Mutual to Stock Conversion, Information Cost, and Thrift Performance

In the 1980s, a large number of thrifts converted from the mutual to the stock form of ownership. The literature has noted that investors in those conversions earned abnormally high short-term returns. However, over the long run the converters earned very poor returns. The major reason for the poor returns was the extra noninterest operational costs associated with the stock form of ownership. Since those extra operational costs were predictable, the stock offerings may have been overpriced, ex ante as well as ex post.     

Value relevance of banks: global evidence

Using 28,785 observations of 813 banking institutions in 38 countries during the 1993–2004 period, this study investigates among others, the role of transparency, accounting standards, legal, financing, corporate, and banking environments at the country level and size, risk, and organization form at the bank-specific level affecting the extent of value relevance. The evidence indicates that at the macro-level, the extent of mandated accounting disclosure, differences in accounting measurement practices, and type of legal environment, were the most influencing factors affecting the extent of value relevance of earnings and book values. At the bank-level, the organizational form and risk had the most impact.     

Organizational Form and Expense Preference: Spanish Experience

This article investigates the effect of alternative ownership structures, stock versus mutual, on the cost of production of Spanish depository institutions. By introducing a stochastic frontier analysis in estimating the best–practiced expense–preference behaviour, the empirical approach adjusts for the possibility that the two sectors of the banking industry employ different production technologies and finds evidence that is consistent with expense–preference behaviour by the mutual savings banks.     

Water flow risks and stakeholder impacts on the choice of a dam site

This study evaluates three alternative locations for building a fresh water dam in the Yeşilirmak Valley of North Cyprus. Each of the three sites has different investment costs, water storage capabilities and socio-political repercussions. These kinds of trade-offs have in recent years characterised much of the worldwide debate surrounding the construction of electricity and irrigation dams. Another issue raised in this paper is the appropriate treatment of the risk and variability associated with the availability of water to fill the dam through time. This paper demonstrates how an integrated financial-economic-stakeholder analysis can provide the inputs needed by decision-makers in such situations to make rational political and economic choices.     

Are expansions cost effective for stock exchanges? A global perspective

This paper investigates the existence and extent of economies of scale and scope among the stock exchanges. Evidence from 38 exchanges in 32 countries and 4 continents around the world for the years 1989–1998 portrays the existence of significant economies of scale and scope. The degree of such scale and scope however differs across size and regions. The largest exchanges show an increasing trend of cost effectiveness. The exchanges in North America and Europe report substantially higher economies of scale relative to the exchanges in the Asia-Pacific regions.     

CORPORATE BOARDS AND BANK LOAN CONTRACTING

We investigate the role of corporate boards in bank loan contracting. We find that when corporate boards are more independent, both price and nonprice loan terms (e.g., interest rates, collateral, covenants, and performance‐pricing provisions) are more favorable, and syndicated loans comprise more lenders. In addition, board size, audit committee structure, and other board characteristics influence bank loan prices. However, they do not consistently affect all nonprice loan terms except for audit committee independence. Our study provides strong evidence that banks recognize the benefits of board monitoring in mitigating information risk ex ante and controlling agency risk ex post, and they reward higher quality boards with more favorable loan contract terms.     

ARE FIRM‐ AND COUNTRY‐SPECIFIC GOVERNANCE SUBSTITUTES? EVIDENCE FROM FINANCIAL CONTRACTS IN EMERGING MARKETS

We investigate how borrowers’ corporate governance influences bank loan contracting terms in emerging markets and how this relation varies across countries with different country‐level governance. We find that borrowers with stronger corporate governance obtain favorable contracting terms with respect to loan amount, maturity, collateral requirements, and spread. Firm‐level and country‐level corporate governance are substitutes in writing and enforcing financial contracts. We also find that the distinctiveness of borrowers’ characteristics affect the relation between firm‐level corporate governance and loan contracting terms. Our findings are robust, irrespective of types of regression methods and specifications.     

Data mining in road crash analysis: the context of developing countries

The recent advancements in the field of data mining have made vast progress in extracting new information and hidden patterns from large datasets which are often overlooked by the traditional statistical approaches. These methods focus on searching for new and interesting hypothesis which were previously unobserved. Road safety researchers working with the crash data from developed world have seen encouraging success in obtaining new insight into crash mechanism through data mining. An attempt was made in this study to apply these advance methods and evaluate their performance in manifesting crash causes for Bangladesh. The study applies hierarchical clustering to identify hazardous clusters, random forest to find important variables explaining each of these clusters, and classification and regression trees to unveil their respective crash mechanisms for the road crash data of Bangladesh. The results identified several new interesting relationships and acknowledged issues related to quality of data.     

Measuring Takeover Premiums in Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions: Insights from Turkey

We investigate whether the merger announcement dates provided in a popular mergers and acquisitions (M&A) database, SDC, serve as accurate event dates for estimating the wealth effects of mergers on target firms located in Turkey. We find that 74 percent of SDC’s merger announcement dates are preceded by merger-related events such as merger rumors, target firms’ search for potential acquirers, and early-stage merger negotiation announcements. Target cumulative abnormal return (CAR) estimates around these early dates are almost twice as large as the CAR estimates around SDC’s merger announcement dates. We argue that our findings have implications for the recently flourishing cross-border M&A literature.