Firm Opacity and the Clustering of Stock Prices: the Case of Financial Intermediaries

Journal of Financial Services Research - In this study, we develop and test the hypothesis that because of opacity, the stock prices of financial firms will cluster on round fractions more than the...     

Financial Opacity and Firm Performance: The Readability of REIT Annual Reports

We examine the capital market pricing implications of firm disclosure opacity as measured by the linguistic readability of REIT annual reports. The SEC has expressed concern that firms selectively manage the transparency of disclosures in order to hide adverse information. After controlling for other non-experimental factors that influence the readability of REIT financial statements, we find (1) financial opacity is negatively related to reported firm performance, and (2) the residual opacity that remains after controlling for other determinants of annual report readability has incremental explanatory power for returns beyond the Fama and French (1992, 1993) risk factors. The opacity risk-return premium persists after controlling for a (heretofore undocumented) stark monotonic decrease in annual report readability following the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.     

Hostility in Takeovers: In the Eyes of the Beholder?

This paper examines whether hostile takeovers can be distinguished from friendly takeovers, empirically, based on accounting and stock performance data. Much has been made of this distinction in both the popular and the academic literature, where gains from hostile takeovers result from replacing incumbent managers and gains from friendly takeovers result from strategic synergies. Alternatively, hostility could reflect strategic choices made by the bidder or the target. Empirical tests show that most deals described as hostile in the press are not distinguishable from friendly deals in economic terms, except that hostile transactions involve publicity as part of the bargaining process.     

Opacity and the comovement in the stock prices of banks

We examine whether the stock prices of banks co-move more than the stock prices of non-banks, and whether that comovement is driven by informational opacity. Since the risks associated with the financial intermediation process are relatively opaque to outside investors, valuing banks can be difficult and information acquisition can be costly. We introduce a measure of comovement, denoted as beta dispersion, that identifies how closely a particular stock co-moves with the average industry CAPM beta. We find that bank stock prices generally co-move more than non-bank stock prices, and that opacity is driving the higher levels of comovement.     

Lies,Damned Lies and More Statistics: The Neglected Issue of Multiplicity in Accounting Research

The problem of ‘multiplicity’ (and selection) is considered by many statisticians to be among the most difficult and important problems they face. It includes such areas as multiple tests, variable selection in regression analysis, subgroup analysis and data mining. It undermines statistical inference by inflating type I errors well above reported levels of significance. The basic issue confronting researchers is how to adjust inferences to allow for multiplicity, particularly in exploratory or model-building analyses where standard textbook probability calculations associated with estimation and hypothesis testing do not apply. Despite its importance, and unlike what occurs in other disciplines, the multiplicity problem receives little or no attention in accounting. This situation is of concern because survey results suggest that serious type I error inflation is a real possibility in management accounting. In attempting to remedy this situation, the paper adopts a classical statistical framework for the purpose of examining the key issues underlying the problem and to present some strategies for dealing with it. These strategies offer the researcher a reasoned approach that recognises the possibility that the observed results may be due to chance, as well as the possibility that they are real. The discussion also highlights the fact that the only way to deal with the issue of multiplicity successfully is to repeat results on new data.     

流通企业的企业理论新析

现有企业理论不能很好地解释流通企业的问题.流通企业产生的经济根源在于分工(专业化利益)与交换(交易成本)的两难冲突,其经济性质在于通过专业化交易降低交易成本.经济性质差异导致流通企业在技术性质、规模约束以及规模扩张模式等方面都与生产企业大不相同,流通企业规模受本地市场容量的限制,因此必须采取分店扩张模式.     

Diversification of the Banking Firm

Diversification of banks and bank holding companies into nonbank product lines may reduce the risk to banking returns or cash flows provided appropriate portfolio conditions are satisfied. This study of bank and nonbank financial-service firms and nonfinancial corporations over the 1966–1985 period finds evidence consistent with the proposition that individual banking firm risk may be reduced through selected product-line diversification, particularly in the insurance and data processing fields. Moreover, there is evidence of less cash-flow sensitivity of selected nonbank product lines to exogenous economic and financial-market variables compared to banking firms. While public policy continues to insulate banking firms from most nonbank product and service lines, the potential benefits of risk reduction suggest that a careful review of current policy is needed.     

信息披露、收益不透明度与权益资本成本

本文以1993年至2001年间我国证券市场进行股权再融资的上市公司为样本,深入考察我国证券市场上市公司信息披露质量与公司权益资本成本的关系。结果表明,在控制其他一些影响因素之后,上市公司信息披露质量与公司权益资本成本呈显著的负相关关系;对上市公司而言,提高信息披露的质量有助于降低公司的权益资本成本。同时,本文还发现,上市公司权益资本成本不仅受到前一年信息披露质量的影响,还受到前四年信息披露质量的影响。所以,上市公司管理者为了降低公司再融资的权益资本成本,应该持之以恒地致力于保持较高的信息披露质量。     

坚固第三道防线

伴随着信息科技与业务发展的深度融合,银行对信息科技这一关键资源的效率和效能、可用和安全有着越来越高的要求。任何与信息科技相关的风险事件的发生,对银行的IT审计都是重大挑战。"十二五"时期,IT审计作为银行的"第三道防线"(信息科技管理为"第一道防线"、信息科技风险管理为     

The Pragmatic Theory of the Firm

Four key ideas provide the foundation for the pragmatic theory of the firm, which is expecially useful for managements and boards in developing an understanding of how companies create long‐term value for the benefit of all stakeholders. First, and a necessary point of departure, is clarity about the purpose of the firm. Maximizing shareholder value is viewed not as the social purpose of the firm, but as a consequence of a company's effectiveness in carrying out a purpose that recognizes the benefits of success to all key corporate stakeholders. Second, a company's knowledge‐building proficiency, in relation to that of its competitors, is viewed as the primary determinant of its long‐term performance. Nurturing and sustaining a knowledge‐building culture facilitates the discovery of obsolete assumptions and early adaptation to a changing environment. Third, the theory avoids “compartmentalizing” a company's activities into silos by treating the firm as a holistic system. A key component of the theory that quantifies corporate performance is the life‐cycle framework in which economic returns exhibit “competitive fade” over the long term. This holistic way of thinking provides insights about intangible assets and other sources of excess shareholder returns. Fourth, managing corporate risk should focus on identifying and removing all major obstacles to achieving the firm's purpose. Such obstacles can lead to value destruction through, for example, unethical behavior and all forms of shortsighted failure to recognize and make the most of opportunities to increase long‐run productivity and value. This theory of the firm is pragmatic in the sense that it aims to produce insights about a company's (or business unit's) performance that can improve management's decisions, especially in allocating capital and other corporate resources. The author uses John Deere's life‐cycle track record over the past 60 years to illustrate a successful application of the theory.     

企业从战略联盟的学习中发展了能力吗?——绩效理论的解释与拓展

本文研究了企业如何从战略联盟类型的组织间合作中获取知识,最终内部化为自身能力。在战略管理领域的传统研究之外,作者以绩效理论重新审视这一问题。通过采用质性研究方法,本文提出了从组织内到组织间合作一体化的绩效观,并基于绩效的因果关系链条,解析了企业在战略联盟中开展的组织间学习同能力发展的直接因果关系与间接因果关系及其作用机制,从而形成了基于绩效理论的解释框架。随后作者应用绩效理论中诊断控制和互动控制的概念,分析了联盟演进的关键因素如何间接影响了企业的组织间学习与能力发展,以及联盟演进中的绩效评价蕴含的互动机制。     

Opacity of young businesses: Evidence from rating disagreements

A conventional wisdom in the contemporary corporate finance literature argues that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are informationally opaque. We use data from two credit information companies and in particular their disagreements over the creditworthiness of SMEs to study the empirical relevance of this often invoked assumption. Our panel data analysis shows that once unobserved firm-effects are controlled for, the disagreements (i.e., rating splits) are inversely related to the age of firms. We are not able to document such a robust relationship between the disagreements and the size of firms. This finding holds a lesson for empirical corporate finance researchers who need firm-level proxies for informational imperfections and asymmetries: of the two often-used proxies, firm size is not as closely related to informational opacity as firm age is.     

中国上市公司收益透明度实证研究

本文运用收益激进度和收益平滑度这两项指标 ,对 2 0 0 0年 12月 31日前在沪深两市上市的公司从 1994年到 2 0 0 2年的收益透明度变化趋势进行了系统的实证分析。分析结果表明 :A股上市公司从 1994到 2 0 0 2年收益透明度的总体趋势是上升的 ,只是在 1997年附近和 2 0 0 0年附近出现偏离情况 (即略为下降 )。论文还对我国上市公司IPO前后收益透明度 ,分行业以及分股票类型的收益透明度进行了分析 ,并完成了各种稳健性检验。     

Cyclical Changes in Firm Volatility

We characterize trends and cycles in the volatility of U.S. firms using a measure that we argue more cleanly captures firm‐specific volatility in sales and earnings growth than standard measures do. While earlier literature has emphasized a trend increase in the volatility of publicly traded firms, we find that a typical publicly traded firm has become more stable. We find that the negative association between firm‐specific volatility and the business cycle is weaker than earlier research based on dispersion measures suggests. We find that during the Great Recession of 2007–2009, firm‐specific volatility increased moderately but never substantially exceeded its sample mean. Our results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that firm‐specific volatility is an important driver of the business cycle, as it theoretically could be through an effect of default risk on credit spreads.     

Disequilibrium Structures and Financing Decisions in the Firm

The business firm confronts interdependent decision problems in production, investment, and finance. Emphasis is here placed on the firm's decision criteria in disequilibrium situations or at infra-optimum structural planning and decision points. The operative cost of capital is shown to be 'the full marginal cost of relaxing the money capital availability constraint'. The popular 'weighted average cost of capital' is shown to be an 'equilibrium datum' which has operative significance only at optimum structural positions. It does not offer adequate guidance to financing and investment decisions in disequilibrium situations.     

Firm type variation in the cost of risk management

This paper explores how the cost of risk management varies with firm characteristics, offering the first comparison between private, public, and family-owned firms. It exploits a natural experiment in highway procurement, which features diverse firms with common exposure to commodity risk. The Kansas government began to insure highway paving firms against oil price risk in 2006. The analysis compares Kansas to Iowa, which has an otherwise similar highway procurement system but never introduced such a policy. Using data from 1998 to 2012, I show that the policy reduced average bid sensitivity to oil price volatility. Private firms with high credit risk and low industry diversification exhibit the most risk pass-through, while public firms exhibit no pass-through. Family-owned firms do not have a higher than average cost of risk. Financial constraints and distress costs appear to best explain the cost of risk management, rather than risk aversion, information, or agency problems.     

A Dynamic Theory of the Banking Firm

Dynamic analysis has greatly increased our understanding of the microfoundations of the general firm. Unfortunately, however, little attention has been focussed on the dynamic nature of the banking firm. Instead, most theoretical work has derived the optimal behavior for the bank in a single period context. This approach, while yielding insight into the function of the bank as a broker between borrowers and lenders, has proven incapable of capturing many essential elements of the banking firm. The role of capital, for example, is understated if the risk of bankruptcy is not considered. Perhaps more importantly, the role of banks in transforming risks in an uncertain environment cannot be captured if the problem of handling these risks over time is not considered. This paper incorporates these dual roles of brokerage and risk transformation in a cohesive model of the banking firm.     

Strategic Alliances and the Boundaries of the Firm

Strategic alliances are long-term contracts between legallydistinct organizations that provide for sharing the costs andbenefits of a mutually beneficial activity. In this paper, Idevelop and test a model that helps explain why firms sometimesprefer alliances over internally organized projects. I introducemanagerial effort into a model of internal capital markets andshow how strategic alliances help overcome incentive problemsthat arise when headquarters cannot pre-commit to particularcapital allocations. The model generates a number of implications,which I test using a large sample of alliance transactions inconjunction with Compustat data.     

Bankers in the Boardroom and Firm Performance in China

We use a dataset comprising the appointments of commercial bankers as board of directors at Chinese listed firms and find that financially distressed firms are more likely to recruit a commercial banker as a director of the board. The presence of a banker on the board increases access to bank loans, yet many investors react negatively to announcements of such appointments. We also find that such appointments are typically followed by a drop in the appointing firm’s operating performance, and an increase in rent-seeking activities. This suggests that bank directors cannot strengthen corporate governance. Most financial resources are expropriated by corporate insiders.     

Firm Defaults and the Correlation Effect

We examine how the correlations of bank loan defaults depend on the correlations of asset returns and how correlations and diversification are affected by macroeconomic risks. We highlight the main properties of the relationship between asset returns and default correlations, illustrating how adverse macroeconomic shocks raise not only the likelihood of defaults, but also the correlation of defaults. The latter effect, called correlation effect, may account for more than 50% of the increase in the credit risk.