IFRS and Secrecy: Assessing Accounting Value Relevance Across Africa

We examine the value relevance of accounting across several African countries and test whether IFRS improved the value association of earnings and equity book values. We report a stronger valuation association between accounting and stock prices in African countries classified as having a secrecy culture. This increases after IFRS and more so for earnings. On the other hand, IFRS induced a stronger increase in the book value coefficient in the less secretive and more developed South African market. We surmise that the more conceptual focus of IFRS induced an increased demand for higher‐quality accounting professionals, which had a filtering‐down effect of improving quality information flow and breaking down the secrecy culture. Our research highlights the diverse impacts of IFRS and the role of culture, asset markets and accounting professionalism, in driving the relevance of accounting components across Africa.     

Consolidation in the European banking industry: how effective is it?

The European banking industry is becoming increasingly consolidated as banks engage in domestic and cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) activities. Due to cultural differences in cross-border consolidations, the benefits of domestic and cross-border consolidations are likely to differ. This paper examines the effectiveness of merger processes, with a detailed analysis of both domestic and cross-border consolidations in Europe from 1998 to 2004. Effectiveness is measured via several criteria: improvement in costs, return on assets (ROA), and return on equity (ROE). To analyze potential cost efficiency improvement, we use a stochastic cost frontier approach. The same methodology is used for ROA and ROE to estimate efficiency in profitability. Finally, considering cross-border mergers as a form of entry, we carry out an analysis of the entry effect in response to the performance and profitability of the incumbent market participants. Results show that mergers in the European banking industry have been effective. Although domestic M&As are more common than cross-border M&As, banks involved in cross-border M&As are more efficient. Moreover, cross-border merged banks seem to outperform incumbent banks.     

Schumpeterian competition and efficiency among commercial banks

In this paper, we aim to fill the gap in the banking literature by quantifying the impact that the Schumpeterian competition mode – i.e. competition through the launch of new products (or new varieties of products) – has on the cost and profit efficiency of a sample of commercial banks based in the United Kingdom. We estimate both a cost and an alternative profit frontier on an unbalanced panel of UK commercial banks over the period 2001–2012. The intensity of competition through product innovation is proxied by the trademark intensity (i.e. the ratio between the number of trademarks registered in a given year by all the commercial banks – net of the trademarks registered by the bank under observation – and the employment in the sector) in the commercial banking sector. Our results show that the (lagged) trademark intensity in the commercial banking sector does affect negatively the mean cost and profit efficiency in the sector but there is evidence that as trademark intensity increases in the sector, commercial banks react by improving their cost and profit efficiency.     

Market crises and Basel capital requirements: Could Basel III have been different? Evidence from Portugal,Ireland, Greece and Spain (PIGS)

Basel III represents a crucial step in strengthening the capital rules underlying banking operations, aimed at reducing the probability and severity of a systemic crisis. Alongside two supplementary capital buffers, the Basel Committee of Banking Supervision imposed severe pressure on the Value-at-Risk based Internal Models Approach in order to increase. This is to increase the capital base by adding the stressed Value-at-Risk component in an effort to reduce reliance on internal models while keeping the Standardized Approach avenue open. However, even though those measures might appear theoretically correct, evidence gathered for long and short exposures in Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain highlights several defects in Basel III. We emphasize that leptokurtic models, primarily those derived from Extreme Value Theory, should be enforced in the regulations given their superior performance in market crises, and that Basel II could have shielded against 2008 mayhem provided that heavy-tailed techniques had been employed.     

Liberalisation,privatisation and the productivity of Egyptian banks: a non-parametric approach

This paper evaluates the performance of Egyptian banks during a period characterised by changes in economic policies. The Egyptian government's liberalisation policies in the early 1990s have had a positive or negative impact on the performance of the Egyptian banks. In addition, whether the liberalisation impact has influenced different forms of banks' ownership and sizes with consistent magnitude is examined. Another objective of this paper is to examine the impact of the privatisation process at the end of 1995 on the efficiency and productivity performance of the overall banking sector and on joint-venture banks in particular. The data envelopment analysis Malmquist methodology is employed to estimate the productivity of Egyptian banks.