Seasoned Equity Issues in a Closely Held Market: Evidence from France

This paper examines seasoned equity offerings in France.Even though a rights offering is the primary flotation method, French companies are increasingly usingthe relatively expensive public offering method. We show that the market reaction to the announcementof seasoned equity issues is significantly negative for rights issues and insignificantly negative forpublic offerings. Our results suggest that the adverse selection effect is greater for rights issues thanfor public offerings, due to stronger underwriter certification for the public offerings. We find that theshare price effect is positively related to blockholders take-up renouncements for firms with priorconcentrated ownership. For these firms, the favourable ownership dispersion effect offsets the adverse selection effect.     

Hedging Housing Risk in London

This paper investigates the benefits of allowing households to compensate the portfolio distortion due to their housing consumption through investments in housing price derivatives. Focusing on the London market, we show that a major loss from over-investment in housing is that households are forced to hold a very risky portfolio. However, the strong performance of the London housing market means that little is lost in terms of expected returns. Even households with limited wealth are better off owning their home rather than renting and investing in financial assets, as long as they are willing to face the financial risk involved. In this context, access to housing price derivatives would benefit most poor homeowners looking to limit their risk exposure. It would also benefit wealthier investors looking for the high returns provided by housing investments without the costs of direct ownership of properties. Comparisons with French, Swedish and U.S. data provide a broader perspective on our findings.     

Assessing the international spillover effects of capital income taxation

Changes in capital taxes by one economy spill onto other economies with internationally mobile capital. We evaluate these impacts using a two-region, intertemporal general equilibrium model. The foreign economy's unilateral reduction in corporate income taxation has positive but small effects on U.S. welfare. In contrast, unilateral reductions in personal income taxation impose large negative spillovers. The differences result from CIT being source-based and PIT residence-based. The CIT cut reduces tax burdens to U.S. residents who invest abroad, while the PIT cut reduces foreigners' tax burdens only. Through general equilibrium adjustments neglected in simpler models, the PIT cut lowers U.S. residents' welfare.     

Is there a pecking order? Evidence from a panel of IPO firms

We test the pecking order model of capital structure by examining the financing of firms that went public in 1983. We estimate a logit to predict external financing, and a multinomial logit to predict the type of financing using data on the IPO firms' security offerings during 1984–1992. Our results indicate that the probability of obtaining external funds is unrelated to the shortfall in internally generated funds, although firms with cash surpluses avoid external financing. Firms that access the capital markets do not follow the pecking order when choosing the type of security to offer.     

Organizational culture and performance measurement systems

The aim of this study is to articulate and test the relationships between organizational culture and two attributes of performance measurement systems (PMS), namely the diversity of measurement and the nature of use. The results of a survey reveal that top managers of firms reflecting a flexibility dominant type tend to use more performance measures and to use PMS to focus organizational attention, support strategic decision-making and legitimate actions to a greater extent than top managers of firms reflecting a control dominant type.     

Revenue Sharing versus Expenditure Sharing in a Federal System

Problems of intergovernmental policy coordination can take many forms and are becoming increasingly important with continuing economic integration. In this paper we focus on the fiscal competition problem where the non-cooperative choice of taxes and transfers among governments typically leads to a suboptimal outcome. We look at the effect of two widely used corrective policies: revenue sharing and expenditure sharing (or intergovernmental matching grants). Our main result is that these two corrective policies have opposite effects depending on the form of competition between governments, namely whether governments compete in taxes or expenditures. More precisely, for any form of competition, revenue sharing is desirable exactly when expenditure sharing is not and vice versa. The implication is that the choice of the optimal corrective policy requires a complete understanding of the underlying non-cooperative behavior among governments. Our second main result is that neither revenue sharing or expenditure sharing can be sustained as a Nash equilibrium among governments, although all governments would benefit from one of these two corrective policies. Central intervention is therefore inevitable unless governments can pre-commit to the optimal corrective policy before setting their fiscal policies.     

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.     

Tax penalties on fluctuating incomes: estimates from longitudinal data

Progressive personal income taxes can cause individuals with fluctuating incomes to pay more taxes over time than individuals with constant incomes of the same average value. The implicit tax penalty violates principles of equity and may harm efficiency by discouraging risk-taking activities, such as entrepreneurship. This paper uses longitudinal data to estimate the tax penalties in six panels of Canadian data from 1993 to 2010. The effects of various income averaging policies for mitigating tax penalties are then examined.