The impact of settlement period on sales price

This study is an empirical investigation of the impact of settlement period on sales price while controlling for marketing period and standard explanatory variables. The hypothesized positive relationship between settlement period and sales price is confirmed by the results of this study. The estimated coefficient on settlement period is 0.0008 meaning that our market, on average, exacts a premium of 0.08 percent per day of settlement period beyond a norm of 60 days. The estimated coefficient on marketing period (a control variable) is –0.0003 meaning that our market, on average, requires a discount of 0.03 percent per day of marketing period. Our findings show the relative importance of settlement period in making real estate pricing decisions.     

Market Signals Associated with REIT IPOs

Previous studies have found significant but time-varying valuation effects associated with real estate investment trusts initial public offerings (REIT IPOs). Because REIT IPOs may disclose relevant information about real estate market conditions, they may serve to revalue existing real estate securities. To determine whether REIT IPOs signal information that is impounded into the share prices of other real estate securities, we assess the returns on rival portfolios of existing real estate securities upon the issuance of the IPO. On average, the rival portfolios experience insignificant effects on the REIT IPO filing date, but negative and significant abnormal returns around the issue date. A cross-sectional analysis of combined effects at the time of the filing date and issue date shows that the negative effects on the rival portfolios are more pronounced when (1) the size of the REIT IPO is larger, (2) market conditions are relatively weak, (3) more REIT IPOs come to market, and (4) the IPO is not associated with an umbrella partnership REIT.     

What is the Truth About the Scale of Japanese Banks' Bad Debts? Is the Situation Manageable?

In January 1998, the Japanese Ministry of Finance (MoF, 1998) released figures which suggested that the Japanese banking industry';s bad debts might be as high as ¥77 trillion (since revised upward to ¥87.5 trillion, if cooperative-type institutions are included; Financial Supervisory Agency (FSA), 1998). This compared with the previous official estimate of ¥28 trillion. The revelation was designed to do three things: (1) to convince investors, at home and abroad, who had long suspected that the true level of bad debts was much higher than the authorities (and the banks) were willing to admit to, that the authorities were sincere in their quest to enhance disclosure by local financial intermediaries; (2) to stifle opposition to the government's plans to use up to ¥30 trillion (since increased to ¥60 trillion) of public funds to stabilize the financial system¹ by underlining the gravity of the situation facing the Japanese economy; and (3) to pave the way for the introduction of more transparent reporting by the banks in April 1998 when a regime of prompt corrective action (PCA)² was scheduled to commence. This article explains the evolution of bad debt disclosure by the Japanese banking industry and assesses the significance of the latest figures. In particular, it highlights the extent to which accounting forbearance has been, and continues to be, used to mask the true level of the banks' bad debts and refutes the claim that the industry's bad debt burden peaked in 1995. The banking industry's ability to handle the continuing bad debt problem, in the face of a significant impairment of economic capital and the market's relentless drive for full disclosure and transparency, also is assessed.     

Conduit Entities: Implications of Indirect Tax-Efficient Financing Structures for Real Investment

As well known, companies shift income from high to low tax jurisdictions. Typically, profit shifting is achieved by direct financing structures whereby companies use debt finance in the high tax entity and equity finance in the low tax entity. However, certain tax policies can lead to indirect financing structures whereby a conduit entity provides an opportunity to achieve at least two deductions for interest expenses for an investment made in the host country. The effect of direct and indirect financing structures on real investment is compared.     

On Transitory Earnings

The paper develops a concept of transitory earnings and contrasts this source of earnings to core (or recurring) earnings. It is shown that any two of the following three attributes of transitory earnings imply the third: (i) forecasting irrelevance with respect to next-period aggregate earnings, (ii) value irrelevance, and (iii) unpredictability. The paper makes the case that the current dirty surplus items make sense, especially if one expands the valuation perspective to also allow for agency considerations.     

Company Tax Structure and Company Tax Incidence

This paper reviews conflicting theories of company tax incidence impliedby the alternative new and traditional views of dividends andexamines their contrasting policy implications. Whereas, under thetraditional view, closer integration of the corporate and personalincome tax systems is suggested, an alternative policy orientationemphasizing the non-distorting features of the classical system is impliedby the new view. Even if the traditional view is accepted, theimplications for design and reform of the company tax vary widely underalternative specifications of domestic and international tax policy objectives. Schedular alternatives to global income taxation are alsoconsidered.     

Contracts for the sale of residential real estate

I propose a model where the terms of a real estate broker's contract influence both the broker's and theseller's choices. Given equal contract, higher quality, and thus higher priced on average, houses will sell in less time. Thus, simple conditions suffice to show that a competitively set commission rate should fall as the average price rises and, since a seller's cost of waiting are higher for higher quality houses, a cartel's commission rate should rise with the average price. Because this model studies the effects of alternate contracts on observable variables such as the price of a house and its time-till-sale, its implications are testable.     

Optimal Consumption Taxes and Social Security Under Tax Measurement Problems and Uncertainty

A representative individual lives for two periods; works when young and depends on savings and a government operated social security system when old—the returns on both sources of income, when old, are random. Due to administrative problems the returns to savings are observed with some measurement error. Two alternative consumption tax systems are considered; the Registered Asset Treatment (RAT) and the Non-Registered Asset Treatment (NRAT). The advantage of the RAT is that it can perform a social insurance role while the disadvantage is that it imposes measurement error risk. Correlation between the random return on saving and its measurement error can provide a risk-hedging role that can be further strengthened by the RAT version. The NRAT version neither provides social insurance nor imposes measurement error risk. Both tax systems hedge against the uncertainties in the social security system. The taxpayer engages in precautionary saving in response to future uncertainty.     

“Investor sentiment” and the closed-end fund puzzle: A 7 percent solution

Lee, Shleifer, and Thaler (1991) argue that the irrational noise trader model of DeLong, Shleifer, Summers, and Waldmann (1990) ... is consistent with the published evidence on closed-end fund prices. ... However, Lee, Shleifer, and Thaler provide no indication of how much of the variability of a closed-end fund's discounts and premiums is due to such investor sentiment. Using the signal extraction technique of French and Roll (1986) to measure noise, this article estimates that on average only 7 percent of the variance of a standardized measure of weekly changes in discounts and premiums can be attributed to noise-trading activity. Investor sentiment, therefore, seems to account for very little of a closed-end fund's discount and premium variability over time.     

A General Theorem on the Comparative Statics of Changes in Risk

In this paper, the concept of absolutely riskier than is introduced to generalize Gollier's (Journal of Economic Theory, 66, 522–535) necessary and sufficient conditions for the comparative statics of a change in risk for risk averters. The restrictive assumption that the payoff function is monotonic in the risk is relaxed. The policymaker's choice problem, the newsboy problem, and a farmer's example are used to illustrate how easily the monotonicity assumption is violated. Finally, some important properties of the concept of absolutely riskier than, such as its relation with the concept of second-order stochastic dominance, are illustrated using the farmer's example.     

Comparing Alternative Hedge Accounting Standards: Shareholders' Perspective

We study the economic consequences of alternative hedge accounting rules in terms of managerial hedging decisions and wealth effects for shareholders. The rules we consider include the fair-value and cash-flow hedge accounting methods prescribed by the recent SFAS No. 133. We illustrate that the accounting method used influences the manager's hedge decision. We show that under no-hedge accounting, the hedge choice is different from the optimal economic hedge the firm would make under symmetric and public information. However, under a certain definition of fair-value hedge accounting, the hedging decision preserves the optimal economic hedge. We then demonstrate that long-term and future shareholders prefer a certain definition of fair-value hedge accounting to no-hedge accounting, while short-term shareholders prefer either approach depending on risk preferences and the level of uncertainty. We speculate about circumstances in which a manager would choose not to adopt fair-value hedge accounting when he has the option not to do so.     

Heterogeneity in Financial Market Participation: Appraising its Implications for the C-CAPM

This paper presents empirical evidence that accounting for heterogeneity in financial market participation is important for evaluating the empirical performance of the Consumption-based Capital Asset Pricing Model (C-CAPM). Using the US Consumer Expenditure Survey as a common testing ground, I re-assess three well-known characterizations of the equity premium puzzle (i) the inconsistency of the representative agent's IMRS with Hansen and Jagannathan bounds; (ii) Mehra and Prescott's calibration of a large representative agent's risk aversion; (iii) Hansen and the Singleton's large structural estimates of the preference parameters based on aggregate data. In all three cases, the estimates of risk aversion conditional upon financial market participation are not as far from reasonable values as the corresponding unconditional ones. The differences suggest that part of the equity premium puzzle can be accounted for by the use of a representative agent assumption rather than a more appropriate "representative stockholding agent assumption.     

The Market for Corporate Control and the Agency Paradigm

The paper analyzes the role of agency driven takeover activity. The analysis shows that takeovers can play an important role in reducing agency costs even though the gains from the corporate restructuring that follows the takeovers are zero, which counters existing models of agency driven takeover activity. The model can therefore form the basis for deriving empirical predictions which discriminate between the agency paradigm and the corporate restructuring paradigm of takeover activity. Negative post-merger performance (Agrawal et al., 1992), which is inconsistent with corporate restructuring is consistent with this model, and that takeover targets' investment levels are below or at the average (Servaes 1994), which is inconsistent with the free cash flow theory is also consistent with this model.     

Dual VATs and Cross-Border Trade: Two Problems, One Solution?

In recent years, two distinct but related questions have been raised with respect to value-added taxes (VATs). Concern has been expressed over whether it is desirable or even possible for both national and subnational governments in federal countries such as India, Argentina, and Russia to impose VATs. One reason for thinking that such subnational VATs are unlikely to be workable on a destination basis is the problem of cross-border trade. Of course, this same problem also arises within the European Union, where there is no EU VAT. Drawing upon Canadian experience, we argue that not only is it possible to have two-tier or dual VATs on a destination basis in a single country but that the existence of dual VATs may help deal with some of the problems of cross-border trade.     

The Information Content of Bank Examinations

We identify three types of information from bank examinations—auditing information from verifying the honesty and accuracy of the bank's books, regulatory discipline information about the treatment of the bank by regulators, and private information about bank condition. We estimate these information effects by comparing the cumulative abnormal market returns associated with examinations in which the CAMEL rating remained unchanged, improved, and worsened. All three information effects are found to be greater for banks entering the examination process with unsatisfactory ratings from prior examinations. The only consistently strong effect found is that examination downgrades appear to reveal unfavorable private information about bank condition. The evidence also suggests that the information may reach the market in part through loan quality data released in quarterly financial statements.     

The effect of early resolution of uncertainty on the valuation of assets: A dichotomy into market and non-market information

We reconsider how the temporal resolution of uncertainty about the future payoffs from capital assets affects the initial valuation of these assets. Our results regarding valuation indicate that, in an intertemporal CAPM framework, the early resolution of market uncertainty leads to an increase in the value of the market portfolio. The values of individual assets change in direct proportion to their betas. We reconcile the differing conclusions of Ross (1989) and Epstein and Turnbull (1980) regarding the early resolution of what they term idiosyncratic and asset specific information respectively.     

A New Approach to Group Structure, Burden Sharing, and the Equilibrium Provision of Public Goods

In the received model of the voluntary provision of a pure public good, the usual practice is to proceed from assumptions about the group characteristics to inferences about an implied outcome. The approach advocated in this paper reverses the traditional direction. Assuming a Nash equilibrium, we ask how to characterize the diverse set of group characteristics which will support it. Approaching the problem from this angle we define three crucial characteristics of a group-equilibrium: consumer's free rider inducing supply, zero contribution-inducing wealth and voluntary surplus tribute which is the amount by which a person's actual income exceeds his/her zero-contribution inducing wealth. Defining these indicators we show how they form the foundation of a complete mapping between the distribution of individual characteristics of a group, and equilibrium public good supply. Certain questions such as the interaction between size of the group and heterogeneity of incomes and tastes not yet adequately addressed are shown to yield easily to this approach.     

Commercial Mortgage Default: A Comparison of Logit with Radial Basis Function Networks

This article explores the use of artificial neural networks in the modeling of foreclosure of commercial mortgages. The study employs a large set of individual loan histories previously used in the literature of proportional hazard models on loan default. Radial basis function networks are trained (estimated) using the same input variables as those used in the logistic. The objective is to demonstrate the use of networks in forecasting mortgage default and to compare their performance with that of the logistic benchmark in terms of prediction accuracy. Neural networks are shown to be superior to the logistic in terms of discriminating between good and bad loans. The study performs sensitivity analysis on the average loan and offers suggestions on further improving prediction of defaulting loans.     

Economic Risk Factors and Commercial Real Estate Returns

A great deal of research has focused on the links between stock and bond market returns and macroeconomic events such as fluctuations in interest rates, inflation rates, and industrial production. Although the comovements of real estate and other asset prices suggests that these same systematic risk factors are likely to be priced in real estate markets, no study has formally addressed this issue. This study identifies the growth rate in real per capita consumption, the real T-bill rate, the term structure of interest rates, and unexpected inflation as fundamental drivers or state variables that systematically affect real estate returns. The finding of a consistently significant risk premium on consumption has important ramifications for the vast literature that has examined the (risk-adjusted) performance of real estate, for it suggests that prior findings of significant abnormal returns (either positive or negative) that have ignored consumption are potentially biased by an omitted variables problem. The results also have important implications for dynamic asset allocation strategies that involve the predictability of real estate returns using economic data.     

Measuring Potential GSE Funding Advantages

As the size of government sponsored enterprises (GSE) has grown, attention has focused on the relationship between the federal government and the GSEs, with particular attention focused on estimating the impact of this relationship on GSE debt costs. Quantifying the GSEs cost advantage is a controversial exercise with several competing methodologies providing divergent values. Thus, this paper reviews the methods that have been utilized in previous studies and recommends an alternative approach that overcomes many of the criticisms of previous work. By using offering yields on GSE debt, we find that the three housing GSEs enjoyed an average advantage of between 25 and 29 basis points over AA banking sector bonds, between 43 and 47 basis points over A rated bonds, and between 76 and 80 basis points over BBB rated banking issues. We find that our results are robust to both the basic approach taken as well as to model specification.