Predicting future financial performance of banks from management’s tone in the textual disclosures

Quality & Quantity - Predicting bank performance is important for investors and regulatory authorities. Previous research on non-financial firms has shown that augmenting the numeric...     

Board independence and market reactions around news of stock option backdating

This study focuses on whether board independence explains stock price reactions to backdating and factors that explain backdating decision. Consistent with previous studies, we find negative stock returns around backdating news. Although our findings show that board independence variables fail to explain the incidence of backdating, our regression results show that stockholders consider these variables to be important. Abnormal stock returns around news of backdating are higher when firms have higher proportion of outside directors and when outside directors have lower stock ownership in the firm.     

Is Productivity Growth Too Strong For Our Own Good?

Productivity growth and improvement in a nation's standard of living are widely thought to go hand in hand. During the past 15 years, however, the gap between productivity growth and growth of living standards has widened, igniting a debate about whether a larger share of the benefits from productivity gains has gone to capital rather than labor. The first phase of our study characterizes U.S. productivity growth for the period 1948–2011. Our statistical analysis found that productivity growth did not follow one particular pattern over time, and we therefore doubt that it would follow one pattern (either a higher or lower growth rate) in the near future. Our analysis concludes that the “productivity resurgence” era of 1996:Q1 to 2011:Q4 is associated with lower growth rates of real per capita income, employment, and consumer confidence relative to productivity. That may validate the “savage cost-cutting” and “polarization” hypotheses. The stable and higher growth rates of corporate profits and the S&P 500 index indicate that capital and higher skilled workers may have gained benefits from productivity growth over time. A simultaneous rise in food stamp recipients and income share of the top 0.01 percent during the post-mid-1990s era suggest that the distribution of the stronger productivity growth gains is asymmetric.     

Permissibility and use of options for hedging purposes in Islamic Finance

The debate concerning permissibility and use of options in Islamic finance is ongoing, and the issue is far from settled. Current analyses on this issue appear to focus on taking of unnecessary risks ( gharar), the perceived lack of a physical asset in an options contract, and the possibility of exploitation of the ignorant. To the extent that these factors are involved, options are not permitted under Islamic teachings (the Shariah). In this article, we investigate whether options may be permitted for hedging purposes in Islamic finance. We use equity options as an example in our analysis. After providing a brief overview of options markets, we review the existing literature and critically examine other work such as the religious decrees (fatwas). We also provide two examples, one each of call and put options, to illustrate the managerial issue of use of options for hedging purposes. Our analysis shows that options may be permitted for hedging purposes in Islamic finance as long as the underlying economic activities are themselves permissible (halal) from an Islamic point of view. The analysis also indicates that one of the key issues is related to unnecessary risk taking. The avoidance or reduction of such risks in hedging situations is largely dependent on the settlement and clearing function of the exchanges trading options, which effectively provides a guarantee of delivery. Mutual consent for entering into or canceling contracts and the issue of intangible assets also play a role in determining if options are permissible under the Shariah. We conclude the article by urging experts of Islamic jurisprudence to understand the theory and mechanics of options and use group ijitihad (consensus opinion of Islamic scholars) in conjunction with academics and experts in financial markets and instruments on this vital issue in contemporary finance for the benefit of the Islamic world as well as those trading with the Islamic world. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Unemployment and underemployment in Bangladesh agriculture

The paper starts with a critique of the various concepts of unemployment and underemployment from which follows the framework in which the author seeks to investigate and estimate unemployment and underemployment. Unemployment is broken down into various categories so that one can know the composition of the agricultural unemployed and underemployed. All the previous estimates had failed to provide such information. In the rest of the paper various estimates are made and implications discussed in the contest of the framework outlined and using first hand information from a survey of some villages conducted by the author himself.     

Time Series Data Mining with an Application to the Measurement of Underwriting Cycles

Underwriting cycles are believed to pose a risk management challenge to property-casualty insurers. The classical statistical methods that are used to model these cycles and to estimate their length assume linearity and give inconclusive results. Instead, we propose to use novel time series data Mining algorithms to detect and estimate periodicity on U.S. property-casualty insurance markets. These algorithms are in increasing use in data science and are applied to Big Data. We describe several such algorithms and focus on two periodicity detection schemes. Estimates of cycle periods on industry-wide loss ratios, for all lines combined and for four specific lines, are provided. One of the methods appears to be robust to trends and to outliers.     

Three Simple Techniques to Analyze a Complex Economic Phenomenon: The Case of Profits

This paper seeks to characterize the behavior of profits over the business cycle as a model for analyzing any economic series by a practicing business economist. It addresses three fundamental questions about profits that are common and critical to identifying the behavior of any macroeconomic series—mean-reversion, volatility, and trend. First, does profit growth over time exhibit mean-reverting behavior? Second, how volatile are profits, and does this volatility obscure the message of average profit growth? Third, how can we estimate a long-run trend growth component for profits and thereby separate profit cycles from its long-run trend growth component?     

The Relationship between the Argentinean Debt Rescheduling Announcement and Bank Equity Returns

This study examines the effects of the Argentinean debt rescheduling announcement on the equity return levels of several large U.S. commercial banks. The empirical evidence suggests that the equity prices of sample banks immediately reflected the relevant information associated with the announcement. However, the market was unable to discriminate among banks on the basis of exposure to Argentinean loans.     

The Association Between Market and Exchange Rate Risks and Accounting Variables: A GARCH Model of the Japanese Banking Institutions

This study has two purposes. First, it estimates the market, interest rate, and exchange rate sensitivities (betas) of the Japanese banking institutions. Second, it investigates the relationship between the market-based measures of risk and accounting-based financial ratios. We extend the literature in three important ways. First, we employ a multi-factor GARCH model to estimate the betas. This framework incorporates non-linearities in the bank stock return modeling and allows for time-varying risk premia. Second, we investigate the determinants of market and exchange rate risk in terms of bank financial ratios. To this end, we regress the beta measures derived from the GARCH model against the corporate decision variables to determine the direction and the magnitude of the impact of the latter on the market and exchange rate risk exposures. Third, by using data on the Japanese banking institutions, we provide a comparison of the bank interest rate and exchange rate sensitivities and the strength of the links between the risk measure and the corporate decision variables between the U.S. and the Japanese banking institutions. This comparison sheds light on the robustness of the results concerning interest rate and exchange rate risk, and their determinants, across the two countries. Several interesting results are obtained. First, empirical results indicate that interest rate is only occasionally significant while market and exchange rate variables are significant for all the banks in the sample. Second, market and exchange rate risk measures do impound information in the financial ratios with the explanatory power of the market beta model being higher than that of the exchange rate beta model. Third, the association of the market-based risk measures and the financial ratios is weaker for the Japanese banks than those found for their U.S. counterparts in the existing literature.JEL Classification: G21, F37     

Proportional taxation: Nonexistence of stable structures in an economy with a public good

Guesnerie and Oddou [J. Econom. Theory25 (1981), 67–91] raised the open question whether an economy, in which the production of a public good is financed via proportional taxation, has a stable structure. By means of the first example a negative answer to this question is provided. The second example shows that a stable structure may fail to exist even if all the individuals have the same initial endowments in private good.