Examining banks across 27 countries, we estimate two measures of the forward-looking orientation reflected in discretionary loan provisioning practices within a country. We document that forward-looking provisioning designed to smooth earnings dampens discipline over risk-taking, consistent with diminished transparency inhibiting outside monitoring. In contrast, forward-looking provisioning reflecting timely recognition of expected future loan losses is associated with enhanced risk-taking discipline. Thus, proposals to change loan loss accounting embed significant risks of unintended consequences, as gains from reducing pro-cyclicality may be swamped by losses in transparency that dampen market discipline and increase the scope for less prudent risk-taking by banks.

We find that common equity firms pay lower D&O insurance premiums than income trusts, an alternative and riskier ownership form. This result has wide-ranging implications for investors insofar as the information provided by D&O insurers provides investors with an unbiased signal of the firm's governance risk. The signal is unbiased because it comes from an entity (i.e. the insurer) that has a direct financial incentive to correctly assess an organization's governance risk, in contrast to other ad hoc governance measures and indices.

[We compare the ability of three measurement error remedies to deliver unbiased estimates of coefficients in investment regressions. We examine high-order moment estimators, dynamic panel estimators, and simple instrumental variables estimators that use lagged mismeasured regressors as instruments. We show that recent investigations of this question are largely uninformative. We find that all estimators can perform well under correct specification, all can be biased under misspecification, and misspecification is easiest to detect in the case of high-order moment estimators. We develop and demonstrate a minimum distance technique that extends the high-order moment estimators to be used on unbalanced panel data.]

Institutional trading arrangements often involve the portfolio manager delegating the task of trade execution to a separate division within the firm. We model the agency conflict that arises in this setting and show that optimal performance benchmarks often create an incentive to execute orders contrary to concurrent information flow. We hypothesize that aggregate contrarian trading resulting from widespread application of such benchmarks leads to delays in the assimilation of information in security prices. Using institutional trading data, we document the hypothesized contrarian trading pattern and relate the pattern to price-adjustment delays in the response of individual stocks to index futures returns. The evidence supports the assertion that delegated institutional trading contributes to these delays.

ABSTRACT We investigate the role played by the reputation of lead arrangers of syndicated loans in mitigating information asymmetries between borrowers and lenders. We hypothesize that syndications by more reputable arrangers are indicative of higher borrower quality at loan inception and more rigorous monitoring during the term of the loan. We investigate whether borrowers with more reputable lead arrangers realize superior performance subsequent to loan origination relative to borrowers with less reputable arrangers. We further examine whether certification by high‐reputation lead banks extends to the quality of borrowers’ reported accounting numbers. Controlling for endogenous matching of borrowers and lead banks, we find that higher bank reputation is associated with higher profitability and credit quality in the three years subsequent to loan initiation. We also show that bank reputation is associated with long‐run sustainability of earnings via higher earnings persistence, and debt contracting value of accounting via a stronger connection between pre‐loan profitability and future credit quality. We further document that the enhanced earnings sustainability associated with higher reputation lead banks reflects both superior fundamentals and accruals more closely linked with future cash flows.

Why is it difficult to restructure sovereign debt in a timely manner? In this paper, we present a theory of the sovereign debt-restructuring process in which delay arises as individual creditors hold up a settlement in order to extract greater payments from the sovereign. We then use the theory to analyse recent policy proposals aimed at ensuring equal repayment of creditor claims. Strikingly, we show that such collective action policies may increase delay by encouraging free riding on negotiation costs, even while preventing hold-up and reducing total negotiation costs. A calibrated version of the model can account for observed delays and finds that free riding is quantitatively relevant: whereas in simple low-cost debt-restructuring operations, collective mechanisms will reduce delay by more than 60%, in high-cost complicated restructurings, the adoption of such mechanisms results in a doubling of delay.

Due to its simplicity and familiarity, the Gaussian copula is popular in calculating risk in collaterized debt obligations, but it imposes asymptotic independence such that extreme events appear to be unrelated. This restriction might be innocuous in normal times, but during extreme events, such as the housing crisis, the Gaussian copula might be inappropriate. This paper explores various copula specifications and finds that the degree to which housing prices are related based on the Gaussian copula is too small compared with real housing price data. © 2012 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A detailed analysis of 49 firms subject to AAERs suggests that approximately one-quarter of the misstatements meet the legal standards of intent. In the remaining three quarters, the initial misstatement reflects an optimistic bias that is not necessarily intentional. Because of the bias, however, in subsequent periods these firms are more likely to be in a position in which they are compelled to intentionally misstate earnings. Overconfident executives are more likely to exhibit an optimistic bias and thus are more likely to start down a slippery slope of growing intentional misstatements. Evidence from a high-tech sample and a larger and more general sample support the overconfidence explanation for this path to misstatements and AAERs.

The use of research and development (R&D) spending as an empirical proxy for managerial discretion, information asymmetry and growth opportunities, is pervasive in empirical corporate finance research. Underlying this is the implicit assumption that firms choose levels of R&D to maximize value, given firm and industry characteristics. An alternative framework views the level of R&D spending as subject to idiosyncratic behavior as managers myopically manipulate R&D expenditures to meet short-term earnings goals. Using aggregate firm and industry level data, we find evidence consistent with the view that R&D is determined by firm and industry characteristics. Time invariant firm and industry fixed effects explain most of the cross-sectional variation in observed R&D spending, while time-varying factors like size, profitability, or market-to-book explain little of the cross-sectional variation. We find that R&D spending continues to grow faster than advertising and capital expenditures. We also find no evidence of managerial myopia as corporate aggregate R&D expenditures are growing faster than aggregate profitability and the number of firms that undertake R&D has increased over the period from 1976 to 2010.

This paper develops a unified framework to analyze the dynamics of firm investment in countries with poor legal enforcement. The firm's technology edge over the government generates endogenous property rights. Industry variation in the technology gap predicts a sectoral pecking-order of expropriations. Long-run investment distortions may be Pareto superior relative to persistent investment at the static optimum. The dynamics of investment and transfers depend on whether incentives (backloading) or efficiency (frontloading) concerns dominate at the initial division of surplus. An increase in government efficiency may reduce its welfare. The model provides a technology-driven rationale for the widespread use of conglomerate structures in emerging market countries.