How Investment Opportunities Affect Optimal Capital Structure

This article addresses the question of how competition for investments among companies in a certain industry affects their capital structure. The authors develop a new modelling framework that simulates financial variables of a set of firms in a given sector, and uses the framework to analyze how such firms compete for new investments. The leverage of companies affects their flexibility to react to and take advantage of investment opportunities, and the authors show how such flexibility can be optimized to maximize the firm’s growth. As an illustration, they apply the model to a set of European airlines and global pharmaceutical companies. The novelty introduced by this paper is the explicit modelling of the interaction between several companies. The literature on optimal capital structure focuses on individual companies optimizing their capital structure in a world in which the actions of their competitors are exogenous. The authors’ results show how to incorporate the competitive position of the firm as well as the availability of investment opportunities into the capital structure decison.     

ESG as a Value‐Creation Tool for Active Investors: A Profile of Inherent Group

A growing number of investment managers claim to integrate environmental, social, and governance considerations into their investment strategy and processes, but few have described how they do so in depth. Even fewer reinforce the importance of sustainability within their own firms by becoming a certified ‘B Corporation.’ This article offers a rare, inside look at how one such value‐oriented manager uses ESG as a tool for differentiated investment sourcing, underwriting, and corporate engagement with the aim of achieving superior risk‐adjusted returns. One of the main arguments of the article—and a key principle of the firm's investment approach—is that ESG, as applied to both corporate strategy and operations, is an important factor in determining a company's cost of capital. The authors present specific examples of their investment process at work, highlighting how active engagement with management on ESG issues can catalyze progress that becomes valued by the capital markets.     

RISK MANAGEMENT FOR MIDDLE MARKET COMPANIES

This article reinforces the message of the one immediately preceding by showing that small to medium‐sized firms have even stronger (non‐tax) motives for hedging risks than their large corporate counterparts. Although middle market companies have traditionally been viewed as less sophisticated than their larger corporate counterparts in the risk management arena, the authors suggest that such companies have become increasingly receptive to new hedging strategies using derivative products. When used appropriately, such products allow companies to stabilize their periodic operating cash flow by eliminating specific sources of volatility such as fluctuations in interest rates, exchange rates, and commodity prices. Smaller companies recognize that a single swing in a budgeted cost can have a catastrophic effect on an entire budget, whereas a larger company can more easily absorb such a cost. Moreover, because the principal owners of mid‐sized firms often have a substantial part of their net worth tied up in the business, they are likely to have a far stronger interest than typical outside shareholders in using risk management to reduce the volatility of corporate profits and firm value. Perhaps most important to owners whose firms rely on debt financing, the greater cash flow stability resulting from active risk management significantly reduces the possibility of financial distress or bankruptcy. In this article, three representatives of Bank of America's risk management practice discuss three different exposures faced by middle market companies—those arising from changes in interest rates, foreign exchange rates, and commodity prices—and show how these risks can be managed with derivatives. Besides shielding companies from financial trouble, risk management is also likely to improve their access to the money and capital markets. By protecting the firm's access to capital, risk management increases the odds that the firm will not be forced to pass up good investment opportunities because of capital constraints or fear of getting into financial difficulty.     

Internal control and internal capital allocation: evidence from internal capital markets of multi-segment firms

We investigate the impact of internal control over financial reporting on management decisions in directing corporate resources to alternative investment projects in multi-segment firms. Results from cross-sectional and inter-temporal analyses indicate that internal control weaknesses (ICWs) are associated with distortionary internal capital allocations. The adverse impact on internal capital markets is more pronounced for firms with company-level ICWs. Our analyses also show that firms with weak existing governance mechanisms benefit more from maintaining effective internal control. We further document that the negative impact of ICWs on firms’ internal capital transfers manifests in a lower excess value of diversification.     

Capital requirements and claims recovery: A new perspective on solvency regulation

Protection of creditors is a key objective of financial regulation. Where the protection needs are high, that is, in banking and insurance, regulatory solvency requirements are an instrument to prevent that creditors incur losses on their claims. The current regulatory requirements based on value at risk (V@R) and average value at risk (AV@R) limit the probability of default of financial institutions, but they fail to control the size of recovery on creditors' claims in the case of default. We resolve this failure by developing a novel risk measure, recovery V@R. Our conceptual approach is flexible and allows the construction of general recovery risk measures for various risk management purposes. We provide detailed case studies and applications. We show that recovery risk measures can be used for performance-based management of business divisions of firms and discuss how to calibrate recovery risk measures to historical regulatory standards. Finally, we analyze how recovery risk measures react to the joint distributions of assets and liabilities on firms' balance sheets and compare the corresponding capital requirements with the current regulatory benchmarks based on V@R and AV@R.     

Disappearing internal capital markets: Evidence from diversified business groups in Korea

This paper examines how the onset of a financial crisis affects the operation of internal capital markets among firms within a diversified business group. We find that active internal capital markets within Korean business groups (chaebols) attenuate the financial constraints of the group-affiliated firms, allowing them to make efficient capital allocations during the early 1990s. However, these markets barely function after the financial crisis of 1997. Instead, we observe public debt markets serving as a substitute for internal capital markets. Our results suggest that chaebol firms’ coordinated attempts to achieve healthier financial structures in the wake of the crisis have taken place at the expense of investment efficiency.     

Financial Statements Insurance

The fact that auditors are paid by the companies they audit creates an inherent conflict of interest. We analyze how the provision of financial statements insurance could eliminate this conflict of interest and properly align the incentives of auditors with those of shareholders. We first show that when the benefits to obtaining funding are sufficiently large, the existing legal and regulatory regime governing financial reporting (and auditing) results in low quality financial statements. Consequently, the financial statements of firms are misleading and firms that yield a low rate‐of‐return (low fundamental value) are over‐funded relative to firms characterized by a high rate‐of‐return (high fundamental value). We present a mechanism whereby companies would purchase financial statements insurance that provides coverage to investors against losses suffered as a result of misrepresentation in financial reports. The insurance premia that companies pay for the coverage would be publicized. The insurers appoint and pay the auditors who attest to the accuracy of the financial statements of the prospective insurance clients. For a given level of coverage firms announcing lower premia would distinguish themselves in the eyes of the investors as companies with higher quality financial statements relative to those with higher premia. Every company would be eager to pay lower premia (for a given level of coverage) resulting in a flight to high audit quality. As a result, when financial statements insurance is available and the insurer hires the auditor, capital is provided to the most efficient firms.     

How and When Do Firms Adjust Their Capital Structures toward Targets?

If firms adjust their capital structures toward targets, and if there are adverse selection costs associated with asymmetric information, how and when do firms adjust their capital structures? We suggest a financing needs‐induced adjustment framework to examine the dynamic process by which firms adjust their capital structures. We find that most adjustments occur when firms have above‐target (below‐target) debt with a financial surplus (deficit). These results suggest that firms move toward the target capital structure when they face a financial deficit/surplus—but not in the manner hypothesized by the traditional pecking order theory.     

Value acceleration: lessons from private-equity masters

The most successful private-equity firms regularly spearhead dramatic business transformations, creating exceptional returns for their investors. To understand how those firms do it, the authors studied more than 2,000 PE transactions over the past ten years and discovered that the top performers' success stems from the rigor with which they manage their businesses. This article describes the four management disciplines vital to the success of the best PE firms. First, for each business, they define an investment thesis: a brief, clear statement of how to make the business more valuable within three to five years. The thesis, which guides all actions by the company, usually focuses on growth. PE firms know that the demonstration of a path to strong growth produces the big returns on investment. Second, they don't measure too much. They zero in on a few financial indicators that most clearly reveal the business's progress in increasing its value. They watch cash more closely than earnings and tailor performance measures to each business, rather than imposing one set of measures across their entire portfolio. Third, they work their balance sheets, mining undervalued assets, turning fixed assets into sources of financing, and aggressively managing their physical capital. Last, they make the center the shareholder. Corporate staffs in PE firms make unsentimental investment decisions, buying and selling businesses when the price is right and bringing in new management when performance falters. These firms also keep their corporate centers extremely lean. By adopting these four disciplines, executives at public companies should be able to reap significantly greater returns from their own business units.     

Capital Allocation in Financial Firms

This paper develops a theory of capital allocation in financial intermediaries where the cost of "risk capital" is a critical consideration. The implication for capital budgeting is that financial firms should use a modified NPV rule in which projects are valued by calculating the NPV of cash flows using marketdetermined discount rates and then subtracting a deadweight cost of capital that reflects the project's marginal contribution to firm-wide risk.
By taking account of deadweight costs—mainly monitoring and moral hazard costs associated with having too little equity capital as well as "free cash flow" agency costs and higher taxes associated with having too much—the capital allocation model predicts that financial firms will diversify across businesses with similar deadweight costs. Such diversification reduces the cost of risk capital for the individual businesses, thereby creating more profitable investment opportunities at the margin and enabling the businesses to operate on a larger scale. The authors note that their model has similarities to but also important differences from the standard applications of RAROC models.     

Private Equity in the U.S.: Building a New Future

Despite the recent downturn, private equity firms still have an important role to play in the global economy. At the same time, many PE firms may need to rethink their strategies. Practices that have been worked in the past may not produce acceptable returns in a future, particularly given the current constraints on financing and leverage. One source of PE's comparative advantage, as demonstrated during the recent crisis, has been the ability of the best and most experienced firms to reorganize their portfolio companies when they get into financial trouble. But in addition to their financial management skills, specialized operating expertise has become more critical to success, and those PE firms that have not acquired it are especially likely to find that past success in raising capital is no guarantee of success in the future. The authors begin by providing a brief overview of the past three decades of global private equity to identify how the market arrived at its current position. Using the findings of academic research together with case studies and interviews with PE practitioners in the U.K., the authors suggest a number of building blocks for the future that reflect the considerable success of the most reputable and experienced PE firms in increasing the value of their portfolio companies.     

What are the risks when investing in thin emerging equity markets: Evidence from the Arab world

This study attempts to identify the risks involved when investing in five emerging Arab capital markets. We first find that a constant beta is not a good proxy for risk in these thinly traded emerging markets. However, firms’ fundamentals and country risk rating factors prove significant in explaining the cross-sections of stock returns. The paper provides three important contributions to the literature on asset pricing in emerging capital markets: (i) we show how country risk ratings can be aggregated into a country risk factor; (ii) we add to a growing literature suggesting that, in markets other than the US, it is possible to find large and growth stocks to be riskier than small and value stocks; (iii) we determine that despite economic, financial and political reforms, issues related to financial transparency and political instability are still powerful obstacles to investments in these nascent emerging markets.     

Private Equity and Portfolio Companies: Lessons from the Global Financial Crisis

Critics of private equity have warned that the high leverage often used in PE‐backed companies could contribute to the fragility of the financial system during economic crises. The proliferation of poorly structured transactions during booms could increase the vulnerability of the economy to downturns. The alternative hypothesis is that PE, with its operating capabilities, expertise in financial restructuring, and massive capital raised but not invested (“dry powder”), could increase the resilience of PE‐backed companies. In their study of PE‐backed buyouts in the U.K.—which requires and thereby makes accessible more information about private companies than, say, in the U.S.—the authors report finding that, during the 2008 global financial crisis, PE‐backed companies decreased their overall investments significantly less than comparable, non‐PE firms. Moreover, such PE‐backed firms also experienced greater equity and debt inflows, higher asset growth, and increased market share. These effects were especially notable among smaller, riskier PE‐backed firms with less access to capital, and also for those firms backed by PE firms with more dry powder at the crisis onset. In a survey of the partners and staff of some 750 PE firms, the authors also present compelling evidence that PEs firms play active financial and operating roles in preserving or restoring the profitability and value of their portfolio companies.     

Information transfers among co-owned firms

We study how lenders in blockheld firms exploit the information on the other holdings of equity blockholders to learn their attitude toward creditors. In the presence of the conflict of interest between lenders and equityholders, information on how blockholders behave in the other firms they control provides the lenders with key information about potential blockholder behavior. We test this hypothesis using data on US public firms over the 2001–2008 period. We show that the financial conditions of these co-owned firms affect how lenders value other firms in which the owner has a major stake. Bad news on credit quality in co-owned firms raise the firm's credit risk. Our identification is based on the instrumental variables estimation where we instrument the changes in credit risk of co-owned firms by the natural disaster events in the counties of co-owned firm headquarters.     

The deregulation of capital markets in France

This paper investigates how the deregulation of French capital markets affected corporate investment in the 1980s. Access to public financial markets may be less important in countries that have traditionally relied on institutional investors to finance their corporate investment projects. This should be true for France where, contrary to the US, banks and government agencies have always been involved in firms’ long term activities. In this study, French firms are categorized based on their ownership structure and trading characteristics. Two investment models are augmented with measures of corporate liquidity in order to test the role of internal funds on investment. Empirical results show that only small French firms trading on the secondary stock market have to rely on liquid assets to finance their capital expenditures. French firms with strong bank ties avoid this constraint since they are allowed to maintain higher debt levels.     

The Evolution of Private Equity in Emerging Markets: The Case of Poland

In the last ten years, there has been a pronounced shift toward emerging markets in institutional investor allocations of capital to private equity. While the lion's share of the allocations to emerging markets have gone to the “BRIC” nations, lesser‐known markets like Poland are threatening to steal the spotlight. Economic stabilization, development of the private sector, a favorable business outlook, and continuous improvement of the local institutional infrastructure (laws, accounting rules, and fiscal regimes) have all contributed to the development of a vibrant private equity industry in Poland. Most private equity firms in Poland structure their deals around five broad investment themes: technology; media; and telecommunications; manufacturing; consumer services; business services; and financial services. Local private equity firms have traditionally adopted two different strategies towards these sectors. The first group of private equity firms initially targeted manufacturing, with the conviction that, as the Polish economy developed, the satisfaction of consumer needs for basic products would be the largest source of market demand. The second group assumed that the market would require access to more services to accommodate the growing local economy. Both approaches have proved reasonably successful, as the leaders among these two groups of firms have continued to succeed in raising new funds while achieving high returns for their limited partners. And while the accomplishments of the private equity industry have been made possible by the extent of Poland's transformation from a socialist into a market economy, the industry itself continues to play an important role in this transformation by providing both outside capital and know‐how for local firms and managers.     

Designing a Countercyclical Insurance Program for Systemic Risk

This article proposes a framework for measuring and managing systemic risk. Current solvency regulations have been criticized for their focus on individual firms rather than the system as a whole. We show how an insurance program can be designed to deal with systemic risk through a risk charge on participating institutions. The risk charge is based on the generalized co‐conditional tail expectation, a conditional risk measure adapted from conditional value‐at‐risk. Current regulations have been criticized on the grounds that their capital requirements are procyclical. They require extra capital in periods of extreme stress thus exacerbating a crisis. We show how to construct a countercyclical risk charge and illustrate the approach using a numerical example.     

财政转移支付如何影响了地方政府债务?

本文以地方融资平台公司发行的城投债为样本,研究来自中央政府的财政转移支付对于地方城投债发行的影响。研究发现,来自中央政府的人均财政专项转移支付每增加1元,会导致地方融资平台公司城投债发行增加人均0.312元,而包括税收返还和一般性转移支付在内的非专项转移支付对城投债的发行并无显著影响。并且,专项转移支付对城投债发行的显著正影响只在中西部省份存在,东部地区并未发现这一机制。本文的进一步研究表明,地方政府债务的借新还旧现象也正在显现,并且变得越来越严重。     

Is operational hedging a substitute for or a complement to financial hedging?

This paper investigates operational hedging by firms and how operational hedging is related to financial hedging by using a sample of 424 firm observations, which consist of 212 operationally hedged firms (firms with foreign sales) and a size- and industry-matched sample of 212 non-operationally hedged firms (firms with export sales). We find that non-operationally hedged firms use more financial hedging, relative to their levels of foreign currency exposure, as measured by the amount of export sales. On the other hand, though operationally hedged firms have more currency exposure, their usage of financial derivatives becomes much smaller than that of exporting firms. These results can explain why some global firms use very limited amount of financial derivatives for hedging purpose despite much higher levels of currency risk exposure. We also show that hedging increases firm value.     

Debt,Agency Costs,and Industry Equilibrium

We show that risk characteristics of projects' cash flows are endogenously determined by the investment decisions of all firms in an industry. As a result, in reasonable settings, financial structures which create incentives to expropriate debtholders by increasing risk are shown not to reduce value in an industry equilibrium. Without taxes, capital structure is irrelevant for individual firms despite its effect on the equityholders' incentives, but the maximum total amount of debt in the industry is determinate. Allowing for a corporate tax advantage of debt, capital structure becomes relevant but firms are indifferent between distinct alternative debt levels.