Business Commons^™

Being Watched In An Investment Game Setting: Behavioral Changes When Making Risky Decisions, Z. Tingting Jia, Matthew J. Mcmahon

Economics & Finance Faculty Publications

We design a laboratory experiment to test for behavioral differences due to observation within a novel arena: investment games. We find that fund managers are more risk-averse when investors can observe their investment allocations. This effect is more pronounced when investors, in addition to observing the allocations, can also observe the investment outcomes. Interestingly, allowing investors to observe how their investment is allocated does not impact how much they invest. Last, when the outcome of the risky investment is public knowledge, disclosing managers’ allocations leads them to return more tokens to investors and to expropriate fewer tokens for themselves at …

The Expectation Differences Among Stakeholders In The Financial Valuation Fitness Of Auditors, James Digabriele

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to investigate if there is an expectation gap among accounting academics, accounting practitioners, and users of financial statements in the financial valuation fitness of auditors. Complex reporting standards and current market expectations have the potential to create differences between what third-party users consider to be the responsibilities of the auditor and what auditors believe to be their responsibilities in auditing fair value estimates. Design/methodology/approach-This study surveys the perceptions of accounting academics, accounting practitioners, and users of financial statements and the degree to which an expectation gap exists in the financial valuation fitness of auditors. …

Board Diversity, Firm Risk, And Corporate Policies, Gennaro Bernile, Vineet Bhagwat, Scott Yonker

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine the effects of diversity in the board of directors on corporate policies and risk. Using a multi-dimensional measure, we find that greater board diversity leads to lower volatility and better performance. The lower risk levels are largely due to diverse boards adopting more persistent and less risky financial policies. However, consistent with diversity fostering more efficient (real) risk-taking, firms with greater board diversity also invest persistently more in R&D and have more efficient innovation processes. Instrumental variable tests that exploit exogenous variation in firm access to the supply of diverse nonlocal directors indicate that these relations are causal.

Incentivizing Credit Rating Agencies Under The Issuer Pay Model Through A Mandatory Compensation Competition, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

Credit rating agencies are important institutions of the global capital markets. If they had performed properly, the financial crisis of 2008-2009 would not have occurred. This article offers the simplest fix proposed thus far, and it is contrarian. This Article accepts the central role of rating agencies in the regulation of bond investments, the realities of a duopoly, and the issuer-pay model of compensation. The status quo is the baseline. The role of regulation should be to create the conditions necessary to induce competition. This article proposes that a small, recurring portion of revenue earned by the largest rating agencies …

Making Sense Of The New Financial Deal, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, I assess the enactment and implications of the Dodd-Frank Act, Congress’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. To set the stage, I begin by very briefly reviewing the causes of the crisis. I then argue that the legislation has two very clear objectives. The first is to limit the risk of the shadow banking system by more carefully regulating the key instruments and institutions of contemporary finance. The second objective is to limit the damage in the event one of these giant institutions fails. While the new regulation of the instruments of contemporary finance—including clearing and exchange …

Inside-Out Corporate Governance, David A. Skeel Jr., Vijit Chahar, Alexander Clark, Mia Howard, Bijun Huang, Federico Lasconi, A.G. Leventhal, Matthew Makover, Randi Milgrim, David Payne, Romy Rahme, Nikki Sachdeva, Zachary Scott

All Faculty Scholarship

Until late in the twentieth century, internal corporate governance—that is, decision making by the principal constituencies of the firm—was clearly distinct from outside oversight by regulators, auditors and credit rating agencies, and markets. With the 1980s takeover wave and hedge funds’ and equity funds’ more recent involvement in corporate governance, the distinction between inside and outside governance has eroded. The tools of inside governance are now routinely employed by governance outsiders, intertwining the two traditional modes of governance. We argue in this Article that the shift has created a new governance paradigm, which we call inside-out corporate governance.

Using the …

Investing In Hedge Funds: Risks, Returns And Performance Measurement, Francis Koh, Winston T. H. Koh, David K. C. Lee, Kok Fai Phoon

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Hedge funds are collective investment vehicles that are often established with a special legal status that allows their investment managers a free hand to use derivatives, short sell, and exploit leverage to raise returns and cushion risk. We review various issues relating to the investment in hedge funds, which have become popular with high net-worth individuals and institutional investors, as well as discuss their empirical risk and return profiles. The concerns regarding the empirical measurements are highlighted, and meaningful analytical methods are proposed to provide greater risk transparency in performance reporting. We also discuss the development of the hedge fund …

Rapid Calculation Of The Price Of Guaranteed Minimum Death Benefit Ratchet Options Embedded In Annuities, Eric R. Ulm

Journal of Actuarial Practice (1993-2006)

This paper presents a new method of obtaining quick and accurate values and deltas for discrete look back options using Taylor series expansions. This method is applied to the case of ratchet guaranteed minimum death benefits attached to annuity contracts, and the method is extended to include annuities where a fixed fund is attached to the variable account. Finally, both the speed and the accuracy of the method are compared to Monte Carlo simulation and the exact analytic solution. The Taylor expansion method is shown to be faster and, in most cases, more accurate than the alternative methods.

Is The Term Premium A Risk Premium?, Louis H. Ederington, Jeremy C. Goh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper explores whether excess holding period returns on long vis-a-vis short-term securities behave in a manner that is consistent with (1) market efficiency, (2) the time-varying-term-premium variant of the expectations hypothesis, and (3) theories of the term premium that view it as a reward for risk bearing. Both traditional and modern theories of the term premium imply that it should evolve fairly slowly over time as attitudes toward risk and/or perceived covariances with wealth or consumption change. This implies that this period's term premium should have some predictive ability for next period's. However, we find that this quarter's ex-post …

Determination Of Optimal Premiums As A Constrained Optimization Problem, Farrokh Guiahi

Journal of Actuarial Practice (1993-2006)

A simple stochastic model of an insurer's underwriting and related investment operations is used to determine the optimal amounts of written premiums for one period for the insurer's book of business. The written premium for each class is determined by the solution of a constrained optimization problem. The insurer's objective function is the expected profit on a book of business over the period. The insurer has a safety constraint where a certain portion of capital and surplus can be depleted with a small probability. This paper provides an explicit solution for optimum expected profit and corresponding written premiums by classes. …

Dynamic Immunization And Transaction Costs With Different Term Structure Models, Eliseo Navarro, Juan M. Nave

Journal of Actuarial Practice (1993-2006)

A bond portfolio selection model is developed in a dynamic framework using different term structures, but without transactions costs. We show that the optimal portfolios are consistent with Khang's dynamic immunization theorem, i.e., the optimal path consists of making portfolio duration equal to the investor's horizon planning period. The model is then extended to include transaction costs. The resulting optimal portfolios are no longer consistent with Khang's dynamic immunization theorem. In fact, the strategy for constructing the optimal portfolio consists of initially choosing a portfolio with a duration that is smaller than the horizon planning period.

Asset Allocation In Investing To Meet Liabilities, Anthony Dardis, Vinh Loi Huynh

Journal of Actuarial Practice (1993-2006)

We present some rudimentary concepts on asset/liability management and describe an approach to asset allocation modeling for institutions that invest to meet liabilities. The traditional risk/reward framework of financial economics is used as a starting pOint. The definitions of risk and reward are then refined with regard to the institution under consideration. A simple model of a U.S. life office is examined. We assume that the only investments available are domestic stocks and long-dated government bonds. Stochastic simulation is used to create a large number of future investment scenarios using historical total return data for these asset classes. The ability …

Actuarial Conservatism: Not In Public Sector Defined Benefit Pension Plans, Brian A. Jones

Journal of Actuarial Practice (1993-2006)

Most actuaries tend to be conservative, and most, including this writer, probably would be happy to be so categorized. But actuarial conservatism may not be the best rule in defined benefit public sector pension plans. This paper argues that it is not appropriate for actuaries to employ conservatism assumptions in such public sector plans.

A Critique Of Defined Contribution Plans Using A Simulation Approach, David M. Knox

Journal of Actuarial Practice (1993-2006)

During the 1980s there was a trend in many countries away from defined benefit plans toward defined contribution plans. This development means that the individual member bears the full investment risk in the preretirement period and the annuity rate risk at retirement, as no pension benefit (expressed as a percentage of salary) is provided. This paper, through the use of a stochastic model for both inflation and a range of investment returns, analyses the distribution of retirement incomes that will be produced from a defined contribution plan. The impacts of changing entry and exit ages, different investment strategies, alternative career …