Behavior of municipal bond default-risk premiums by maturity

Default-risk premiums have traditionally been considered to be an increasing function of time. More recently, a model has been developed which indicates that, under certain conditions, default-risk premiums are invariant to maturity. One study found significant differences in default-risk premiums for long-term corporate bonds and commercial paper. The hypothesis that default-risk premiums are invariant to maturity was tested using municipal bond data. Results indicate that risk premiums are not invariant to maturity.     

The cyclical effect of default risk on industrial bond yields

This paper examines the determinants of default-risk premiums and the ways in which they change over the business cycle. Seven default-risk factors are constructed from a large number of financial ratio/accounting variables. Factor scores summarizing these variables for a sample of industrial corporations are regressed with bond risk premiums for all years from 1971 to 1977—a complete business cycle. A second sample covering the years 1975 to 1977 is also examined. The main conclusion is that the cyclical movement of business conditions influences investors' assessments of default risk. Bonds issued in periods of economic normalcy have premiums that are significantly associated with earnings instability in addition to sales and size factors. By contrast, firms issuing bonds during recessionary climates must have relatively greater size and profitability to obtain funding at lower-interest costs. Firms with higher sales turnover ratios and, therefore, greater earnings instability with respect to economic downswings, are less likely to issue debt securities during depressed business conditions.     

Debt composition and balance sheet effects of exchange rate depreciations: a firm-level analysis for Chile

By studying the behavior of foreign currency borrowing, maturity, sales and the investment decisions of firms listed in the Chilean Stock Exchange from 1994 to 2001, this paper assesses whether in the aftermath of the Asian crisis of the late 1990s the depreciation of the local currency (Chilean peso) affected these firms’ real and financial decisions. At issue is the contrast between a negative net-worth effect and a potential expansionary competitiveness effect for the tradable sector. We find that there exists little evidence that devaluations cause a positive impact on investment and sales for firms with dollar denominated debt. The maturity structure of Chilean firms is mainly explained by the size of the companies. Large firms will have a debt structure biased to higher maturities. Analyzing dollar denominated debt composition the evidence shows that larger firms maintained a higher proportion of dollar denominated debt reflecting the development of the financial sector in Chile.     

Paying for cross-border acquisitions: The impact of prior acquirers’ decisions

By examining the premiums paid by acquiring firms in cross-border acquisitions (CBAs), this study aims to determine why they might rely on prior premium decisions in the host market rather than rigorous assessments of the deal. An information-based imitation framework offers an explanation for foreign acquirers’ premium decisions. The developed hypotheses are tested with 2350 CBAs that occurred during 1995–2008. The results show that the premium paid by acquiring firms in CBAs relates positively to prior premiums paid by foreign acquirers in that host country. This imitation behavior is influenced by both organization- and offering-level characteristics.     

Identifying the Factors that Affect Interest‐Rate Swap Spreads: Some Evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom

We assess the ability of the factors proposed in previous research to account for the stochastic evolution of the term structure of the U.S. and U.K. swap spreads. Using as factor proxies the level, volatility, and slope of the zero‐coupon government yield curve as well as the Treasury‐bill—London Interbank Offer Rate (LIBOR) spread and the corporate bond spread, we identify a procyclical behavior for the short‐maturity U.S. swap spreads and a countercyclical behavior for longer maturity U.S. swap spreads. Liquidity and corporate bond spreads are also significant, but their importance varies with maturity. The liquidity premium is more important for short‐maturity swap spreads, although the corporate bond spread affects long‐maturity swap spreads. For the United Kingdom, swap spreads are countercyclical across maturities. In addition, we find that shocks to the liquidity premium are more significant for long‐maturity swaps and that the links between corporate bond markets and swap markets are much stronger than in the United States. When we look at the links between U.S. and U.K. swap markets, we identify a significant influence of the U.S. factors on the U.K. swap spreads across maturities. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 21:737–768, 2001     

Market efficiency among futures with different maturities: Evidence from the crude oil futures market

Although many studies have investigated market efficiency of spot and futures prices, that among futures with different maturities has not been studied extensively. In this study, market efficiency and unbiasedness among such futures are defined and the concept of “consistently efficient (or consistently efficient and unbiased) market within n‐month maturity” is introduced. According to this definition, market efficiency and unbiasedness among WTI futures with different maturities are tested using cointegration analysis, and short‐term market efficiency, using an error correction model and GARCH‐M‐ECM. The results show that WTI futures are consistently efficient within 8‐month maturity and consistently efficient and unbiased within 2‐month maturity. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 31:487–501, 2011     

Pricing American options on foreign currency with stochastic volatility,jumps, and stochastic interest rates

By applying the Heath–Jarrow–Morton (HJM) framework, an analytical approximation for pricing American options on foreign currency under stochastic volatility and double jump is derived. This approximation is also applied to other existing models for the purpose of comparison. There is evidence that such types of jumps can have a critical impact on earlyexercise premiums that will be significant for deep out‐of‐the‐money options with short maturities. Moreover, the importance of the term structure of interest rates to early‐exercise premiums is demonstrated as is the sensitivity of these premiums to correlation‐related parameters. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 27:867–891, 2007     

Something Free or Something Off? A Comparative Study of the Purchase Effects of Premiums and Price Cuts

As an alternative to promotional price cuts, retailers and manufacturers often rely on non-price promotion techniques, such as premium promotions, where consumers receive a free gift with the purchase of a product. We compare the effectiveness of premiums to that of price cuts, and study moderators of this comparative premium effectiveness. We use data from a large online shopping simulation study with more than 2,000 participants to model consumers’ purchase decisions in response to premiums and price cuts. Results indicate that the impact of premiums on purchase behavior is systematically lower than that of equivalent price cuts. However, a premium’s smaller sales impact may be offset by a cost advantage. This is especially true for private label brands where the premium’s purchase effects do not differ too much from those of a price cut. We calculate how large the cost advantage has to be for a premium to be more profitable than a price cut, and show that premiums entail risks as well as opportunities, for both manufacturers and retailers.     

Managerial labor-market discipline and the characteristics of merger and acquisition transactions

This study evaluates how state regulation of noncompetition agreements affects merger and acquisition activity. Noncompetition agreements put restrictions on postemployment activities, thereby reducing management mobility and forcing top managers to bear the long-term consequences of their corporate decisions. In this sense, state regulation of noncompetition agreements functions as a mechanism to align management's interests with those of the shareholders when management makes major corporate decisions. To examine this hypothesis empirically, this study tests whether the legal enforcement of noncompetition agreements across states affects the choice of payment methods, the premium paid for targets, and the acquirers' abnormal returns on their merger or acquisition activity. The results suggest that stricter enforcement of noncompetition agreements significantly reduces the likelihood of using stock in takeovers and the premiums paid for targets. In addition, the study documents that stronger enforcement of noncompetition agreements is related with more favorable market reactions for large acquirers.     

Consistency of option prices under bid–ask spreads

Given a finite set of European call option prices on a single underlying, we want to know when there is a market model that is consistent with these prices. In contrast to previous studies, we allow models where the underlying trades at a bid–ask spread. The main question then is how large (in terms of a deterministic bound) this spread must be to explain the given prices. We fully solve this problem in the case of a single maturity, and give several partial results for multiple maturities. For the latter, our main mathematical tool is a recent result on approximation by peacocks.     

A MODEL OF THE MATURITY PROFILE OF THE BALANCE SHEET (1)

In this paper, the expected return-variance of return hypothesis of investment behavior is applied to the problem ot the wealth-holder's choice of the maturity distributions of his assets and liabilities. It is assumed that the only asset forms available to the wealth-holder are bonds homogeneous in all respects except: the dates on which they promise with certainty to pay their face values plus interest in a single lump sum. Bonds are assumed to be available from a continuous spectrm of maturities in infinitely divisible denominations. The wealth-holder is assuined, in addition, to make risky forecasts of the future level of interest rates. Under these assumptions, the wealth-holder's networth is a random variable with given mean and variance. Expected net-worth and its variance are shown to be functions of a set of moments describing the distributions by maturity date of the wealth-holder assets and liabilities, i. e., the wealth-holder views the maturity distributions of his assets and liabilities as statistical frequency functions capable of being described by a set of statistical moments. These moments are then treated as the wealth-holder's decision variables to be adjusted to maximize a utility function over expected net-worth and its variance. Optima 1 values of these moments then describe the optimal maturity profile of the wealth-holder's balance sheet.     

Valuation of housing index derivatives

This study analyzes the valuation of housing index derivatives traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). Specifically, to circumvent the nontradability of housing indices, we propose and implement an equilibrium valuation framework. Assuming a mean-reverting aggregate dividend process and a utility function characterized by constant relative risk aversion, we show that the value of a housing index derivative depends only on parameters characterizing the underlying housing index, the endogenized interest rate and their correlation. We also analytically and numerically examine risk premiums for the CME futures and options and obtain three important findings. First, risk premiums are significant for all contracts with maturities longer than one year. Second, the expected growth rate of the underlying index is the key determinant for risk premiums. Third, risk premiums can be positive or negative, depending on whether the expected growth rate of the underlying index is higher or lower than the risk-free yield-to-maturity. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 30:660–688, 2010     

Estimation Uncertainty and the Equity Premium*

This paper studies a dynamic equilibrium model of asset prices in a partially observable exchange economy. It shows that the precautionary savings motive in response to estimation uncertainty can dominate the risk aversion effect, resulting in the reduction of the equity premium over short horizons. This exacerbates the equity premium puzzle. Over longer holding horizons, however, estimation uncertainty does induce higher risk premiums on equity over risk‐free coupon bonds of matching maturities, as long‐term bond yields are lowered due to the precautionary savings effect.     

LOCAL VARIANCE GAMMA AND EXPLICIT CALIBRATION TO OPTION PRICES

In some options markets (e.g., commodities), options are listed with only a single maturity for each underlying. In others (e.g., equities, currencies), options are listed with multiple maturities. In this paper, we analyze a special class of pure jump Markov martingale models and provide an algorithm for calibrating such models to match the market prices of European options with multiple strikes and maturities. This algorithm matches option prices exactly and only requires solving several one‐dimensional root‐search problems and applying elementary functions. We show how to construct a time‐homogeneous process which meets a single smile, and a piecewise time‐homogeneous process which can meet multiple smiles.     

Volatility and maturity effects in the Nikkei index futures

Many financial data series are found to exhibit stochastic volatility. Some of these time series are constructed from contracts with time-varying maturities. In this paper, we focus on index futures, an important subclass of such time series. We propose a bivariate GARCH model with the maturity effect to describe the joint dynamics of the spot index and the futures-spot basis. The setup makes it possible to examine the Samuelson effect as well as to compare the hedge ratios under scenarios with and without the maturity effect. The Nikkei-225 index and its futures are used in our empirical analysis. Contrary to the Samuelson effect, we find that the volatility of the futures price decreases when the contract is closer to its maturity. We also apply our model to futures hedging, and find that both the optimal hedge ratio and the hedging effectiveness critically depend on both the maturity and GARCH effects. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 895–909, 1999     

The forward pricing function of the shipping freight futures market

This article investigates the unbiasedness hypothesis of futures prices in the freight futures market. Being the only market whose underlying asset is a service, it sets it apart from other markets investigated so far in the literature. Cointegration techniques, employed to examine this hypothesis, indicate that futures prices one and two months before maturity are unbiased forecasts of the realized spot prices, whereas a bias exists in the three-months futures prices. This mixed evidence is in agreement with studies in other markets and suggests that the acceptance or rejection of unbiasedness depends on the idiosyncrasies of the market under investigation and on the time to maturity of the contract. Despite the existence of a bias in the three-months prices, futures prices for all maturities are found to provide forecasts of the realized spot prices that are superior to forecasts generated from error correction, ARIMA, exponential smoothing, and random walk models. Hence it appears that users of the BIFFEX market receive accurate signals from the futures prices (regarding the future course of cash prices) and can use the information generated by these prices to guide their physical market decisions. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 353–376, 1999     

Shopping trip behavior: An empirical investigation

The purpose of this article is to describe shopping trip behavior empirically using shopping trip data. A better understanding of this aspect of the purchase process can assist in generating testable hypotheses as to how the shopping trip decision may influence other choice decisions.     

Expectancy-value attitude models an analysis of critical measurement issues

Criteria for scaling beliefs and evaluations in the Fishbein model are considered, and a procedure is developed and illustrated for the proper test of multiplicative models. Hierarchical regression is shown to be a valid method for testing interaction hypotheses even when measures are only interval or ordinal scaled.     

Lending to small businesses: the role of loan maturity in addressing information problems

We investigate what determines the maturity of lines of credit to small businesses. Our results provide strong support for the hypothesis that shorter loan maturities serve to mitigate the problems associated with borrower risk and asymmetric information that are typical of small business lending. We find that maturity is shorter for firm owners that have poor credit histories, are older, and less experienced, and for firms that are more informationally opaque. Supporting the notion that collateral and maturity are substitute mechanisms in mitigating agency problems, we also find strong evidence that maturity increases with collateral pledges, that personal collateral is associated with longer maturities than business collateral, and that collateral types that better mitigate agency problems reduce the sensitivity of loan maturity to informational asymmetries and risk. Finally, while it is argued that relationship lending may mitigate information asymmetry, we find no relation between loan maturity and stronger firm-creditor ties.

虚拟社区对消费者购买行为的影响——一个参照群体视角

本文以参照群体理论为基础,针对信息性动机、群体规范、社区认同感、虚拟社区意识对消费者行为的影响提出了若干假设,构建了消费者参与虚拟社区的购买行为变化理论模型,运用结构方程模型方法进行了实证检验。结果表明,虚拟社区是对消费者具有明显影响力的参照群体,虚拟社区对消费者的购买行为产生信息性影响和规范性影响,使消费者的购买行为发生变化。消费者对信息的需求越强烈,对虚拟社区的认同感越强,受虚拟社区的信息性影响越大。社区意识在社区认同感、群体规范与虚拟社区的规范性影响之间起着完全中介作用。消费者的社区意识越强烈,受虚拟社区的规范性影响越大。