Yankee Bonds and Cross-Border Private Placements

With credit spreads and U.S. Treasury yields near historical lows and the recent relaxation of U.S. regulatory reporting requirements, the U.S. bond markets are more and more frequently the markets of choice for international issuers. Total cross-border U.S. bond issuance is expected to top $200 billion in 1997, easily surpassing previous issuance levels.
Overseas issuers have three primary forms through which they can participate in the U.S. long-term debt markets: publicly traded, SEC registered bonds (commonly known as "Yankee" bonds); traditional private placements; and underwritten Rule 144A private placements. Each of these three financing methods has distinct benefits and limitations that should be thoroughly evaluated in light of the specific objectives of the issuer. Yankee bonds are typically the most cost-efficient vehicle for large, investment-grade issuers. The fastest growing segment is the rule 144A market, which accounted for 38% (by number, not dollar volume) of all U.S. cross-border debt transactions in 1996. The Rule 144A structure is often used for complex structures requiring heavy rating-agency involvement, such as future financial flow transactions and project financings. The 144A market has also become a particular favorite with international issuers because of its less formal disclosure requirements and streamlined execution process. The private placement market, which accounted for 24% of cross-border transactions in 1996, continues to be the dominant choice of smaller issuers, companies with complicated "stories," and firms that do not wish to submit to regular scrutiny by rating agencies. This article provides a detailed analysis of each type of bond issuance and the related issues facing a financial officer in trying to determine the most appropriate source of long-term debt.     

ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT: THE CASE OF UNITED GRAIN GROWERS

Enterprise risk management (ERM) refers to the identification, quantification, and management of all of a company's risks within a unified framework. This approach is much more comprehensive than traditional risk management practice, where different types of risk are managed by different people using different tools. The authors evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of ERM and then describe how United Grain Growers (UGG), a major farm service provider in Western Canada, established such an approach.
Extensive risk identification and measurement indicated that the volatility of UGG's earnings was driven to a large extent by changes in the volume of its grain shipments, which in turn were principally due to variation in weather. After first considering the use of weather derivatives to hedge the risk, the company ended up purchasing an insurance contract, bundled with its traditional insurance coverage, that pays UGG if its grain volume is unexpectedly low. The potential for moral hazard that can make insurance an expensive proposition was limited by basing payoffs on industry grain shipments rather than the company's shipments. The bundled approach served to expand and integrate UGG's insurance coverage, while eliminating redundant coverage.
Besides economizing on insurance costs, another valuable aspect of enterprise risk management is as a source of information about the operations of the firm. By providing managers with a better understanding of their business and events that can undermine the firm's strategic objectives, ERM can lead to better operating decisions as well as a more efficient approach to risk retention and risk transfer.     

Accounting-policy choice and firm characteristics in the Asia Pacific region: An international empirical test of Costly Contracting Theory

This study provides evidence on the cross-sectional relationship between firm-specific variables and management's choice of accounting policies by examining four key accounting-policy disclosures in the 2000/2001 annual reports of 442 listed companies in the Asia Pacific region. The dependent variable is the composite measure for the income increasing (decreasing) accounting-policy choice tendency.The results show that firm-specific variables linked to Costly Contracting Theory partially explain management's choice of accounting policies. Companies that pursue income-increasing accounting techniques are characterized by lower financial leverage, lower level of ownership concentration, and higher investment opportunity sets. This finding holds true when country and industry control variables are not considered. When the control variables are included, the CCT variables are less a factor and instead country of reporting provides the strongest explanation for company managers' choice of accounting policies. Indonesian companies utilize the most income-decreasing accounting technique.     

Progress on XBRL from an Australian perspective

This study examines the progress of XBRL (extensible Business Reporting Language) in the Australian context. XBRL has the potential to be the digital language for data transfer and integration of business systems. The paper describes the nature of XBRL and notes that the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has mandated its use. We review the implications of XBRL, such as audit assurance issues, comparability and real-time reporting, and conclude that XBRL has the potential to enhance financial accounting reporting. What is needed is the completion of the enabling technology, simplification and acceptance.     

Memory, transaction records, and The Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith hypothesized that impersonal exchange was necessary for a society to develop specialized division of labor and create wealth. Douglass North and Vernon Smith argue that successful developed economies are the result of institutions. We hypothesize and provide evidence from ethnographic data that the basic accounting technology of recording transactions is associated with more extensive impersonal exchange and increased specialization in the division of labor. Our intuition is that extensive impersonal exchange requires reliable memory of trading partners’ past behavior to sustain trust and encourage reciprocity when a group expands beyond the size of traditional hunter-gatherer groups. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that transaction records are necessary for the emergence of complex economies as suggested by the archaeological evidence of recordkeeping in Mesopotamian societies 10,000 years ago.     

Informative Advertising Competition

This paper investigates informative price advertising in an established-product Hotelling duopoly where firms compete for shares of a fixed market. Prices are uncertain because firms’ costs are private information. For a sufficiently low cost of advertising, advertising necessarily arises in equilibrium. Also, the less balanced the initial distributions over costs, the greater the potential for informative advertising. Moreover, whenever firms use informative advertising, it increases the firms’ expected profits, and social welfare, relative to the outcome without advertising.     

Students staying home: Questioning the wisdom of a digital future for Australian universities

The understanding of the role of global digital technologies in the future of Australian universities mirrors the international debate as exemplified by some of the articles in this special issue of Futures. However, this debate between cautious optimists on the one hand and supreme optimists on the other is misleading, because the future for universities lies neither in a grudging acceptance of technology's inevitability nor a mindless embrace of it. The complex evolution to a true ‘knowledge supernetwork' requires an understanding of the socially constructed nature of technologies including the social technology known as learning. Moreover, it requires us to reinstate a perspective missing from both the articles in this issue and from the debate in Australia, namely that of students.     

A Multi-Agent ODSS Architecture for Supporting Distributed Decision-Making

In this paper, we present an architecture of an ODSS that focuses on organizational learning to enhance the organization's memory and distribution of the organization's intelligence throughout the organization to the various units that need it in their decision-making process. Learning in this ODSS is done by multiple intelligent agents that are designed to gather, accumulate and classify information in order to assist the decision-maker.