Utilizing Printed Media to Understand Desired Leadership Attributes in the People's Republic of China

Using news media as a reliable source, we content analyzed stories on business leaders in two major official Chinese newspapers in three different time periods over the past 20 years. Results show that the reform has brought an increase in stories of business leaders, and in coverage of the desirable leadership attributes relating to Confucian virtues, communist ideologies, and modern management philophies. The results suggest that, by publicizing and adorning specific leaders in both government and business sectors in the official media, the government reinforces the traditional values that are consistent with communist ideologies, and at the same time, it also introduces Western management values to suit the current needs of the society. The results of our study echo the findings of empirical studies on Chinese values that used data collected using other methods. We therefore encourage future research to use the printed media as a potentially valuable source of data for tracking changes in social phenomena in a society over time.     

ASSET BACKED COMMERCIAL PAPER: GET WITH THE PROGRAM

Asset backed commercial paper, or ABCP for short, is commercial paper that is issued by a special purpose corporation against undivided interests in corporate receivables, including retail, trade, or export receivables. Since the inception of the market in 1983, the volume of ABCP has grown to represent about 16% of the total commercial paper market.
ABCP is a valuable source of liquidity for companies that generate a steady flow of quality receivables. Many ABCP programs restrict purchases to companies with investment grade ratings. For such companies, ABCP may help diversify funding sources and allow the firms to lower their funding costs by arbitraging different markets. But ABCP programs can also prove a low-cost source of funding for companies that either do not have access to the CP market through their own balance sheets or have used up their prime CP and bank borrowing capacity. ABCP is also an important source of funds for smaller companies requiring liquidity to support rapid growth.
ABCP programs can be viewed as "synthetic" revolving bank credit facilities in the sense that they can provide the same flow of funds as revolving credits by using a vehicle constructed specifically to refinance pools of receivables. The benefits of ABCP relative to bank lines of credit may take the form of either lower interest rates, less restrictive financial covenants, or both. Although ABCP is at best a partial substitute for bank credit, the liquidity provided by an asset backed commercial paper program can be used to hold down the costs of bank borrowing.     

Capitalized intangibles and financial analysts

We examine whether firms that capitalize a higher proportion of their underlying intangible assets have higher analyst following, lower dispersion of analysts’ earnings forecasts and more accurate earnings forecasts relative to firms that capitalize a lower proportion. Under Australian generally accepted accounting principles, capitalization of intangible assets has become increasingly ‘routine’ since the late 1980s. It is predicted that this experience leads Australian analysts to expect firms with relatively more certain intangible investments to signal this fact by capitalizing intangible assets. Our results are consistent with this. We find that capitalization of intangible assets is associated with higher analyst following and lower absolute earnings forecast error for firms with a stock of underlying intangible assets. Our tests suggest a weaker association between capitalization and lower earnings forecast dispersion. We conclude that there are benefits for analysts, for management to have the option to capitalize intangible assets. These findings suggest that IAS 38 Intangible Assets and AASB 138 Intangible Assets reduce the usefulness of financial statements.     

Evidence on the efficacy of interest-rate risk disclosures by commercial banks

This paper documents evidence on the efficacy of maturity-gap disclosures of commercial banks in indicating their net interest income that is exposed to interest-rate risk. For the large sample of banks that filed call reports from 1990 to 1997, a period that includes a wide range of interest rate movements, we find that (i) one-year maturity gap measures are significantly related to the one-year- and three-years-ahead change in net interest income, (ii) fixed-rate and variable-rate instruments differ in explanatory ability, and (iii) the one-to-five-year aggregate gap measures also have some power in explaining three-year-ahead changes in net interest income. These findings hold after controlling for the ex post growth in assets as well as the amount of rate-sensitive assets and liabilities (a competing set of explanatory variables). Because the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)'s [Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), (1997). Disclosure of accounting policies for derivative financial instruments and derivative commodity instruments and disclosure of qualitative and quantitative information about market risk inherent in derivative financial instruments, other financial instruments, and derivative commodity instruments. Release Nos. 33-7386; 3438223; IC-22487; FR-48; International Series No. 1047; File No. S7-35-95 (January 31, 1997), Washington, DC] tabular disclosures are finer than maturity-gap data, our findings mitigate concerns about the usefulness of the SEC's market-risk-disclosure requirements. Furthermore, they suggest contrary to the claims of certain banks that the omission of prepayment and early withdrawal risk from gap measures does not totally compromise the ability of gap data to indicate interest-risk exposures.     

Enterprise Risk Management and the Cost of Capital

Enterprise risk management (ERM) is a process that manages all risks in an integrated, holistic fashion by controlling and coordinating any offsetting risks across the enterprise. This research investigates whether the adoption of the ERM approach affects firms' cost of equity capital. We restrict our analysis to the U.S. insurance industry to control for unobservable differences in business models and risk exposures across industries. We simultaneously model firms' adoption of ERM and the effect of ERM on the cost of capital. We find that ERM adoption significantly reduces firm's cost of capital. Our results suggest that cost of capital benefits are one answer to the question how ERM can create value.     

Competitive pricing strategies in social networks

We study pricing strategies of competing firms selling heterogeneous products to consumers. Goods are substitutes and there are network externalities between neighboring consumers. In equilibrium, firms price discriminate based on the network positions and charge lower prices to more central consumers. We also show that, under some conditions, firms' equilibrium profits decrease when either the network becomes denser or network effects increase. In contrast, consumers always benefit from being more connected to each other. We determine the optimal network structure and compare uniform pricing and discriminatory pricing from the perspectives of firms and consumers.     

Marriage between credit cards and the Internet: Buying is just a click away!

This paper examines whether Internet access positively affects credit card balances. To that end, we compare the 2010 and 2013 Surveys of Consumer Finances, analyze the consistency of the results over time, and provide the rationale for any resulting differences. Using the censored techniques, our results indicate that Internet access has a positive effect on credit card balances, which suggests that consumers with Internet access are prone to higher balances compared to those without. The probability of carrying positive balances was larger in 2010 compared to 2013. Overall, the results suggest that, while the financial crisis might have contributed to higher balances in 2010, the economic recovery afterward seems to have eased the burden of credit card debt.     

Board of Directors and CSR in Banking: The Moderating Role of Bank Regulation and Investor Protection Strength

This paper brings together research on boards of directors as the backbone of corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in the banking industry. The underlying idea is that some characteristics of bank boards, in particular independence and gender diversity, may impact the CSR commitments of banks. By making use of a sample of 159 banks in nine countries during the period 2004–2010, our empirical evidence suggests that banks with more independent directors and more female members on their boards incline toward socially responsible behaviour. Our results also suggest that institutional factors play a significant role in these effects. They show that in greater regulatory and stronger investor protection environments, board independence and gender diversity have more influence on the social behaviour of banks.