Venture Capital and Private Equity: A Review and Synthesis

This paper reviews the existing literature on venture capital and private equity. The paper emphasises the importance of examining venture capital in the light of recent developments in corporate finance and its distinctiveness from other forms of finance. In order to understand current developments, the paper adopts a framework which combines industry/market and firm levels of analysis. Existing literature is reviewed using this framework. Industry level issues relate to rivalry between firms, the power of suppliers and customers, and the threats from new entrants and substitutes. Firm level issues concern deal generation, initial and second screening, valuation and due diligence, deal approval and structuring, post-contractual monitoring, investment realisation, and entrepreneurs' exit and recontracting with venture capitalists. This is followed by a review of the evidence on the performance of venture capital firms. The paper suggests potentially fruitful areas for further research including the extension of analysis to cover all stages of venture capital investment, examination of the inter-linkages between industry and firm level issues and between stages in the venture capital process, as well as further analysis of deal structuring issues and investment realisation and recontracting.     

Should banks be geographically diversified? Empirical evidence from cross-country diversification of European banks

Using a sample of European bank, this paper investigates the impact of banks' geographic diversification on their cost of equity capital. Examining the geographic diversification of European banks gives an insight on the value of cross-border banking. To measure diversification between major geographic areas in which the bank operates, the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, based on revenues generated at home and abroad is constructed for each bank. To address the problem of endogeneity, system generalized method of moments estimator is used. The main finding of the analysis is that, other things equal, more geographic diversified banks have higher cost of equity capital than geographically focused ones. This result implies that the adverse market valuation effect of geographic diversification (increase in agency problem) dominates the positive ones (increase in efficiency and reduction in risk).     

The Stock Market and the Financing of Corporate Growth in Africa: The Case of Ghana

This paper examines corporate financing patterns in Ghana, in particular, whether listed Ghanaian corporations make considerable use of the stock market to finance their growth. The paper also examines econometrically the effect of stock market development on the importance of debt relative to external equity in the balance sheet of Ghanaian firms. The results show that the average listed Ghanaian firm finances its growth mainly from short-term debt. The stock market, however, is the most important source of longterm external finance. Stock market development tends to shift the financial structure of Ghanaian firms toward more equity and less debt. Overall, the evidence suggests that the stock market is a surprisingly important source of finance for funding corporate growth.     

公司治理与会计稳健性——基于上市公司的实证研究

会计稳健性是财务报告的一个重要特征和惯例，已成为会计盈余的重要质量特征之一。本文运用basu（1997）模型，将会计稳健性定义为会计报告对坏消息的确认比好消息更及时，探讨了有关公司治理的几个重要因素对会计稳健性的影响。研究发现：在影响会计稳健性的治理因素中，银行借款比例与会计稳健性正相关，国家股比例与会计稳健性负相关，在国家股比例低的分组，会计稳健性较高。发行有B股的企业，会计稳健性与只有A股的企业没有显著差异。研究表明，会计稳健性作为会计报告质量的一种量度，随着会计制度和准则的国际接轨与完善，证券市场监管的加强，取得了一定成效，但是会计准则和会计制度不能保证会计报告的质量，尚需改革国内相关的制度背景，如公司治理、法律实施环境等。     

Lessons from the financial crisis: failure of markets or failure of regulation?

The popular, demagogic narrative after the global financial system's collapse in 2008 has held that the financial crisis signalled the failure of capitalism. However, regulators across the world must realize that the financial crisis was not brought about by the failure of markets but by the failure of governments to appropriately regulate markets. Beginning in the 1980s, and continuing over the quarter-century that followed, regulators afforded the world of big finance an unaffordable luxury: insurance against possible failure. As a result, banks and financial institutions became adept at turning their insulation from disorderly failure, as enforced by free markets, into insulation from market discipline, as inflicted by myopic regulators. This ‘too big to fail’ syndrome combined with the incorrect belief perpetrated by the Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan that financial companies, powered by a rational motive not to lose money, could police themselves and one another. In turn, such sanguine beliefs led to considerable over-supply of financial innovation. The supply created its own demand as the financial world operated under the implicit guarantee (and market distortion) created by the ‘too big to fail’ syndrome.

The errors laid bare by the financial crisis clearly call for regulatory reform. But in designing that reform, regulators across the world should avoid the temptation to seek heavy-handed new approaches. Instead, policymakers should look to the long-term success of the system of rules whose decay brought about the crisis. Prudent regulations must seek to reinforce the fundamental principle that no one, however big or small, can be made immune to failure. Such pro-market regulation of finance is essential to preserving and fostering countries’ economic futures.     

公司治理与绩效关系研究最新进展

公司治理的重要性已经得到理论界和实务界的认可。本文从两个方面论述了好的公司治理能够带来的影响,一方面好的公司治理能够提高管理效率,降低代理成本,进而提升财务绩效;另一方面,好的业绩使公司在资本市场上有更好的表现,即市场绩效,体现为公司治理溢价的存在。     

'A doe in the city': Women shareholders in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain

This paper investigates the role of women as shareholders in joint stock companies, and how far they can be characterised as active investors. It is based on a large database of company constitutions, together with procedural records and the pamphlet literature of the period. The penetration by women of the private sphere of investment did not always extend to the more public sphere of participation at shareholder meetings. Literary representations of women as speculators reinforced such boundaries. While the separate spheres may have been blurred, considerable limitations were set on the extent to which female shareholders could participate fully in the governance of joint stock companies.     

Numerical computation of Theta in a jump-diffusion model by integration by parts

Using the Malliavin calculus in time inhomogeneous jump-diffusion models, we obtain an expression for the sensitivity Theta of an option price (with respect to maturity) as the expectation of the option payoff multiplied by a stochastic weight. This expression is used to design efficient numerical algorithms that are compared with traditional finite-difference methods for the computation of Theta. Our proof can be viewed as a generalization of Dupire's integration by parts to arbitrary and possibly non-smooth payoff functions. In the time homogeneous case, Theta admits an expression from the Black–Scholes PDE in terms of Delta and Gamma but the representation formula obtained in this way is different from ours. Numerical simulations are presented in order to compare the efficiency of the finite-difference and Malliavin methods.     

金融集团的公司治理:典型模式的案例分析

本文对花旗集团、德意志银行集团以及三菱东京金融集团的公司治理实践进行了详细的比较分析。研究表明,三种金融集团治理模式之间存在着显著差异,但又不乏一些共性。比较分析后得到如下启示:国有商业银行应该进行股份制改造并成为上市公司;商业银行的公司治理应该以“长期股东价值最大化”为目标;要进一步明确以风险管理原则为基础构建商业银行治理结构的重要性;应该进一步强化监事会的功能,保证监事会的独立性,并使监事具备任职的积极资格;实现责任人的绩效与薪酬额度的有机结合是我们构建高效的激励机制的努力方向;要实现我国银行业的国际化、集团化与多元化。     

The Friday Effect in European Securitized Real Estate Index Returns

This study extends research on the day-of-the-week effect towards European real estate indices. We examine this anomaly for several European securitized real estate index returns between 1990 and 2003. Although the countries under analysis have unique country-specific patterns, we find that eight out of eleven European countries exhibit abnormally high Friday returns. Moreover, two different Europe indices also exhibit the Friday anomaly. The anomaly is robust with respect to extreme observations, alternative specifications and several well-known calendar effects.     

基于公司治理监督职能的财务舞弊防范——一个分析框架及其应用

世界范围内上市公司财务舞弊案的爆发将公司治理问题推上了风口浪尖。文章之目的在于将公司治理引入财务舞弊研究范畴,提供一个基于公司治理监督职能角度的舞弊治理分析框架。文章首先从公司治理模式、所有权状态依存与公司治理功能三方面剖析公司治理的监督职能,在此基础上试图勾勒出基于公司治理之监督职能的财务舞弊治理框架,并以财务报告生产与呈报过程为例具体说明公司治理监督职能的运用。结合目前的研究文献简要讨论基于公司治理监督职能的舞弊治理未来研究思路与方向。     

审计委员会财务专家监督作用的多维透析

本文从政策规范、学术研究和运行机制等多个维度剖析了审计委员会财务专家的公司治理角色,认为财务专家在公司治理中发挥了积极的监督作用,但实务中对财务专家的定义和财务专家有效监督基理的认识还存在一定的差异性和模糊性。本文还认为,确保兼具独立性和专业胜任能力的财务专家以及完善财务专家市场和财务专家的职业声誉机制,是财务专家发挥有效监督作用的关键所在。     

财务重述:国外研究述评与展望

财务重述是上市公司修正前期财务报告以反映这些报告中的差错被更正的过程。本文系统地对国外公司财务重述的原因、财务重述公司的特征以及财务重述的经济后果等方面研究进行了综述。最后,对财务重述的未来研究方向进行了展望。