Knowledge that Transforms

This paper is motivated by the progressive liberalisation of the European insurance market in recent years. It uses stochastic frontier analysis to estimate Flexible Fourier cost functions for European insurance companies. Separate frontiers are estimated for life, non-life and composite companies. We adopt a maximum likelihood approach to estimation in which the variance of both one-sided and two-sided error terms is modelled jointly with the frontiers. This approach allows us to simultaneously control for the impact of heteroskedasticity on the estimation of scale economies as well as estimating the effect of firm size and market structure on X-inefficiency. The study draws on Standard & Poor’s Eurothesys data set of financial reports for the period 1995 to 2001. This provides technical and non-technical accounts at year-end for life, non-life and composite insurance businesses in 14 major European countries. Our estimates suggest that over this period most European insurers were operating under conditions of decreasing costs (increasing returns to scale), and that company size and domestic market share were significant factors determining X-inefficiency. Larger firms, and those with high market shares, tend to have higher levels of cost inefficiency.

This paper provides new evidence on the time-series predictability of stock market returns by introducing a test of nonlinear mean reversion. The performance of extreme daily returns is evaluated in terms of their power to predict short- and long-horizon returns on various stock market indices and size portfolios. The paper shows that the speed of mean reversion is significantly higher during the large falls of the market. The parameter estimates indicate a negative and significant relation between the monthly portfolio returns and the extreme daily returns observed over the past one to eight months. Specifically, in a quarter in which the minimum daily return is −2% the expected excess return is 37 basis points higher than in a month in which the minimum return is only −1%. This result holds for the value-weighted and equal-weighted stock market indices and for each of the size decile portfolios. The findings are also robust to different sample periods, different indices, and investment horizons.

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between banking sector reform and bank performance – measured in terms of efficiency, total factor productivity growth and net interest margin – accounting for the effects through competition and bank risk-taking. To this end, we develop an empirical model of bank performance, which is consistently estimated using recent econometric techniques. The model is applied to bank panel data from ten newly acceded EU countries. The results indicate that both banking sector reform and competition exert a positive impact on bank efficiency, while the effect of reform on total factor productivity growth is significant only toward the end of the reform process. Finally, the effect of capital and credit risk on bank performance is in most cases negative, while it seems that higher liquid assets reduce the efficiency and productivity of banks.

The transaction cost theory of managerial ownership and firm value predicts that deviations from optimal managerial ownership reduce firm value. This paper empirically tests the transaction cost theory by studying the relation between deviations on either side of optimal CEO ownership and firm value. We find that both above-optimal and below-optimal deviations reduce firm value. We find that a change in CEO ownership is associated with a higher (lower) abnormal return if it moves the ownership towards (away from) the optimal level. These findings are consistent with the transaction cost theory of managerial ownership and firm value.

This paper examines the degree of pass-through and adjustment speed of retail interest rates in response to changes in benchmark market rates in New Zealand during the period 1994–2004. We consider the effects of policy transparency and financial structure of the monetary transmission mechanism. New Zealand is the first OECD country to adopt a full-fledged inflation targeting regime with specific accountability and transparency provisions. Policy transparency was further enhanced by a shift from quantity (settlement cash) to price (interest rate) operating targets in 1999. Using Phillips–Loretan estimates of cointegrating regressions we find complete long-term pass-through for some but not all retail rates. Our results also show that the introduction of the Official Cash Rate (OCR) increased the pass-through of floating and deposit rates but not fixed mortgage rates. In line with previous studies we find the immediate pass-through of market interest rates to bank retail rates to be incomplete. Although we find no statistical evidence for asymmetric response of retail rates to changes in market rates other than for business lending rates in the pre OCR period, differences in the magnitude of mean adjustment lags indicate that banks appear to pass on decreases to fixed mortgage rates faster. Overall, our results confirm that monetary policy rate has more influence on short-term interest rates and that increased transparency has lowered instrument volatility and enhanced the efficacy of policy.

This paper deals with a portfolio selection model in which the methodologies of robust optimization are used for the minimization of the conditional value at risk of a portfolio of shares. Conditional value at risk, being in essence the mean shortfall at a specified confidence level, is a coherent risk measure which can hold account of the so called “tail risk” and is therefore an efficient and synthetic risk measure, which can overcome the drawbacks of the most famous and largely used VaR. An important feature of our approach consists in the use of techniques of robust optimization to deal with uncertainty, in place of stochastic programming as proposed by Rockafellar and Uryasev. Moreover we succeeded in obtaining a linear robust copy of the bi-criteria minimization model proposed by Rockafellar and Uryasev. We suggest different approaches for the generation of input data, with special attention to the estimation of expected returns. The relevance of our methodology is illustrated by a portfolio selection experiment on the Italian market.

Share repurchases help alleviate agency costs of surplus cash by restricting management’s scope to waste corporate resources. But why do self-interested managers agree to disgorge surplus cash in the first place? This study examines the intervening effect of managerial monitoring and incentive alignment mechanisms on the decision to distribute excess cash through a share repurchase. Findings indicate that repurchases substitute for cash retention decisions that would otherwise prove costly for shareholders, and that better managerial incentive alignment and closer monitoring by external shareholders are important factors stimulating such payouts.

This paper investigates the characteristics of the operational loss data formation mechanism that takes place between the date of discovery of a new operational risk event and the final settlement date on which all losses are materialized. The first loss that characterizes the initial impact of a new operational risk event frequently triggers a sequence of related losses. Then, losses generated by the same event are not independent and follow a predictable scheme and the frequency of secondary losses is not homogeneous: both are functions of the initial loss amount and time. We model the arrival intensity and loss severities with a shot-noise stochastic process and derive its key properties. We then discuss implications of our model for the estimation of the regulatory capital charge for operational risk. In an empirical analysis, we find strong evidence of a shot-noise behavior in operational losses using the data of a major US commercial bank.

This paper examines the demand for directors’ and officers’ liability insurance (D&O insurance) by Chinese listed companies where controlling-minority shareholder incentive conflicts are acute due to the concentrated and split ownership structure. We hypothesize and find evidence that the incidence of seeking D&O insurance is positively related to the extent of controlling-minority shareholder incentive conflicts – a finding not previously documented in the literature. Using an event study, we find that the announcements of D&O insurance decisions in firms that engage in earnings management, and/or are controlled by a local government (such firms tend to have stronger incentives to tunnel), seem to have a negative wealth effect. In addition, the incidence of the D&O insurance decision is positively related to the proportion of independent directors and several litigation risk proxies. Therefore, the breakthrough in corporate governance and judicial reforms has created non-negligible perceived securities litigation risks in China.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between bank risk and product diversification in the changing structure of the European banking industry. Based on a broad set of European banks for the period 1996–2002, our study first shows that banks expanding into non-interest income activities present higher risk and higher insolvency risk than banks which mainly supply loans. However, considering size effects and splitting non-interest activities into both trading activities and commission and fee activities we show that the positive link with risk is mostly accurate for small banks and essentially driven by commission and fee activities. A higher share of trading activities is never associated with higher risk and for small banks it implies, in some cases, lower asset and default risks.