Determinants of corporate governance practices in Brazil

We study the determinants of Corporate Governance (CG) practices in Brazil. Using hand collected data, we build CG subindices for Board Structure, Board Procedures, Minority Shareholders Rights, and Disclosure, and an overall CG index, BCGI, computed as the average of these four subindices. During our sample period, CG practices changed significantly: improvement was stronger among firms in the High- than Low-CG requirement listings. Tangibility and Liquidity are the only variables that predict CG practices with some consistency. Most importantly, we find no evidence that Tobin's q predicts CG practices. This last result lowers the possibility of reverse causation in analyses that use CG practices as determinant of firm value.     

Pricing risky corporate bonds: An empirical study

This paper empirically studies a model for pricing risky corporate bonds proposed by Baaquie—based on the seminal Merton. The proposed model provides an exact solution for the price of a risky corporate bond with a finite maturity and explains the market price of corporate fixed coupon bonds as being the result of the market risk that is carried by the bond. Baaquie's model is empirically tested using 42 fixed coupon bonds issued by 23 US corporations, between 2011 and 2017. It is found that the proposed model estimates most bond prices quite accurately. Market time (similar to the concept of psychological time), which is distinct from calendar time, is quantified in the paper and is an exogenous behavioral parameter that plays a pivotal role in improving the accuracy of the pricing model for long-maturity risky bonds.     

Return and price volatility of bonds with different credit risk

This article analyzes the relative price and monthly holding period return volatility of bonds with differing credit risk. The research proceeds by decomposing the causes of price volatility into that due to duration and yield volatility. Lower duration, due to higher coupon rate, and relatively stable yields, due to the behavior of credit risk and risk aversion over the business cycle, may well make lower quality issues such as A and Baa industrials exhibit less volatility than high-quality issues such as Aaa industrials and United States Treasury issues.     

Pricing corporate bonds in Brazil: 2000 to 2004

This paper analyzes the factors that influence the issuing price of debentures in Brazil in the period from year 2000 to 2004, applying a factor model, in which exogenous variables explain return and price behavior. The variables in this study include: rating, choice of index, maturity, country risk, basic interest rate, long-term and short-term rate spread, the stock market index, and the foreign exchange rate. Results indicate that the index variable, probability of default and bond's maturity influence pricing and points out associations of long-term bonds with better rating issues.     

Real earnings management and the cost of new corporate bonds

We examine the association between real earnings management and the cost of new bond issues of U.S. corporations. We consider three types of real earnings management: sales manipulation, overproduction, and the abnormal reduction of discretionary expenditures. We find that overproduction impairs credit ratings and that sales manipulation and overproduction are associated with higher bond yield spreads. Overall, our results imply that credit rating agencies and bondholders perceive real earnings management as a credit risk-increasing factor and thus require high risk premiums.     

Behavior of default-risk premiums for corporate bonds and commercial paper

The question addressed in this paper is whether default-risk premiums for short-term and for long-term securities behave differently over time. The question is important because it affects decisions by corporations and state and local governments as to the maturity structure of their debt. It also affects decisions by investors as to the maturity and the type and grade of security in which they invest. Several hypotheses have been advanced about the behavior of default-risk premiums for different maturities. The purpose of this paper is to test these hypotheses empirically with a set of data heretofore unused. In so doing, new insights are gained into the behavior of default-risk premiums for different maturities.     

Determinants of corporate hedging and derivatives: A revisit

Although the primary purpose of hedging is to reduce earnings volatility, corporate hedging may also increase firm value. Using publicly-available data, we found that hedging reduces the probability of financial distress, reduces the agency costs of debt, and reduces some agency costs of equity. However, we found no support for the hypothesis that hedging increases firm value by reducing expected tax liability. In addition, we suggest that corporate ownership structure may affect the desirability of hedging. We also found that large firms have a stronger tendency to hedge, firms with a larger percentage of value derived from growth opportunities are more likely to hedge, and convertible debt serves as a substitute for corporate hedging. With a dummy variable for multinational corporations as a proxy for operational hedging, we found that operational hedging and derivative hedging are complements rather than substitutes.     

Investor base and corporate borrowing: Evidence from international bonds

We examine international bond issues by US firms to study the benefits of investor taste for cross-border security issuances. We proxy for firms' international investor taste with the fraction of prior international bond holding in firms' domestic and international bonds and find that international investor demand increases with such taste. Moreover, the offering yield spreads on international bonds are lower than domestic offering yield spreads for these internationally recognized firms and they have higher probability of issuing internationally. Such international recognition may occur, for instance, if the diversification benefits of adding the security to investor's portfolio outweigh the negative effects of higher renegotiation costs for international compared to domestic investors.     

Experience-based corporate corruption and stock market volatility: Evidence from emerging markets

This paper reassesses how “experience-based” corporate corruption affects stock market volatility in 14 emerging markets. We match the World Bank enterprise-level data on bribes with a unique cross-country macroeconomics dataset obtained from the World Bank development indicators. It is found that wider coverage of “realized” corporate corruption in the emerging markets investigated reduces the stock market volatility, attributed to decrease in uncertainty about government policy with regard to the business environment, as implied by the general equilibrium model of Pastor and Veronesi (2012). Overall, our results suggest that stock price volatility decreases as the uncertainty about government policy becomes more predictable, which is consistent with the testable hypotheses of Pastor and Veronesi (2012).     

Modeling recovery rates of corporate defaulted bonds in developed and developing countries

This paper examines the determinants of recovery rates of corporate defaulted bonds in the emerging markets. We use data on defaulted bonds from Moody's ultimate recovery database over the period 2005–2015 to experiment the impact of the borrower characteristics added to the macroeconomic and the bond market conditions on recovery rates. We find evidence that bond recovery rates in emerging and developed countries do not depend on the same factors. Our results show that bond recovery rates in developing countries seem to depend much more on specific characteristics of firms. The financial crisis has affected more significantly subordinated bond recovery rates than secured bonds in emerging markets.     

Determinants of the corporate identity construct: a review of the literature

Corporate identity has received significant attention from both academics and practitioners in the last 25 years. Despite many articles written in this area a definitive construct of corporate identity and its measurements does not yet exist. The objective of this paper is therefore to provide a review of the literature on the corporate identity construct and its components and also to present the academic and managerial implications of this study.     

Determinants of corporate social responsibility and business ethics education in Spanish universities

The current economic crisis, unsustainable growth, and financial scandals invite reflection on the role of universities in professional training, particularly those who have to manage businesses. This study analyzes the main factors that might determine the extent to which Spanish organizational management educators use corporate social responsibility (CSR) or business ethics stand‐alone subjects to equip students with alternative views on business. A web content analysis and non‐parametric mean comparison statistics of the curricula of undergraduate degrees in all universities in Spain were conducted. The main conclusion of this paper is related to the Bologna effect in Spanish universities. Comparing our results with prior research in this matter, it is demonstrated that the main reason that explains the increase of CSR and ethical education in Spain is the Bologna process and its adaptation to the European Higher Education Area. Also, private universities in Spain are more likely to require an ethics course than public universities. Other factors, such as size, political orientation, or related to CSR chairs are not statistically explanatory of CSR and ethical education.     

Determinants of corporate listings on stock markets in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Ghana

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) economies have established stock markets to encourage the mobilization of domestic funds and attract foreign capital in-flows for corporate investment and growth. But domestic corporate listings on stock markets have been abysmal. This study examines the reasons behind the low patronage of stock markets by domestic firms in SSA using Ghana as a case study. Data for the study was obtained from 110 out of the 200 largest firms in Ghana and included firms which were listed on the stock market and unlisted firms over three time-periods from 2002 to 2009. The findings show that knowledge about stock market dynamics and financial institutions' support encourages listing on the stock market. However, extensive information and disclosure costs requirements, and loss of ownership and control discourage listing on the stock market.     

Progress toward understanding tensions in corporate venture capital: A systematic review

We systematically review the past four decades of research on tensions in corporate venture capital (CVC) and inductively identify three main tensions: (1) multiple stakeholders championing CVC-based exploration versus core business-focused exploitation, (2) CVC programs simultaneously belonging to the corporate parent versus the startup/venture capital (VC) world, and (3) startups and VCs viewing CVC programs as a threat versus an opportunity. By combining the understanding of the CVC phenomenon with that of the paradox literature, we expand our understanding of why, how, and when contradictory goals and multiple stakeholder expectations result in tensions and how these tensions can be managed.     

Asymmetric pricing of implied systematic volatility in the cross‐section of expected returns

Assuming a symmetric relation between returns and innovations in implied market volatility, Ang, A., Hodrick, R., Xing, Y., and Zhang, X. (2006) find that sensitivities to changes in implied market volatility have a cross‐sectional effect on firm returns. Dennis, P., Mayhew, S., and Stivers, C. (2006), however, find an asymmetric relation between firm‐level returns and implied market volatility innovations. We incorporate this asymmetry into the cross‐sectional relation between sensitivity to volatility innovations and returns. Using both portfolio sorting and firm‐level regressions, we find that sensitivity to VIX innovations is negatively related to returns when volatility is rising, but is unrelated when it is falling. The negative relation is robust to controls for other variables, suggesting only the increase in implied market volatility is a priced risk factor. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 31:34–54, 2011     

Local volatility under rough volatility

Several asymptotic results for the implied volatility generated by a rough volatility model have been obtained in recent years (notably in the small-maturity regime), providing a better understanding of the shapes of the volatility surface induced by rough volatility models, supporting their calibration power to SP500 option data. Rough volatility models also generate a local volatility surface, via the so-called Markovian projection of the stochastic volatility. We complement the existing results on implied volatility by studying the asymptotic behavior of the local volatility surface generated by a class of rough stochastic volatility models, encompassing the rough Bergomi model. Notably, we observe that the celebrated “1/2 skew rule” linking the short-term at-the-money skew of the implied volatility to the short-term at-the-money skew of the local volatility, a consequence of the celebrated “harmonic mean formula” of [Berestycki et al. (2002). Quantitative Finance, 2, 61–69], is replaced by a new rule: the ratio of the at-the-money implied and local volatility skews tends to the constant $1/(H+3/2)$ (as opposed to the constant 1/2), where H is the regularity index of the underlying instantaneous volatility process.     

The impact of volatility derivatives on S&P500 volatility

This study investigates whether the newly cultivated platform of volatility derivatives has altered the volatility of the underlying S&P500 index. The findings suggest that the onset of the volatility derivatives trading has lowered the volatility of both the cash market volatility and the cash market index, and significantly reduced the impact of shocks to volatility. When big sudden events hit financial markets, however, the volatility of volatility seems to elevate in the U.S. equity market as a result of increased global correlations. Regardless of the period under examination and the estimator employed, long‐run volatility persistence is present. The latter drops significantly when the credit crunch period is excluded from the post‐event date sample period. The correlation between the broad equity index and the return volatility remains low, which in turn strengthens the role of volatility derivatives to facilitate portfolio diversification. The analysis also shows that volatility is mean reverting, whereas market data support the impact of information asymmetries on conditional volatility. In the post‐event date phase, no asymmetries are found when the recent crisis is not accounted for. Finally, comparisons with other international equity indices, with no volatility derivatives listed, unveil that these indices exhibit higher volatility and slower recovery from shocks than the S&P500 index. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 29:1190–1213, 2009     

Uncertainty and the volatility forecasting power of option-implied volatility

This study investigates the impact of uncertainty on the volatility forecasting power of option-implied volatility. Option-implied volatility is a powerful predictor of future volatility, particularly during periods of high uncertainty. This is consistent with option-implied volatility being largely determined by volatility-informed traders (rather than directional traders) when uncertainty is high. New volatility forecasting models that incorporate such interaction outperform benchmark models, both in- and out-of-sample. The new models also better predict future volatility during the 2008 global financial crisis, for which benchmark models perform poorly. The results are robust to alternative choices of benchmark models, loss functions, and estimation windows.