Trade Credit Risk Management: The Role of Executive Risk‐Taking Incentives

In this study we investigate how executive equity incentives affect companies’ risk‐taking behavior in relationships with their customers. We hypothesize and find that executive risk‐taking incentives provided by options are positively related to the degree of trade credit riskiness measured both as the amount of total trade credit a firm extends to all its customers and as the amount of trade credit a firm extends to customers with a high probability of default. We also find that the measures of trade credit riskiness are positively related to the firm's future stock return volatility, suggesting that the customer default risk inherent in customer‐supplier trade credit relationships represents an important economic source of the overall supplier‐firm riskiness. The findings of the study provide insights into why firms facing financial difficulties are not denied trade credit.     

The effect of major customer concentration on firm profitability: competitive or collaborative?

We test two potential hypotheses regarding the effects of major customer concentration on firm profitability. Under the collaboration hypothesis, customer power facilitates collaboration, and both the supplier firm and its major customers obtain benefits. Under the competition hypothesis, customer power results in rent extraction, and the major customers benefit at the expense of the supplier firm. We document that major customer concentration is negatively associated with the supplier firm’s profitability but positively associated with the major customers’ profitability. We demonstrate that these effects weaken as the supplier firm’s own power grows over its relationship with major customers, supporting the competition hypothesis. We carefully reconcile our results with prior studies’ findings that focus only on the supplier firm’s profitability and identify their research design and interpretation problems. We obtain similar inferences in a setting of major customers’ horizontal mergers and when we use an alternative measure of major customer power.

     

基于RFM模型的个人客户忠诚度研究

本文在总结个人客户忠诚研究理论的基础上,提出了基于RFM模型的多层级个人客户忠诚度衡量指标及评估模型。作者利用商业银行数据仓库积累的数据,对个人客户忠诚度进行了实证研究,分析和评价了个人客户的总体忠诚度,以及活期存款、信用卡、定期存款、理财类和贷款的分产品忠诚度;结合客户的收入贡献,将个人客户划分为"挚友、藤壶、蝴蝶、陌生人"四类客户群体,并建议在实际业务应用中,对"挚友"客户重点维系;对"藤壶"客户重点营销,提升其价值;对"蝴蝶"客户进行维护时侧重挽留;而对"陌生人"客户要及时辨识,努力唤醒,降低维系成本。     

The Effect of Bank Credit on Asset Prices: Evidence from the Japanese Real Estate Boom during the 1980s

This paper studies whether bank credit fuels asset prices. Financial deregulation during the 1980s allowed keiretsus to obtain finance publicly and reduce their dependence on banks. Banks that lost these blue-chip customers increased their property lending, and serve as an instrument for the supply of real estate loans. Using this instrument, I find that a 0.01 increase in a prefecture's real estate loans as a share of total loans causes 14–20% higher land inflation compared with other prefectures over the 1981–91 period. The timing of losses of keiretsu customers also coincides with subsequent land inflation in a prefecture.     

Corporate capital structure and the characteristics of suppliers and customers

We investigate the link between a firm's leverage and the characteristics of its suppliers and customers. Specifically, we examine whether firms use decreased leverage as a commitment mechanism to induce suppliers/customers to undertake relationship-specific investments. We find that the firm's leverage is negatively related to the R&D intensities of its suppliers and customers. We also find lower debt levels for firms operating in industries in which strategic alliances and joint ventures with firms in supplier and customer industries are more prevalent. Consistent with a bargaining role for debt, we find a positive relation between firm debt level and the degree of concentration in supplier/customer industries.     

Optimal introductory pricing for new financial services

Financial services institutions often provide special introductory prices to new customers who sign up for their services such as credit cards, credit monitoring services and online stock trading. Despite their prevalence, the decision to provide introductory prices to new customers entails challenges for decision makers. Providing small incentives may not perceptibly affect the adoption of the service while providing a large incentive leads to the loss of revenue and profits. As a result, the effectiveness of such activities on firm profitability remains largely unexplored. This study seeks to address this gap in the literature by exploring optimal introductory pricing of a financial service. Employing agent-based simulation experiments, we find that offering introductory discounts significantly increases a firm’s net present value (NPV) of profits. Moreover, the findings suggest the amount of discount and the duration of time that a new customer receives the discount are critical factors in determining the NPV of profits. The research and managerial implications are discussed.     

Tests of ex ante versus ex post theories of collateral using private and public information

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant empirical literature has been unable to isolate each of these effects. This paper attempts to do so using a credit registry that is unique in that it allows the researcher to have access to some private information about borrower risk that is unobserved by the lender. The data also include public information about borrower risk, loan contract terms, and ex post performance for both secured and unsecured loans. The results suggest that the ex post theories of collateral are empirically dominant, although the ex ante theories are also valid for customers with short borrower–lender relations that are relatively unknown to the lender.     

The market’s use of supplier earnings information to value customers

In this paper we examine whether the quarterly earnings announcements of supplier firms contain information about their customer’s earnings. Our evidence suggests that they do. Specifically, we find evidence consistent with the market impounding supplier firm earnings information into the stock prices of the firm’s customers. This is consistent with the market using the supplier’s earnings to help assess the customer firm’s future cash flows and/or uncertainty of those cash flows. We also find that the quality of the earnings influences the magnitude of the customer firm’s stock price reaction. The customer’s stock price reaction is increasing in the revenue growth reported by the supplier and the past persistence of the supplier’s earnings. Additional tests reveal that the market reaction is amplified when the customer firm is more dependent on the supplier. Finally, we find that the relative bargaining power of the customer influences the market reaction to supplier earnings. While prior research has documented that the market uses industry peer earnings and customer earnings in pricing a firm’s stock, this is the first study to provide evidence on the market’s use of supplier earnings information.     

DETERMINANTS OF CAPITAL STRUCTURE IN BUSINESS START‐UPS: THE ROLE OF NONFINANCIAL STAKEHOLDER RELATIONSHIP COSTS

According to the finance literature, nonfinancial stakeholders (NFS), such as customers, suppliers, and employees, take into account their expected liquidation costs when dealing with a firm. In this framework, firms can influence their probability of liquidation by choosing an appropriate capital structure. Also, the literature suggests NFS bargaining power may affect firm financing decisions. In the current article we investigate these ideas for initial financing decisions by business start‐ups, where ex ante failure risk is high and NFS must decide whether to make relationship‐specific investments. We find that start‐ups imposing larger costs on their NFS following liquidation significantly reduce leverage. This effect is strengthened when suppliers have greater bargaining power. We also document a marginally negative effect of NFS liquidation costs on the proportion of bank loans. Finally, business start‐ups rely less on bank loans when customers and suppliers are in a powerful bargaining position.     

What price loyalty? A fresh look at loyalty programs in the credit card industry

There is controversy about the effects of loyalty programs in the customer relationship management literature. Although some managers and researchers believe that customer loyalty created through loyalty programs leads to higher firm profits, others have found evidence that loyalty programs do not have a positive effect on firm's profits. In this article, we present our findings regarding the effect of reward cards and affinity cards on customer profitability in the context of credit card industry. We find surprising evidence that customers who own either a reward card or an affinity card generate significantly less profit than those customers who do not have these cards. Equally puzzling is the fact that these customers also have lower average lifetime with the firm. This leads us to a puzzle as to why these practices are widely prevalent in the industry. We find that loyalty cards provide value to the issuers in terms of risk management. They serve as a mechanism to reduce the risk associated with more profitable customers by attracting less risky customers. Thus, through loyalty cards the financial institution is able to balance out the total risk of the portfolio of customers by acquiring customers, who although less profitable, are less risky.     

Greasing the wheels of bank lending: Evidence from private firms in China

Bribery, rather than firm performance, largely determines the extent to which private firms access bank credit in China. Bribery enables an economic outcome whereby firms with better economic performance are awarded larger loans. These firms also pay more in terms of bribes. Although satisfactory firm performance does determine whether firms can access loans, it does so only for loans originated by the big-four banks. For loans originated by smaller banks, performance is not essential for firms to secure loan access. Our evidence sheds light on the surprising finding of earlier studies that Chinese banks use commercial logic in their lending practices despite being endowed with a weak institutional framework.     

The Role of Lending Banks in Forced CEO Turnovers

This article investigates the governance role of banks exercised through the replacement of underperforming CEOs in borrowing firms. An average level of bank loans outstanding implies a 22% to 47% increase in the forced turnover probability of a borrowing firm’s CEO if a firm’s industry adjusted performance is one standard deviation below average. This increase is much larger, 68% to 92%, when an underperforming firm violates its loan covenants. Overall, the paper’s findings suggest that banks play a key role in the governance of underperforming firms, especially when covenants are violated.     

Earnings performance of major customers and bank loan contracting with suppliers

Using a sample of 3725 loan facility–years for supplier firms that have financial data on their major customers during the period 1995–2011, this study investigates whether the earnings performance of major customers has effect on the price and nonprice terms of loans to the supplier firms. We find that various contracting terms are more favorable for loans to supplier firms whose major customers have higher return on assets (ROA). More importantly, we find that the effect of major customers’ earning performance on loan contracting terms is weaker for the borrowers with prior loan relationships with banks, while it is stronger for the borrowers that are highly dependent on their major customers. Our results suggest that banks take into account major customers’ earnings performance when contracting with their supplier firms, and the informativeness of customer earnings varies with the nature and strength of the customer–supplier relationships.     

Why are some modes of acquisition more profitable? A study of the credit card industry

A key challenge in financial services marketing is attracting good customers to the firm. For most financial services firms, including credit card firms, a good customer is also a profitable customer. Managers would like to use marketing tactics that attract the most profitable customers while closely monitoring and perhaps limiting expenditures on marketing tactics that tend to attract relatively less profitable customers. Therefore, managers need to understand the relative effectiveness of different modes of new account acquisition and the impact that the various modes of acquisition may have on overall account profitability. To date, there have been very few studies that have calculated individual level customer profitability and then investigated the relationship between new customer acquisition source and customer profitability. That is, how do modes of acquisition differ in their ability to attract profitable customers? We answer this question using a proprietary and novel data set from the credit card industry. Of the four modes of acquisition used in this industry, we find that Internet and direct mail efforts generate more profitable customers than telemarketing and direct selling. We provide possible explanations for these findings. Our work adds to the growing literature in customer relationship management and our results have important managerial implications for resource allocation among acquisition strategies.     

对产业集群客户授信风险管理的思考

贷款客户集中度是衡量贷款风险的一项重要指标。特别是2008年世界金融危机发生后,各国都在防范金融风险上加强控制,随着巴塞尔协议3逐步广泛得到世界各国的认同和实施,贷款集中度问题越来越应该引起重视。但是,由于事实上的微观动作,贷款集中有趋重的趋势,其中产业集群客户授信是重要手段。本文结合授信风险管理存在的问题提出建议。     

Consumer credit-risk models via machine-learning algorithms

We apply machine-learning techniques to construct nonlinear nonparametric forecasting models of consumer credit risk. By combining customer transactions and credit bureau data from January 2005 to April 2009 for a sample of a major commercial bank’s customers, we are able to construct out-of-sample forecasts that significantly improve the classification rates of credit-card-holder delinquencies and defaults, with linear regression R²’s of forecasted/realized delinquencies of 85%. Using conservative assumptions for the costs and benefits of cutting credit lines based on machine-learning forecasts, we estimate the cost savings to range from 6% to 25% of total losses. Moreover, the time-series patterns of estimated delinquency rates from this model over the course of the recent financial crisis suggest that aggregated consumer credit-risk analytics may have important applications in forecasting systemic risk.     

商业信用与合作型客户关系的构建——基于提供给大客户应收账款的经验证据

利用我国上市公司前5名应收账款欠款人信息以及前5名大客户信息的披露数据,本文较为直接地考察了企业是否以及如何利用应收账款的产品质量担保功能与大客户构建合作型客户关系。研究结果表明,客户集中度越高,企业提供给大客户的信用政策越宽松,即应收账款金额越多,信用期限越长;进一步研究发现,在与主要客户地理位置相似度较低的企业、处于竞争性行业的企业以及营商环境较好的地区,上述两者之间的正相关关系有所增强。最后,本文发现,在与大客户构建合作型客户关系时,企业向这些大客户提供的应收账款越多,企业的业绩越好。     

Formal finance and trade credit during China's transition

Using a large panel dataset of Chinese industrial firms, we find that poorly performing SOEs were more likely to redistribute credit to firms with less privileged access to loans via trade credit. While that could be consistent with the efficient redistribution of credit, it is more likely that these SOEs extended trade credit to prop up faltering customers that were in arrears. By contrast, profitable private domestic firms were more likely to extend trade credit than unprofitable ones. Trade credit likely provided a substitute for loans for these firms' customers that were shut out of formal credit markets. As biases in lending become less severe, the allocation of lending became more efficient, and the amount of trade credit extended by private firms declined. Our evidence implies that redistribution of bank loans via trade was not a major contributor to China's explosive growth.     

When arm's length is too far: Relationship banking over the credit cycle

We conduct face-to-face interviews with bank chief executive officers to classify 397 banks across 21 countries as relationship or transaction lenders. We then use the geographic coordinates of these banks’ branches and of 14,100 businesses to analyze how the lending techniques of banks near firms are related to credit constraints at two contrasting points of the credit cycle. We find that while relationship lending is not associated with credit constraints during a credit boom, it alleviates such constraints during a downturn. This positive role of relationship lending is stronger for small and opaque firms and in regions with a more severe economic downturn. Moreover, relationship lending mitigates the impact of a downturn on firm growth and does not constitute evergreening of loans.     

Major government customers and loan contract terms

Review of Accounting Studies - We examine the relation between the presence of U.S. government as a major customer and a supplier firm’s loan contract terms, using major corporate customers...