The good and bad news about the new liquidity rules of Basel III in Western European countries

New liquidity rules phased in under Basel III define the new net stable funding ratio (NSFR) to promote sustainable funding structures at financial institutions. In this paper, we analyze characteristics and drivers of NSFR for a sample of 921 Western European banks between 1996 and 2010. We find that a majority of banks have historically not fulfilled NSFR minimum requirements, in particular larger and faster growing institutions as well as banks also active in asset management and investment banking. Many of them have started increasing NSFR with the onset of financial crisis 2008 while this ratio had been sliding in earlier years. Interestingly, potential advantages in funding costs for low NSFR banks do not seem to translate into higher profitability and results of these banks are more volatile.     

Bank regulation and international financial stability: A case against the 2006 Basel framework for controlling tail risk in trading books

In attempting to promote international financial stability, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2006) provided a framework that sought to control the amount of tail risk that large banks around the world would take in their trading books relative to their corresponding minimum capital requirements. However, many of these banks suffered significant trading losses during the recent financial crisis. Our paper examines whether the Basel framework allowed banks to take substantive tail risk in their trading books without a capital requirement penalty. We find that it allowed banks to do so and that its minimum capital requirements can be notably procyclical. Hence, focusing on the way the Basel framework sought to control the amount of tail risk in trading books relative to their corresponding minimum capital requirements, our paper supports the view that it was not properly designed to promote financial stability. We also discuss alternative regulatory frameworks that would potentially be more effective than the Basel framework in preventing banks from taking substantive tail risk in their trading books without a capital requirement penalty.     

Multinational banks in the crisis: Foreign affiliate lending as a mirror of funding pressure and competition on the internal capital market

We investigate how the lending activities abroad of a multinational bank’s local and hub affiliates have been affected by funding difficulties during the financial crisis. We find that affiliates’ local deposits and performance have been stabilizing loan supply. By contrast, relying on short-term wholesale funding has increasingly proven to be a disadvantage in the crisis, which has seen inter-bank and capital markets freeze. By introducing a liable approximate measure for intra-bank flows, we detect competition for intra-bank funding between the affiliates abroad as well as an increasing focus on the parent bank’s home market activities. In addition, the more an affiliate abroad relies on intra-bank funding in the crisis, the greater its dependence on its parent bank having a stable deposit and long-term wholesale funding position. We consider changes in long-term lending to the private sectors of 40 countries by the affiliates of the 68 largest German banks. To obtain a more precise picture, we clean our lending data from valuation effects.     

A shared boundary object: Financial innovation and engineering in Islamic financial institutions

This paper explores the way in which ethico-faith-based rules act as a boundary object in constraining the process of financial innovation and engineering (FIE) in Islamic Financial Institutions (IFIs). The paper examines how this faith-based approach is enacted in the FIE process amid different social worlds and groups that cooperate without consensus within IFIs. We contribute to studies of governance in faith-based organizations, by identifying the plasticity of faith-based rules that act as boundary objects in the governance of the FIE process. The plasticity of ethico-faith based rules allows coordination among local and global actors with intersecting faith-based values, logics, and interests. IFIs ensure that the products of FIE become an integral part of and as compatible as possible with the logics of global financial markets.     

The Chinese experience: The impact of financial restatements on firm value and its implications on the investigatory practices of regulators

We examine the relationship between restatements of prior period financial results and firm value in China. This relationship is relevant to the millions of global investors who purchase Chinese equity securities because Chinese regulatory authorities must focus on the restatement events that, in their judgment, most warrant investigation. We recommend that they focus their attention on restatement announcements (and the firms that announce them) that possess the characteristics that most impact firm value.Prior studies of the American equity markets found evidence of a relationship between the nature of the restatement announcements and firm value, as well as evidence that core account adjustments and high-magnitude adjustments affect firm value more than noncore account adjustments and low-magnitude adjustments. However, based on a sample of Chinese listed firms that made corporate announcements that appeared in the Asian press between 2003 and 2011, we only find mixed evidence in the Chinese equity markets in support of the former relationship, and no evidence at all in support of the latter relationship.In other words, restatement announcements in China do not impact firm value to the same extent, and in the same manner, as restatement announcements in America. Chinese regulators must thus develop policies that are unique to the Chinese markets in order to effectively prioritize their oversight activities on firms that issue restatement announcements.What factors should be considered by Chinese regulators? We identify a collection of corporate governance variables, as well as a smaller collection of financial variables, that are significantly associated with decreases in firm value. We also develop a set of regression analyses that utilize these variables to explain a significant portion of the variability of firm value during the sample period. Interestingly, however, we find no evidence that the growth patterns of the firms are significantly associated with changes in firm value.Using this evidence, we recommend the development of a model of regulatory guidance that is customized for the unique characteristics of the Chinese equity markets. We believe that this model can help Chinese authorities focus their attention on specific restatement announcements that most impact firm value.     

The impact of corporate governance on financial performance of Indian and GCC listed firms: An empirical investigation

Corporate governance plays a vital role in creating a corporate culture of consciousness, transparency, and openness. In this context, this paper provides a brief view about the background of corporate governance mechanisms in India and Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) countries, corporate legal system and monitoring policies laid down by Indian and GCC governments. Furthermore, it analyzes the impact of corporate governance mechanisms on the financial performance of Indian and GCC listed firms. The study uses a sample that consists of 53 non-financial listed companies from India and 53 non-financial listed companies from GCC countries for the period 2009–2016. Results revealed that board accountability (BA) and audit committee (AC) have an insignificant impact on firms' performance measured by ROE and Tobin’s Q. Similarly, transparency and disclosure (TD) have an insignificant negative impact on firms' performance measured by Tobin’s Q. Moreover, the country dummy results show that Indian firms are performing better than Gulf countries ones in terms of corporate governance practices and financial performance. The current study is considered as a battery for further research and studies particularly in India & GCC listed firms in the context of corporate governance and financial performance.     

A half-century of Accounting and Business Research: the impact on the study of international financial reporting

This paper celebrates the contribution of this journal, over its first 50 years, to research on international financial reporting, defined as comprising writings on comparative or harmonisation topics. The paper examines the journal’s output in that field and how it contributed to the field’s development. Even though the journal was sympathetic to international financial reporting, less than 1% of output in its first decade (the 1970s) related to it. In its first 35 years, a large proportion of the journal’s limited output in the field was produced by two small groups of researchers. However, during its fourth decade, the field gradually became dominant as the accounting world changed. By then, the journal had already published the seminal papers on several central topics in international financial reporting, including measuring harmonisation, using reconciliations to measure international accounting differences, assessing international differences in the influence of tax on financial reporting, and measuring international difference in the application of international standards. These topics were later taken up by many researchers in several other journals.