In Search of Distress Risk

This paper explores the determinants of corporate failure and the pricing of financially distressed stocks using US data over the period 1963 to 2003. Firms with higher leverage, lower profitability, lower market capitalization, lower past stock returns, more volatile past stock returns, lower cash holdings, higher market-book ratios, and lower prices per share are more likely to file for bankruptcy, be delisted, or receive a D rating. When predicting failure at longer horizons, the most persistent firm characteristics, market capitalization, the market-book ratio, and equity volatility become relatively more significant. Our model captures much of the time variation in the aggregate failure rate. Since 1981, financially distressed stocks have delivered anomalously low returns. They have lower returns but much higher standard deviations, market betas, and loadings on value and small-cap risk factors than stocks with a low risk of failure. These patterns hold in all size quintiles but are particularly strong in smaller stocks. They are inconsistent with the conjecture that the value and size effects are compensation for the risk of financial distress.

The Influence of Capital Controls on Long Run Growth: Where and How Much?

The recent financial crisis in East Asia generated a revival of interest in the merits of financial openness. The ensuing debate on the benefits of openness has focused more on short and medium run issues than on the long run effects. Within the empirical literature on economic growth, little or no attention has been paid to the effects of financial openness. Contrary to the orthodox position, the few results that exist suggest that capital controls have no effect on economic growth. This paper argues that this conclusion emerges from a failure to account for underlying differences across countries with similar degrees of capital controls. I show that the degree of ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity in a country plays a significant role in explaining the effects of controls on economic growth. For countries with relatively higher degrees of ethnic heterogeneity, the effects are particularly adverse whereas for countries with high degrees of homogeneity, capital controls actually have a net positive effect on economic growth. On balance, more developing countries suffered due to controls than not. Within the sample of 57 non OECD countries that did implement controls for the period 1975-95, as many as 39 saw a reduction in their growth rates. This result is robust to a number of variables commonly used in the economic growth regressions.Economic Growth, Capital Controls, Ethno-Linguistic Fractionalization

Ownership versus Environment: Why are Public Sector Firms Inefficient?

In this paper we disentangle the sources of public sector inefficiency using 1982-1995 panel data on manufacturing firms in Indonesia. We consider two leading hypotheses: (1) public sector enterprises are inefficient due to monitoring problems and (2) public sector enterprises are inefficient because of the environment in which they operate, as measured by the soft budget constraint. The two models are nested in a production function framework and the empirical results provide support for the second hypothesis. Public sector enterprises are inefficient because of their access to soft loans; public sector ownership has no independent impact on productivity growth. The finding that ownership per se does not matter, but environment does, holds when we control for fixed effects and when we allow for the endogeneity of government loans. Interestingly, private sector firms with access to government loans did not perform more poorly than other private sector enterprises. Another dimension of the environment, i.e. import penetration, also matters; public sector enterprises that have been shielded from import competition are inferior performers.

Family Involvement in Management and Product Innovation: The Mediating Role of R&D Strategies

Following calls to capture family firms’ innovative behavior and to specifically clarify how family firms manage product innovations to achieve sustainable economic development, this study empirically investigates the mediating role of Research & Development (R&D) strategies (i.e., intramural R&D investments, extramural R&D investments, and the combination of both intramural and extramural R&D investments) in the relationship between family involvement in the management and likelihood of obtaining product innovations. Carrying out a panel data analysis that is based on 7264 observations of Spanish manufacturing firms throughout the 2000–2015 period, our results suggest a negative effect of the level of family management on the likelihood of introducing product innovations. Moreover, we found that intramural R&D investments and the investment strategy consisting of both intramural and extramural R&D mediated the family involvement in management-likelihood of obtaining product innovations relationship. Our findings contribute important insights to the comprehension of which determinants instigate product innovation in family managed firms

Three Essays On Private Market Interactions

The first study addresses why insurers, whom traditionally invest in relatively safe assets, choose to invest in private equity (PE). Using insurer financial disclosures, we test theories relating how risk shifting, managerial discretion, underinvestment, asset liability matching, regulation, home bias, and reaching for yield affect PE investment. Results indicate risk¬ shifting and managerial discretion by stock insurers does not factor into the PE investment decision. In addition, results confirm home bias positively influences PE investment while underinvestment, asset liability matching, and regulation deter PE investment. Finally, insurers have not increased their PE allocation due to low-yield interest rate environments. The second study directly tests the economies of scope hypothesis of Gao, Ritter, and Zhu (2013) using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology of Demerjian et al. (2012, 2013). I find private firms with less than $50 million in sales are more likely to be acquired than to offer an IPO when their industry has high economies of scope. I do not find evidence that 3-year buy-and-hold returns for IPOs are associated with economies of scope levels. I also find economies of scope are negatively related to firms adopting a dual tracking strategy, but does not explain sell-out premiums for acquired private firms. The third study examines whether private IPOs (PIPOs) decrease information asymmetry in firms that eventually engage in an IPO. Theoretically, PIPOs can mitigate problems of adverse selection and moral hazard because private investments can signal undervaluation and potentially provide more effective monitoring. Consequently, firms with larger, more recent, and frequent PIPOs should experience less underpricing and post IPO volatility relative to other IPOs due to increased monitoring, lower signal attenuation, and positive feedback with existing investor buy ins, respectively. Results indicate the percentage of PIPO investment compared to total equity at IPO is negatively associated with underpricing, thus suggesting PIPOs decrease information asymmetry. However, the longer the amount of time between the last PIPO and the IPO and the total number of PIPOs are positively related to underpricing

On the pricing, wealth effects and return of private market debt

The essays collected in this PhD thesis concern the pricing, wealth effects and return of private market debt, which has grown tremendously over the last two decades. Increasingly, companies are seeking flexible terms of private funding rather than capital from public capital markets. The first essay shows how private placement bonds are priced and provides evidence how the use of covenants affects the cost of capital. The second essay examines how the use of restrictive covenants impacts shareholder wealth ex ante and in the context of issuing privately placed bonds. The third essay investigates the risk and return of private debt funds and their persistence across subsequent funds of a partnership

Long term portfolio construction

Financial analyst commonly advice individual investors with a long investment horizon to invest in portfolios comprised more of equities. This advice is usually coupled with the practice of shifting the investor's portfolio from risky asset holdings towards bonds and cash as the investor's target date gets closer. This view rests on the notion that equities tend to be less risky over the long horizon and that stock returns exhibit mean reversion overtime. The purpose of this dissertation is to find the optimal asset allocation over various investment horizons; and investigate how the optimal asset allocation changes over the long investment horizon. The study uses data from South Africa's financial market covering the period December 2001 to December 2014. The mean - variance framework generated the optimal asset allocation over 12 investment horizons. The study finds that, over 90 percent of the portfolio should be vested into fixed - income South African bonds, with little over 5 percent equities allocation, over longer investment periods. In addition, the study found evidence of time diversification on the JSE all shares index and the presence of mean reversion properties for the all s hares index. With these conclusions, implications and recommendations are suggeste

Analysis of investment strategies: a new look at investment returns

Chapter 1: Intuition suggests that constraint investment strategies will result in losses due to a limited portfolio allocation. Yet prior research has shown that this is not the case for a particular set of constraint mutual funds so-called Socially Responsible Investing, SRI. In this paper I show that such assets do face loses to portfolio efficiency due to their limited asset universe. I contribute to the literature by employing two techniques to estimate asset performance. First, I estimate a DEA based efficiency score that allows for direct comparison between ex-post efficiency rankings and test the ex-ante relevance of such scores by including them into asset pricing models. Second, I further check if these results are consistent when comparing the performance of ethical funds based on the alphas of traditional asset pricing models even after adjusting for coskewness risk. Overall, the results suggest that ethical funds underperform traditional unconstraint investment assets. Chapter 2: Starting after the turn of the millennium, inflation has been persistently higher than the short term T-Bill rate. Following the traditional view, this will imply a negative real rates of return that have become commonplace in the US economy. This paper examines the possibility that if an inflation risk discount contained in nominal rates exist and can explain low or negative real rates, using consumption based asset pricing model. Evidence suggests using the traditional Fisher equation to calculate real rates leads to an overestimate of real rates due to a modest inflation risk premium. To achieve non-negative real rates in a consumption based asset pricing framework the covariance between consumption growth and inflation innovations would have to be at least thirty times larger than empirically found, and in opposite direction, for the Post-Volker era. Still, though the after 2000’s covariance is positive, which suggest a discount on risk free, the magnitude is still too small to explain negativity of real rates. JEL Classification : E21, E31 Key Words : Mutual Funds, Performance, Data Envelop Analysis, Coskewness, Risk Factors, Real Returns, Consumption Bases Asset Pricing Models, Inflatio

Essays on the Roles of Employee Representatives on the Board in Corporate Policy-Making

This dissertation consists of four chapters, investigating the roles of employee representatives on the board in corporate policies in a sample of European countries. I examine the role of employee representatives on the board in firms’ merger and acquisition intensity and performance. In addition, I study the value-creating roles of these directors. In particular, I study the effects of employee representative directors on the firms’ pay gap between the CEO and average employees. In chapter Ι, I describe the background on the idea behind the presence of employee representatives and how the laws mandating this presence have changed in Europe. In chapter II, I examine how, in European countries, the presence of employee-elected directors affects firms’ acquisitions. I find that firms with employee representatives on the board engage in fewer acquisitions. Moreover, acquiring firms with these directors exhibit higher announcement returns and higher post-merger productivity than those firms without. Subsample analyses show that this acquisition effect is more pronounced in firms with more severe agency conflicts, in high coordination industries, and in countries with less legal provisions supporting employee rights. Overall, my results suggest that employee representation on the board enhances shareholders’ wealth by curbing a firm’s excessive risk-taking behavior. In chapter ΙΙI, I employ a sample consists of firms in 15 European countries between 2000 and 2014 and examine the effect of employee representatives on the pay gap between top manager and average employees. I find that the presence of employee representatives on the board is associated with lower pay gap by refraining from overcompensating CEOs. Sub-sample analyses indicate that the diminishing effect is stronger for firms exposed to more agency problems. Further, this effect is more pronounced when the employee directors have more power in the board as they are more socially connected, have longer tenure, and more influence in CEO pay setting by serving on a compensation committee. Overall, my results highlight the value enhancing role of the employee directors by turning the compensation in firms into a more fair setting. In chapter ΙV, I summarize the findings of my dissertation and provide concluding remarks

Capital structure in Saudi Arabian listed and unlisted companies

Although there have been many prior studies of the determinants of capital structure, most have investigated listed companies in countries with well-developed markets and institutions. The main objective of the present study is to extend prior research by investigating both listed and unlisted companies in Saudi Arabia where many cultural and institutional features may have an impact on financing decisions in a different manner to ‘developed’ countries. A further contribution is the application of a systematic statistical approach, using meta-analysis, to summarise the many prior empirical studies. The empirical part of the study investigates 60 listed and 403 unlisted firms over the period 2000-2004 using several regression-based archival techniques including panel data analysis. Robustness checks are carried out to investigate the potential impact of the different methods and alternative measurement proxies. The results show that, in general, companies in Saudi Arabia have substantially lower levels of debt than in many other countries. This finding is related to the very low tax regime and other environmental characteristics. Unlisted firms have more short-term debt but less long-term debt than listed firms, as found in other countries. Despite the profound institutional differences, several firm-specific factors (such as firm size, asset tangibility, profitability, and liquidity) are found to have similar impacts on capital structure decisions in Saudi Arabia as they have in prior research. However, the impact of some factors is different, most likely reflecting lower levels of agency costs in the Saudi Arabian institutional environment