, have attendant negative consequences for market participation of “outsiders,” such as indigenous-African SMES. This is indicated through the determinants of access to supplier credit. Policy interventions will be needed to improve the platform for relation-based governance mechanisms and to address the exclusionary effects of tight networks.

We show that exposure to foreign currency debt does not necessarily increase the risk of having a financial crisis. Some countries do not suffer from financial fragility despite original sin. Before 1913 British offshoots and Scandinavia afflicted with it avoided financial meltdowns. Today many advanced countries have original sin, but few have had crises. In both periods, aggregate balance sheet mismatches are associated with a greater likelihood of a crisis. The evidence suggests that foreign currency debt is dangerous when mis-managed. This is part of the difference between developed countries and emerging markets both of which borrow in foreign currency.

This paper presents a model for approximating the value of a basket of default-correlated assets and analyzes subordinate tranches in securitized debt obligations. The model is calibrated to an intensity-based simulation of correlated defaults and represents an alternative computation method to full Monte Carlo simulation. Timing of individual obligor defaults are driven by intensity processes and collateral value is modeled with a jump-diffusion process where the number of jumps corresponds to the total number of defaults in the asset pool. This approach allows decomposition of subordinate obligations in terms of a collection of simpler securities and yields useful risk management information.

This research study examines the tendency for serial correlation in bank holding company profitability, finding significant evidence of reversion to the industry mean in profitability. The paper then considers the impact of mean reversion on the evaluation of post-merger performance of bank holding companies. The research concludes that when an adjustment is made for the mean reversion, post-merger results significantly exceed those of the industry in the first 5 years after the merger.

We investigate whether firms with strong corporate governance benefit from higher credit ratings relative to firms with weaker governance. We document, after controlling for firm-specific risk characteristics, that credit ratings are negatively associated with the number of blockholders and CEO power, and positively related to takeover defenses, accrual quality, earnings timeliness, board independence, board stock ownership, and board expertise. We also provide evidence that CEOs of firms with speculative-grade credit ratings are overcompensated to a greater degree than their counterparts at firms with investment-grade ratings, thus providing one explanation for why some firms operate with weak governance.

This paper examines the relation between revenue surprises and contemporaneous and future stock returns. It also investigates whether analysts update their earnings forecasts in response to revenue surprises in a timely and unbiased fashion. Stock price reaction on the earnings announcement date is significantly related to contemporaneous as well as past revenue surprises. After controlling for earnings surprises, we find significant abnormal returns in the post-announcement period for stocks that have large revenue surprises. Although analysts revise their forecasts of future earnings in response to revenue surprises, they are slow to incorporate fully the information in revenue surprises.

Theory suggests that managers issue earnings forecasts to reduce information asymmetry. An earnings forecast is more effective in reducing information asymmetry if it contains earnings news that is relatively more informative about the firm's value. We hypothesize that a manager is more likely to issue an earnings forecast if investors perceive that earnings are more informative. We measure earnings informativeness by estimating the firm's earnings response coefficient (ERC) in quarters prior to the forecast issuance decision. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that the firm's historic ERC is positively associated with management's issuance of earnings forecasts.

Lang, Raedy and Wilson (henceforth LRW) (2006) compare the properties of U.S. GAAP accounting numbers across cross-listed and U.S. firms. Using a wide range of properties, LRW show that accounting data are not comparable, even though sample firms use the same accounting standards. I discuss how these findings advance the literature and what they imply for the effectiveness of cross listing as a bonding mechanism. My discussion highlights that documented differences cannot be solely attributed to weak U.S. legal enforcement. I emphasize that accounting standards provide discretion and that cross-listed and U.S. firms are likely to have differential incentives to use this discretion. To illustrate, I document that cross-listed and U.S. firms differ in ownership concentration and that these differences are associated with the level of earnings management. I also provide evidence that home-country institutions continue to influence cross-listed firms’ reporting behavior.

This paper explores financial reporting incentives created by an economy's institutional structure. The underlying premise of our analysis is that a country's legal/judicial system, securities laws, and political economy create incentives that influence the behavior of corporate executives, investors, regulators and other market participants. Further, such incentives ultimately shape the properties of reported accounting numbers. We empirically analyze relations between key characteristics of country-level institutions and the asymmetric recognition of economic gains and losses into earnings (i.e., conditional conservatism). We also provide evidence on channels through which specific institutions manifest their influence on observed conservatism.