Financial consequences of mutual fund mergers

This study examines the impact of mutual fund mergers on performance and investment flows of target and acquiring funds. Results indicate some improvements in the post-merger performance for target funds shareholders. Results also confirm prior evidence of negative net asset flows in target funds in the pre-merger period as well as negative, but not significant, net asset flows in the years following the merger. However, a more detailed analysis allows us to observe that this lack of significance in the negative reaction of investors to mutual fund mergers is explained by the compensation of abnormally high inflows and outflows in the resultant funds. These substantial flows are significantly above the average in their market segment, especially regarding money flows. This finding provides evidence that investors pay attention to mutual fund mergers, especially institutional investors who are concentrated on the market possibilities resulting from these organizational processes.     

Why good accountants do bad audits

On July 30, President Bush signed into law the Sarbanes-Oxley Act addressing corporate accountability. A response to recent financial scandals, the law tightened federal controls over the accounting industry and imposed tough new criminal penalties for fraud. The president proclaimed, "The era of low standards and false profits is over." If only it were that easy. The authors don't think corruption is the main cause of bad audits. Rather, they claim, the problem is unconscious bias. Without knowing it, we all tend to discount facts that contradict the conclusions we want to reach, and we uncritically embrace evidence that supports our positions. Accountants might seem immune to such distortions because they work with seemingly hard numbers and clear-cut standards. But the corporate-auditing arena is particularly fertile ground for self-serving biases. Because of the often subjective nature of accounting and the close relationships between accounting firms and their corporate clients, even the most honest and meticulous of auditors can unintentionally massage the numbers in ways that mask a company's true financial status, thereby misleading investors, regulators, and even management. Solving this problem will require far more aggressive action than the U.S. government has taken thus far. What's needed are practices and regulations that recognize the existence of bias and moderate its effects. True auditor independence will entail fundamental changes to the way the accounting industry operates, including full divestiture of consulting and tax services, rotation of auditing firms, and fixed-term contracts that prohibit client companies from firing their auditors. Less tangibly, auditors must come to appreciate the profound impact of self-serving biases on their judgment.     

Science and fiction: the good and the bad

When Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the Moon, they said science had at last caught up with fiction. The event had long been foretold in the Promethean genre of science fiction. Indeed, NASA had paid tribute to the prophetic powers of this literature when it gave the name of Columbia to the space module of the Apollo 11 mission in memory of the Columbiad of Jules Verne's space story. As I.F. Clarke shows in this survey, science and fiction have always had the future in common. From the earliest days of the first industrial revolution the innumerable possibilities of a technological society have found their appropriate images in the many future worlds of science fiction. Thirty years before they started work on the Manhattan Project, H.G. Wells invented the term atomic bomb and described the first atomic war in The World Set Free.     

欧洲跨国并购喜忧参半

全球并购市场持续火爆,特别是欧洲市场一扫阴霾,其强劲走势令人刮目相看.而其背后深藏的原因更是发人深思     

Middlemen: the good,the bad,and the ugly

We examine the role of a middleman as an expert in markets. A seller's effort determines the quality of the good. Buyers observe neither the seller's effort nor the good's quality. A middleman, after observing a signal about the good's quality, decides whether to purchase it and then to sell it. We show that the presence of a middleman may either reduce or exacerbate the seller's moral hazard problem. We also consider a model with multiple middlemen. We find that the seller's effort is minimized if either the middleman's signal is perfect or the number of middlemen is large.     

Aggregate earnings and stock market returns: The good,the bad,and the state-dependent

Prior research documents a negative aggregate earnings-returns relation. In contrast, we posit that the sign of the relation varies, depending upon the macroeconomic and financial market conditions that exist in the earnings announcement quarter. We argue that the existing macroeconomic and financial market conditions influence market participants’ frame of reference, which in turn affects whether they interpret aggregate earnings surprises to be informative about the expected inflation component of the discount rate, the market risk premium component of the discount rate, or aggregate future cash flows. Consistent with this, we find that the sign of the aggregate earnings-returns relation changes numerous times across our sample period. We also find that market participants interpret aggregate earnings to be informative about changes in expected inflation (market risk premium) when the sign of the aggregate earnings-returns relation is negative (positive). Finally, we identify macroeconomic and financial market conditions under which the aggregate earnings-returns relation is more (less) likely to be negative (positive).     

The dynamics of mergers and acquisitions

This paper presents a dynamic model of takeovers based on the stock market valuations of merging firms. The model incorporates competition and imperfect information and determines the terms and timing of takeovers by solving option exercise games between bidding and target shareholders. The implications of the model for returns to stockholders are consistent with the available evidence. In addition, the model generates new predictions relating these returns to the drift, volatility and correlation coefficient of the bidder and the target stock returns and to the dispersion of beliefs regarding the benefits of the takeover.     

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.     

In good times and in bad: Bank capital ratios and lending rates

This paper investigates the relationship between bank capital ratios and lending rates using data from 1998 to 2012 for 13 large banks accounting for 75% of total UK lending. We document a substantial change in the coefficient of the Tier 1 capital ratio in reduced-form regressions for secured household lending rates; the coefficient changes from positive pre-crisis to negative in crisis. Significant changes are also detected in the relationship for unsecured household and corporate lending. Such instability is difficult to reconcile with many well-established theories of financial intermediation but is consistent with the relatively recent theories of bank portfolio decisions emphasising cyclical variation in bank leverage and risk-appetite.     

The value of informational arbitrage

Finance and Stochastics - In the context of a general semimartingale model, we aim at determining how much an investor is willing to pay to learn additional information that allows achieving...     

The good,the bad and the impaired: A credit risk model of the Irish mortgage market

Using a uniquely constructed loan-level dataset of the residential mortgage book of Irish financial institutions, this paper provides a framework for estimating default probabilities of individual mortgages. In contrast to the popular stock delinquency approach, this model provides estimates of default and cure flows: a requirement of the stress test approach adopted by the European Central Bank's comprehensive assessment. In addition, both default and cure transitions are modelled as functions of micro- and macro-covariates including loan characteristics and current macroeconomic conditions such as house prices and unemployment. When comparing the competing equity and affordability effects, labour market deterioration played a stronger role than house equity in the rise of Irish default rates. For cures, a scarring effect of default is identified and estimated with the probability of a loan returning to performing reducing by almost four per cent each month a loan remains delinquent.     

The informational content of unsolicited ratings

This paper investigates whether the stock market reacts to unsolicited ratings for a sample of firms rated by S&P between January 1996 and December 2005. We first analyze the stock market reaction to the assignment of an initial unsolicited rating. We find evidence that this reaction is negative and particularly accentuated for small Japanese firms. We then analyze the stock market reaction to changes in unsolicited ratings for a Japanese sub-sample and find that here too the stock market reacts negatively. Our results imply that unsolicited ratings convey new information to the stock market and that investors react to this information. Although unsolicited ratings are based on publicly available information only, the stock market seems to be inefficient in processing this information for Japanese companies.     

The informational efficiency and the financial crashes

The evolution of the daily informational efficiency is measured for different stock market indices (Japanese, Malaysian, Russian, Mexican, and the US markets) by using the local entropy and the symbolic time series analysis. There is some evidence that for different stock markets, the probability of having a crash increases as the informational efficiency decreases. Further results suggest that the latter probability also increases for jumping to a less efficient market. In addition, the US stock market seems to be the most structurally efficient and the Russian is the most inefficient, maybe because is a young market, recently established in 1995.     

The informational content of implied volatility

Implied volatility is widely believed to be informationallysuperior to historical volatility, because it is the 'market's'forecast of future volatility. But for S&P 1 00 index options,the most actively traded contract in the United States, we findimplied volatility to be a poor forecast of subsequent realizedvolatility. In aggregate and across subsamples separated bymaturity and strike price, implied volatility has virtuallyno correlation with future volatility, and it does not incorporatethe information contained in recent observed volatility.     

When good investments go bad: The contraction in community bank lending after the 2008 GSE takeover

In September 2008, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were placed into conservatorship. The GSEs' equity prices dropped considerably in response, and, as a result, many banks that held sizable amounts of the preferred stock of the two GSEs recognized substantial losses. Fifteen failures and two mergers resulted. We treat these losses as plausibly exogenous, unanticipated, supply-side shocks to bank lending, as they are likely unrelated to demand-side factors that could affect lending, and because GSE investments were considered to be safe by banks, regulators, and rating agencies. As a result, this event allows us to examine the relationship between community bank condition and lending during the global financial crisis. We find that, following the shock, loan growth at exposed banks was about 2 percentage points lower than other banks.     

The valuation effects of bank mergers

This paper examines the valuation effects of a sample of 558 bank mergers from 1980–1997. The overall results indicate that bank mergers create wealth. On average over a 36-day (−30, +5) event window, targets gain over 22%, bidders break even, and combined firms gain 3%. The results further indicate that mergers in the 1990s, which have not been extensively studied in prior work, have positive effects. In the 1990s over the 36-day window: target gain significantly, bidder returns are positive and statistically larger than the mid-1980s, and combined firm returns are significantly positive. These results are consistent with the notion that bank mergers occur for synergistic reasons and are not the result of empire building. However, bidder returns are sensitive to the event window implemented. Examining returns over an 11-day (−5, +5) window, target returns remain significantly positive, while bidder returns are statistically negative, and combined firm returns are statistically positive. Results over both windows indicate that overall wealth effects from bank mergers are positive over time, particularly in the 1990s.     

The probability of informed trading and mergers and acquisitions

This paper investigates the role of the probability of informed trading (PIN) in mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We show that acquirers with higher PINs use more cash to finance their deals due to their higher cost of equity, and acquirers use more equity financing when acquiring targets with higher PINs to share the information risk with the target shareholders. We also find that acquirers and targets with higher PINs both experience higher announcement returns when cash financing is used, indicating that PINs are priced in the M&A market.     

Interventionist research in accounting: reflections on the good,the bad and the ugly

Our paper advances understanding of interventionist research (IVR) as a qualitative accounting research approach. It reflects on the potential value, challenges and key issues, as manifested by the good, the bad and the ugly. The reflection contributes towards clarifying the IVR landscape, thereby forging a future path for IVR as a legitimate qualitative methodology, to enthuse qualitative researchers to produce accounting research relevant to theory, practice and society. The primary contribution is synthesising the interventionist theory and practice literature encompassing a view of the good, the bad and the ugly in interventionist accounting research.