Can financial literacy reduce anxiety about life in old age?

This study examines the role of financial literacy in reducing anxiety about life in old age. We hypothesize that financial literacy increases preparedness for old age through better savings and investment decisions, leading to the accumulation of more assets and earning more income, which enhances financial capacity and reduces anxiety. Using data from a nationwide panel survey in Japan, we provide evidence that financial literacy can reduce anxiety about life in old age by making people capable of accumulating more assets and earning more income. Moreover, the interaction of financial literacy with age and spouse reduces anxiety, while living with children increases anxiety about life during old age. We check the robustness of our results using an alternative measure of financial literacy, changing composition of the sample, controlling for residents’ geographical dispersion, and testing for endogeneity bias. The major findings remain unchanged after considering these factors.     

Measuring financial market integration over the long run: Is there a U-shape?

Using long time series for sovereign bond markets of fifteen industrialized economies from 1875 to 2009, I find that financial market integration by the end of the 20th century was higher than in earlier periods and exhibited a J-shaped trend with a trough in the 1920s. The main reason for the higher financial integration seen today is the recent extensive globalization. Around the turn of the 20th century, countries frequently drifted apart. Conversely, in recent years, the bond markets of most countries have moved together. Both policy variables and the global market environment play a role in explaining the time variation in integration, while “unexplained” changes in the overall level of country risk are also empirically important. My methodology, based on principal components analysis, is immune to outliers and accounts for global and country-specific shocks and, hence, can capture trends in financial integration more accurately than standard techniques such as simple correlations.     

Is high-frequency trading tiering the financial markets?

Some academic research has identified the possibility of High-Frequency Trading (HFT) creating a two tier market, in which the fast traders mostly deal with each other at most favourable prices and spread, leaving the slower investors to share the least profitable deals. Yet, although intriguing, this view has been seldom quantitatively investigated − and that is the gap found in previous research. A computer simulation has been produced to mimic the behaviour of both slow and fast traders, each category showing characteristics consistent with their behaviour on the markets. In particular, High-Frequency (HF) traders show their preference for aggressive orders when the bid-ask spread is tight and are less aggressive when spread is wide. The Low-Frequency (LF) traders are then forced to live with the remaining deals, hoping to profit from longer term price movements. The purpose of this piece of research is to verify whether HF traders (HFTs) tend to deal with each other and, something not investigated by previous studies, if LF traders also mainly restrict their trading with other slow traders.The results show some tendency toward markets actually splitting into two-tiers: they confirm previous findings of HF traders' tendency to deal with their similar counterparts in case of thin bid-ask spread (which means higher probability of profits for the aggressive side), leaving mostly LF traders to deal amongst themselves when the spread is wider, so aiming at long-term gain (which makes trading inherently riskier).     

Is there a bright side to government banks? Evidence from the global financial crisis

Using a sample of banks from 56 countries, this paper investigates the lending behavior of government banks during the crisis of 2008, and its association with bank performance and the economy. Contrary to the traditional wisdom, we find that government banks can play a beneficial role under certain circumstances. Government banks have higher loan growth rates than private banks during the crisis. In countries with low corruption, the increased lending by government banks is associated with better bank performance and more favorable GDP and employment growth in the crisis period. In contrast, the results for countries with high corruption are more consistent with the political view: the increased lending by government banks is associated with underperformance relative to private banks, and creates no beneficial effects on either GDP growth or employment.     

Is there a relation between audit fee cuts during the global financial crisis and banks’ financial reporting quality?

As a result of the global financial crisis (GFC), several audit clients were able to negotiate lower audit fees for the years 2008 and 2009. However, the PCAOB has expressed concern that lower audit fees might lead to lower audit effort and lower audit quality and financial reporting quality. This study examines the relation between audit fee cuts and banks’ financial reporting quality. Specifically, we focus on earnings management via loan loss provisions (LLP), the relation between current period LLP and future loan charge-offs, i.e., LLP validity, and the timely recognition of loan losses. For banks audited by Big 4 auditors, we find that income-increasing abnormal LLP are decreasing in audit fee cuts and LLP validity is increasing in audit fee cuts. For banks audited by non-Big 4 auditors, LLP validity is higher for banks that received a fee cut of more than 25% relative to other banks audited by non-Big 4 auditors. We do not observe an association between timely loan loss recognition and cuts in audit fees except for banks audited by non-Big 4 auditors and exempt from internal control audits where a fee cut of more than 25% is associated with less timely loan loss recognition. Overall, the findings suggest that Big 4 auditors constrained earnings management via LLP in banks that received cuts in audit fees. Our findings have important implications for regulators, investors, and others.     

Is there a gender effect on the cost of bank financing?

In this paper, we address the question of whether the gender of a firm’s leader affects the cost of bank funding faced by small and medium enterprises in Europe. Using a large sample of observations of non-financial firms, during the years 2009–2013, we empirically test for the presence of discrimination, comparing female-led and male-led firms. After controlling for a rich set of variables and addressing potential endogeneity, our results show that i) female-led enterprises are more likely to face worse price conditions for bank financing compared to their male-led counterparts and, ii) firms whose leadership changes from female to male are more likely to benefit from an improvement in interest rate levels. This evidence is robust to different model specifications and various methodological approaches. The existence of such bias in the credit markets highlights the need of policy measures addressing female-led businesses, thus reducing their bank financing burdens and enhancing their entrepreneurial opportunities.     

Is there an Olympic gold medal rush in the stock market?

Investor sentiment and attention are often linked to the same non-economic events making it difficult to understand why and how asset prices are affected. We disentangle these two potential drivers of investment behaviour by analysing a new data-set of medals for the major participating countries and sponsor firms over four Summer Olympic Games. Our results show that trading volume and volatility are substantially reduced following Olympic success although returns appear to be largely unaffected. Analysis of data from online search volumes and surveys measuring investor sentiment also suggests that the market impact of the Olympics is linked to changes in attention.     

Is there price discovery in equity options?

We use tick-by-tick quote data for 39 liquid US stocks and options on them, and we focus on events when the two markets disagree about the stock price in the sense that the option-implied stock price obtained from the put-call parity relation is inconsistent with the actual stock price. Option market quotes adjust to eliminate the disagreement, while the stock market quotes behave normally, as if there were no disagreement. The disagreement events are typically precipitated by stock price movements and display signed option volume in the direction that tends to eliminate the disagreements. These results show that option price quotes do not contain economically significant information about future stock prices beyond what is already reflected in current stock prices, i.e., no economically significant price discovery occurs in the option market. We also find no option market price discovery using a much larger sample of disagreement events based on a weaker definition of a disagreement, which verifies that the findings for the primary sample are not due to unusual or unrepresentative market behavior during the put-call parity violations.     

Is there an optimal microcredit size to maximize the social and financial efficiencies of microfinance institutions?

Financial intermediation theory posits that a smaller loan size triggers a higher cost per dollar lent. This leads to question whether microfinance can become a self-sustainable industry. Hence, in microfinance innovations like loans without collateral, progressive loans, solidarity groups and relational lending are employed to reduce asymmetric information costs, adverse selection, and moral hazard while serving the poorest people. Crucially, we find a non-linear U-shaped effect of loan size on financial and social efficiencies. This reconciles the two opposite strands of the literature, aligning microfinance and banking central principles. The major implication of this study is that, unlike banking, microfinance institutions can grant small size loans while simultaneously obtaining high levels of financial and social efficiency. Indeed, our findings do not support the widely debated mission drift assumption since loan size does not generate a trade-off between financial and social outcomes. Therefore, loan size is a core management variable.     

The effects of news events on market contagion: Evidence from the 2007–2009 financial crisis

In this paper, we use the quantile regression technique along with coexceedance, a contagion measure, to assess the extent to which news events contribute to contagion in the stock markets during the crisis period between 2007 and 2009. Studies have shown that, not only the subprime crisis leads to a global recession, but the effects on the global stock markets have also been significant. We track the news events, both in the UK and the US, using the global recession timeline. We observe that the news events related to ad hoc bailouts of individual banks from the UK have a contagion effect throughout the period for most of the countries under investigation. This, however, is not found to be the case for the news events originating from the US. Our findings regarding the evidence of contagion effects in the UK reinforce the argument that spreads and contagion—an outcome of the risk perception of financial markets—are solely a result of the behaviour of investors or other financial market participants.     

Central bank financial strength and inflation: Is there a robust link?

Central bank financial strength has not been a fundamental issue for a substantial period of time. However, recent theoretical and empirical studies argue that central banks need to maintain a sufficient level of financial strength to perform their functions effectively and to achieve monetary policy objectives. In this study, we examine the empirical relationship between central bank financial strength and inflation using an unbalanced panel data set for a sample of selected advanced and emerging countries. We observe a statistically significant and robust negative relationship between central bank financial strength and inflation. This relationship is robust in the presence of other determinants of inflation and for alternative estimation methods. Our results have important implications for policy makers and central bankers. Particularly, our results suggest that avoiding persistent losses and maintaining the health of the central bank balance sheet remain vital pre-conditions for desirable policy outcomes of a central bank.     

Cross-border M&As in the financial sector: Is banking different from insurance?

This paper investigates what factors might help explain the internationalization strategy of banks and insurance companies, by comparing the determinants of cross-border M&As in the two sectors in a unified framework. The empirical analysis shows that between 1990 and 2003 the internationalization of banks and insurance companies followed similar patterns. Distance and economic and cultural integration are important determinants for both the banks’ and the insurance companies’ expansion abroad. Comparative advantage also has a prominent role, the more so for banks. The evidence is less supportive of the view that cross-border M&As are more frequent between similar countries, as predicted by the new trade theory. Finally, and most interestingly, we find indirect evidence consistent with the hypothesis that implicit barriers to foreign entry are more important in explaining the behavior of banks than that of insurance companies.     

Returns and volatility spillover in the European banking industry during global financial crisis: Flight to perceived quality or contagion?

This paper empirically investigates return, volatility and leverage spillover effects between banking industrial stock markets of the major economies (ME) (Germany, UK and US) and the smaller stressed European Union countries (SE), (Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal) from 2002 to 2014 which includes the global financial crisis period (2007–2014). Thus the paper investigates the influence of the global crisis on the spillover between the banking industrial stock markets of Europe and the US. We apply a multivariate GARCH–GJR framework to investigate the effects of the financial crisis with respect to spillover. Our results indicate an increase in both means and volatility spillover between the major economies and the stressed EU economies from the pre-crisis to the crisis period. During the pre-crisis period there is ample evidence of spillover from Germany, UK and the US to the smaller EU economies. Little evidence of a significant spillover from the smaller economies to the major economies is found during this period. We find that return and volatility transmission mechanisms between the major economies and the smaller EU countries are asymmetric during the crisis period. During the crisis, the level and amount of spillover from the major economies increase. But now there is also clear evidence of spillover from smaller EU economies to the major economies, this is especially true for Germany and the UK. Evidence of spillover effects suggests the existence of exploitable trading strategies and has important implications to investors in the areas of option pricing, portfolio optimization and risk management.     

The risk of financial crises: Is there a role for income inequality?

Could macroeconomic factors such as income inequality be the real root cause of financial crises? We explore a broad variety of financial and macroeconomic variables and employ a general-to-specific model selection process to find the most reliable predictors of financial crises in developed countries over a period of more than 100 years. Our in-sample results indicate that income inequality has predictive power beyond loan growth and several other financial variables. Out-of-sample forecasts for individual predictors show that their predictive power tends to vary considerably over time, but income inequality has predictive power in each forecasting period.     

Is there Information in an Earnings Announcement Delay?

Using a sample of announcements drawn from the 1980s and early 1990s, we reassess the relation between earnings news and earnings announcement timing. Using analyst forecast errors to proxy for news, we find that early announcements are associated with good news relative to late announcements. The relation between news and timing, however, does not appear to be strictly monotonic. Furthermore, we find that unexpected earnings explain 4% or less of the variation in timing. Finally, we assess whether abnormal returns behave in a manner that is consistent with a good news early, bad news late relation.     

Is there a gender gap in CEO compensation?

The gender pay gap generates significant political and social debate. This study contributes to this discussion by examining if a gender pay gap exists at the highest level of corporate management, the CEOs. While previous studies have documented a gender pay gap for most levels of executives the findings with respect to CEOs are conflicting. In this paper we focus only on CEO's as it is the most homogenous of executive roles and does not require us to assume that executives with similar titles undertake identical roles. Our evidence is based on 291 US firm-years for the period of 1998–2010. We do not find any association between CEO pay and gender using both the total sample and a sample matched using propensity scores to control for firm characteristics. These insignificant results hold for total pay, salary and bonuses, and for different matching procedures and econometric specifications. Our results therefore indicate that women who rise through the “glass ceiling” to the level of CEO are remunerated at similar levels to their male counterparts.     

Bank efficiency in the new European Union member states: Is there convergence?

We employ the stochastic frontier approach and estimate a common frontier in order to examine cost and profit efficiency in the banking systems of the ten new European Union member states over the period 1998-2003. The results indicate a generally low level of cost and an even lower level of profit efficiency, whilst we do not observe marked differences of inefficiency scores across countries. Foreign banks outperform both state-owned and domestic private-owned banks in terms of profit efficiency, though results are less clear in the case of cost efficiency. In addition, β- and σ-convergence criteria indicate some convergence in cost efficiency across the new member states, yet no convergence appears to have been achieved in terms of profit efficiency.     

Are there any cost and profit efficiency gains in financial conglomeration? Evidence from the accession countries

Diversified banks should benefit from an efficient allocation of resources, debt coinsurance and scope economies. At the same time, critics of diversification question these advantages pointing to agency problems such as managerial entrenchment and empire building that could also lead to diversification but for the ‘wrong’ reasons. This paper sheds further light on the issue of bank diversification by taking a direct look into how efficiently financial conglomerates operate and by measuring to what extent size and other bank- and market-specific factors matter in evaluating the relationship between diversification and efficiency. We focus on banks operating in the accession countries over the period 2001–2007 and estimate their cost and alternative profit efficiencies using a data envelopment analysis estimator. The results indicate that banks suffer from relatively high cost and profit inefficiencies and that there are noticeable differences in the efficiency levels across countries. Concerning banks’ degree of diversification, we find strong evidence to suggest that more diversified institutions are more likely to be cost- and profit-efficient and that size is a key factor in explaining best practice, particularly on the profit side.     

Is the realized volatility good for option pricing during the recent financial crisis?

The contributions of this paper are threefold. The first contribution is the proposed logarithmic HAR (log-HAR) option-pricing model, which is more convenient compared with other option pricing models associated with realized volatility in terms of simpler estimation procedure. The second contribution is the test of the empirical implications of heterogeneous autoregressive model of the realized volatility (HAR)-type models in the S&P 500 index options market with comparison of the non-linear asymmetric GARCH option-pricing model, which is the best model in pricing options among generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic-type models. The third contribution is the empirical analysis based on options traded from July 3, 2007 to December 31, 2008, a period covering a recent financial crisis. Overall, the HAR-type models successfully predict out-of-sample option prices because they are based on realized volatilities, which are closer to the expected volatility in financial markets. However, mixed results exist between the log-HAR and the heterogeneous auto-regressive gamma models in pricing options because the former is better than the latter in times of turmoil, whereas it is worse during the rather stable periods.     

Is there Value-Added Information in Liquidity and Risk Premiums?

Size has become a significant factor in explaining returns. According to the size effect, smaller capitalization stocks on average outperform larger capitalization stocks over long periods of time. This paper first documents the traditional size effect on the French market for the 1986–1998 period. It introduces a new proxy for size, free float, which is argued to be the appropriate measure of size and liquidity for most non‐US markets. Evidence is presented of a negative link between historical returns and free float. The link is significant even outside of the month of January, a notable divergence from results obtained on the NYSE. The rest of the paper is an attempt to take advantage of this 'ex‐post' phenomenon on an 'ex‐ante' basis, with an empirical study of the link between expected return, risk, and liquidity in a sample consisting of the main 150 stocks quoted on the Paris Bourse between January 1986 and January 1998. Liquidity premiums are estimated for portfolios from both a univariate and a multivariate perspective. The paper shows how risk and liquidity premiums can be used separately or in tandem for market timing and asset allocation. In all cases, the use of both premiums together leads to superior performance. Results confirm our measurements of liquidity and liquidity premiums and supply evidence that liquidity premiums together with risk premiums are useful in active asset management.