Prediction, Decision making, Sequential patters, Time-series

Ian R. C. Eggleton, [Discussion of Patterns, Prototypes, and Predictions: An Exploratory Study]: A Reply, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 14, Studies on Human Information Processing in Accounting (1976), pp. 145-158

Financial institutions are financed by both investors and customers. Investors expect an appropriate risk-adjusted return for providing financing and risk bearing. Customers, in contrast, provide financing in exchange for specific services, and want the service fulfillment to be free of the intermediary's credit risk. We develop a framework that defines the roles of customers and investors in intermediaries, and use it to build an economic theory that has the following main findings. First, with positive net social surplus in the intermediary-customer relationship, the efficient (first best) contract completely insulates the customer from the intermediary's credit risk, thereby exposing the customer only to the risk inherent in the contract terms. Second, when intermediaries face financing frictions, the second-best contract may expose the customer to some intermediary credit risk, generating “customer contract fulfillment” costs. Third, the efficiency loss associated with these costs in the second best rationalizes government guarantees like deposit insurance even when there is no threat of bank runs. We further discuss the implications of this customer-investor nexus for numerous issues related to the design of contracts between financial intermediaries and their customers, the sharing of risks between them, ex ante efficient institutional design, regulatory practices, and the evolving boundaries between banks and financial markets.

This paper investigates whether the institutional affiliation of a collateralized loan obligation (CLO) manager influences the manager's access to information and risk appetite. We find that CLO managers affiliated with banks start to sell off their positions in loans arranged by their bank well before the onset of default. In contrast, CLO managers affiliated with nonbanks do not lower their exposures to distressed loans. These findings are consistent with bank-affiliated CLO managers being more risk averse, but they could also derive from them having access to valuable information. On close inspection, we find that although bank-affiliated CLO managers are averse to holding any distressed loans, they are also more aggressive at divesting distressed loans arranged by their parent bank, suggesting that they benefit from an information wedge. Besides helping us understand CLO managers’ trading activities, our findings highlight a potential limit to banks’ ability to originate loans and distribute them via their affiliated CLOs.

Our study of the corporate loan pricing policies of U.S. banks over the past two decades shows that loan spreads for riskier firms become relatively lower during periods of monetary policy easing compared to tightening. This effect is driven by banks with greater risk appetite, measured from individual banks’ answers to the Senior Loan Officers Opinion Survey. Our results hold with different fixed effects that account for time-varying observed and unobserved heterogeneity of credit demand and bank lending conditions that are not directly related to monetary policy. Together with our survey-based measure of bank risk appetite, we provide compelling evidence of the presence of a bank risk-taking channel of monetary policy in the U.S.

In this article we investigate the disincentive effects of shortening the potential duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. We identify these disincentive effects by exploiting changes in Slovenia’s unemployment insurance system—a “natural experiment” that involved substantial reductions in the potential duration of benefits for four groups of workers plus no change in benefits for another group (which served as a natural control). We find that the change had a positive effect on the exit rate from unemployment—to new jobs and other options—for unemployment spells of various lengths and for several categories of unemployed workers.

We use data from the Canadian 2-year longitudinal Labour Market Activity Survey of 1986-87 to estimate the effect of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system on job duration. Particular attention is focused on the "entrance requirements" of the UI system, which relate eligibility for UI benefits to an individual's recent employment history. The article makes operational the UI entrance requirement provisions which take into account variations in the regional unemployment rate. Controlling for many personal and job characteristics, we find evidence that a significant number of jobs terminate when they have reached the duration that would permit a UI claim.

A model of unemployment duration is estimated with weekly micro data on Canadian men. Ent itlement provisions in the unemployment insurance program and demand conditions are found to have a significant effect on the probability of leaving unemployment. The probability of a worker leaving unemploy ment declines with the duration of unemployment, holding unemployment insurance entitlement constant. When entitlement is allowed to vary, the probability of leaving first falls and then generally rises with unemployment duration. These results are robust with respect to allo wing for person-specific unobserved heterogeneity and alternative spe cifications of duration dependence.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of how job search requirements under various government programs influence job search behavior. The analysis indicates that job search requirements exert a significant impact on certain aspects of the job search process, but not those that generally lead to a higher probability of employment. It is also found that persons who utilize intensively search activities that result in direct employer contact have much shorter durations of unemployment than persons who do not utilize such activities intensively. It is speculated that altering job search requirements to include more direct employer contact could lead to a significant reduction in unemployment.

Building on the work of Bernard and Thomas 1990, we develop a model to infer the degree to which the information in an earnings announcement is incorporated into investors' expectations for the subsequent earnings announcement at any point in time between the two announcements. We are unable to reject the null hypothesis that investors' earnings expectations are based on a seasonal random walk and reflect none of the implications of the immediately prior earnings announcement up to 15 trading days after that announcement. By mid‐quarter, expectations are significantly more sophisticated than a seasonal random walk. Two trading days before the next earnings announcement, as much as one half of the information in the prior earnings announcement is reflected in earnings expectations. We also find that the dissemination of information, albeit predictable information, speeds the incorporation of prior earnings information into earnings expectations. Our results suggest that as information about future earnings that could have been discerned from the earlier announcements (because past earnings surprises predict future ones) is disseminated in a more transparent form, investors revise their earnings expectations to reflect this information. Thus, the investors' expectations appear to incorporate more and more of the serial correlation in earnings surprises as the quarter progresses, even though they do not consider per se the serial correlation in earnings surprises in forming their expectations.