When Do Vertical Mergers Create Value?

This paper studies the market reaction to vertical mergers and explores the many rationales for vertical integration proposed in the industrial organization literature. Abnormal returns for vertical merger announcements are positive until the late 1990s, and turn negative afterward. Acquirers suffer most of the losses. We find support for the most fundamental insight in the industrial organization literature, namely, that vertical mergers generate the greatest value when undertaken in imperfectly competitive markets. We find some evidence to support ideas of asset and site specificity, that is, creating value when market exchange is difficult. We do not find support for information‐based or price uncertainty theories.     

Testing for Bubbles in Housing Markets: A Panel Data Approach

We employ recently developed cross-sectionally robust panel data tests for unit roots and cointegration to find whether house prices reflect house related earnings. We use U.S. data for Metropolitan Statistical Areas, with house price measured by the weighted-repeated-sales index and cash-flows by market tenants’ rents. In our full sample period, an error-correction model is not appropriate, i.e. there is a bubble. We then combine overlapping 10-year periods, price–rent ratios, and the panel data tests to construct a bubble indicator. The indicator is high for the late 1980s, early 1990s and since the late 1990s. Finally, evidence based on panel data Granger causality tests suggests that house price changes are helpful in predicting changes in rents and vice versa. CERGE-EI is a joint workplace of the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education, Charles University, and the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.     

Firm Size and Growth in the United Kingdom Life Insurance Industry

This study tests whether the organic growth rates of United Kingdom (UK) life insurance firms are independent of size, as predicted by Gibrat's (1931) Law of Proportionate Effects. Using data for 1987–1996 and the three subperiods, 1987–1990, 1990–1993, and 1993–1996, we find that smaller life insurance firms tended to grow faster than larger ones in the 1987–1990 period and that larger life insurers tended to grow faster than smaller ones in the 1990–1993 and 1993–1996 periods. But over the ten‐year period, we find no significant difference between the growth rates of small and large firms, thus supporting Gibrat's Law as a long‐run tendency in the UK life insurance industry. When we examine firm‐specific determinants of asset growth, we find evidence in 1987–1996 and 1987–1990 that more diversified life insurance firms experienced higher growth rates on average than more specialized life insurers. We also find that the growth of life insurance firms was related to input costs during the 1990–1993 and 1993–1996 subperiods.     

The choice of equity selling mechanisms: PIPEs versus SEOs

We examine the firm's choice between an SEO and a PIPE, an innovation in follow-on equity selling mechanism seen in the late 1990s. Our primary finding indicates that the rapid rise of the PIPE market fills the capital needs of firms which may not have access to more traditional alternatives. This lack of access is driven mainly by information asymmetry and weak operating performance. We also show that firms are more likely to choose PIPEs when the general market and the firm's stock are performing poorly. Furthermore, we find that selected firms with access to the public market may prefer a PIPE due to specific cost considerations.     

Technical, Allocative and Scale Efficiencies of REITs: An Empirical Inquiry

Abstract:   This paper empirically explores various efficiency aspects of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in light of their remarkable growth in the 1990s. We find clear evidence of considerable technical inefficiency in REITs, though not much indication for allocative or scale inefficiency. The results also suggest that an increasing number of REITs has been operating under diseconomies of scale since the late 1990s primarily due to the recent wave of consolidation and merger activities. As creatures of the US tax code, REIT's have undergone several changes to their operating status, and our results suggest that the prevalent regulatory environment appears too onerous for the industry and may have contributed to the REITs' poor efficiency performance. In particular, further cuts or total elimination of the dividend restriction on REITs could provide much needed relief and stability in the US real estate market.     

The run-up to the global financial crisis: A longer historical view of financial liberalization,capital inflows,and asset bubbles

Using forecast error and sensitivity analyses with a vector error correction model for the US economy, we find that the specific exogenous shocks that contributed to the run-up to the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 vary across the three time periods (1980–1988; 1989–1997; and 1998–2006) that are known for distinctive historical events. Deregulation in the 1980s and capital inflows in the early and mid-1990s triggered by the collapse of the European exchange rate mechanism contributed significantly to changes in real house prices. However, capital inflows after the Asian financial crises in 1997 were driven in large part by rising asset prices. Thus, there were interesting changes in the nature of exogenous shocks and directions of causality through the three sub-periods. These results are robust even after controlling for the exogenous global factors partly determining short-run changes in capital flows, asset prices, and per capita real GDP. We conclude that all of the short run changes in response to financial deregulation starting in the 1980s, surges in capital inflows in the early 1990s, and people's expectation of ever-rising asset prices in the late 1990s and early 2000s culminated in the crisis of 2007–2009.     

Changes in REIT Liquidity 1988?C2007: Evidence from Daily Data

In this study, we present panel-data evidence on REIT liquidity and its determinants over the 1988?C2007 period. We focus upon liquidity measures that do not require micro-structure data (1) to facilitate use of our results as benchmarks for comparisons with results from international markets for which micro-structure data may be unavailable, (2) to provide benchmarks that do not require access to costly (and voluminous) micro-structure data. We find that REIT liquidity improved during the early and mid-1990s, deteriorated during the late 1990s, and then improved dramatically during 2000?C2006, with the notable exception of 2007. Liquidity improved the most for REITs traded on the NYSE, and was an order of magnitude better than liquidity of REITs traded on the AMEX or NASDAQ. We link the deterioration in liquidity observed in 2007 to the investment portfolio of a REIT. We find that the percentage bid-ask spread is highly correlated with the measure of price impact proposed by Amihud (2002). We provide panel-data evidence on the key determinants of the percentage bid-ask spread that largely confirms the results reported by Bhasin et al. (1997) for 1990 and 1994: the percentage spread is a positive function of the volatility of stock returns, and a negative function of dollar volume turnover, share price and market capitalization. Finally, we provide evidence that these results obtained using daily closing bid- and ask-prices are not qualitatively different from those obtained using market micro-structure data. This suggests that we can use liquidity measures based upon readily available daily return data rather than being forced to rely upon market micro-structure data.     

Do Small‐Group Health Insurance Regulations Influence Small Business Size?

State small‐group health insurance reforms, implemented in the 1990s, aimed at controlling the variability of health insurance premiums and to improve access to health insurance. These reforms only affected firms within a specific size range, and as a result, they may have affected the size of small firms around the legislative threshold and may also have affected the propensity of small firms to offer health insurance. We examine the relationship between small‐group reform and firm size and find evidence that small firms just below the regulatory threshold that were offering health insurance grew in order to bypass reforms.     

Why Option Prices Lag Stock Prices: A Trading-based Explanation

While many studies find that option prices lead stock prices, Stephan and Whaley (1990) find that stocks lead options. We find no evidence that options, even deep out-of-the-money options, lead stocks. After confirming Stephan and Whaley's results, we show their results can be explained as spurious leads induced by infrequent trading of options. We show that the stock lead disappears when the average of the bid and ask prices is used instead of transaction prices. Hence, we find no evidence of arbitrage opportunities associated with the stock lead.     

The Valuation of MNC International Operations During the 1990s

We investigate how international operations affected firm value during the early 1990s. We also investigate whether the disclosures of foreign operations in specific geographic regions under SFAS No. 14 provide investors with useful information beyond disclosure of aggregate foreign operations. We find that in the early 1990s, investors do not value international operations as highly as domestic operations, and that geographic region disclosures are not useful for conveying information about the specific location and magnitude of the firm's operations. This latter finding supports the recent FASB decision that eliminated the requirement that firms break out foreign operating statistics by geographic region.     

Industry upheaval and valuation: Empirical evidence from the international oil and gas industry

Accounting literature suggests that contemporaneous earnings are more useful than current operating cash flow in predicting future cash flows and, therefore, also more relevant for company valuation. However, recent research indicates that elevated levels of merger and acquisition activity or a changing economic environment may reduce the value relevance of earnings. Using the oil and gas industry as a case, this paper examines how the oil industry upheaval in the late 1990s influenced the value relevance of financial statement information. We extend the literature by testing for a structural shift in the equity market valuation process. Our results provide evidence of a structural break in the value relevance of accounting information. In contrast to prior research, we find that the value relevance of cash flows actually decreased in the recent oil industry upheaval. On the other hand, the value relevance of book equity increased. Furthermore, we find that accounting-method choice (full cost versus successful efforts) affects the value relevance of accounting information.     

Prudential Regulation and the "Credit Crunch": Evidence from Japan

The underlying causes of sharp declines in bank lending during recessions in large developed economies, as exemplified by the U.S. in the early 1990s and Japan in the late 1990s, are still being debated due to the lack of any convincing identification strategy of the supply side capital–lending relationship from lending demand. Using within bank share of real estate lending in the late 1980s as an instrumental variable for bank capital, we find that Japanese banks cut back on their lending in response to a large loss of bank capital in fiscal year 1997.     

What Makes the Output–Inflation Trade‐Off Change? The Absence of Accelerating Deflation in Japan

It is standard to model the output–inflation trade-off as a linear relationship with a time-invariant slope. We assess empirical evidence for two sets of theories that allow for endogenous variation in the slope of the short-run Phillips curve. At an empirical level, we examine why large negative output gaps in Japan in the late 1990s did not lead to accelerating deflation but instead coincided with stable, albeit moderately negative inflation. Our results suggest that this episode is most convincingly interpreted as reflecting a gradual flattening of the Phillips curve. We find that this flattening is best explained by models with endogenous price durations. These models imply that in any economy where trend inflation is substantially lower (or substantially higher) today than in past decades, time variation in the slope of the Phillips curve has become too important to ignore.     

China as a reserve sink: The evidence from offset and sterilization coefficients

China has been stockpiling international reserves at an extremely rapid pace since the late 1990s and has surpassed Japan to become the largest reserve holder in the world. This paper undertakes an empirical investigation to assess the extent of de facto sterilization and capital mobility using monthly data between mid 2000 and late 2008. We find that China has been able to successfully sterilize a large portion of these reserve increases thus making it a reserve sink such as Germany was under the Bretton Wood system.     

The disappearance of momentum

We investigate the dynamics of the momentum premium in the USA. The momentum premium is significantly positive only during certain periods, notably from the 1940s to the mid-1960s and from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, and it has disappeared since the late 1990s. Our results further suggest that momentum profits have slowly disappeared since the early 1990s, in a process which was delayed by the occurrence of the high-tech and telecom stock bubble of the late 1990s. In particular, we estimate that the bubble accounted for at least 50% of momentum profits during the period from 1994 to 2000.     

Bank privatization and performance: Empirical evidence from Nigeria

We assess the effect of privatization on performance in a panel of Nigerian banks for the period 1990–2001. We find evidence of performance improvement in nine banks that were privatized, which is remarkable given the inhospitable environment for true financial intermediation. Our results also suggest negative effects of the continuing minority government ownership on the performance of many Nigerian banks. Finally, our results complement aggregate indications of decreasing financial intermediation over the 1990s; banks that focused on investment in government bonds and non-lending activities enjoyed a relatively better performance.     

Is there Information in an Earnings Announcement Delay?

Using a sample of announcements drawn from the 1980s and early 1990s, we reassess the relation between earnings news and earnings announcement timing. Using analyst forecast errors to proxy for news, we find that early announcements are associated with good news relative to late announcements. The relation between news and timing, however, does not appear to be strictly monotonic. Furthermore, we find that unexpected earnings explain 4% or less of the variation in timing. Finally, we assess whether abnormal returns behave in a manner that is consistent with a good news early, bad news late relation.     

Credit supply and corporate innovation

We present evidence that banking development plays a key role in technological progress. We focus on manufacturing firms' innovative performance, measured by patent-based metrics, and employ exogenous variations in banking development arising from the staggered deregulation of banking activities across US states during the 1980s and 1990s. We find that interstate banking deregulation had significant beneficial effects on the quantity and quality of innovation activities, especially for firms highly dependent on external capital and located closer to entering banks. Furthermore, we find that these results are strongly driven by a greater ability of deregulated banks to geographically diversify credit risk.     

Household Life Cycle Protection: Life Insurance Holdings, Financial Vulnerability, and Portfolio Implications

Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, we examine the life cycle demand for different types of life insurance. Specifically, we test for the consumer's aversion to income volatility resulting from the death of a household's wage‐earner through the purchase of life insurance. We first develop a financial vulnerability index to control for the risk to the household. We then examine the life cycle demand for life insurance using several definitions of life insurance. We find, in contrast to previous research, that there is a relationship between financial vulnerability and the amount of term life or total life insurance purchased. In addition, we find older consumers use less life insurance to protect a certain level of financial vulnerability than younger consumers. Secondly, our study provides evidence that life insurance demand is jointly determined as part of a household's portfolio. Finally, we consider the impact of family members' nonmonetary contribution on the household's life cycle protection decision. Our results provide some evidence that households take into account the value of nonmonetary contribution in their insurance purchase.     

Mortgage credit growth for lower-income borrowers during the 2000s housing boom: Evidence and implications

I examine the relationship between mortgage credit and borrower income from 1993 to 2009. I find that the relationship was positive throughout this period. However, it became significantly flatter (i.e. less positive) from 1998 to 2006, implying that growth in mortgage credit was most substantial for lower-income borrowers during this time. The evidence suggests that a disproportionate share of credit growth during the boom accrued to borrowers that previously would have had the most limited access to mortgage credit. This is consistent with the view that the housing crisis of the mid-2000s was precipitated by a dramatic expansion in the supply, or availability, of mortgage credit and that this expansion began as early as the late 1990s.