Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Hedging And Pricing Rent Risk With Search Frictions, Briana Chang, Hyunsoo Choi, Harrison Hong, Jeffrey Kubik

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The desire of risk-averse households to hedge rent risk is thought to increase home ownership and prices. While evidence for the ownership implication is compelling, support for the price effect is mixed. We show that an important reason is search frictions. Rent risk reduces outside options, leading to less-picky buyers and worse home/buyer matches. This attenuates the rise in the price-to-rent ratio that would otherwise occur without frictions. Consistent with our model, a house remains on the market for fewer days when rent risk is higher. Accounting for frictions significantly increases the effect of rent risk on home prices.

Two Essays On Forced Ceo Turnover During Envy Merger Waves, And Dividends, Bader Almuhtadi

Finance Theses & Dissertations

Scholars have provided different theories that aim to explain merger waves throughout the years. However, a recent stream of the finance literature addresses the behavioral aspect behind mergers waves and imply that envy motivated CEOs tend to create merger waves. On the other hand, the decision to oust a CEO is considered one of the most important corporate decisions made in the lifetime of corporations. In Essay 1, we participate into the study stream by focusing on whether the incident of forced CEO turnover is higher during the late stages of merger waves where envy turns out to be more …

Three Essays On Mutual Funds, Fund Management Skills, And Investor Sentiment, Feng Dong

Finance Theses & Dissertations

The mutual fund research focus has switched from whether average active fund managers have fund management skill to whether a subset of active fund managers have skills that produce investor benefits. In this dissertation we participate into the study stream by investigating the relation between managerial skills possessed by mutual fund managers and fund performance.

Essay 1 focuses on whether investor sentiment affects the performance of skilled mutual fund managers. Stocks during periods of high investor sentiment are more likely to have noise, while during low investor sentiment periods stocks are more likely to trade close to their fundamental values. …

Blockholder Characteristics And Earnings Quality, Aslihan G. Korkmaz, Qingzhong Ma, Haigang Zhou

Business Faculty Publications

This study focuses on the impact of blockholder characteristics on earnings quality. Most of the studies in
literature make the implicit assumption that blockholders are a homogeneous group. This study is one of
few studies that acknowledges the heterogeneity of blockholders and attempts to understand the
unexplained proportion of blockholder heterogeneity. Earnings quality is calculated using the modified
Dechow and Dichev (2002) model with fixed effects (FDD model) by Lee and Masulis (2009), and it is
regressed on various blockholder characteristics. The results show that earnings quality is lower for
firms with market-driven and multilateral blockholders.

Identification Of Key Drivers For Municipal Utility Performance, Jasmin Alsaied

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

This report explores the various performance indicators for municipal electric utilities and the greatest impact financial investments can make for improving these indicators. A literature search provided key detail about performing an analysis that would prove useful to utilities. The analysis identifies key performance indicators that allowed for the most prudent of investments. Data mining techniques and statistical analyses were performed on data sets concerning the 51 North Carolina municipal electric utilities to identify several key ratios and performance indicators that have the greatest impact on cost of service, system reliability, and customer satisfaction. Statistical analyses were used to determine …

Post-Jgtrra Dividend Planning, Danny A. Pannese, Paul N. Iannone

Danny Pannese

The JGTRRA reduced the tax rate on dividends for individuals and lowered the accumulated earnings and personal holding company taxes for corporations until 2008. This article reviews some of the planning techniques corporations and shareholders can use to take advantage of the temporarily lower rates. One of the key provisions of the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA), if not the prime emphasis of the legislation, is Section 302's reduction in the individual tax rate on corporate dividends received to 15% (5% for individuals in the 15% and 10% brackets). In an emerging trend, the lower …

Interpreting Financial Results, Bridget Lyons, Rupendra Paliwal, Danny A. Pannese

Danny Pannese

The article discusses three accounting changes issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FSAB). The Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) No. 158 "Employers' Accounting for Defined Benefit Pension and Other Retirement Plans" and the SFAS No. 160 "Noncontrolling Interests in Consolidated Financial Statements" are mentioned. Financial Interpretation 48 "Accounting for Uncertainty in Income Taxes, an Interpretation of FSAB Statement No. 109" is mentioned. The takeaway? Financial analysts, investors, and creditors need to carefully interpret ratios and measures, including debt to equity, liabilities to equity, and return on equity. Financial ratios used in loan covenants should be clearly designed and …

The Tension Between Monetary Policy And Financial Stability: Evidence From Agency Mortgage Reits, W. Scott Frame, Eva Steiner

Eva Steiner

The prolonged use of unconventional monetary policies since the financial crisis has resulted in concerns about the potential for such policy accommodation to undermine financial stability. Recent research identifying a “risk-taking channel” of monetary policy suggests that rapidly growing shadow banking organizations are of particular concern. In this paper, we study Agency mortgage REITs (Agency MREITs), which are specialized, tax-exempt financial institutions, whose rapid growth raised systemic risk concerns by the Financial Stability Oversight Council. After controlling for key variables that drive the Agency MREIT business (level, slope, and expected volatility of the term structure as well as the mortgage …

Fossil Fuel Asset Risk Analysis: Clark University Endowment, Travis A. Dodge, B. Maiwand Akbari

Student Works

The environmental and social risks of climate change are well known and perhaps inevitable. The economic and financial risks are less so. The many financial risks associated with climate change embedded in endowment portfolio fossil fuel holdings are leading many institutional stakeholders to enter into dialogue and take action. Divestment is emerging as an effective strategy for limiting portfolio exposure and tackling climate change itself.

Our team’s goals were to assess whether the Clark University endowment portfolio faces any of these risks and evaluate the impacts on asset values. Our findings show that the Clark endowment does face these same …

Reit Capital Structure: The Value Of Getting It Right, Eva Steiner

Eva Steiner

An analysis of the capital structure of commercial real estate investment trusts finds that the strongest REITs overall tend to employ lower leverage and longer debt maturity, maintain larger proportions of fixed-rate debt, rely less on secured debt, have a greater line of credit capacity but use it less, and hold smaller cash reserves. The REITs’ strength is measured by Tobin’s q, which expresses the ratio of the market value of assets relative to their book value. The study examines yearly data for the years 1993 through 2013 for 137 REITs based in the United States and the years 2001 …

P/E Ratios And Value Investor Attention, Jordan Moore

Rohrer College of Business Faculty Scholarship

Price-earnings (P/E) ratios, the most popular value proxy, are widely reported using the last four quarters of earnings. Corresponding earnings yields (4QEP) have significantly greater return predictability than lagged earnings yields or current book-to-market ratios. The weekly pattern in returns is consistent with individual investor trading activity. The return predictability is robust to fundamentals, price momentum, earnings momentum, volume, and liquidity. 4QEP relates positively to volume and liquidity and negatively to idiosyncratic volatility. Financial data providers only report P/E ratios for stocks with positive earnings; 4QEP only predicts returns, volume, and liquidity for these stocks.

The Impact Of Geographic And Cultural Dispersion On Information Opacity, George D. Cashman, David M. Harrison, Michael J. Seiler, Hainan Sheng

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

This paper investigates the influences of intrafirm geographic and cultural dispersion, the distance between the location of a firm’s investments and its headquarters, on the firm’s information environment. Specifically, using a sample of publicly traded real estate companies across the Asia-Pacific region, we examine how intrafirm geographic and cultural distance impacts a firm’s capital acquisition costs. As a consequence of both the heavily regulated operating environment faced by these firms, as well as the capital intensive nature of this industry, funding costs should be of pronounced importance to firms within this sector. Consistent with this paradigm, we find that firms …

Essays On Capital Structure And Public Debt Markets, Viktoriya Staneva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine capital structure determinants as well as the evolution of credit rating standards in the market for public debt.

Chapter 1 This chapter shows that firm fixed effects in panel leverage regressions act as a noisy proxy for managerial effects that drive persistence in leverage. Firms that do not change their CEO for prolonged periods of time are more likely to keep debt ratios within a narrow bandwidth and to display persistent differences in their time-series averages for up to 20 years. A CEO turnover is associated with considerable modifications to the financing …

Capital Expenditures, Asset Dispositions, And The Real Estate Cycle, Brent W. Ambrose, Eva Steiner

Eva Steiner

Recent empirical research provides evidence on the asset disposition choices of individual and institutional real estate investors that is consistent with the `disposition effect'. We propose a value-add investment strategy as an alternative rational explanation for the observed patterns in disposition choices. The main value-add mechanism in real estate investment is capital expenditures. However, capital expenditure investment is a real option whose exercise depends on its moneyness, which is a function of the economic environment. Therefore, we study the links between economic conditions, building-level capital expenditures, and subsequent transactions throughout the real estate cycle. We present empirical evidence consistent with …

Refocusing Through Discontinued Operations In Response To Acquisitions And Diversification, Richard Lord, Yoshie Saito

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We examine how prior acquisitions and the extent of corporate diversification affect decisions to discontinue operations. These choices comprise a very important class of publicly announced disposal decisions, and analyzing them allows us to utilize a much larger sample than most prior studies of divestitures. We employ a multinomial logistic regression setting to test our three hypotheses; this framework allows us to assess the difference in choices regarding positive- and negative-valued announcements of discontinued operations. We find that firms are less liable to report negative-valued divestitures in the year of an acquisition, and are more likely to discontinue operations, especially …

Essays In Corporate Cash Holdings, Chenxi Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

This dissertation addresses three topics in corporate cash holdings. The first paper provides a new determinant of cash holdings by examining the impact of earnings transparency on corporate cash holdings. Motivated by Barth et al. (2013), who show that firms with less earnings transparency tend to have higher cost of equity, this paper shows that the cross-section differences in earnings transparency cause variations in firm cash holdings because firms with less earnings transparency have more incentives to hold cash in order to avoid costly external financing. Using data of US firms from 1980 to 2013, it is found that earnings …

Financial Reporting And The Accounting Expectations Gap, James Mohs

Finance Faculty Publications

The overall goal of financial reporting is to provide high quality financial information regarding reporting entities that is useful for informed decision making. Considering most organizations have multiple groups of stakeholders which often have differing and competing informational needs, as well as expectations and desired outcomes, the accounting expectations gap has become a topic of current debate in many business circles. Historically, the accounting expectations gap has centered around the role of the auditor and audit responsibility. The financial accounting expectations gap encompasses what the preparers of the statements and auditors believe they should contain and includes what stakeholders believe …

Competing With Free: An Analysis Of The Effects Of Tennessee Promise On Freshman Enrollment In Four-Year Colleges And Universities, Vicki Clark

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

In 2014, Tennessee’s governor, Bill Haslam, introduced Tennessee Promise - legislation that enabled Tennessee high school and home school graduates to attend two years of tuition-free higher education at qualifying institutions. In the fall of 2015, Tennessee’s four-year colleges and universities experienced a significant decline in freshman enrollment. This quantitative descriptive study uses the theories of human capital, social capital, and marketing service theory to examine the impact of free tuition on the college choice. Four hundred twelve Tennessee Promise students answered survey questions, demonstrating the impact of Tennessee Promise funds on their decision to attend college and on the …

Essays On Investor Sentiment In Asset Pricing, Liya Chu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

The dissertation addresses three topics on investor sentiment in asset pricing.

The first essay investigates the impact of market sentiment on the recent debate on equity premium forecasting. Particularly, market sentiment may break the link between fundamental economic predictors and equity premium. We find that economic predictors tend to lose their power and various remedies proposed in recent studies, such as non-negativity constraints, no longer work during high sentiment periods. In contrast, economic predictors actually do have strong performances even without using any such remedies, as long as the sentiment stays low enough so as not to distort the link. …

Shades Of Darkness: A Pecking Order Of Trading Venues, Albert J. Menkveld, Bart Zhou Yueshen, Haoxiang Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We characterize the dynamic fragmentation of U.S. equity markets using a unique data set that disaggregates dark transactions by venue types. The "pecking order" hypothesis of trading venues states that investors "sort" various venue types, putting low-cost-low-immediacy venues on top and high-cost-high-immediacy venues at the bottom. Hence, midpoint dark pools on top, non-midpoint dark pools in the middle, and lit markets at the bottom. As predicted, following VIX shocks, macroeconomic news, and firms' earnings surprises, changes in venue market shares become progressively more positive (or less negative) down the pecking order. We further document heterogeneity across dark venue types and …