Bank credit risk and macro-prudential policies: Role of counter-cyclical capital buffer

This paper investigates the impact of macro-prudential policy (proxied by the counter-cyclical capital buffer (CCyB)) on bank credit risk during uncertain times, as banking sector stability is crucial in promoting financial intermediation. Using a unique daily data set consisting of 4939 credit default swaps (CDS) of 70 banks from 25 countries over the period 2010–2019, we find that CCyB tightening decreases bank-level CDS spreads, while CCyB loosening increases CDS spreads. This heterogeneous effect of CCyB arises due to its asymmetric effect on the capital ratio (i.e., the equity-to-total assets ratio) of banks. Tightening CCyB significantly increases capital, whereas loosening CCyB does not impact capital. Thus, the risks that emanate from the banking sector during periods of heightened uncertainty and financial distress can be significantly dampened when CCyB regulation is enabled. Consequently, macro-prudential policies for banks to hold higher levels of capital during good times are justified to contain financial market risks during downturns.     

The countercyclical capital buffer and the composition of bank lending

Do targeted macroprudential measures impact non-targeted sectors too? We investigate the compositional changes in the supply of credit by Swiss banks, exploiting their differential exposure to the activation in 2013 of the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB) which targeted banks’ exposure to residential mortgages. We find that the additional capital requirements resulting from the activation of the CCyB are associated with higher growth in banks’ commercial lending. While banks are lending more to all types of businesses, the new macroprudential policy benefits smaller and riskier businesses the most. However, the interest rates and other costs of obtaining credit for these firms rise as well.     

无形资产对公司资本结构的影响研究

针对无形资产是否可以起到有效的债务支持替代作用进而影响企业资本结构这一当前少有文献实证探讨的问题,结合我国实际融资环境实证分析无形资产对企业负债水平及资本结构的影响程度和机制.研究发现,企业无形资产投入与负债支持能力及资产负债率显著正相关,实际上发挥出了对有形资产债务支持的替代作用.     

Dividend premium: Are dividend-paying stocks worth more?

This paper reports that the relation between dividend payout and firm value is positive. Panel data regressions suggest that the dividend premium for firms' equity is 17.4% and the dividend premium for firms' assets is 7.1%. The tests using propensity score matching methodology report a lower – but still positive and statistically significant – dividend premium: 12.5% for equity and 6.1% for assets. Thus, stock prices of dividend payers are greater by 12.5% or 17.4% on average (depending on methodology) compared to those of nonpayers. We find that policy-related economic uncertainty and the proportion of firms paying dividends explain more than half of the variation in dividend premium for assets.     

Does the Conditional CAPM Work? Evidence from the Istanbul Stock Exchange

Using a sample of common stocks traded on the Istanbul Stock Exchange from February 1997 to April 2008, we test whether the conditional capital asset pricing model (CAPM) accurately prices assets. In our empirical analysis, we closely follow the methodology introduced in Lewellen and Nagel (2006). Our results show that the conditional CAPM fares no better than the static counterpart in pricing assets. Although market betas do vary significantly over time, the intertemporal variation is not large enough to drive average conditional alphas to zero.     

Risk Management and the Cost of Capital for Operating Assets

This article attempts to clarify the effect of risk management on a company's cost of capital in the spirit of the traditional M&M/CAPM model. The traditional cost of capital model can and should be used to find the hurdle rate for a company's operating assets, since it can be applied regardless of the composition of the firm's non‐operating assets or its risk management policy. The author's main message is that if a firm manages idiosyncratic risk, the correct cost of capital for the operating investment is not the firm's enterprise WACC, but rather the required return on the assets being funded. Using the case of a company with a single line of business that is evaluating an investment opportunity, the author demonstrates how to adjust the firm's overall WACC to find the cost of capital for the operating assets to be acquired.     

Capital Structure and Assets: Effects of an Implicit Collateral

This paper analyses a firm's capital structure choice when assets have outside value. Valuable assets implicitly provide a collateral and increase tax shield exploitation. The key feature in this paper is asset value uncertainty, implying that it is unknown ex ante whether the equity holders ex post optimally sell the assets or re‐optimise the capital structure. Ex ante, more uncertain asset value decreases leverage, but not firm value, and selling the assets becomes less likely. Firms should tend to invest in assets whose value is less correlated to changes in earnings and, in addition, asset sales are less likely when this correlation is low.     

资本投向与控制权私有收益攫取的实证研究

文章基于资本投资形成控制性资源,为获取控制权私有收益创造基础的理论阐述,以2005—2007年在沪深两市A股市场的公司为样本,对我国上市公司投资决策中资本投向与控制权私有收益的关系进行了实证检验。研究结果表明：（1）不同投向的资本投资与控制权私有收益攫取水平正相关。（2）就固定资产、股权并购、无形资产三种资本投向而言,股权并购方式取得控制权私有收益的代价较低,但控制性股东占有被并购公司控制权私有收益的比例也较低。（3）不同投向下的资本投资,在形成控制权私有收益的同时并没有通过提高公司业绩而增加控制权共有收益,很大程度上是形成控制权私有收益的自利行为。     

The Relation Between Patent Citations and Tobin's Q in the Semiconductor Industry

The market value of a firm is largely determined by the expected returns to the firm's tangible and intangible assets. However, accounting data generally excludes intangible assets. Financial variables which are constructed in part from accounting data, such as Tobin's Q, are thus biased. If measures of intangible capital are successful in explaining variation in Q, then a case can be made for incorporating such measures into future research. In high technology industries, such as the semiconductor industry, valuing a firm's intangible assets requires the valuation of its technological capital. Past studies have relied heavily on simple patent counts and research and development expenditures to quantify the technological component of a firm's intangible assets. This paper examines the ability of measures of intangible capital to explain variation in Q and considers an additional data source, patent citations. We find that stock variables created from citation data contain relevant information about the market's valuation of intangible assets.     

International capital market equilibrium with investment barriers

This paper outlines models of capital market equilibrium when there are explicit barriers to international investment in the form of a tax on holdings of assets in one country by residents of another country. There is a corresponding subsidy on short positions in foreign assets. Asset prices deviate from the predictions of the world capital asset pricing model. Investors do not hold a mixture of national market portfolios, but the mix of risky assets is the same for every investor in a country. Optimal portfolios tend to be heavy in domestic assets, and light in foreign assets. Tax free investors, however, tend to hold assets anywhere in the world that are taxed heavily. Estimates of the magnitude of the average tax (or the magnitude of effective barriers to international investment) can be made by comparing the average return on the minimum variance zero β portfolio, z, with the average across countries and time of the short-term interest rate. When barriers are ineffective, the expected return on portfolio z will be the average short-term interest rate, and the world capital asset pricing model will hold.     

An economic assessment of capital requirements in the banking industry

The paper uses a two-period model to evaluate the capital requirements imposed on banks. In particular, the interaction between capital requirements and other regulatory measures is analyzed. It is shown that, in a competitive set-up, there is a tradeoff between the capital ratio and the liquidity of assets.     

Growth Opportunities and Investment Decisions: A New Perspective on the Cost of Capital

This paper shows that it is not always correct to make an upward adjustment to the stock beta in calculating the hurdle rate for capital budgeting even when the project under consideration is riskier than existing assets. The paper also shows that the correct hurdle rate is smaller than the market capitalization rate calculated from the firm's stock beta when the project under consideration has the same risk as existing assets. In addition, it is shown that the market capitalization rate will be an underestimate (overestimate) of the correct hurdle rate when the risk of future assets is greater (smaller) than both the risk of assets in place and that of future capital expenditures. These new results are direct consequences of the insight that the firm's investment opportunities are in fact real call options written on underlying assets.     

投资者保护与控股股东资产偏好

本文从控股股东资产偏好的角度构建了一个在股权集中型公司中研究控股股东侵占中小股东利益的行为决策分析框架。理论分析表明,投资者保护可以缓解因控股股东对流动性资产的偏好而形成的投资不足,但公司现金持有水平取决于公司投资不足和控股股东资产转移两个方面的净效应。实证研究结果证实了较好的投资者保护能够在一定程度上缓解公司投资不足,并抑制控股股东的资产转移动机,从而促使外部投资者对公司所持有的现金予以较高的价值评估。我们还发现中国上市公司控股股东较高的现金流权对应着较高的控制权,其结果是加剧公司投资不足,导致公司现金水平较高而现金价值较低。     

Do a firm's equity returns reflect the risk of its pension plan?

This paper examines the empirical question of whether systematic equity risk of US firms as measured by beta from the capital asset pricing model reflects the risk of their pension plans. There are a number of reasons to suspect that it might not. Chief among them is the opaque set of accounting rules used to report pension assets, liabilities, and expenses. Pension plan assets and liabilities are off-balance sheet and are often viewed as segregated from the rest of the firm, with its own trustees. Pension accounting rules are complicated. Furthermore, the role of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation clouds the real relation between pension plan risk and firm equity risk. The empirical findings in this paper are consistent with the hypothesis that equity risk does reflect the risk of the firm's pension plan despite arcane accounting rules for pensions. This finding is consistent with informational efficiency of the capital markets. It also has implications for corporate finance practice in the determination of the cost of capital for capital budgeting. Standard procedure uses de-leveraged equity return betas to infer the cost of capital for operating assets. But the de-leveraged betas are not adjusted for the risk of the pension assets and liabilities. Failure to make this adjustment typically biases upward estimates of the discount rate for capital budgeting. The magnitude of the bias is shown here to be large for a number of well-known US companies. This bias can result in positive net present value projects being rejected.     

Testing macroprudential stress tests: The risk of regulatory risk weights

We compare the capital shortfall measured by regulatory stress tests, to that of a benchmark methodology — the “V-Lab stress test” — that employs only publicly available market data. We find that when capital shortfalls are measured relative to risk-weighted assets, the ranking of financial institutions is not well correlated to the ranking of the V-Lab stress test, whereas rank correlations increase when required capitalization is a function of total assets. We show that the risk measures used in risk-weighted assets are cross-sectionally uncorrelated with market measures of risk, as they do not account for the “risk that risk will change.” Furthermore, the banks that appeared to be best capitalized relative to risk-weighted assets were no better than the rest when the European economy deteriorated into the sovereign debt crisis in 2011.     

Reclassification of Financial Assets under IAS 39: Impact on European Banks' Financial Statements

In response to the financial crisis, the IASB issued on 13 October 2008 an amendment to IAS 39 which enables entities to reclassify non-derivative financial assets held for trading and financial assets available-for-sale. This paper examines the influence of this controversial amendment on the 2008 financial statements of 219 European banks which apply IFRS. I find that approximately one-third of the sample banks have taken extensive advantage of these reclassification opportunities. The mean reclassification amount is 3.9% of total assets and 131% of the book value of equity, respectively. I further document that reclassifying banks avoid substantial fair value losses, and hence, report significantly higher levels of return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), book value of equity and regulatory capital. In particular, the mean ROE switches sign from a negative ROE of ?1.4% to a positive ROE of 1.3% due to gains from reclassifications. Overall, this paper documents a substantial impact of the amendments on banks' financial statements and suggests analysing these reclassifications with particular caution.     

The Effect of Serial Dependence on Multiperiod Holding Period Return Performance

The impact of the investment time horizon on risk‐return properties of asset returns depends on the presence of serial correlation and higher order serial dependencies. We present a methodology for decomposing multiperiod holding period return covariance into serial and cross‐sectional components using a recursive multiplicative model that captures the effects of serial and cross‐sectional dependencies and their joint effects without requiring a distributional form assumption. Applying this model to historical monthly return series for commonly held financial assets and portfolios of assets, we investigate the significance of the investment time horizon, the existence and relevance of time diversification, the inflation‐hedging effectiveness of different assets, and the appropriateness of applying traditional capital market theory in a multiperiod framework.     

外资股权、外币资产负债结构对我国银行稳定性影响的研究

目前,国际资本流动影响我国银行稳定性主要通过两条路径：一是通过持有我国商业银行股权,二是通过改变商业银行的资产负债结构。本文运用15家股份制商业银行2006—2012年面板数据,从微观角度探讨了外资股权结构、外币资产负债结构对其稳定性造成的影响。实证结果表明：（1）外资股权对商业银行稳定性影响在不同银行之间存在着一定差异;（2）外币资产负债结构对于我国商业银行稳定性有明显影响。据此,本文从外资股权、外币资产负债结构方面提出了商业银行稳定性管理的建议。     

资产结构、资本结构与盈利能力相关性研究——基于我国稀土类上市公司经验数据

稀土企业盈利状况极不稳定是当前我国稀土产业面临的严峻问题之一.资产结构与资本结构是否合理直接关系着企业的盈利状况.本文以我国13家稀土类上市公司为研究样本,首先采用主成分法对影响企业盈利能力的财务指标进行综合,再通过回归分析法对稀土企业资产结构、资本结构与盈利能力之间的关系进行回归分析.研究表明：稀土类上市公司资产结构与资本结构不够合理,优化资产结构与资本结构是提高稀土类上市公司盈利能力的重要途径.     

Factores que explican la extensión de revelación de activos intangibles de los bancos que cotizan en la Bolsa de Valores de Panamá

This paper analyzes the level of voluntary disclosure of intangible assets, and identifies the factors that explain the disclosure of such information by the banks listed on the Panama Stock Exchange during the period 2005-2009. The information is recorded on an index that contains 158 indicators divided into five categories: human capital, technological structural, organizational structure, relational business and social relational. Three hypotheses are posed: H₁ there is a positive relationship between the size and extent of disclosure of intangible assets; H₂ a positive relationship between the extent of incorporation and disclosure of intangible assets; H₃ there is a positive relationship between leverage and the extent of disclosure of intangible assets. The results indicate that for Panama banks it is more important to disclose information on intangibles in the following order: business relational capital, social relational, organizational structure, human and technological structural. H₁ was accepted as a size category except for the structural capital; H₂ was accepted for the years in all categories, while H₃ was rejected.