Assessing Co-ordinated Asian Exchange Rate Regimes

This study assesses alternative Asian exchange rate regimes and finds short- and long-run currency dynamics more conducive to the possibility of introducing a common peg based on a basket of the European euro, the United States dollar and the Japanese yen than the alternative of re-introducing a United States dollar peg exchange rate regime. Exchange rate systems of 3- 4- and 5- Asian currencies are examined and the dynamics in a set of 4 European currencies prior to the introduction of the Euro provides benchmark evidence. The evidence for an Asian basket peg regime is strengthened when, unlike in prior studies, the long-run parameters are estimated while accounting for generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity effects.Exchange Rate Regimes, Asia, Currency Pegs, Basket Exchange Rates

Law enforcement spillover effects in the financial sector.

Recipient firms but also comparable peer firms exhibit asizeable negative capital market reaction to UnitedKingdom's regulatory enforcement actions. This result isinvariant to the identification of peer firms as belongingto the same industry classification or as having com-parable propensity scores to attract a sanction. Indis-criminate regulatory contagion, however, is ruled out.As per expectation, enforcement actions which piercethe‘corporate veil’, that is, target an individual within afirm, are related to no significant firm‐level market re-actions. These findings, in the financial sector, indicatethat sanctions are associated with a material spillovereffect consistent with informed regulatory contagion

Cash dividends and investor protection in Asia

We study the importance of investor rights in payout policy determination in Asia, using a sample of up to 52,778 firm years. The listed Asian firms located in relatively high investor protection, common law countries, have a greater tendency to payout and, if they do so, they tend to pay out more. We also examine the importance of distinctive creditor and minority shareholder rights in respect to payout policy determination. In our study of a variety of payout events (decisions to pay out, to initiate or omit payout and to markedly increase or decrease payout), we show that this set of payout events is principally determined by competing creditor and minority shareholder rights, rather than managerial sought reputation related effects, to diminish the cost of capital. Our findings indicate that creditors exert significant and far reaching influence over corporate payout policy decision-making, however, the importance of the agency costs of equity predominates

Countering racial discrimination in algorithmic lending: A case for model-agnostic interpretation methods

In respect to racial discrimination in lending, we introduce global Shapley value and Shapley–Lorenz explainable AI methods to attain algorithmic justice. Using 157,269 loan applications during 2017 in New York, we confirm that these methods, consistent with the parameters of a logistic regression model, reveal prima facie evidence of racial discrimination. We show, critically, that these explainable AI methods can enable a financial institution to select an opaque creditworthiness model which blends out-of-sample performance with ethical considerations

Flexible firm-level dividends in Latin America

We show, for a sample of up to 757 industrial firms, in seven Latin American countries from 1994–2014, that these firms exhibit comparatively flexible payout behavior. Flexibility is defined in respect to (i) variability in firm payout status and amounts and (ii) parameters of the Lambrecht-Myers (2012) theory on the Lintner (1956) dividend equation. The results indicate that Latin American firms have higher speeds of adjustment and target payout ratios as well as lower rates of habit formation than found in the payout policies of United States firms. This note, thus, highlights an open question regarding conspicuously flexible payout policies in Latin American firms

Does the information content of payout initiations and omissions influence firm risks?

We study the influence on firm risks of NASDAQ and NYSE firm payout initiations and omissions. These payout events can be interpreted as managerial signals of firm financial life-cycle maturation resulting in concomitant changes in firm risks. We remove confounding payout types and we match on the propensity to initiate or omit informed by determinants of payout known to investors in advance. For payout event and matched firms, we apply the difference-in-differences method to estimate the effect of the information content of actual initiations and omissions on firm risks. We find consistent significant declines in total, aggregate systematic, and idiosyncratic firm risks after cash dividend initiations and increases after dividend omissions, but only incidentally after share repurchase initiations and omissions

A semantic rule based digital fraud detection

Digital fraud has immensely affected ordinary consumers and the finance industry. Our dependence on internet banking has made digital fraud a substantial problem. Financial institutions across the globe are trying to improve their digital fraud detection and deterrence capabilities. Fraud detection is a reactive process, and it usually incurs a cost to save the system from an ongoing malicious activity. Fraud deterrence is the capability of a system to withstand any fraudulent attempts. Fraud deterrence is a challenging task and researchers across the globe are proposing new solutions to improve deterrence capabilities. In this work, we focus on the very important problem of fraud deterrence. Our proposed work uses an Intimation Rule Based (IRB) alert generation algorithm. These IRB alerts are classified based on severity levels. Our proposed solution uses a richer domain knowledge base and rule-based reasoning. In this work, we propose an ontology-based financial fraud detection and deterrence model

Flexible firm-level dividends in Latin America

We show, for a sample of up to 757 industrial firms, in seven Latin American countries from 1994–2014, that these firms exhibit comparatively flexible payout behavior. Flexibility is defined in respect to (i) variability in firm payout status and amounts and (ii) parameters of the Lambrecht-Myers (2012) theory on the Lintner (1956) dividend equation. The results indicate that Latin American firms have higher speeds of adjustment and target payout ratios as well as lower rates of habit formation than found in the payout policies of United States firms. This note, thus, highlights an open question regarding conspicuously flexible payout policies in Latin American firms

The global preference for dividends in declining markets

Investors globally prefer dividend‐paying stocks over nondividend‐paying stocks more in declining than in advancing markets, even accounting for firm‐level growth opportunities, size and risk effects. Dividend‐paying stocks outperform nondividend‐paying stocks, from 0.63% (China) to 3.79% (Canada) more per month in declining than in advancing markets. In declining markets, dividend‐paying firms outperform by more than any underperformance in advancing markets. The results are robust across dividend taxation regimes, legal environments, emerging and developed markets, periods prior to and after the 2008 global financial crisis, the exclusion of the dividend declaration month and in respect to segmented or integrated international capital markets