Role of accounting, Accounting education

Journal Article The Economics of the Iron and Steel Industry Get access M. M. Bober M. M. Bober Lawrence College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 52, Issue 1, November 1937, Pages 179–185, https://doi.org/10.2307/1884504 Published: 01 November 1937

Journal Article Recent Literature on the Origins of Modern Capitalism Get access M. M. Knight M. M. Knight Paris, France Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 41, Issue 3, May 1927, Pages 520–533, https://doi.org/10.2307/1883704 Published: 01 May 1927

We develop a model of liquidity shortages that incorporates a general equilibrium feature of liquidity: when banks hold more liquidity, other agents in the economy hold less of it and will supply less in times of crisis. We show that the private holdings of liquidity at banks are inefficient, with the direction of the bias being determined by the characteristics of the suppliers of liquidity to banks. Minimum liquidity requirements for banks may reduce welfare; in such cases interest rate policies that stimulate the ex-post supply of liquidity can restore efficiency. Overall, our results show that optimal liquidity policies critically depend on a financial institution’s (marginal) source of liquidity and will hence differ across institutions of different types.

This paper studies rehypothecation, a practice in which financial institutions re-pledge collateral pledged to them by their clients. Rehypothecation enhances provision of funding liquidity to the economy, but it also incurs deadweight cost by misallocating the asset among the agents when counterparties fail. We examine the possibility of a conflict between the intermediary and its borrower on rehypothecation arrangements. The direction of this conflict depends on haircuts of the contract between them: if the contract involves over-collateralization, there tends to be an excessive use of rehypothecation, and if the contract involves under-collateralization, there tends to be an insufficient use of rehypothecation. This offers an empirical prediction of a link between the size of haircut in collateralized financial contracts, borrower information, and the likelihood of rehypothecation.

This paper investigates whether functional diversification is value-enhancing or value-destroying in the financial services sector, broadly defined. Based on a U.S. dataset comprising approximately 4060 observations covering the period 1985–2004, we report a substantial and persistent conglomerate discount among financial intermediaries. Our results suggest that it is diversification that causes the discount, and not that troubled firms diversify into other more promising areas. In addition, the discount applies to all financial services activity-areas with the exception of investment banking and is stable over different combinations of financial activity-areas with the exception of commercial banking units combined with insurance companies and/or investment banking activities.

This paper argues that the presence of both profit-based and stock price-based components in compensation contracts provides senior managers the incentive to optimally allocate effort to both implementing previously devised strategies that provide current profits and to formulating new strategies that create shareholder value. If managers are concerned about their reputation and if outcomes of strategy implementation are more informative about their ability than outcomes of strategy formulation, compensation based only on profit will incent managers to boost their reputation by over-allocating effort to strategy implementation. To restore the balance the contract needs to contain some stock-based compensation.

This paper argues that banks must be sufficiently levered to have first-best incentives to make new risky loans. This result, which is at odds with the notion that leverage invariably leads to excessive risk taking, derives from two key premises that focus squarely on the role of banks as informed lenders. First, banks finance projects that they do not own, which implies that they cannot extract all the profits. Second, banks conduct a credit risk analysis before making new loans. Our model may help understand why banks take on additional unsecured debt, such as unsecured deposits and subordinated loans, over and above their existing deposit base. It may also help understand why banks and finance companies have similar leverage ratios, even though the latter are not deposit takers and hence not subject to the same regulatory capital requirements as banks.

Equity capital allocation plays a particularly important role for financial institutions such as banks, who issue equity infrequently but have continuous access to debt capital. In such a context this paper shows that EVA and RAROC based capital budgeting mechanisms have economic foundations. We derive optimal capital allocation under asymmetric information and in the presence of outside managerial opportunities for an institution with a risky and a riskless division. It is shown that the results extend in a consistent manner to the multidivisional case of decentralized investment decisions with a suitable redefinition of economic capital. The decentralization leads to a charge for economic capital based on the division's own realized risk. Outside managerial opportunities increase the usage of capital and lead to overinvestment in risky projects; at the same time more capital is raised but risk limits are binding in more states. An institution with a single risky division should base its hurdle rate for capital allocated on the cost of debt. In contrast, the hurdle rate tends to the cost of equity for a diversified multidivisional firm. The analysis shows that hurdle rates have a common component in contrast to the standard perfect markets result with division-specific hurdle rates.

This paper tests a new hypothesis that bank managers issue public debt, at least in part, to convey positive, private information and refrain from issuance to hide negative, private information. This “positive selection” hypothesis is tested against the traditional “adverse selection” hypothesis. We find evidence for “positive selection,” using ratings migrations, equity returns, bond issuance, and balance sheet data for US bank holding companies. The results add to our understanding of “market discipline” in monitoring bank holding companies and also inform upon how proposed regulatory requirements that banking organizations frequently issue public debt might augment “market discipline.”