Financial Architecture and Economic Performance: International Evidence

The paper examines the relation between the architecture of an economy's financial system—its degree of market orientation—and economic performance in the real sector. I find that while market-based systems outperform bank-based systems among countries with developed financial sectors, bank-based systems fare better among countries with underdeveloped financial sectors. Countries dominated by small firms grow faster in bank-based systems and those dominated by larger firms in market-based systems. The findings suggest that recent trends in financial development policies that indiscriminately prescribe market-oriented financial-system architecture to emerging and transition economies might be misguided because suitable financial architecture, in and of itself, could be a source of value. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: G1, G21, O1, 04.     

Bank-Based or Market-Based Financial Systems: Which Is Better?

For over a century, economists and policymakers have debated the relative merits of bank-based versus market-based financial systems. Recent research, however, argues that classifying countries as bank- or market-based is not a very fruitful way to distinguish financial systems. This paper represents the first broad, cross-country examination of which view of financial structure is more consistent with the data. The results indicate that although overall financial development is robustly linked with economic growth, there is no support for either the bank-based or the market-based view. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: G0, K2, O4.     

Local underwriter oligopolies and IPO underpricing

We develop a theory of initial public offering (IPO) underpricing based on differentiated underwriting services and localized competition. Even though a large number of investment banks compete for IPOs, if issuers care about non-price dimensions of underwriting, then the industry structure is best characterized as a series of local oligopolies. We test our model implications on all-star analyst coverage, industry expertise, and other non-price dimensions. Furthermore, we posit that venture capitalists (VCs) are especially focused on all-star analyst coverage, and develop the analyst lust theory of the underpricing of VC-backed IPOs. Consistent with this theory, we find that VC-backed IPOs are much more underpriced when they have coverage from an all-star analyst.     

Asymmetric Information and News Disclosure Rules

When the imminence of news announcements is not public knowledge, many traders will lack information on both the mean and variance of private information. Our analysis of such a setting in both single and multisecurity contexts implies that disclosure of impending information events by firms can bound variance uncertainty and thereby improve investor welfare by mitigating the market breakdown problem. We also find that the equilibrium pricing functions are nonlinear; specifically, convex for small trades and concave for larger ones. In addition, we predict that large transactions will be followed by large levels of volatility. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: 022, 026, 522.     

The Costs, Wealth Effects, and Determinants of International Capital Raising: Evidence from Public Yankee Bonds

This paper examines the costs, wealth effects, and determinants of international capital raising for a sample of 260 public debt issues made by non-U.S. firms in the Yankee bond market. We find that investors demand economically significant premiums on bonds issued by firms that are located in countries that do not protect investors' rights and do not have a prior history of ongoing disclosure. The results provide support for the literature that suggests better legal protections and more detailed information disclosure increases the price investors will pay for financial assets. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: F3, G1.     

Debt Structure Adjustments and Long-Run Stock Price Performance

We examine the long-run implications of debt structure adjustments using a sample of U.S. bond IPOs from 1971 to 1994. Bond IPOs result in simultaneous and pronounced changes in both debt maturity and debt ownership structures. We document that firms engaging in debt IPOs substantially underperform their size-and-book-to-market-matched benchmarks by 33.39 and 55.99% over the 3- and 5-year post-offer periods. Our results are strikingly similar to those reported for equity offers but contrast the evidence for seasoned debt offers. We find evidence that debt IPOs are timed to coincide with the market having the highest expectations concerning firms' prospects. A negative relation is documented between debt maturity and future growth opportunities. In part, the underperformance can be attributed to significantly reduced growth opportunities following the offering. Post-offer underperformance is more pronounced for (a) longer maturity issues and (b) firms that do not experience an increase in bank monitoring. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: G12, G24, G30, D82.     

Deposit insurance and subsidized recapitalizations

The 2007–2009 financial crisis saw a vast expansion in deposit insurance guarantees around the world and yet our understanding of the design and consequences of deposit insurance schemes is in its infancy. We provide a new rationale for the provision of deposit insurance. In our model the banking sector exhibits both adverse selection and moral hazard, which implies that the social benefits of bank monitoring must for incentive reasons be shared between depositors and banks. Consequently, socially too few deposits are made in equilibrium. Deposit insurance – or, equivalently, bank recapitalization – corrects this market failure. We find that deposit insurance should be funded not by banks or depositors but out of general taxation. The optimal level of deposit insurance varies inversely with the quality of the banking system. Hence, when the soundness of the financial sector is uncertain, governments should consider supporting deposit insurance schemes and undertaking subsidized recapitalizations.     

Basel Core Principles and bank soundness: Does compliance matter?

This paper studies whether compliance with the Basel Core Principles for effective banking supervision (BCPs) is associated with bank soundness. Using data for over 3000 banks in 86 countries, we find that neither the overall index of BCP compliance nor its individual components are robustly associated with bank risk measured by individual bank Z-scores. We also fail to find a relationship between BCP compliance and systemic risk measured by a system-wide Z-score.     

What UIP tests on extreme samples reveal about the missing variable

In their UIP regressions, Huisman et al. (1998. Extreme support for uncovered interest parity, Journal for International Money and Finance 17, 211–228.) focus on extreme forward premia and find much higher coefficients. We show that, for such results, the expectation signal needs to be thicker-tailed than the missing variable. Transaction costs may produce the right sort of bias. It is (i) bounded (i.e. it has no tails at all), (ii) wide (i.e. it may generate betas below 1/2) and (iii) U-distributed, which makes an “extreme” sample quite effective. We derive theoretical and numerical results in the direction of what Huisman et al. observe. We also tighten Fama's moment conditions.     

Possible solutions to the forward bias paradox

This note outlines the economic theory behind the theory of uncovered interest parity and some of the econometric issues involved in testing and interpretation. I illustrate some of the issues involved by estimating a rolling regression of the forward premium regression from 22 years of eight major currencies. I also conclude that Pippenger's model is not consistent with the theory of UIP and that furthermore there are severe econometric problems in estimating his model. The forward premium anomaly remains a paradox in international finance that is important and worthwhile to understand more fully.     

Securities class actions in the US banking sector: Between investor protection and bank stability

This paper investigates whether securities class actions (SCAs) can play a role in banking supervision, both as a warning signal of insolvency and as an instrument of market discipline to encourage bank managers to carefully evaluate risk. Two groups of US banks are compared over the 2000–2008 period. One includes banks that have faced at least one SCA, while the other is composed of non-targeted banks (control group). Results indicate that collective private litigation procedures are more frequently directed at financially fragile intermediaries exhibiting inadequate governance standards. Furthermore, banks which have been subjected to SCAs are likely to reduce their excessive risk positions. This supports the idea that SCAs could be efficiently employed as a complement to public supervisory activity in the banking sector.     

Forward exchange market unbiasedness: the case of the Australian dollar since 1984

This paper implements a robust statistical approach to regression with non-stationary time series. The methods were recently developed in other work and are briefly exposited here. They allow us to perform regressions in levels with non-stationary time series data, they accommodate data distributions with heavy tails and they permit serial dependence and temporal heterogeneity of unknown form in the equation errors. With these features the methods are well suited to applications with frequently sampled exchange rate data, which generally display all of these empirical characteristics. Our application here is to daily data on spot and forward exchange rates between the Australian and US dollars over the period 1984–1991, following the deregulation of the Australian foreign exchange market. We find big differences between the robust and the non-robust regression outcomes and in the associated statistical tests of the hypothesis that the forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate. The robust tests reject the unbiasedness hypothesis but still give the forward rate an important role as a predictor of the future spot rate.     

The behavior of consumer loan rates during the 1990 credit slowdown

This study re-examines the 1990 credit slowdown by investigating the loan pricing behavior of commercial banks. We find strong evidence that large, undercapitalized banks contributed to the credit slowdown by charging consumers a higher-than-average loan rate relative to better-capitalized institutions. This disparity in lending exists even after accounting for bank funding costs. Thus, we argue that there was a lending slowdown that occurred among large, undercapitalized banks. The reluctance to lend among undercapitalized banks is at least suggestive of behavior that is consistent with a credit crunch.     

Do banks have a future?: A study on banking and finance as we move into the third millennium

Are banks special intermediaries? Do they play any unique role in the economy? And if so, will they retain their specialness in the ever-faster changing world of finance? The rapid evolution of finance over the last two decades and the breathtaking “e-age” revolution have persuaded many that, eventually, banks will be indistinguishable from other financial intermediaries since all their functions can, at least as efficiently, be carried out by nonbanks. This study re-explores the issue of the specialness of banks in light of the large existing literature on the subject, and presents an approach which identifies the banks' specialness with their unique capacity to lend out claims on their own debt which the public accepts and uses as money. The study discusses various structural and policy implications deriving from the approach, and draws on it to point to the continuing relevance of banking in a world where nonbanks are taking business away from banks, lending to production has become relatively less important, and the use of e-money may soon be dominating financial transactions.     

Do Japanese banks lead or follow international business? An empirical investigation

Although many precedent studies analyze the factors that promote the internationalization of banks, we have no empirical evidence answering the question as to whether banks follow or lead the manufacturing industries. In this paper, we investigate empirically whether Japanese banks are leaders or followers of the manufacturing industries in the process of internationalization. Using the Granger causality test based on Hsiao's (Hsiao, 1979, 1981) sequential test procedures, we find that Japanese banks have led Japanese manufacturing industries in the process of internationalization in Asia and Oceania and that banks have followed the manufacturing industries in the Near East. Furthermore, there is no clear causality in North America and Europe. The banks' leadership in Asia and Oceania seems to demonstrate that Japanese banks have comparative advantage against host-country competitors in these regions, while Japanese banks seem to enter US or European financial centers in order to avoid domestic regulations.     

The persistent effects of a false news shock

In September 2008, a six-year-old article about the 2002 bankruptcy of United Airlines' parent company resurfaced on the Internet and was mistakenly believed to be reporting a new bankruptcy filing by the company. This episode caused the company's stock price to drop by as much as 76% in just a few minutes, before NASDAQ halted trading. After the “news” had been identified as false, the stock price rebounded, but still ended the day 11.2% below the previous close. We explore this natural experiment by using a simple asset-pricing model to study the aftermath of this false news shock. We find that, after three trading sessions, the company's stock was still trading below the two-standard-deviation band implied by the model and that it returned to within one standard deviation only during the sixth trading session. On the seventh day after the episode, the stock was trading at the level predicted by the asset-pricing model. We investigate several potential explanations for this finding, but fail to find empirical evidence supporting any of them. We also document that the false news shock had a persistent negative effect on the stock prices of other major airline companies. This is consistent with the view that contagion effects would have dominated competitive effects had the bankruptcy actually taken place.     

Do delays in expected loss recognition affect banks' willingness to lend?

Banks can decrease their future capital inadequacy concerns by reducing lending. The capital crunch theory predicts that lending is particularly sensitive to regulatory capital constraints during recessions, when regulatory capital declines and external-financing frictions increase. Regulators and policy makers argue that the current loan loss provisioning rules magnify this pro-cyclicality. Exploiting variation in the delay in expected loss recognition under the current incurred loss model, we find that reductions in lending during recessionary relative to expansionary periods are lower for banks that delay less. We also find that smaller delays reduce the recessionary capital crunch effect. These results hold across management quality partitions.     

tay's as good as cay: Reply

In a recent comment on our published work [Lettau, M., Ludvigson, S., 2001. Consumption, aggregate wealth, and expected stock returns. Journal of Finance 56, 815–850], Michael Brennan and Yihong Xia [2005. tay's as good as cay. Finance Research Letters 2, 1–14] advance the following argument: A “mechanistic” variable tay, where t is a linear time trend, forecasts stock returns. Since “t has no foresight,” the argument goes, the predictive power of this variable must be attributable to what they call “look-ahead bias.” The authors assert that cay is subject to the same look-ahead bias (generated because we use the full sample to estimate the cointegrating parameters in cay), implying that its forecasting power must be spurious. In this response, we explain why this critique is misplaced.     

An “American Dream” theory of corporate executive Fraud

In this paper, we first describe a “Broken Trust” theory that was introduced by Albrecht el al. [Albrecht, W. S., Albrecht, C. C., & Albrecht, C. O. (2004). Fraud and corporate executives: Agency, Stewardship and Broken Trust. Journal of Forensic Accounting, 5, 109–130] to explain corporate executive Fraud. The Broken Trust theory is primarily based on an “Agency” theory from economic literature and a “Stewardship” theory from psychology literature. We next describe an “American Dream” theory from sociology literature to complement Albrecht el al.'s (2004) Broken Trust theory. Like the Broken Trust theory, the American Dream theory relates to a “Fraud Triangle” concept to explain corporate executive Fraud. Finally, we provide some anecdotal evidence from recent high profile corporate executive Fraud to explore the American Dream theory. We conclude our thoughts on corporate executive Fraud from a teaching perspective.     

When can you immunize a bond portfolio?

This paper presents a condition equivalent to the existence of a Riskless Shadow Asset that guarantees a minimum return when the asset prices are convex functions of interest rates or other state variables. We apply this lemma to immunize default-free and option-free coupon bonds and reach three main conclusions. First, we give a solution to an old puzzle: why do simple duration matching portfolios work well in empirical studies of immunization even though they are derived in a model inconsistent with equilibrium and shifts on the term structure of interest rates are not parallel, as assumed? Second, we establish a clear distinction between the concepts of immunized and maxmin portfolios. Third, we develop a framework that includes the main results of this literature as special cases. Next, we present a new strategy of immunization that consists in matching duration and minimizing a new linear dispersion measure of immunization risk.