The Effect of Regulation on Insurance Pricing: The Case of Germany

This article analyzes the impact of policy form regulation on the unit price of insurance and determinants of premium changes using the 1994 deregulation of the German property–liability market as a natural experiment. Our result show that policy form regulation did not increase prices above competitive levels. Factors influencing premium changes are significantly different for the two time periods, pre‐ and post‐deregulation, indicating that regulation affects insurance pricing. Focusing on highly competitive lines after deregulation, we find a significant price decrease, and this decrease is offset by higher prices in the remaining other lines.     

Inflation and Innovation in a Schumpeterian Economy with North–South Technology Transfer

This study analyzes how inflation affects innovation and international technology transfer via cash‐in‐advance constraints on R&D. We consider a North–South quality‐ladder model that features innovative Northern R&D and adaptive Southern R&D. We find that higher Southern inflation causes a permanent decrease in technology transfer, a permanent increase in the North–South wage gap, and a temporary decrease in the Northern innovation rate. Higher Northern inflation causes a temporary decrease in the Northern innovation rate, a permanent decrease in the North–South wage gap, and ambiguous effects on technology transfer. Finally, we calibrate the model to China–U.S. data to perform a quantitative analysis.     

Audit Partner Disciplinary Actions and Financial Restatements

This study investigates the signalling role and rectification effectiveness of an audit partner disciplinary system. The signalling role refers to whether sanctions reflect the poor audit quality of disciplined audit partners, and rectification effectiveness addresses whether disciplinary actions enhance subsequent audit quality. The sample consists of Taiwanese listed companies, in the period 2000 to 2006, where the identities of audit partners who sign audit reports and who are sanctioned are accessible. Empirical results indicate that in the pre‐sanction period, the probability of financial restatements by clients of disciplined audit partners is significantly higher than that of non‐disciplined audit partners. The more severe or frequent the sanctions, the higher the likelihood of financial restatements in the pre‐sanction period. These findings imply that audit partner disciplinary actions can serve as a signal of lower audit quality provided by those partners. The rectification effectiveness of disciplinary actions is examined from two perspectives: (1) the effects on subsequent improvements of audit quality of disciplined audit partners; and (2) audit quality enhancement of successor non‐disciplined audit partners who accept clients from disciplined audit partners. Empirical results show a lower probability of restating financial statements audited by disciplined audit partners after sanctions. We also find a lower likelihood of restating financial statements audited by successor non‐disciplined audit partners in the post‐sanction period. Both findings support our conclusion that audit partner sanctions improve audit quality. Overall, audit partner disciplinary actions can signal lower quality audit partners and are effective in enhancing audit quality.     

Do investors misprice components of net periodic pension cost?

We examine whether and how investors misprice the components of net periodic pension cost under SFAS No. 87 and 158. We find that investors appear to have difficulty in understanding the transitory feature of other net periodic pension cost (PPOPCC) and thus overestimate its persistence, which in turn leads to the mispricing of PPOPCC in the pre‐158 period. We also find that SFAS No. 158 appears to reduce the mispricing of PPOPCC, suggesting a positive effect of SFAS No. 158 on investors' valuation of pension items in the income statement. Additional analysis suggests that investors also overestimate the persistence of, and thus misprice, pension‐related cash flows and accruals in the pre‐158 period and that SFAS No. 158 reduces the mispricing of pension‐related cash flows and accruals.     

Failures to Deliver,Short Sale Constraints,and Stock Overvaluation

Studying a large sample of publicly available data on failures to deliver, we find that stocks reaching threshold levels of failures become significantly overvalued. Where short sale constraints are especially binding, we report extreme overpricing and subsequent reversals. These findings support the overvaluation hypothesis, although the mispricing is likely to be difficult to arbitrage because of extreme shorting costs. In addition, threshold stocks with low short interest become more overvalued than threshold stocks with high short interest. This suggests that the level of short interest reflects supply‐side effects when the examination conditions on the difficulty of borrowing shares.     

Interest Rates and Credit Risk

This paper explores the effects of shifts in interest rates on corporate leverage and default in the context of a dynamic model in which the link between leverage and default risk comes from the lower incentives of overindebted entrepreneurs to guarantee firm survival. The need to finance new investment pushes firms' leverage ratio above some state‐contingent target toward which firms gradually adjust through earnings retention. The response to interest rate rises and cuts is both asymmetric and heterogeneously distributed across firms. Our results help rationalize some of the evidence regarding the risk‐taking channel of monetary policy.     

Demand for fair value accounting: The case of the asset revaluation boom in Korea during the global financial crisis

When the fair value accounting (FVA) option for property, plant, and equipment was introduced in the midst of the global financial crisis, a significant proportion of Korean firms elected FVA. We attribute this unusual boom in asset revaluations to the nation's culture of government intervention and civilian compliance, which was particularly espoused during this period of financial turmoil, and a foreseeable option to switch back to historical cost accounting. We find that among those firms whose debt‐to‐equity ratios are low, public firms opt for the FVA option more often than private firms, suggesting that the need to communicate fair value information with diversified equity holders is more important than the need to do so with creditors. In contrast, among those firms whose debt‐to‐equity ratios are high enough to warrant such unfavorable dispositions as new debt freezes and monitoring by regulators, we find no difference in the FVA choice between private and public firms. These findings imply that during the global financial crisis, private firms that rely heavily on debt financing have a strong incentive to utilize FVA to comply with government guidelines for the debt‐to‐equity ratio and to ease a potential hold‐up problem by influential creditors.     

Can Investors Identify Managerial Discretion in Corporate Social Responsibility Practices? The Moderate Role of Investor Protection

This paper analyses investors’ ability to identify if managers use corporate social responsibility as an entrenchment practice to conceal the risk of dismissal associated with managerial discretion and if this detection is determined by the level of investor protection orientation. Results based on an international database of 1949 companies show that investors and markets do not identify managerial entrenchment based on the promotion of sustainable practices, except when such entrenchment is developed by companies located in countries with strong investor protection. In these countries, investors identify and penalise such companies with lower financial performance.     

Corporate Governance and the Investment Efficiency of Diversified Corporate Asset Buyers

Many corporate assets are bought and sold each year in the U.S. and most scholars believe these transactions improve economic efficiency. But given the reality that the interests of corporate managers may diverge from those of their shareholders and reflect empire‐building or other managerial entrenchment strategies—and that such agency problems tend to be worse in highly diversified, multi‐divisional companies—the authors tested the proposition that diversified corporate asset buyers with more effective governance structures can be expected to allocate capital more efficiently, as reflected in higher rates of return on operating capital and more favorable market reactions to the announcements of their purchases. Using a sample of diversified U.S. companies that announced large asset purchases between 1988 and 2006, the authors report finding that the investment allocation process following such asset purchases was more consistent with value creation in the case of diversified buyers with more effective governance structures, which were identified by their greater board independence, higher‐quality audit committees, and higher levels of stock ownership by institutional ownership, directors, and CEOs.