Hedge accounting and its influence on financial hedging: when the tail wags the dog

We analyse the application of hedge accounting and its influence on hedging behaviour in German and Swiss non-financial corporations. Of our sample companies, 72% apply hedge accounting. The likelihood of its use is associated with frequency of derivatives usage, size, IFRS experience, perceived importance of reduced earnings volatility and low growth opportunities. More than half of the companies using hedge accounting indicate that the accounting rules influence their hedging behaviour. Companies are more likely to be affected if they use derivatives only occasionally, are smaller, are highly leveraged, have dispersed shareholding, have fewer growth opportunities and hedge selectively.     

Derivatives Usage in Emerging Markets Following the GFC: Evidence from the GCC Countries

In this article, we avail of International Accounting Standards IFRS 7 to investigate the usage and motivation of hedging by firms in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). The results of our panel and cross-sectional data logistic regressions indicate a focus on foreign exchange exposure, interest rates risk, and commodity risk in this region. We find that the use of hedging instruments in this region is also influenced positively by the firm’s size and, to a lesser degree, positively by the firm’s gearing ratio and negatively by its propensity to growth. The level of activity, nevertheless, remains lower than is the case for firms globally.     

Corporate risk management and firm value: evidence from the UK market

The paper evaluates the effect of corporate risk management activities on firm value, using a sample of large UK non-financial firms. Following recent changes in financial reporting standards, we are able to collect detailed information on risk management activities from audited financial reports. This enables us to gain a better understanding of risk management practices and to investigate value implications of different types of hedging. Overall 86.88% of the firms in the sample use derivatives to manage at least one type of price risk. The hedging premium is statistically and economically significant for foreign currency derivative users, while we provide weak evidence that interest rate hedging increases firm value. The extent of hedging and the hedging horizon have an impact on the hedging premium, whereas operational risk management activities do not significantly influence the market value of the firm.     

A literature survey of financial reporting in private firms

This paper provides a survey of the empirical literature on financial reporting in private firms. Although private firms play a dominant role in country-level economic development, research on their financial reporting is limited. The survey reveals that there remains uncertainty as to the purpose of financial reporting in private firms which is also reflected in the current body of the empirical literature. The survey provides implications for regulators with respect to regulating the financial reporting of private firms. The survey also identifies some limitations of existing research and offers potential avenues for future research.     

The Impact of Institutional Differences on Derivatives Usage: a Comparative Study of US and Dutch Firms

This paper examines the influence of institutional differences on corporate risk management practices in the USA and the Netherlands. We compare results to surveys in each country using a strategy that corrects for differences over industry and size classes across the Dutch and US samples. We document several differences in the firms’ uses and attitudes towards derivatives and attempt to attribute them to the differences in the institutional environments between the USA and the Netherlands. We find that institutional differences appear to have an important impact on risk management practices and derivatives use across US and Dutch firms.     

Financing firms with restricted access to financial markets: the use of trade credit and factoring in Belgium

Many authors emphasize the implications of restricted access to financial markets for both small and new firms. The paper reports investigations into the use of alternative means of financing. More specifically, the use of trade credit and factoring are examined. Indeed, following the trade credit management literature both institutional and macro economic restrictions on small business finance can be overcome by ‘larger suppliers’ extending trade credit to their smaller customers. However, the DSO-rate cannot be used to measure the supplier's willingness to invest in trade credit as it depends on both suppliers' and customers' characteristics. The decision to extend trade credit is therefore approximated by the will to control its management and operationalized by the decision to factor or not to factor. The results of our study are twofold. First, factoring is mainly used by small and medium-sized companies. Moreover, when looking at the characteristics of the factor's customers, new companies facing huge capital expenditure programmes and seasonal sales decide to factor. The prejudice about factoring being a last resort means of finance is, however, not supported: companies that decide to use factoring are indeed less profitable, but this is simply due to their high growth and/or capital intensive investment programmes.     

Why and how firms use operating cash flow in compensation**

This study considers the choice of operating cash flow (OCF) in contracts and further examines the sensitivity of the CFO's and CEO's compensation to OCF performance, conditional on our stylized indicator of the importance of working capital management (WCM). The analysis depicts OCF as conveying distinct information about WCM, and predicts that firms for which WCM is an important source of value are more likely to contract on OCF. The importance of WCM is instrumented by firm conditions that create strong demand for WCM, including large working capital, rapid growth in working capital, highly volatile working capital, and large debt relative to total assets. Using a sample of firms whose incentive plans explicitly include OCF measures and a control sample of firms without such plans, we show that all four indicators of the importance of WCM have positive association with the likelihood of contracting upon OCF, individually and collectively. In compensation regressions, we find that WCM importance has a pronounced positive effect on the weight of OCF, but muted effect on the weight of accrual earnings. The results suggest that firms include measures of OCF performance in contracts largely to provide incentives for WCM and internal cash generation.     

美国信用衍生品交易监管立法及对我国的启示

本文论述信用衍生品主要类别、积极作用及交易蕴含风险,分析评价了2010年7月美国国会通过的包含信用衍生品在内的金融衍生品交易监管立法。我国监管层也有推出信用衍生品的计划,并于2010年11月开始市场试点,在此背景下作者对构建我国信用衍生品监管法律制度提出若干建议:加快制定包括信用衍生品在内的统一的金融衍生品交易监管法,为市场发展奠定法律基础;完善金融监管协调机制;尽快出台相关立法或司法解释以解决《中国银行间市场金融衍生产品交易主协议》有关规定与现行法律冲突的问题;适时修改监管规则以鼓励金融机构更多采用信用衍生品管理风险;逐步引进集中清算方式;改进信用衍生品监管信息披露要求。     

全球金融危机后的场外金融衍生品市场变革

后金融危机时代的全球场外衍生品市场正处于深刻变革之中,各国政府、监管部门和金融行业改革场外衍生品市场的一系列举措对我国也有着重要的借鉴意义。文章对金融危机以来全球场外衍生品市场发展改革的情况进行了整理研究,并结合我国实际提出相关建议。     

Earnings management and firm financial motives: A financial investigation of UK listed firms

This study focuses on the investigation of motives for and characteristics of UK firms that engage in earnings management activities. It concentrates particularly on the provision of voluntary accounting disclosures, the violation of debt covenants, management compensation, and on the equity and debt capital needs of firms and their relation with the use of earnings management. The study examines also the earnings management inclination of firms that seek to meet or exceed financial analysts' forecasts. The findings generally indicate that firms with low profitability and high leverage measures are likely to use earnings management. Also, firms that are in equity and debt capital need and are close to debt covenant violation also appear to be inclined to employ earnings management practices. Likewise, firms tend to use earnings management to improve their financial numbers and subsequently reinforce their compensation and meet and/or exceed financial analysts' earnings forecasts. In contrast, the study shows that firms that provide voluntary accounting disclosures appear to be less inclined to make use of earnings management.     

金融危机前后国际信用衍生产品市场的发展及启示

信用衍生产品自问世以来在分散金融机构信用风险、完善信用风险定价机制、提高债券市场流动性等方面发挥了积极的作用。该文介绍了信用衍生产品的主要功能及其在本次金融危机前、中、后三个时期的发展特点,肯定了基础信用衍生产品对金融市场的重要作用,指出中国应推动金融创新,建立有中国特色的信用衍生产品市场。     

A systematic and efficient simulation scheme for the Greeks of financial derivatives

Greeks are the price sensitivities of financial derivatives and are essential for pricing, speculation, risk management, and model calibration. Although the pathwise method has been popular for calculating them, its applicability is problematic when the integrand is discontinuous. To tackle this problem, this paper defines and derives the parameter derivative of a discontinuous integrand of certain functional forms with respect to the parameter of interest. The parameter derivative is such that its integration equals the differentiation of the integration of the aforesaid discontinuous integrand with respect to that parameter. As a result, unbiased Greek formulas for a very broad class of payoff functions and models can be systematically derived. This new method is applied to the Greeks of (1) Asian options under two popular Lévy processes, i.e. Merton's jump-diffusion model and the variance-gamma process, and (2) collateralized debt obligations under the Gaussian copula model. Our Greeks outperform the finite-difference and likelihood ratio methods in terms of accuracy, variance, and computation time.     

信用衍生工具及其在我国的应用探析

信用衍生品是20世纪90年代末发展起来的一种新型金融衍生工具．它将信用风险从市场风险中分离出来,并使信用风险变得可以交易和管理,从根本上改变了传统的信用风险管理模式。尽管信用信息缺乏、金融法规不健全、债务交易二级市场滞后等问题限制了我国信用衍生工具的发展,但随着我国金融业对外开放程度的迅速提高和金融体制改革深化,发展信用衍生工具将成为我国未来金融市场发展的必然选择。     

Derivatives Usage and Financial Risk Management in Large and Small Economies: A Comparative Analysis

The objective of this paper is to expand and update previous New Zealand — based surveys in order to compare and contrast risk management practices of firms in the small, foreign trade-dependent economy of New Zealand to those of firms in the considerably larger, more developed US, UK, and German markets. This survey examines patterns of usage, reasons and objectives for derivatives use, and reporting and control procedures and finds that the practice of hedging with derivative instruments among New Zealand firms appears to be evolving as global markets become more integrated. We find that the percentage of firms involved in hedging, both large and small, has grown since the last New Zealand surveys, and that New Zealand firms have many of the same reasons and objectives for using derivatives as firms in the much larger American and European economies. We also find that the focus on control and reporting derivatives transactions in New Zealand is similar to that of firms in the other countries and appears to have strengthened since previous surveys.     

An analysis of the literature on systemic financial risk: A survey

This article presents an analysis of the literature on systemic financial risk. To that end, we analyze and classify 266 articles that were published no later than September 2016 in the databases Scopus and Web of Knowledge; these articles were identified using the keywords “systemic risk”, “financial stability”, “financial”, “measure”, “indicator”, and “index”. They were evaluated based on 10 categories, namely, type of study, type of approach, object of study, method, spatial scope, temporal scope, context, focus, type of data used, and results. The analysis and classification of this literature made it possible to identify the remaining gaps in the literature on systemic risk; this contributes to a future research agenda on the topic. Moreover, the most influential articles in this field of research and the articles that compose the mainstream research on systemic financial risk were identified.     

从美国次贷危机看金融创新的风险管理

该文指出美国次贷危机的根源是对金融创新的风险管理不到位,文章分析了金融创新的特征以及市场参与者对金融创新的风险意识淡薄的现状,指出美国次贷危机的教训在于金融机构应充分重视金融创新中的风险管理,而监管机构对金融创新的风险监管则是业务发展和市场稳定的有力保障;最后文章对如何加强我国金融创新的风险管理提出相关的意见和建议。