Knowledge that Transforms

This paper estimates a structural demand model for commercial bank deposit services in order to measure the effects on consumers given dramatic changes in bank services throughout US branching deregulation in the 1990s. Following the discrete choice literature, consumer decisions are based on prices and bank characteristics. Consumers are found to respond to deposit rates, and to a lesser extent, to account fees, in choosing a depository institution. Moreover, consumers respond favorably to the branch staffing and geographic density, as well as to the bank’s age, size, and geographic diversification. Consumers in most markets experience a slight increase in welfare throughout the period.

In designing credit rating systems under the new Basel Accord, considerable effort has been devoted to rating assignment and quantification, while the choice of the optimal bucket structure has received less attention. To fill this gap, we propose two “bucketing” strategies based on constrained optimisation, paying attention to the implications of rating buckets for loan-pricing and adverse selection phenomena. We compare them with some more naïve approaches, based on a sample of about 100,000 European companies. We also analyse the persistence of our performance measures over time, as well as the effect of large exposures being associated with low-PD obligors.

By examining a sample of non-listed Chinese firms, we provide the first evidence from China for the effect of managerial ownership on firm performance. In matching-sample comparisons, we find that firms of significant managerial ownership outperform firms whose managers do not own equity shares. Our further results indicate the relation between firm performance and managerial ownership is nonlinear, and the inflection point at which the relation turns negative occurs at ownership above 50%. Compared with previous studies, our results are less likely to suffer from an endogeneity problem due to the non-list nature of our sample and the unique institutional environment in China.

This paper examines the relation between the new markets for credit default swaps (CDS) and banks’ pricing of syndicated loans to US corporates. We find that changes in CDS spreads have a significantly positive coefficient and explain about 25% of subsequent monthly changes in aggregate loan spreads during 2000–2005. Moreover, when compared to traditional explanatory factors, they turn out to be the dominant determinant of loan spreads. In particular, they explain loan rates much better than same rated bonds. This suggests that CDS prices contain, beyond general credit risk, to a substantial extent information relevant for bank lending. We also find that, over time, new information from CDS markets is faster incorporated into loans, but information from other markets is not. Overall, our results indicate that the markets for CDS have gained an important role for banks.

Rating transition matrices for corporate bond issuers are often based on fitting a discrete time Markov chain model to homogeneous cohorts. Literature has documented that rating migration matrices can differ considerably depending on the characteristics of the issuers in the pool used for estimation. However, it is also well known in the literature that a continuous time Markov chain gives statistically superior estimates of the rating migration process. It remains to verify and quantify the issuer heterogeneity in rating migration behavior using a continuous time Markov chain. We fill this gap in the literature. We provide Bayesian estimates to mitigate the problem of data sparsity. Default data, especially when narrowing down to issuers with specific characteristics, can be highly sparse. Using classical estimation tools in such a situation can result in large estimation errors. Hence we adopt Bayesian estimation techniques. We apply them to the Moodys corporate bond default database. Our results indicate strong country and industry effects on the determination of rating migration behavior. Using the CreditRisk+ framework, and a sample credit portfolio, we show that ignoring issuer heterogeneity can give erroneous estimates of Value-at-Risk and a misleading picture of the risk capital. This insight is consistent with some recent findings in the literature. Therefore, given the upcoming Basel II implementation, understanding issuer heterogeneity has important policy implications.

In this paper we provide a framework that explains how the market risk premium, defined as the difference between forward prices and spot forecasts, depends on the risk preferences of market players and the interaction between buyers and sellers. In commodities markets this premium is an important indicator of the behavior of buyers and sellers and their views on the market spanning between short-term and long-term horizons. We show that under certain assumptions it is possible to derive explicit solutions that link levels of risk aversion and market power with market prices of risk and the market risk premium. We apply our model to the German electricity market and show that the market risk premium exhibits a term structure which can be explained by the combination of two factors. Firstly, the levels of risk aversion of buyers and sellers, and secondly, how the market power of producers, relative to that of buyers, affects forward prices with different delivery periods.

We propose a new methodology to provide fair prices of international mutual funds by adjusting prices at the individual security level using a comprehensive and economically relevant information set. Stepwise regressions are used to endogenously determine the stock-specific optimal set of factors. Using 16 synthetic funds whose characteristics are extracted from 16 corresponding actual US-based Japanese mutual funds, we demonstrate that our method estimates fund prices significantly more accurately than existing methods. Although existing fair-pricing methods provide an improvement over the current practice of simply using Japanese market closing prices, they are still highly vulnerable to exploitation by market-timers. By contrast, our method is the most successful in preventing such strategic exploitation since no competing method can profit from our stated prices.

This study assesses whether the widely documented momentum profits can be attributed to time-varying risk as described by a GJR-GARCH(1,1)-M model. We reveal that momentum profits are a compensation for time-varying unsystematic risks, which are common to the winner and loser stocks but affect the former more than the latter. In addition, we find that, perhaps because losers have a higher propensity than winners to disclose bad news, negative return shocks increase their volatility more than they increase those of the winners. The volatility of the losers is also found to respond to news more slowly, but eventually to a greater extent, than that of the winners.

This study forwards an explanation and empirical investigation of price clustering in retail banking markets. It is proposed that price or interest rate clustering forms in retail markets as firms wish to maximise returns from customers, some of whom have difficulties in recalling and processing price information. This theory is developed and tested using a dataset of retail interest rates from the UK which enables interest rate clustering to be viewed in both lending and investment markets, and at different levels of financial involvement. It is found that interest rate clustering occurs in a manner consistent with firms maximising returns from customers. These findings are viewed to be a key policy concern for financial regulators and firms concerned with consumer protection.

The Basel 2 Accord requires regulatory capital to cover stress tests, yet no coherent and objective framework for stress testing portfolios exists. We propose a new methodology for stress testing in the context of market risk models that can incorporate both volatility clustering and heavy tails. Empirical results compare the performance of eight risk models with four possible conditional and unconditional return distributions over different rolling estimation periods. When applied to major currency pairs using daily data spanning more than 20 years we find that stress test results should have little impact on current levels of foreign exchange regulatory capital.