Frans de Roon, E. Eiling, Pierre Hillion, Bruno Gerard
{"title":"International Portfolio Diversification: Currency, Industry and Country Effects Revisited","authors":"Frans de Roon, E. Eiling, Pierre Hillion, Bruno Gerard","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.302353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.302353","url":null,"abstract":"We examine the relative importance of country, industry, world market and currency risk factors for international stock returns. Our approach focuses on testing the mean-variance efficiency of the various factor portfolios. An unconditional analysis does not show significant differences between country, industry and world portfolios, nor any role for currency risk factors. However, when we allow expected returns, volatilities and correlations to vary over time, we find that equity returns are mainly driven by global industry and currency risk factors. We propose a novel test to evaluate the relative benefits of alternative investment strategies and find that including currencies is critical to take full advantage of the diversification benefits afforded by international markets.","PeriodicalId":172053,"journal":{"name":"EFA 2002 Berlin Meetings Presentation Papers (Archive)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131159769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impact of the Introduction of the Euro on Foreign Exchange Rate Risk Exposures","authors":"Söhnke M. Bartram, G. Karolyi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.299641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.299641","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper tests whether significant changes in stock return volatility, market risk, and foreign exchange rate risk exposures took place around the launch of the Euro in 1999. The experiment analyzes weekly returns for 3220 nonfinancial firms from 18 European countries, the United States, and Japan. We find that though the Euro's launch was associated with an increase in total stock return volatility, significant reductions in market risk exposures arose for nonfinancial firms both in and outside of Europe. We show that the reductions in market risk were concentrated in firms domiciled in the Euro area and in non-Euro firms with a high fraction of foreign sales or assets in Europe. The Euro's introduction led to a net absolute decrease in the foreign exchange rate exposure of nonfinancial firms, but these changes are statistically and economically small. We interpret our findings in the context of existing theories of exchange rate risk management.","PeriodicalId":172053,"journal":{"name":"EFA 2002 Berlin Meetings Presentation Papers (Archive)","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115099153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corporate Cash Holdings: An Empirical Investigation of UK Companies","authors":"Aydin Ozkan, Neslihan Ozkan","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.302313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.302313","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the empirical determinants of corporate cash holdings for a sample of UK firms over the period 1984-1999. We present evidence of the significant relation between managerial ownership and cash holdings. The results also suggest that the way in which managerial ownership exerts influence on cash holding decisions differs between firms with ultimate controllers and those that are widely-held. The results reveal that growth options of firms, cash flows, liquid assets, leverage and bank debt are important in determining cash holdings. In contrast, there is much less evidence that larger firms hold less cash. Our analysis also suggests that unobserved firm heterogeneity and endogeneity are crucial in analysing the cash structure of firms.","PeriodicalId":172053,"journal":{"name":"EFA 2002 Berlin Meetings Presentation Papers (Archive)","volume":"287 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114262649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modelling the Implied Probability of Stock Market Declines","authors":"Ernst Glatzer, Martin Scheicher","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.300199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.300199","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we study risk-neutral densities (RNDs) for the German stock market. The use of option prices allows us to quantify the risk-neutral probabilities of various levels of the DAX index. For the period from December 1995 to November 2001, we implement the mixture of log-normals and a volatility-smoothing method. We discuss the time series behaviour of the moments of the two models and we examine linkages of the moments to macroeconomic variables, the US stock markets and credit risk. We find that the risk-neutral densities exhibit pronounced negative skewness. The spline and mixture models produce a similar shape for the entire density, but their pricing performance differs. Finally, we observe a significant volatility spillover effect, as the implied volatility and kurtosis of the DAX RND are mostly driven by the volatility of US stock prices.","PeriodicalId":172053,"journal":{"name":"EFA 2002 Berlin Meetings Presentation Papers (Archive)","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131738839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Managerial Labour Market and the Governance Role of Shareholder Control Structures in the UK","authors":"G. Trojanowski, L. Renneboog","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.302308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.302308","url":null,"abstract":"We simultaneously analyze two mechanisms of the managerial labor market: CEO turnover and monetary remuneration schemes.Sample selection models and hazard analyses applied to a random sample of 250 firms listed on the London Stock Exchange over a six-year pre-Cadbury period show that managerial remuneration and the termination of labor contracts play an important role in mitigating agency problems between managers and shareholders.We find that both the CEO's industry-adjusted monetary compensation and their replacement are strongly performance-sensitive.Top executive turnover is shown to serve as a disciplinary mechanism for corporate underperformance, whereas the level of monetary compensation rewards good performance.We also investigate whether specific corporate governance mechanisms (different types of blockholders or of boards of directors) have an impact on managerial disciplining or on the pay-for-performance contracts.There is little evidence of outside shareholder monitoring and CEOs with strong voting power successfully resisting replacement irrespective of corporate performance.This case of strong managerial entrenchment is even exacerbated when the CEO also holds the position of chairman of the board.In firms with large outside shareholdings, CEO compensation is lower, but outside shareholder do not impose a stricter performance-related incentive remuneration scheme.When insiders have strong voting power, the CEOs remuneration is lower except when the stock price performance is poor: it seems that when the CEOs wealth resulting from their investment goes down due to decreasing stock prices, the CEOs cash compensation is higher.The presence of a remuneration committee has no impact on remuneration.Finally, we find strong support for the incentive effect-hypothesis of remuneration: CEOs with higher levels of monetary compensation attain better subsequent accounting and stock price-based measures of corporate performance.","PeriodicalId":172053,"journal":{"name":"EFA 2002 Berlin Meetings Presentation Papers (Archive)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124351301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Are Two Investors Better than One?","authors":"A. Menichini, P. Simmons","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.302140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.302140","url":null,"abstract":"This paper compares the optimal investor repayment contracts of a firm which has private information over its expost revenues when the finance can be provided by a single or by two investors (say a big shareholder and a group of small dispersed shareholders). Costly monitoring can be carried out by those investors who have a larger stake into the contract. When they are the only investors we use the Khalil-Parigi financial contract with non-contractible monitoring, in which the probabilities of cheating by the firm and monitoring by investors are mutual best responses. The contract is written by the firm knowing that this equilibrium will subsequently occur. With a second group of investors who have no monitoring rights, cheating and monitoring probabilities are chosen in a similar way. The small shareholders learn the results of any monitoring for free. A main result is that without commitment there is a negative correlation between repayments to the two investor groups: the contract uses the small group to smooth out the repayments of the firm optimally. This reduces the incentive for the firm to make false reports and mitigates the investor's incentive to monitor. A second result is that the two investor scenario is Pareto superior to the single investor model. A third result is that the possible extent of this smoothing depends on whether the investors have limited liability; it is found that in some circumstances investors should make repayments to the firm rather than receive them.","PeriodicalId":172053,"journal":{"name":"EFA 2002 Berlin Meetings Presentation Papers (Archive)","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117045604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Capital Structure and Real Assets: Effects of an Implicit Collateral to Debt Holders","authors":"Christian Riis Flor","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.302314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.302314","url":null,"abstract":"This paper analyzes how real assets implicitly provide a collateral for debt when an initially profitable production becomes relatively non-profitable in a structural model framework. Ex ante, the implicit collateral will benefit the firm owners because the tax shield can be better exploited. Results indicate that the firm value can increase by 40-50% and the par yield may decrease about 200 bps. The possibility to sell the assets extends the equity holders' strategy space: entering a renegotiation process with the debt holders may lead to either a restructuring of the firm's capital or an asset sale. The model further provides an argument for why Internet firms lose value fast when the initial production fails to be profitable.","PeriodicalId":172053,"journal":{"name":"EFA 2002 Berlin Meetings Presentation Papers (Archive)","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123167410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Structural Models of Corporate Bond Pricing: An Empirical Analysis","authors":"Y. Eom, Jing-Zhi Huang, Jean Helwege","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.302681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.302681","url":null,"abstract":"This paper empirically tests five structural models of corporate bond pricing: Those of Merton (1974), Geske (1977), Leland and Toft (1996), Longstaff and Schwartz (1995), and Collin-Dufresne and Goldstein (2001). We implement the models using a sample of 182 bond prices from firms with simple capital structures during the period 1986-1997. The conventional wisdom is that structural models do not generate spreads as high as those seen in the bond market, and true to expectations we find that the predicted spreads in our implementation of the Merton model are too low. The compound option approach of Geske comes much closer to the spreads observed in the market, on average, but still underpredicts spreads. In contrast, the Leland and Toft model substantially overestimates credit risk on most bonds, and especially so for high coupon bonds. The Longstaff and Schwartz model modifies Merton to incorporate a stochastic interest rate and a correlation between interest rates and firm value. While the correlation and the level of interest rates have little effect, higher interest rate volatility leads to higher predicted spreads. However, this and other features of this model result in spreads that are often too high for risky bonds and too low for safe bonds. The target leverage ratio model of Collin-Dufresne and Goldstein helps to raise the spreads on the bonds that were considered very safe by the Longstaff and Schwartz model, but overall tends toward overestimation of credit risk. We conclude that structural models do not systematically underpredict spreads, as the previous literature implies, but accuracy is a problem. Moreover, some of the simplifications made to date lead to overestimation of credit risk on the riskier bonds while scarcely affecting the spreads of the safest bonds.","PeriodicalId":172053,"journal":{"name":"EFA 2002 Berlin Meetings Presentation Papers (Archive)","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131752257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Classical Corporation Tax as a Global Means of Tax Harmonization","authors":"Seppo Kari, J. Ylä-Liedenpohja","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.301501","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.301501","url":null,"abstract":"Classical corporation tax entails double taxation of corporate income. The alternative practice to impute corporation tax to the domestic recipients of dividends is shown, in the case of a company with international owners, effectively to convert the imputation system back to a classical corporation tax. It also requires complex rules for exempting flow-through dividends from equalization tax to avoid the cumulation of corporation tax internationally. In contrast, classical corporation tax maintains its simplicity and can be designed so as to be neutral in respect of the financing and dividend decisions of multinationals, by adopting double taxation of interest income. Broad tax bases, flat-rate taxes on personal income from capital, and low statutory tax rates are advocated as general policy.","PeriodicalId":172053,"journal":{"name":"EFA 2002 Berlin Meetings Presentation Papers (Archive)","volume":"159 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121974154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comparing Risk-Neutral Probability Density Functions Implied by Option Prices - Market Uncertainty and Ecb-Council Meetings","authors":"Martin Mandler","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.298779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.298779","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years different techniques to uncover the information on market expectations implicit in option prices have been developed. This paper proposes an approach to highlight statistically significant changes in risk-neutral probability density functions by comparing the distributional characteristics of statistics derived from risk-neutral densities to those of a benchmark sample. In an application we extract risk-neutral probability density functions from LIFFE-Euribor futures options and look for characteristic differences in market expectations related to meetings of the Governing Council of the ECB.","PeriodicalId":172053,"journal":{"name":"EFA 2002 Berlin Meetings Presentation Papers (Archive)","volume":"26 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113993354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}