Excessive continuation and dynamic agency costs of debt

This paper analyses the incentives of the equityholders of a leveraged company to shut it down in a continuous time, stochastic environment. Keeping the firm as an ongoing concern has an option value but equity and debt holders value it differently. Equityholders’ decisions exhibit excessive continuation and reduce firm's value. Using a compound exchange option approach, we characterise the resulting agency costs of debt, derive the “price” of these costs and analyse their dynamics. We also show how agency costs can be reduced by the design of debt.     

An agency model to explain trade credit policy and empirical evidence

This article explains trade credit policy based on the agency theory. According to this theory, we have developed an agency model based on the adverse selection and moral hazard phenomena arising from the relation between sellers and buyers. This model has been estimated by using panel data methodology applied to UK companies. Our findings strongly support the model proposed. We find that smaller firms, those with a smaller proportion of fixed assets, and those that are less profitable extend more trade credit, whereas firms with a high proportion of variable costs and high percentage of bad debts extend less.     

Taxation, agency conflicts, and the choice between callable and convertible debt

We analyze debt choice in light of taxes and moral hazard. The model features an infinite sequence of nonzero-sum stochastic differential games between equity and debt. Closed-form expressions are derived for all contingent-claims. If equity can increase volatility without reducing asset drift, callable bonds with call premia are optimal. Although callable bonds induce risk shifting, call premia precommit equity to less frequent restructuring and are tax-advantaged. Convertible bonds mitigate risk shifting, but only induce hedging if assets are far from the default threshold. Convertibles are optimal only if risk shifting reduces asset drift sufficiently.     

Credit risk and sustainable debt: a model and estimations of why the Euro is stable in the long-run

Sustainable debt has become the key issue in rating of private as well as sovereign debtors. The problem of how to estimate sustainable debt has also been at the center of the debate over the Asian 1997–1998 financial crisis. If the external value of the currency depends on the external debt of a country, it is necessary to estimate the creditworthiness of the country. This paper studies credit risk and sustainable debt in the context of a dynamic model. For a dynamic growth model with an additional equation for the evolution of debt, we demonstrate of how to compute sustainable debt and creditworthiness. The model is estimated by employing time series data for the core countries of the Euro-area. The computations show that the Euro-area has large external assets. Using time series methods, the sustainability of external debt (assets) is estimated for those core countries of the Euro-area. Those estimations show that the Euro will be a stable currency in the long-run.     

Feedback effects between credit ratings and financial markets

Credit rating agencies often make sharp adjustments in their pronouncements during times of stress in financial markets. These adjustments typically happen with a delay relative to shocks in market prices. Since prices convey information about what market participants are doing and thinking, it is likely that rating agencies take into account market prices when issuing their pronouncements.In order to understand the relationship between credit ratings and financial prices, we develop a model of debt roll-over in which rating agencies incorporate information publicly available in financial markets. We find that (1) rating agencies respond to market prices, i.e. nonfundamental price volatility can shift financing conditions from a low risk spread and high credit rating equilibrium to an equilibrium with high spread and low rating, and (2) rating agencies can anchor expectations about the equilibrium in financial markets, thus serving as an antidote to nonfundamental price volatility.     

Asset bubbles,banking stability and economic growth

This paper examines the relationships between the asset bubble and the banking stability from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. The theoretical analysis demonstrates that the moral hazard caused by the deposit insurance and limited liability might facilitate the banks to hold bubble assets for the purpose of risk premium. Meanwhile the supervisory intensity, leverage ratio and credit spread provide the conditions for banks to hold bubble assets through their effects on risk premium. Once the banks hold the bubble assets, their stability will deteriorate because of four types of effects, namely internal leverage, cash withdrawal, credit friction and network effects. This paper also utilizes the BMA-PVAR model to test the theoretical findings by employing the data from 26 representative economies for a period between 2000 and 2014. The empirical evidences are consistent with the theoretical findings that the equity bubbles will lower the banking stability. The empirical evidences also suggest that the banking instability will be detrimental to the economic growth.     

激励与约束:国有商业银行信贷管理制度分析

对于银行而言,其经营中所面临的道德风险不仅来源于借款企业,更重要、更直接的是其信贷人员的“财德行为”问题。我国国有商业银行传统的信贷管理制度未能对信贷人员的代理行为形成有效的约束,从而导致了大量银行坏帐的产生。现有的信贷管理制度又过度强调了对风险的防范,从而又在很大程度上约束了银行的开拓经营和整修宏观经济的平稳快速发展。本文对此运用契约经济理论分析了我国国有商业银行传统及现有信贷管理制度对信贷人员所做的契约安排及其存在的问题,在此基础上尝试性的提出了一种新的制度改进方案。     

Evaluating sovereign risk spillovers on domestic banks during the European debt crisis

Using a Markov-switching model with time-varying probabilities, spillovers from sovereign to domestic bank CDS spreads during the European debt crisis for a set of 14 European countries and 30 European banks are investigated. Our model is able to capture how the increased sovereign risk observed between 2010 and 2013 throughout Europe has impacted i) the probability that banks fall into a crisis regime and ii) the probability that banks stay in the crisis regime. The latter state is characterized by a high volatility and large positive returns of CDS spreads. Different regime-dependent indicators have been computed to assess heterogeneity within the region. The evidence indicates that the intensification of sovereign risk observed during the European debt crisis has positively and significantly driven the regime shifts in volatility of the bank CDS spreads due to increased risk aversion. The results show that the increase in sovereign credit risk seems to have generated second-round effects for some banks that have experienced a deterioration in their funding conditions due to a rise in the domestic sovereign default risk. Overall, our results suggest that sovereign CDS spreads can be considered good forewarning indicators for predicting the evolution of bank CDS spreads. We also find that the effects differ depending on the country and the financial institution. This result suggests that banks are heterogeneously exposed to sovereign credit risk within the same country. One argument relates to the size of these financial institutions and the domestic exposure to sovereign debt.     

Incentive roles of fringe benefits in compensation contracts

The purpose of this paper is to establish a new insight into the potential benefit of fringe benefits used by firms in compensation contracts. We show that fringe benefits have a role to provide incentives and reduce agency costs. In an agency model with moral hazard, we examine the optimal incentive package that involves salary, equity shares, and fringe benefits. Based on the notion that fringe benefits are imperfect substitutes for salary and (weakly) complementary to effort, we show how the optimal package may include an excessive provision of fringe benefits that exceeds the first-best level, and why it involves a distortion towards overconsumption of fringe benefits in terms of the manager's preferences.     

金融危机背景下信用违约互换道德风险研究

2007年爆发的金融危机中,信用违约互换蕴含的道德风险使其成为危机发生和发展的助推器。本文通过构建信用违约互换交易的合约设计模型,研究该产品的作用以及控制其道德风险的最优合约设计。分析发现:交易双方资金成本差异决定了信用违约互换具有优化配置信用风险、提高银行收益和拓宽市场主体投资渠道等有利作用,但信用违约互换交易会降低银行监督信贷资产的努力水平,导致信用风险积聚和增加。通过引入不完全保护机制,我们给出了有效控制信用违约互换道德风险的最优合约。本文的研究结论为防范和控制信用衍生品隐含的道德风险提供了借鉴,有利于促进其发挥分散信用风险等积极作用。     

基于SV-KMV模型的信用风险度量研究

KMV模型是度量信用风险的主要模型,股权价值波动率是KMV模型的重要参数,应用改进KMV模型GARCH-KMV模型与SV-KMV模型对中国上市公司信用质量的实证研究表明:股权价值波动与KMV模型的结果违约距离高度负相关;GARCH-KMV与SV-KMV模型均能度量上市公司信用状况,但SV-KMV模型比GARCH-KMV模型度量效果更好。     

Strategic debt service and investment decisions

Firms alter investing decisions when there is debt in the capital structure. Security design features can exacerbate the situation. This article studies how strategic debt service may affect investment distortions resulting from debt financing in a dynamic framework. When the production decision involves an expansion option, the shareholders’ option to strategically default on the outstanding debt eliminates bankruptcy costs but, in contrast to previous literature where production decisions are fixed, leads to suboptimal investing decisions. This is due to higher wealth transfers from shareholders to debt holders upon exercise of the growth option. Strategic debt service, therefore, may reduce the value of the firm. The setting of an endogenous production set offers a potential explanation for empirical observations of wide credit spreads and low leverage.     

Optimal personal bankruptcy design under moral hazard

In this paper, we develop a normative theory of unsecured consumer credit and personal bankruptcy based on the optimal trade-off between incentives and insurance. First, in order to characterize this trade-off, we solve a dynamic moral hazard problem in which agents' private effort decisions influence the life-cycle profiles of their earnings. We then show how the optimal allocation of individual effort and consumption can be implemented in a market equilibrium in which (i) agents and intermediaries repeatedly trade secured and unsecured debt instruments, and (ii) agents obtain (restricted) discharge of their unsecured debts in bankruptcy. The structure of this equilibrium and the associated restrictions on debt discharge closely match the main qualitative features of personal credit markets and bankruptcy law that actually exist in the United States.     

The relationship between risk-neutral and actual default probabilities: the credit risk premium

The study investigates empirically the relationship between the risk-neutral measure Q and the real-world measure P. We study the ratio between the risk-neutral and actual default intensities, which we call the coverage ratio or the relative credit risk premium. Actual default intensities are derived from rating agencies annual transition matrices, while risk-neutral default intensities are bootstrapped from CDS quotes of European corporates. We quantify the average risk premium and its changes over time. Compared to related literature, special attention is given to the effects of the recent financial and European sovereign crises. We find that average credit risk premia rose substantially and that post-crisis levels are still higher than those observed before the financial crisis. This observation is especially true for high-quality debt and if it persists, it will have an impact on corporates funding costs. The quantification and revision of risk premia contributes to the discussion of the credit spread puzzle and could give extra insights in valuation models that start from real-world estimates. Our work is furthermore important in the context of state aid assessment. The real economic value (REV) methodology, applied by the European Commission to evaluate impaired portfolios, is based on a long-term average risk premium.     

债权与股权的转换比率:市场原则与方法

在我国目前情况下，债转股是银行剥离不良资产、企业减轻债务负担的重要举措，受到银行、企业以及各级政府的多方关注。然而，撇开我国目前的特殊情况不论，在企业正常的资本运营中、债转股、股转债也属于常见的操作。本认为，在正常情况下，应该依据市场的原则与方法来确定转换比率。为此，本引入期权方法评估企业债权和股权的价值。由于期权模型以有效市场假设为前提，并且直接考虑了债权和股权的收益与风险，这种方法更为有效地体现了等价交换的市场原则。     

Efficient moral hazard

This paper presents an infinite-horizon, discounted dynamic programming model of the endogenous opportunity costs of an agent’s effort that is allocated among an endogenous number of principals. An agent allocates effort between evaluating new principals and attending to current principals. Since each principal’s return is not maximized by the agent’s optimal allocation, moral hazard occurs in equilibrium. However, since the agent maximizes the total expected value of all undertaken projects, the agent’s allocation of effort is efficient. If the agent chooses a single principal, then moral hazard does not occur and the allocation is efficient. These results are contrary to the inefficient moral hazard results in bilateral principal-agent (P-A) and common agency (C-A) models.     

Equity market valuation,systematic risk and monetary policy

This study examines the relationship between equity market valuation and risk indicators that portend economic downswings. The indicators are implied options volatility, Treasury-Eurodollar (TED) spread and exchange rate. While implied volatility captures market risk in that it reflects the fear factor embedded in the price of an option, TED spread reflects the default risk premium that is priced into a key short-term credit instrument. Equity markets often show a tendency to reflect the incidence of these risk factors. And because they provide valuable information about the health of the economy, many have argued that equity market valuation be taken into account in the formulation of monetary policy. Results of this study not only show a statistically significant inverse relationship between the stock market and these risk factors, but also evidence of a cointegration. In a variance decomposition of the series, we find that equity valuation is a major contributor to the forecast error variances of each of the risk indicators, a finding that lends tacit support to the argument that risk indicators associated with the equity market be considered in monetary policy decisions.     

Equity market information and credit risk signaling: A quantile cointegrating regression approach

Investigating linkages between credit and equity markets, we consider daily aggregate U.S. CDS spreads as well as well-chosen equity market and implied volatility indexes over ten years. We describe such robust (to spurious correlation) relationship with the quantile cointegrating regression approach. Such approach handles extreme quantiles/CDS values and their behavior with respect to the equity market's influence. Heteroskedastic patterns such as time-varying variance, but also autocorrelation, skewness and leptokurtosis are captured. Thus, the sensitivity of aggregate CDS spreads to equity market price and volatility channels is accurately measured across quantiles and spreads. Such quantile-dependent sensitivity exhibits asymmetric responses to equity market shocks. A sub-period analysis investigates potential regime shifts in estimated quantile cointegrating regressions. Quantile cointegrating coefficients vary over time and quantiles, and exhibit different magnitudes across sub-periods and spreads. Therefore, the relationship is unstable over time. We also propose a scenario analysis and risk signaling application for credit risk management prospects. Under specific risk levels, credit risky situations are described conditional on the equity market's information over time, and related expected aggregate CDS spreads are computed. Estimated conditional quantiles/CDS spreads act as credit alert triggers.     

RISK‐SHARING MATCHING AND MORAL HAZARD

In this study we model the endogenous relationship formation between risk‐averse principals and agents in a CARA‐normal framework. Agents exert unobservable efforts to increase mean outputs and reduce risks. We show that risk‐reduction efforts are more important than mean‐increasing efforts in determining the matching patterns. Compared to cases without moral hazard, the agency problem in risk reduction induces more positive‐assortative matchings.     

Credit risk – Return puzzle: Evidence from India

Although asset pricing theories predict a positive relation between risk and returns, empirical findings on credit risk-return relationship are mixed. And, observed negative relation between the two in this regard is referred to as credit risk-return puzzle. Using credit rating as a measure of credit risk, we have investigated into the existence of this puzzle in India during July 2011 to March 2019. We have used information for the companies listed on the National Stock Exchange for this purpose. Our results validate the presence of this puzzle in the Indian stock market. Moreover, credit risk is observed to be a systematic risk, which has not been captured in the traditional asset pricing models. We have also observed partial evidence favoring both behavioural and rational pricing explanations—the two widely acknowledged explanations in the literature behind this puzzle. On our further query in this connection, we have not seen any significant change in the puzzle due to the recent enactment of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code.