The role of government in the venture capital market with asymmetric information

Information asymmetry increases the risks undertaken by venture capitalists. The present study departs from the tendency in earlier analyses to attribute the problem of information asymmetry to the entrepreneur only. In view of the obvious social benefits that the development of the venture capital industry brings, the government should take upon itself to consider tax incentives and changes to regulatory policies in order to attract venture capital investments. Three scenarios are portrayed here to examine the issue of asymmetric information in the venture capital market: (1) when both the venture capitalist's and entrepreneur's efforts are observable and the government incentive policy is available; (2) when the entrepreneur's effort is unobservable but the venture capitalist's is observable and government tax incentive is available; and (3) when the entrepreneur's effort is observable but the venture capitalist's effort is unobservable, and regulatory monitoring and government tax incentives are uncertain. This investigation reveals that the tax incentive policy and regulatory measures put in place by the government can significantly and positively affect the outcome of the entrepreneurial project by reducing information asymmetry.     

Moral Hazard and the Portfolio Management Problem

This paper investigates the significance of nonlinear contracts on the incentive for portfolio managers to collect information. In addition, the manager must be motivated to disclose this information truthfully. We analyze three contracting regimes: (1) first-best where effort is observable, (2) linear with unobservable effort, and (3) the optimal contract within the Bhattacharya-Pfleiderer quadratic class. We find that the linear contract leads to a serious lack of effort expenditure by the manager. This underinvestment problem can be successfully overcome through the use of quadratic contracts. These contracts are shown to be asymptotically optimal for very risk-tolerant principals.     

Is it obligor or instrument that explains recovery rate: Evidence from US corporate bond

This study investigates the impacts of unobservable firm heterogeneity on modelling corporate bond recovery rates at the instrument level. Based on the recovery information over a long horizon from 1986 to 2012, we find that an obligor-varying linear factor model presents significant improvements in explaining the variations of recovery rates with a remarkably high intra-class correlation being observed. It emphasizes that the inclusion of an obligor-varying random effect term has effectively explained the unobservable firm level information shared by instruments of the same issuer and thus results in an improvement of predictive accuracy of recovery rates. The empirical results show that the latent economic cyclical effects have been well represented by firm level heterogeneity, and strong evidence is presented for the normal distributional assumption of the recovery rates. Finally, we demonstrate the choice of recovery rate models may influence portfolio risk with the obligor-varying factor model generating a more right clustered loss distribution than other regression methods on the aggregated portfolio.     

Push or pull? Performance-pay,incentives, and information

We study a principal-agent model wherein the agent is better informed of the prospects of the project, and the project requires both an observable and unobservable input. We characterize the optimal contracts, and explore the trade-offs between high- and low-powered incentive schemes. We discuss the implications for push and pull programs used to encourage Research and Development (R&D) activity, but our results are relevant in other contexts.     

WARRANT PRICING USING OBSERVABLE VARIABLES

The classical warrant pricing formula requires knowledge of the firm value and of the firm‐value process variance. When warrants are outstanding, the firm value itself is a function of the warrant price. Firm value and firm‐value variance are then unobservable variables. I develop an algorithm for pricing warrants using stock prices, an observable variable, and stock return variance. The method also enables estimation of firm‐value variance. A proof of existence of the solution is provided.     

Understanding the Endogeneity Between Firm Value and Shareholder Rights

I explore the relation between firm value and the shareholder rights-based Governance Index "G," which has become a popular measure of governance quality among researchers and investors. I show that the relation is not spuriously driven by unobservable firm heterogeneity or an assortment of observable firm characteristics, such as firm growth potential and profitability. The causality seems to run from G to firm value, rather than from firm value to G. My results suggest that granting more rights to shareholders could be an effective way to reduce agency costs and enhance firm value.     

Contracting Incentives and Compensation for Property-Liability Insurer Executives

This article examines several hypotheses about the structure and level of compensation for 103 property‐liability chief executive officers (CEOs) from 1995 through 1997. The greater the level of firm risk and the larger the firm, the greater the use of incentive compensation. Insurers subject to more regulatory attention and those whose CEOs have greater stock ownership make less use of incentive compensation. There is some evidence that option grants and restricted stock awards provide CEOs with differing incentives. This article finds that corporate governance structures, managers' stock ownership, and regulatory attention are not adequate to prevent CEOs from receiving compensation levels in excess of what economic factors predict. Contrary to findings in prior studies, there is little evidence that use of incentive compensation or level of total compensation paid increases with insurer investment opportunities, as traditionally measured.     

How Does Unobserved Heterogeneity Affect Value Relevance?

Most value relevance (VR) studies consider an accounting item value relevant if the regression coefficient (RC) of that item is statistically significant. Unobservable heterogeneity leads to biased RCs, interpretation of which generates incorrect inferences. To obtain unbiased RCs, the effect of unobservable heterogeneity on RCs should be mitigated. As two dimensions of unobservable heterogeneity are at the firm level and time level, outcomes with the following unobservable heterogeneity concerns are discussed: i) no fixed‐effects (FE); ii) firm FE; iii) time FE; and iv) two‐way (firm and time) FE. By employing a sample of Turkish firms from 2005–2014, we report several findings. First, we find that regressions with firm (time) FE yield large (low) RCs vis‐à‐vis regressions with no FE, and regressions with two‐way FE generate balanced RCs compared to the others. Second, we compare RCs with i and iv, and conclude that the book value of equity becomes more value relevant while net income does not after controlling for unobservable heterogeneity. Last, we arbitrarily divide the entire period into two to reveal how unobserved endogeneity affects the comparison of RCs belonging to different periods. Our outcomes robustly reveal that unobserved endogeneity leads to erroneous RC comparisons.     

Forecast Dispersion and the Cross Section of Expected Returns

Recent work by Diether, Malloy, and Scherbina (2002) has established a negative relationship between stock returns and the dispersion of analysts' earnings forecasts. I offer a simple explanation for this phenomenon based on the interpretation of dispersion as a proxy for unpriced information risk arising when asset values are unobservable. The relationship then follows from a general options‐pricing result: For a levered firm, expected returns should always decrease with the level of idiosyncratic asset risk. This story is formalized with a straightforward model. Reasonable parameter values produce large effects, and the theory's main empirical prediction is supported in cross‐sectional tests.     

Tax reform, the informal economy, and bank financing of capital formation

This paper develops a model that relates businesses’ entry into the underground economy to tax rates and the need to access the banking system. The model uses a dynamic approach in which both firms and banks optimize and in which the benefits to a firm of accessing the banking system are endogenous. A firm compares the return to capital with the marginal tax rate on capital income and uses the difference to determine how much of the tax to pay. At the same time, banks use a firm’s capital tax payments, combined with the capital tax rate to obtain an estimate of the firm’s minimum capital value. If the firm pays at least some taxes then it will have access to the banking system, which will allow it to finance investment. If the firm pays no taxes, then it cannot access the banks and cannot invest. We compare the equilibria resulting from tax compliance and tax evasion. We calibrate the model to a highly stylized version of the Russian economy, and analyze the effect of potential tax changes on the underground economy. We compute a dynamic equilibrium for our model, and note that it tracks the path of certain macroeconomic variables of the Russian economy (GDP, budget and trade balances, price level and interest rate) with some accuracy for the years 2001–2008. We are unable to track the underground economy, as this data is unobservable. We then carry out a series of counterfactual simulations, first asking if non-capital intensive firms have an incentive to evade taxes under existing value added tax rates. We find that they do, and that the incentive would have been greatly reduced if the value added tax rate had been selectively reduced for the non-capital intensive sectors. We then ask what the effect would be if the corporate tax rate were raised on capital intensive sectors. The simulations indicate that the capital intensive sectors would not increase their entry into the underground economy.     

The Moderating Effect of Relative Performance Evaluation on the Risk Incentive Properties of Executives’ Equity Portfolios

We offer evidence that the use of relative performance evaluation (RPE) in CEOs’ incentive contracts influences the effect of risk‐taking incentives on both the magnitude and composition of firm risk. We find that, when the incentive design lacks RPE features, the incentive portfolio vega motivates CEOs to increase total risk through the systematic component because it can be hedged. In contrast, when the incentive design includes RPE features, CEOs prefer idiosyncratic risk because RPE filters out the systematic component of firm performance. We also document that the use of RPE reinforces the incentive portfolio vega's effect on the total risk.     

Correlation in credit risk changes

The current economic climate makes understanding credit risk correlation particularly important. After allowing for a comprehensive set of observable firm-specific, industry, market, and macroeconomic factors, there is an economically significant co-movement in credit default swap spreads that remains to be explained. Including a time dummy completely accounts for the remaining co-movement, confirming the existence of a systematic component that has been previously unaccounted for. Our findings suggest that it may be important to consider unobservable risk factor(s) in credit risk models.     

Stock price reactions as surrogates for the net cash flow effects of corporate policy decisions

This paper adopts a rational market structure to examine the link between the cash flow effects of management policy decisions and the resulting stock price reactions. The focus is on testing cross-sectional associations between cash flow effects and the underlying characteristics of affected firms. We find that it is not possible to infer the sign of association between the stock price reaction and any characteristics of the firm that are observable before management announces its decision. Our methodological suggestions involve exploiting either a priori assumptions or sample information about the probability distribution of unobservable decision variables underlying the management decision process.     

Sentiment stocks

To study how investor sentiment at the firm level affects stock returns, we match more than 58 million social media messages in China with listed firms and construct a measure of individual stock sentiment based on the tone of those messages. We document that positive investor sentiment predicts higher stock risk-adjusted returns in the very short term followed by price reversals. This association between stock sentiment and stock returns is not explained by observable stock characteristics, unobservable time-invariant characteristics, market-wide sentiment, overreaction to news, or changing investor attention. Consistent with theories of investor sentiment, we find that the link between sentiment and stock returns is mainly driven by positive sentiment and non-professional investors. Finally, exploiting a unique feature of the Chinese stock market, we are able to isolate the causal effect of sentiment on stock returns from confounding factors.     

Determinants of the floating-to-fixed rate debt structure of firms

We analyze the effects of managerial incentive, firm characteristics and market timing on floating-to-fixed rate debt structure of firms. We find that chief financial officer's (CFO's), not chief executive officer's (CEO's), incentive has a strong influence on firm's debt structure. When CFOs have incentives to increase (decrease) firm risk, firms obtain volatility-increasing (-decreasing) debt structure. These effects are present only for CFOs who are not subject to high monitoring by board members, CEOs, or corporate control market. Our findings suggest that agency problems at the level of non-CEO executives could be an important driver of various corporate decisions.     

CEO's Inside Debt and Dynamics of Capital Structure

Debt‐type compensation (inside debt) exacerbates the divergence in risk preferences between the chief executive officer (CEO) and shareholders and, in turn, affects capital structure decisions. An excessively risk‐averse CEO tends to use less debt than the shareholders desire, reduce debt quickly when the firm is overlevered, but is reluctant to increase debt when the firm is underlevered. We find that higher CEO's inside debt ratio (i.e., inside debt as a percentage of total incentive compensation) is associated with lower firm leverage and faster (slower) leverage adjustments toward the shareholders’ desired level for overlevered (underlevered) firms. The CEO's inside debt ratio most conducive to capital structure rebalancing is around 10% of the firm's market debt ratio.     

Signalling and the Pricing of New Issues

This paper develops a signalling model with two signals, two attributes, and a continuum of signal levels and attribute types to explain new issue underpricing. Both the fraction of the new issue retained by the issuer and its offering price convey to investors the unobservable “intrinsic” value of the firm and the variance of its cash flows. Many of the model's comparative statics results are novel, empirically testable, and consistent with the existing empirical evidence on new issues. In particular, the degree of underpricing, which can be inferred from observable variables, is positively related to the firm's post-issue share price.     

Insurance loss coverage and social welfare

Restrictions on insurance risk classification may induce adverse selection, which is usually perceived as a bad outcome, both for insurers and for society. However, a social benefit of modest adverse selection is that it can lead to an increase in ‘loss coverage’, defined as expected losses compensated by insurance for the whole population. We reconcile the concept of loss coverage to a utilitarian concept of social welfare commonly found in the economic literature on risk classification. For iso-elastic insurance demand, ranking risk classification schemes by (observable) loss coverage always give the same ordering as ranking by (unobservable) social welfare.     

The Forgone Gains of Incomplete Portfolios

This article proposes a test for the cost-based explanationof nonparticipation, by estimating a lower bound to the forgonegains of incomplete portfolios; these are in turn a lower boundto the costs that could rationalize nonparticipation in financialmarkets: high bounds would imply implausibly high costs. Assumingisoelastic utility and a relative risk aversion of three orless, for the stock market I estimate an average lower boundof between 0.7 and 3.3 percent of consumption. Since total annual(observable plus unobservable) participation costs are likelyto exceed these bounds, the cost-based explanation is not rejectedby this test.