Mandatory dividend rules: Do they make it harder for firms to invest?

What are the costs and benefits of mandatory dividend rules? On the one hand, they make it harder for controlling shareholders to divert corporate assets. On the other hand, they reduce the internal funds available for firms to invest, possibly leading to the loss of valuable projects. To assess this trade-off, we look at investment and dividend decisions in a sample of public firms in Brazil. We show that a significant fraction of these firms use loopholes of Brazil's mandatory dividend rules to avoid paying dividends. And yet, the dividend rules are effective. They help explain why the average dividend yield in Brazil is higher than in the U.S., without making it harder for firms to invest.     

How do banks create money,and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking

Thanks to the recent banking crises interest has grown in banks and how they operate. In the past, the empirical and institutional market micro-structure of the operation of banks had not been a primary focus for investigations by researchers, which is why they are not well covered in the literature. One neglected detail is the banks' function as the creators and allocators of about 97% of the money supply (Werner, 1997, Werner, 2005), which has recently attracted attention (Bank of England, 2014a, Bank of England, 2014b, Werner, 2014b, Werner, 2014c). It is the purpose of this paper to investigate precisely how banks create money, and why or whether companies cannot do the same. Since the implementation of banking operations takes place within a corporate accounting framework, this paper is based upon a comparative accounting analysis perspective. By breaking the accounting treatment of lending into two steps, the difference in the accounting operation by bank and non-bank corporations can be isolated. As a result, it can be established precisely why banks are different and what it is that makes them different: They are exempted from the Client Money Rules and thus, unlike other firms, do not have to segregate client money. This enables banks to classify their accounts payable liabilities arising from bank loan contracts as a different type of liability called ‘customer deposits’. The finding is important for many reasons, including for modelling the banking sector accurately in economic models, bank regulation and also for monetary reform proposals that aim at taking away the privilege of money creation from banks. The paper thus adds to the growing literature on the institutional details and market micro-structure of our financial and monetary system, and in particular offers a new contribution to the literature on ‘what makes banks different’, from an accounting and regulatory perspective, solving the puzzle of why banks combine lending and deposit-taking operations under one roof.     

Board diversity reforms: Do they matter for EU bank performance?

We examine the impact of governance reforms related to board diversity on the performance of European Union banks. Using a difference‐in‐difference approach, we document that reforms increase bank stock returns and their volatility within the first 3 years after their enactment. The type of reform matters, with quotas increasing return volatility. The effectiveness of reforms depends on a country's institutional environment. The impact of reforms on return volatility is found to be beneficial in countries more open to diversity, with common law system and with greater economic freedom. Finally, reforms play a bigger role in banks that have ex ante less heterogeneous boards.     

Do individual short-sellers make money? Evidence from Korea

We use a proprietary trade- and account-level dataset of short sales to investigate the profitability of individual investors short-selling in the Korean stock market from August 1, 2007, to May 31, 2010. Using actual data on short-covering transactions, we find that the average profit is 26,810 Korean won (roughly USD 24.4) per trade per hour, and about 44% of shorted trades are covered within a day. We also find that the profitability of short-selling decreases as the hours-to-cover increases. Account-level analyses show that investors who sell short more firms make higher profits than those who sell short fewer firms and that the profitability of short-selling is persistent. We attribute the profitability to short-sellers’ ability to exploit short-run price reversals and information processing skills.     

What should regulators do about consolidation and electronic money?

Shared systems in the credit card mode may offer electronic money such as stored value (“smart”) cards, e-cash, and cybermoney. In such consolidations bank partners potentially may come from far outside the customary regulated banking fraternity. While some cyberbanks have been granted official status with its responsibilities, other nonbank cyberbanks have absconded with deposits amidst fraudulent claims. Electronic money is distributed typically in complex tiers, with backup reserves often held by nonbank third parties. The regulatory rules which apply to the mixed systems are therefore uneven and unclear. Banking regulators and the Antitrust Division wrestle with the ensuing dilemmas.     

UK Vice Chancellor compensation: Do they get what they deserve?

The compensation received by UK Vice Chancellors (VCs) has been on an upward trend in recent years and attracted a lot of negative media attention. In this paper, we examine whether VCs receive the compensation they deserve. Using a panel dataset covering the academic years 2007/2008 to 2018/2019, we develop a model to predict expected VC compensation to determine whether VCs are over- or undercompensated. Our model finds that VCs are not overcompensated regarding their base salary, but some are overcompensated in terms of their benefits and pension contributions. However, there is very little difference in terms of characteristics of over- and undercompensated VCs, indicating that on average, UK VCs receive the compensation they deserve. For robustness purposes, we employ a variety of alternative model specifications and subsamples which all support our previous findings.     

How does managed care do it?

Integrating the health services and insurance industries, as health maintenance organizations (HMOs) do, could lower expenditure by reducing either the quantity of services or unit price or both. We compare the treatment of heart disease in HMOs and traditional insurance plans using two datasets from Massachusetts. The nature of these health problems should minimize selection. HMOs have 30% to 40% lower expenditures than traditional plans. Both actual treatments and health outcomes differ little; virtually all the difference in spending comes from lower unit prices. Managed care may yield substantial increases in measured productivity relative to traditional insurance.     

On the differences in measuring SMB and HML in the UK – Do they matter?

The Fama–French (FF) three factor model expands the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) to include two additional factors to the market factor – SMB, employed to capture a firm size effect in returns and HML employed to capture book-to-market effects in returns. In the UK, different researchers use different ways of calculating SMB and HML in the context of empirical applications of the three factor model, or extensions of it, perhaps because they believe the differences in the construction of the SMB and HML factors to be relatively unimportant from an empirical standpoint. We investigate whether indeed factor construction methods are unimportant. Our conclusion is that they do matter.     

CEO contract design: How do strong principals do it?

We study changes in chief executive officer (CEO) contracts when firms transition from public ownership with dispersed owners to private ownership with strong principals in the form of private equity sponsors. The most significant changes are that a significant portion of equity grants performance-vests based on prespecified measures and that unvested equity is forfeited by fired CEOs. Private equity sponsors do not reduce base salaries, bonuses, and perks, but redesign contracts away from qualitative measures. They use some subjective performance evaluation, do not use indexed or premium options, and do not condition vesting on relative industry performance. We compare the contracts to predictions from contracting theories, and relate our results to discussions of executive compensation reform.     

Medical savings accounts: why do they work?

This article analyzes and reviews the cost and design characteristics of medical savings accounts (MSAs). By placing premium savings from high-deductible health insurance in medical savings accounts, individuals have an incentive to shop for medical services. A more market-oriented health insurance and delivery system results, as individuals are now both users and buyers of health care. Data show that most families would accumulate balances in their MSAs that may be used for future medical expenses or savings. Through program design, the potential problems of adverse selection and cost to risk can be greatly reduced.     

Financial experts on the top management team: Do they reduce investment inefficiency?

We examine the effect of the top management team (TMT) professional finance experience on firm investment efficiency. Top managers with a career background in finance help reduce deviations of investment from the level warranted by firm fundamentals. Reductions in investment inefficiencies are achieved by financial expert managers using project-specific rather than company-wide, discount rates for project evaluation and facilitating debt and equity issuance at lower costs. Greater investment efficiency due to the financial expertise of TMT improves firm performance. We demonstrate that these improvements are driven by the collective expertise of the TMT rather than solely by chief executive officers.     

Is it the weather?

We show that results in the recent strand of the literature, which tries to explain stock returns by weather induced mood shifts of investors, might be data-driven inference. More specifically, we consider two recent studies [Kamstra, Mark J., Kramer, Lisa A., Levi, Maurice D., 2003a. Winter blues: A SAD stock market cycle. American Economic Review 93(1), 324–343; Cao, Melanie, Wei, Jason, 2005. Stock market returns: A note on temperature anomaly. Journal of Banking and Finance 29(6), 1559–1573] that claim that a seasonal anomaly in stock returns is caused by mood changes of investors due to lack of daylight and temperature variations, respectively. While we confirm earlier results in the literature that there is indeed a strong seasonal effect in stock returns in many countries: stock market returns tend to be significantly lower during summer and fall months than during winter and spring months as documented by Bouman and Jacobsen [Bouman, Sven, Jacobsen, Ben, 2002. The Halloween indicator, Sell in May and go away: Another puzzle. American Economic Review, 92(5), 1618–1635], there is little evidence in favor of a SAD or temperature explanation. In fact, we find that a simple winter/summer dummy best describes this seasonality. Our results suggest that without any further evidence the correlation between weather-related variables and stock returns might be spurious and the conclusion that weather affects stock returns through mood changes of investors is premature.     

Do directors perform for pay?

Many corporations reward their outside directors with a modest fee for each board meeting they attend. Using a large panel data set on director attendance behavior in publicly-listed firms for the period 1996–2003, we provide robust evidence that directors are less likely to have attendance problems at board meetings when board meeting fees are higher. This is surprising since meeting fees, on average roughly $1,000, represent an arguably small fraction of the total wealth of a representative director in our sample. Thus, corporate directors appear to perform for even very small financial rewards.     

Value for money: a broken piñata?

In public management a key driver of effectiveness is value for money (VfM). This paper argues that the VfM concept suffers from conceptual ambiguity, and thus ethical implications arise when VfM is used to legitimize public buying decisions. A conceptual framework, which clarifies properties and boundaries of VfM, is proposed. Empirical data collected from public employees involved in public procurement in Ireland and a perceptual map of subjective meaning and impact of VfM are discussed. While the conceptual framework is broadly supported, it highlights different interpretations of VfM and distinguishes those employees who dent the VfM piñata from those who break it. The implications of the research in this paper include a need for more debate concerning the usefulness of the VfM concept.     

State-level politics: Do they influence corporate investment decisions?

Motivated by the real options theory, we develop the hypothesis that political outcomes (POs) influence corporate investment (CI). We show that POs influence CI strongly when a sample of all 1331 Australian firms are modelled as a panel. The effect of POs on CI at the Australian state-level is heterogenous with some states more affected than others and with some PO variables more influential than others. We also confirm that when confronted with a large sample of firms, firm characteristics such as political connections, size and capital intensity do matter in terms of whether POs influence CI.     

Do interbank customer relationships exist? And how did they function in the crisis? Learning from Italy

Using 11 years of monthly Italian bank-by-bank data, this paper correlates the bilateral amounts and the identity of each interbank borrower and lender with a long list of explanatory variables. The results show that interbank customer relationships, i.e. stable and strong relationships between pairs of borrowing and lending banks, do exist in Italy, that they persist over time, and that they functioned well during the crisis, enabling the healthier banks to provide and the troubled ones to receive funds.     

Do firms follow GAAP when they record share repurchases?

This paper examines U.S. firms' accounting for share repurchases and the accounting choice provided to Delaware-incorporated firms between the treasury and retirement methods. This accounting choice does not affect income, cash flows, or net assets, but it nevertheless affects financial reporting transparency and the allocation of equity between retained earnings and contributed capital. According to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), the accounting choice to record share repurchases should reflect management's intended disposition of the repurchased shares. We compare characteristics of Delaware-incorporated treasury and retirement firms and find that the choice between the two accounting methods is not always consistent with GAAP, but neither is it random; rather, this choice is related to a number of firm characteristics including firm growth, industry membership, trading exchange, and price–earnings ratio. We also find that a firm's accounting method for share repurchases is associated with a firm's propensity to make future share repurchases.     

Do you really want to ask an underwriter how much money you should leave on the table?

This paper analyses whether the owners of companies seeking to list will leave less money on the table if underwriters are employed to price and market the issue. Our findings indicate that limited liability and Industrial company initial public offerings (IPOs) that have used underwriters have left more money on the table than those not employing underwriters. Not only is there a direct cost in employing an underwriter but this study suggests there might also be an indirect cost. We also find that a positive forecast earnings per share yield may be useful in reducing the amount of money left on the table.     

Do multiple credit ratings reduce money left on the table? Evidence from U.S. IPOs

Using credit ratings as an uncertainty-reducing mechanism, we provide evidence of the beneficial impact of multiple credit ratings on reducing IPO underpricing and filing price revision. We find that the acquisition of multiple ratings in the pre-IPO period mitigates uncertainty more than the acquisition of a single rating. Multi-rated firms also have higher probabilities of survival than those with a single rating, whereas credit rating levels matter only for IPOs with more than one rating. The IPOs that are awarded the first rating on the borderline between investment and non-investment grades are more likely to seek an additional rating.     

De-growth: Do you realise what it means?

The implications of de-growth are much more far reaching and radical than seems to be appreciated. It is important to start with a brief consideration of the magnitude and nature of the global predicament, because when this is understood it becomes clear firstly that consumer-capitalist society cannot be made sustainable or just, secondly that a satisfactory and viable post-capitalist society must take a particular form, and thirdly that specific implications for transition strategy are indicated.