Political uncertainty and a firm's credit risk: Evidence from the international CDS market

Using a large sample of firms with single-name credit default swap (CDS) contracts in 30 countries, we document the evidence that political uncertainty, proxied by national election dummy, is positively related to firm-level credit risk. Specifically, this positive relation is more pronounced for the firms that have no political connection or poor international diversification, and in the countries with higher political uncertainty and lower investor protections. Further, by using a difference-in-differences approach, we find evidence to support idiosyncratic volatility and debt rollover channels through which political uncertainty affects the credit risk of individual firm.     

Sovereign debt markets in turbulent times: Creditor discrimination and crowding-out effects

In 2007, countries in the euro zone periphery were enjoying stable growth, low deficits, and low spreads. Then the financial crisis erupted and pushed them into deep recessions, raising their deficits and debt levels. By 2010, they were facing severe debt problems. Spreads increased and, surprisingly, so did the share of the debt held by domestic creditors. Credit was reallocated from the private sector to the public sector, reducing investment and deepening the recessions even further. To account for these facts, we propose a simple model of sovereign risk in which debt can be traded in secondary markets. The model has two key ingredients: creditor discrimination and crowding-out effects. Creditor discrimination arises because, in turbulent times, sovereign debt offers a higher expected return to domestic creditors than to foreign ones. This provides incentives for domestic purchases of debt. Crowding-out effects arise because private borrowing is limited by financial frictions. This implies that domestic debt purchases displace productive investment. The model shows that these purchases reduce growth and welfare, and may lead to self-fulfilling crises. It also shows how crowding-out effects can be transmitted to other countries in the euro zone, and how they may be addressed by policies at the European level.     

合理性审查下离职竞业限制范围之再思考

经营权与劳动权的冲突是竞业限制制度所面临的核心问题,而权利的冲突需要通过合理的限制契约自由来加以化解。因此,对离职竞业限制的范围进行合理性审查具有法理基础和现实意义。基于我国《劳动合同法》第24条,通过对相关法理、学理以及司法实践进行分析,文章总结了我国离职竞业限制行业范围以及地域范围的几种审查标准。同时,我们认为竞争法下相关市场概念的引入能够对竞业限制的范围判断提供一定的参考价值,并建议在合理性审查过程中要树立平等保护理念,权衡相关原则以及考量社会公共利益。     

The shadow costs of repos and bank liability structure

Making use of a structural model that allows for optimal liquidity management, we study the role that repos play in a bank׳s financing structure. In our model the bank׳s assets consist of illiquid loans and liquid reserves and are financed by a combination of repos, long-term debt, deposits and equity. Repos are a cheap source of funding, but they are subject to an exogenous rollover risk. We show that the use of repos inflicts two types of indirect (“shadow”) costs on the bank׳s shareholders: first, it induces the bank to maintain higher liquid reserves in order to alleviate the additional default risk; second, it adds to the cost of long-term debt financing. These shadow costs limit the bank׳s appetite for cheap but unstable repo funding. This effect is, however, weakened under poor returns on risky assets, access to deposit funding and the depositor preference rule. We also analyze the impact of a liquidity coverage ratio, payout restrictions and a leverage ratio on the bank׳s financing choices and show that all these tools are able to curb the bank׳s reliance on repos.     

Rollover risk and credit risk under time-varying margin

For a firm financed by a mixture of collateralized (short-term) debt and uncollateralized (long-term) debt, we show that fluctuations in margin requirements, reflecting funding liquidity shocks, lead to increasing the firm’s default risk and credit spreads. The severity with which a firm is hit by increasing margin requirements highly depends on both its financing structure and debt maturity structure. Our results imply that an additional premium should be added when evaluating debt in order to account for rollover risks, especially for short-matured bonds. In terms of policy implications, our results strongly indicate that regulators should intervene fast to curtail margins in crisis periods and maintain a reasonably low margin level in order to effectively prevent creditors’ run on debt.     

Non-compete agreements: How fiduciary duty and covenants not to compete restrict managers’ mobility

Companies spend time and money training employees; in the case of a merger or acquisition, they spend resources such as cash, stock, and debt. It makes sense, then, that they do not want an employee to take the expertise the company underwrote to a competitor. Thus, employment contracts will often include non-compete clauses—sometimes known as covenants not to compete—which state that the employee cannot move to a competitor for a certain period of time. Though not all employees have the heightened fiduciary duty of board members and officers, they frequently have signed agreements that, at least on paper, restrict their employment mobility. Not only have officers and board members often signed such agreements as well, but they also have fiduciary duties further restricting their new employment plans. In decades of teaching courses in the legal environment of business as well as in business ethics, no topic flummoxes students more than this one. After all, in a free country, a person should be able to work where they wish, right? How can such restrictions be fair? Legally and ethically, this is a complicated area and one in which the old lawyer’s answer—it depends—is true. This article provides some parameters for employees and employers to know when fiduciary duty precludes certain employees from moving to a new company, including when those are legal in what ways they are fair.     

Some further remarks on a superiority problem in misspecified restricted singular linear models

Razzaghi (1987) examined the difference of covariance matrices of competing estimators in misspecified restricted linear models. Further, Gross, Trenkler and Liski (1998) extended Razzaghi's result by asserting his sufficient condition for nonnegative definiteness of the covariance matrix difference to be also necessary. In this paper, when the covariance matrix of the disturbance vector is nonnegative definite, the necessary and sufficient conditions for nonnegative definiteness of the covariance matrix difference are derived. So above results are strengthened. Received: February 1999     

Optimal equity infusions in interbank networks

We study optimal equity infusions into a financial network prone to the risk of contagious failures, which may be due to insolvency or to bank runs by short term creditors. Bank runs can be triggered by failures of connected banks.Under complete information on interbank linkages, we show that the problem reduces to a combinatorial optimization problem. Subject to budget constraints, the government chooses the set of minimal cost whose survival induces the maximum network stability. Our results demonstrate that the optimal equity infusion might significantly mitigate failure contagion risk and stabilize the system. In the case of partial information on the network, the controllers’ focus swiftly changes from preventing insolvencies to preventing runs by short term creditors.     

农村金融市场充足性缺口：实证分析

中国农村金融市场的充足性缺口是农村金融服务供给与有效需求之间的缺口.产生这种充足性缺口的重要原因是高风险、信息不对称和高交易成本.弥合这种缺口,就必须创新金融技术,积累人力资本和信息资本,发展有利于农村金融市场有效运行的物质和制度基础.     

住房交易约束与农户习惯形成

本文分析了现行农村住房制度对农户习惯偏好的影响。利用2000~2008年中国29个省区市的农村住户调查数据得到的估计结果表明,住房交易约束是中国农户习惯形成的重要原因,但不是唯一原因。由于不能通过市场进行交易、不能作为抵押物而获得贷款,中国农户的住房资产不仅未能产生显著的财富效应,反而降低了农户的短期边际消费倾向。