Information acquisition and financial contagion

This paper incorporates costly voluntary acquisition of information à la Nikitin and Smith (2007) [Nikitin, M., Smith, R.T., 2007. Information acquisition, coordination, and fundamentals in a financial crisis. Journal of Banking and Finance, in press, doi:10.1016/j.jbankfin.2007.04.031], in a framework similar to Allen and Gale (2000) [Allen, F., Gale, D., 2000. Financial contagion. Journal of Political Economy 108, 1–33], without relying on any unexpected shock to model contagion. In this framework, contagion and financial crises are the result of information gathering by depositors, weak fundamentals and an incomplete market structure of banks. It also shows how financial systems entering a recession can affect others with apparently stronger economic conditions (contagion). Finally, this is the first paper to investigate the effectiveness of the Contingent Credit Line procedures, introduced by the IMF at the end of the nineties, as a mechanism to prevent the propagation of crises.     

Information acquisition,coordination, and fundamentals in a financial crisis

This paper reconciles the two explanations of a financial crisis, the self-fulfilling prophecy and the fundamental causes, in an empirically-relevant framework, by explicitly modeling the costly voluntary acquisition of information about fundamentals in a variant of Diamond and Dybvig [Diamond, D., Dybvig, P., 1983. Bank runs, deposit insurance, and liquidity. Journal of Political Economy 91, 401–419]. The model exhibits strategic complementarity in information acquisition. In the “partial run” equilibrium investors engage in costly evaluation of projects, so that banks with lower-return projects fail. There also exist the classic “full-run” and “no-run” equilibria in which there is no project evaluation. Investors’ coordination on a specific equilibrium is triggered by a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, financial crises are seen as both fundamentals-based and self-fulfilling prophecies-based phenomena.     

Information technology and organization design

This report looks at technological impact on organizational design and discusses a study carried out by the Institute of Manpower Studies on organizational design and new technology.     

Information verifiability, bank organization, bank competition and bank-borrower relationships

This paper investigates whether the benefits of bank-borrower relationships differ depending on three factors identified in the theoretical literature: verifiability of information, bank size and complexity, and bank competition. We extend the current literature by analyzing how relationship lending affects loan contract terms and credit availability in an empirical model that simultaneously accounts for all three of these factors. Based on Japanese survey data we find evidence that the benefits from stronger bank-borrower relationships in terms of credit availability are limited to smaller banks. However, when the benefits are measured as improved credit terms, we find little additional benefit, and in some cases increased cost, from stronger relationships for opaque borrowers and for borrowers who get funding from small banks. These latter findings suggest the possibility that relationship borrowers may suffer from capture effects.     

Information acquisition and voting with heterogeneous experts

A social planner selects heterogeneously biased experts to (either sequentially or simultaneously) acquire costly signals, and then agents vote between two alternatives. To maximize social welfare, the social planner adopts an alternating mechanism—choosing extremely biased experts whose preferences oppose the pivotal voter's current preference—in the optimal sequential mechanism, whereas she chooses mildly biased experts in the optimal simultaneous mechanism. Despite the flexibility of a sequential mechanism, the optimal simultaneous mechanism can achieve strictly higher social welfare when information cost is low. Supermajority rules can dominate simple majority rule in terms of both information acquisition and social welfare.     

Safe but fragile: Information acquisition,liquidity support and redemption runs

This paper proposes a theory of redemption runs based on strategic information acquisition by fund managers. We argue that liquidity lines provided by third parties can be a source of financial fragility, as they incentivize fund managers to acquire private information about the value of their assets. This strategic information acquisition can lead to inefficient market liquidity dry-ups caused by self-fulfilling fears of adverse selection. By lowering asset prices, information acquisition also reduces the value of funds’ assets-under-management and may spur inefficient redemption runs by investors. Two different regimes can arise: one in which funds’ information acquisition incentives are unaffected by the volume of redemptions, and another where market and funding liquidity risk mutually reinforce each other.     

Information acquisition and market liquidity: Evidence from EDGAR search activity

We find that information acquisition is associated with an improvement in market liquidity. An empirical analysis of search activity using EDGAR as a proxy for information acquisition shows a theoretical gap in market microstructure models. We also find that EDGAR search is associated with nonsynchronicity, more efficient pricing, and negatively associated with the PIN measure. These results demonstrate that the main finding can be explained through improved incorporation of information into prices and use of sophisticated trading strategies by informed traders.     

Target abnormal returns associated with acquisition announcements: Payment,acquisition form,and managerial resistance

Abnormal returns earned by target firms at the time of initial acquisition announcements are related to form of payment, degree of resistance, and type of offer. Results indicate that interdependence among these characteristics is important. Previous research suggests that tender-offer targets earn higher abnormal returns than merger targets. After controlling for payment method and degree of resistance, however, the difference in abnormal returns between tender offers and mergers is insignificant. Resisted offers are associated with insignificantly higher returns than unresisted offers. Abnormal returns associated with cash offers are significantly higher than those associated with stock offers.     

Ownership structure, family control, and acquisition decisions

We investigate how ownership and family control influence the decision to take part in M&As as an acquirer or as an acquired company in a sample of 777 large Continental European companies in the period 1998-2008. We find that ownership is negatively correlated with the probability of launching a takeover bid, and family firms are less likely to make acquisitions, especially when the stake held by the family is not large enough to assure the persistence of family control. On the passive side of M&A deals, the effect of the largest shareholders' ownership on the decision to accept an acquisition proposal depends non-linearly on the voting rights they hold, and family control reduces the probability of being acquired by an unrelated party. We do not find evidence that family-controlled firms destroy wealth when they acquire other companies. Finally, we document that ownership and family control, while being negatively correlated with M&A activity, are not negatively correlated with growth in firm size.     

Corporate finance,industrial organization,and organizational economics

In the last 35 years, research at the intersection of corporate finance, industrial organization, and organizational economics has grown substantially. This paper reviews work that combines elements from these fields of finance and economics, with an emphasis on recent developments. I discuss how product market competition, customer-supplier relations, firms’ organizational form, and ownership structures interact with firms’ financial policies. I also overview new developments in the literature from a special issue of the Journal of Corporate Finance.     

Social connections,reference point and acquisition premium

This paper examines the impact of acquirer-target social connections along with the target 52-week high (Baker et al., 2012) on acquisition premiums. We show that acquisition premium is more sensitive to first-degree connection than the reference point, suggesting that information is the main driving force for determining acquisition premiums. The findings also indicate that connected directors are more likely to favour firms where they hold higher positions and negotiate favourable premiums. Acquirers pay lower premiums when target directors are retained in the new entity. Connected acquirers are also more likely to finance their deals with equity. Overall, this paper provides support to the information flow hypothesis that acquirers with social connections have better access to target information and enhanced bargaining power in negotiations.     

Deal size,acquisition premia and shareholder gains

This study examines the contradictory predictions regarding the association between the premium paid in acquisitions and deal size. We document a robust negative relation between offer premia and target size, indicating that acquirers tend to pay less for large firms, not more. We also find that the overpayment potential is lower in acquisitions of large targets. Yet, they still destroy more value for acquirers around deal announcements, implying that target size may proxy, among others, for the unobserved complexity inherent in large deals. We provide evidence in favor of this interpretation.     

Firm size,information acquisition and price efficiency

We present a model in a competitive market where traders choose between a small and a large firm to acquire costly private information, but they also obtain free public information by observing equilibrium share prices. Our major finding is the existence of a noisy rational expectation competitive equilibrium, in which there are more informed traders of the large firm than those of the small firm. As a result, share prices of the large firm are more informative than those of the small firm. Our empirical study supports the analytical results. By using a bivariate vector autoregressive regression, we are able to conduct a variance decomposition of share prices for different size portfolios. We find that prices of large-size portfolios are more informative because non-value-related price shocks are less important in driving price changes of large-size portfolios than in the case of small-size portfolios.     

Trading Volume, Information Asymmetry, and Timing Information

This paper investigates trading volume before scheduled and unscheduled corporate announcements to explore how traders respond to private information. I show that cumulative trading volume decreases inversely to information asymmetry prior to scheduled announcements, while the opposite relation holds for volume after the announcement. In contrast, trading volume before unscheduled announcements increases dramatically and shows little relation to proxies for information asymmetry. I investigate the behavior of market makers and find that they act appropriately by increasing price sensitivity before all announcements, implying that they extract timing information from their order books.     

OLAP查询系统

在激烈的市场竞争中,企业必须把业务经营同市场需求联系起来,在此基础上做出科学、正确的决策。为此,企业纷纷建立起了自己的数据库系统,由计算机管理代替手工操作,以此来收集、存储、管理业务操作数据,提高操作人员的工作效率。然而,传统的数据库应用     

Earnings management,incentive contracts and private information acquisition

This paper analyzes the optimal design of compensation contracts in the presence of earnings management incentives, and its interplay with investors’ information acquisition decisions. We consider a setting in which compensation contract is based on both accounting earnings and stock price when an agent engages in predictable, pernicious earnings management and stock price is endogenously determined in a Noisy Rational Expectations Equilibrium (NREE) that reflects both the public information from reported earnings and a costly, noisy signal privately acquired by investors. We show that an increase in the precision of the firm’s financial reporting system could reduce the informativeness of stock price and exacerbate the agency problem by inducing lower productive effort and higher earnings management, implying that the firm may not choose a more precise financial reporting system.     

UNIDO,一个专业化的服务机构

联合国工业发展组织为中国加入WTO特别推出了“国际化就绪规划”,其中包括一系列富有针对性、操作性及前瞻性的子计划;联合国工业发展组织中国投资与技术促进办事处为了满足中国企业、政府应对国际竞争的各类紧迫而海量的服务需求,正致力于与各类金融、顾问、管理、会计、评估等专业机构建立广泛而密切的合作,以便更好地为各类企业及各地政府提供及时、便捷、可靠的国际化“贴身”服务。只有熟悉了,才能够利用。请看     

四重整合实现并购价值——以管理的充分整合推进钢铁企业重组的合力建设

中国钢铁行业进入兼并重组时代 随着经济全球化,钢铁行业作为我国国民经济的重要行业,还处于从钢铁大国向钢铁强国转变的成长阶段,这也是行业进行产业结构调整、产品优化升级的机遇期。这一阶段,钢铁企业联合、兼并和资产重组将成为钢铁工业结构调整的中心环节和突破口。     

Access to financing,rents, and organization of the firm

This paper provides a theory for the choice of an organizational structure by the headquarters of a unitary structure concerned about overload. The headquarters can avoid overload by delegating operational decisions to divisions, i.e., moving the firm to a multidivisional structure. We show that, under moral hazard, these divisions receive rents for incentive purposes, and that the multidivisional structure is able to invest more. Thus, there is a trade-off between increasing investment and paying rents. We also show that this trade-off applies to situations where firms consider engaging in acquisitions and joint ventures, or where entrepreneurs consider resorting to venture capitalists.     

Communication costs, information acquisition, and voting decisions in proxy contests

This article synthesizes some recent progress in the theoriesof corporate control and political lobbying to model the proxycampaign as a political campaign. The model yields a numberof testable implications, only some of which have been examinedin the literature. For example, if the loss from voting fora 'bad' dissident exceeds the gain from voting for a 'good'dissident, the model predicts that as communication costs fall,the number of proxy fights increases, announcement day returnsdecrease, and the fraction of dissident wins first increasesand then decreases.