The Usefulness of Financial Reporting in Spanish Local Governments

Since 1992, accounting for Spanish local governments has been undergoing substantial change. The application of a new regulation has introduced the double entry system, an approximation to the accounting terminology used in the private sector and the presentation of financial statements beyond the purely budgetary reporting. In this context, the paper attempts to examine the extent to which the new regulation has achieved the objectives of financial reporting, who the users of the information could be, what the usefulness of the financial statements is and what they are used for in local governments. The results prove that the financial reporting of local governments can be useful for potential users like audit institutions, financial institutions or creditors. However, there is a long way to go before we can say that the information is used to the maximum. This implies that further progress is necessary in the use of financial information in local governments, and fundamentally it is necessary to introduce techniques of financial analysis traditionally used in business entities.     

Discourse and institutional change: ‘Giving accounts’ and accountability

This paper examines the impact of the implementation of Local Management of Schools (LMS) in the UK on the discursive practices that help construct institutions of ‘accountability’ in a particular organizational field. The paper examines the institutionalization of accountability processes by analyzing discourses on accountability in the education field. It explores the extent to which the focus on financial discourses of accountability introduced by state legislation, and underpinned by the promotion of the market ethos, mediates the enactment of non-financial understandings and beliefs about the institutionalized accountability of schools and their staff. We focus upon two discourses of accountability: those introduced by organizations requirements under recent legislation to legitimate themselves within their field (regulatory institutions of accountability) and how organizational actors legitimate themselves with each other in the enactment of their everyday activities (‘folk’, or old, institutions of accountability). The paper argues that, in their strategic response to regulatory institutions of accountability, school staff struggled to disentangle the ‘rational’ or ‘legitimate’ notions of their accountability from the folk, tacit or private institutional norms to which they have held themselves accountable in the past. Although different informants have tended to emphasize different dimensions of accountability, discourses of financial accountability were the key rationale for the explanations of conduct, even when informants were discussing seemingly non-financial or ‘folk-based’ institutions of accountability.     

STOCK MARKET CONSEQUENCES OF POLITICAL VIBRANCY

We define areas with strong geographic ties to powerful politicians as politically vibrant and show that they are characterized by greater value-relevant information generation and symptomatic of equity market segmentation. Political vibrancy entails greater levels of local bias and local comovement and has two important return predictability implications. First, it enhances local institutions’ informational advantages; their trades’ ability to forecast local stock returns exceeds that of nonlocal institutions. Second, in support of the view that information diffuses slowly into prices, stock returns of firms from politically vibrant areas predict returns of similar firms in other areas.     

Effectiveness of Macroprudential Policies in Developing Asia: An Empirical Analysis

Before the 2008 global financial crisis, bank monitoring focused primarily on risks to individual institutions, or what are generally referred to as prudential risks. Regulators thus failed to consider that a buildup of macroeconomic risks and vulnerabilities could pose systemic risk to the financial sector. The global credit crisis showed the inadequacy of purely prudential surveillance systems and the need for bank supervisors to better detect the buildup of macroeconomic risks before they can threaten the financial system. This article presents an empirical framework for analyzing how effectively macroprudential policies control credit growth, leverage growth, and housing price appreciation. Two significant findings emerge. Broadly, macroprudential policies can indeed promote financial stability in Asia. More specifically, different types of macroprudential policies are proved effective for different types of macroeconomic risks.     

Institutions and Economic Performance: Endogeneity and Parameter Heterogeneity

The hallmark of the recent development and growth literature is the quest to identify institutions that explain significant portions of the observed differences in living standards. There are two drawbacks to the prominent approaches that focus either on the global sample, or on developing nations. First, it is unclear whether the identified institutions also hold explanatory power in advanced countries. Second, it is unclear whether the identified institutions matter to the same degree across all countries, or whether perhaps an altogether different set of institutions matters in advanced countries. To address these issues, we examine parameter heterogeneity in prominent approaches to institutions and economic performance. We find that parameter heterogeneity is so strong that it requires a new set of instruments to control for endogeneity. At the same time, however, we confirm that a common set of economically important institutions does exist among advanced and developing nations. The impact of these institutions is shown to vary substantially across subsamples; they are about three times more important in developing countries than in OECD countries.     

Momentum Trading by Institutions

We document the equity trading practices of approximately 1,200 institutions from the third quarter of 1987 through the third quarter of 1995. We decompose trading by institutions into the initiation of new positions (entry), the termination of previous positions (exit), and adjustments to ongoing holdings. Institutions act as momentum traders when they enter stocks but as contrarian traders when they exit or make adjustments to ongoing holdings. We find significant differences in trading practices among different types of institutions.     

Supervisory shocks to banks' credit standards and their macroeconomic impact

Credit standards reported in the Bank Lending Surveys (BLS) of the European Central Bank (ECB) summarize banks’ sentiment about credit market tightness, and they strongly comove with credit growth. This paper introduces a new external instrument that captures an exogenous source of variation in credit standards, allowing us to identify a structural shock that negatively affects the credit supply. The instrument accounts for mandatory rotations of external auditors within credit institutions of nine euro-area countries. By estimating local projections, this paper finds that an unexpected supervisory measure at the banking-system level features significant dynamic causal effects at the macroeconomic level, which are also state-dependent.     

Do locals know better? A comparison of the performance of local and foreign institutional investors

We compare the performance of local versus foreign institutional investors using a comprehensive data set of equity holdings in 32 countries during the 2000–2010 period. We find that foreign institutions perform as well as local institutions on average, but only domestic institutions show a trading pattern consistent with an information advantage. Our results suggest a smart-money effect of local institutions in countries subject to higher information asymmetry, non-English speaking countries, countries with less efficient stock markets, with poor investor protection, or high levels of corruption. The local advantage is more pronounced in periods of market turmoil and in illiquid stocks.     

Performance and informed trading. Comparing foreigners,institutions and individuals in an emerging stock market

Do local institutions, local individuals or foreigners perform better in a small emerging market? We seek answers to this question by examining the investment performance of each group of investors using two unique databases of Colombian stocks. Our analysis serves as an out-of-sample test of previous findings. We find that local institutions have better outcomes than foreigners and local individuals on all performance measures. Furthermore, local individuals perform better than foreigners on trading execution, while foreigners generate better long-term returns. Using a bid-ask spread decomposition, we provide additional evidence that the better performance of institutions is consistent with informational advantages. Our findings reconcile contradictory statements from previous studies.     

Investor heterogeneity,trading account types and competing liquidity channels for Malaysian stocks

This paper examines the relationship between various investor groups and stock liquidity for Malaysian public listed firms over the 2002–2009 sample period. Using the Amihud illiquidity ratio, we extend the literature by addressing the issues of investor heterogeneity, trading account types and the interactions of competing liquidity channels. The analysis reveals that only local institutions and local individual investors who trade through the direct accounts are significantly associated with the liquidity of domestic firms. In contrast, the significant liquidity effect for foreign investors operates through the nominee accounts. While institutional ownership exhibits a linear negative relationship, our findings on local individuals and foreign nominees differ greatly from previous studies in that their relationship with stock liquidity is non-monotonic. Apart from the widely-researched information asymmetry and trading effects, we find that liquidity is also driven by the largely ignored information competition channel. An important insight from our findings is that the large shareholdings by any particular investor group is detrimental to stock liquidity as they exacerbate information asymmetry, reduce the degree of competition and lower the level of trading activity.     

State ownership, the institutional environment, and auditor choice: Evidence from China

This paper finds that compared with non-state-owned firms, Chinese state-owned enterprises controlled by province, city, and county governments (local SOEs) are more likely to hire small auditors within the same region (small local auditors). In regions with less developed institutions, SOEs controlled by central government (central SOEs) also have such a tendency. However, the tendency of local and central SOEs to hire small local auditors is attenuated as the institutions develop. This auditor choice pattern is likely to be explained by SOEs’ lack of demand for large or non-local auditors, small local auditors’ superior local knowledge, and SOEs’ collusion incentives.     

Accounting internships: The state of the art

This paper reports the results of an investigation into the “state of the art” in the use, administration and operation of accounting internship programs. Data was collected via a questionnaire from 153 institutions concerning their use of student internships. These responses were used to determine the extent to which student internships are currently incorporated into the accounting curriculum. Forty-seven institutions stated they did not sponsor student internships and identified the reasons underlying their decision. One hundred and six schools reported offering internships and provided information concerning the administration and operation of their programs.     

Local institutional investors,information asymmetries,and equity returns

We examine the informational role of geographically proximate institutions in stock markets. We find that both the level of and change in local institutional ownership predict future stock returns, particularly for firms with high information asymmetry; in contrast, such predictive abilities are relatively weak for nonlocal institutional ownership. The local advantage is especially evident for local investment advisors, high local ownership institutions, and high local turnover institutions. We also find that the stocks that local institutional investors hold (trade) earn higher excess returns around future earnings announcements than those that nonlocal institutional investors hold (trade).     

The long-term role of non-traditional banking in profitability and risk profiles: Evidence from a panel of U.S. banking institutions

The goal of this empirical study is to identify empirically and on a panel basis how non-traditional bank activities affect directly the profitability and risk profiles of the financial institutions involved in such activities. Through a dataset that covers 1725 U.S. financial institutions involved in non-traditional bank activities spanning the period 2000–2013 and the methodology of panel cointegration, the empirical findings document that non-traditional bank activities exert a positive effect on both the profitability and the insolvency risk. The results could be important for regulators given they could serve as a pre-warning signal that sends a clear message to regulators about the potential systemic risk that exists within the financial markets.     

Ownership structure and earnings informativeness: Evidence from Korea

This paper examines the relationship between corporate ownership structure in Korea and the informativeness of earnings. Korean ownership structure is characterized by the dominance of one primary owner who also participates in firm management. Existing literature offers two alternative perspectives on the behavior of such owner-manager firms, convergence of interests, and management entrenchment hypotheses. We tested the alternative views to see how they are reflected in earnings informativeness. The results show that earnings are more informative as holdings of the owner increase, supporting the convergence of interest explanation for the owner-manager structure. Second, we examine the role of institutional investors and blockholders. On the one hand, institutions/blockholders have incentives to actively monitor management. However, on the other hand, institutions/blockholders may not render effective monitoring because they lack expertise, suffer from freerider problems, or strategically ally with management. These opposing views predict conflicting signs on the relation between the earnings informativeness and holdings of institutions/blockholders. We find that earnings informativeness increases with the holdings of institutions and blockholders. This supports the active monitoring role of institutions/blockholders. Finally, we test the relationship between earnings informativeness for chaebol (Korean business group)-affiliated companies vs. that for nonchaebol-affiliated companies, and find no significant relationship between the owner-largest shareholder's holdings and earnings informativeness. This provides evidence that for chaebol companies, the negative effect of management entrenchment/expropriation of minority shareholders offsets the positive effects. This phenomenon is stronger for chaebol-affiliated companies than for nonchaebol affiliates.     

Banking relationship and research spin-offs’ life cycle: The Italian experience

Research Spin-Offs (RSOs) are special firms created within universities or research institutes that require significant financial resources to transfer their innovative technologies to the market. This work studies an important driver of RSOs’ success, i.e. the local banking environment in which such firms operate. Empirical results highlight that the local development of the banking sector does not affect RSO performance at the time of incubation, when the main source of funding comes from public contributions. Conversely, there is a significant positive and growing influence of local banking relationships when the RSO enters the market and becomes independent of public resources. The findings suggest that governments and banking institutions should develop new financial instruments to support RSOs, especially during the early stages of their life cycle. RSOs should consider bank debt as a complementary source of funding that allows them to encounter the vital growth opportunities emerging during the incubation phase.     

Understanding the market reaction to shockwaves: Evidence from the failure of Lehman Brothers

The spectacular failure of the 150-year-old investment bank Lehman Brothers on September 15th, 2008 was a major turning point in the global financial crisis that broke out in the summer of 2007. Through the use of stock market data and credit default swap (CDS) spreads, this paper examines investors’ reaction to Lehman's collapse in an attempt to identify a spillover effect on the surviving financial institutions. The empirical analysis indicates that (i) the collateral damage was limited to the largest financial firms; (ii) the institutions most affected were the surviving “non-bank” financial services firms; and (iii) the negative effect was correlated with the financial conditions of the surviving institutions. We also detect significant abnormal jumps in CDS spreads that we interpret as evidence of sudden upward revisions in the market assessment of future default probabilities assigned to the surviving financial firms.     

基于动态因子Copula模型的我国银行系统性风险度量

本文基于2007年至2019年我国14家上市银行的股票收益率,构建偏态t-分布动态因子Copula模型,利用时变荷载因子刻画单家银行与整个系统的相关性,计算联合风险概率作为系统性风险整体水平的度量,基于关联性视角提出了新的单家机构系统脆弱性和系统重要性度量指标——系统脆弱性程度和系统重要性程度。该方法充分考虑了银行个体差异性和系统的内在关联性以及收益率的厚尾性和非对称性,从而能够捕捉到更多的信息且兼具时效性。研究表明:银行机构在风险聚集时期相关程度更大,联合风险概率能够准确识别出系统性风险事件且在我国推行宏观审慎评估体系以后有明显降低;整体而言,大型商业银行系统重要性水平最高,同时风险抗压能力也最强;本文使用的度量方法降低了数据获取成本且更具时效性,有助于为宏观审慎差异化监管工作提供借鉴和参考。     

基于动态因子Copula模型的我国银行系统性风险度量

本文基于2007年至2019年我国14家上市银行的股票收益率,构建偏态t-分布动态因子Copula模型,利用时变荷载因子刻画单家银行与整个系统的相关性,计算联合风险概率作为系统性风险整体水平的度量,基于关联性视角提出了新的单家机构系统脆弱性和系统重要性度量指标——系统脆弱性程度和系统重要性程度。该方法充分考虑了银行个体差异性和系统的内在关联性以及收益率的厚尾性和非对称性,从而能够捕捉到更多的信息且兼具时效性。研究表明:银行机构在风险聚集时期相关程度更大,联合风险概率能够准确识别出系统性风险事件且在我国推行宏观审慎评估体系以后有明显降低;整体而言,大型商业银行系统重要性水平最高,同时风险抗压能力也最强;本文使用的度量方法降低了数据获取成本且更具时效性,有助于为宏观审慎差异化监管工作提供借鉴和参考。     

Ownership structure and risk in publicly held and privately owned banks

Using detailed ownership data for a sample of European commercial banks, we analyze the link between ownership structure and risk in both privately owned and publicly held banks. We consider five categories of shareholders that are specific to our dataset. We find that ownership structure is significant in explaining risk differences but mainly for privately owned banks. A higher equity stake of either individuals/families or banking institutions is associated with a decrease in asset risk and default risk. In addition, institutional investors and non-financial companies impose the riskiest strategies when they hold higher stakes. For publicly held banks, changes in ownership structure do not affect risk taking. Market forces seem to align the risk-taking behavior of publicly held banks, such that ownership structure is no longer a determinant in explaining risk differences. However, higher stakes of banking institutions in publicly held banks are associated with lower credit and default risk.