Corporate Finance Commons^™

The Effects Of Risk Management On Management Forecast Behavior, John L. Campbell, Sean Cao, Hye Sun Chang, Raluca Chiorean

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Prior research examines several reasons why managers voluntarily disclose information, but provides relatively little evidence as to whether day-to-day operational decisions influence a manager’s disclosure choice. In this study, we examine whether a particular operational activity – risk management through the use of derivatives – affects whether a manager decides to issue earnings forecasts. Using a large hand-collected sample of derivatives users and non-users, we find that derivatives users are more likely to issue earnings forecasts relative to non-users. We then find that this result is stronger when the use of derivatives makes it less costly for managers to issue …

Fss 2020 Financial Markets Programme: Progress So Far, Charles Ohamara

Bullion

The Financial System Strategy (FSS) 2020 is a national reform program aimed at developing and transforming Nigeria's financial sector into a growth catalyst to fast track the achievement of the Vision 20:2020 and engineer Nigeria's evolution into on International Financial Centre. The strategic objectives of FSS2020 are to strengthen and deepen the domestic financial markets, enhance the integration of domestic financial markets with the external financial markets and supporting the reals sector. To attain these objectives, the key regulators of the Nigerian financial system come together under the leadership of the Central Bank of Nigeria and crafted the vision to …

Essays On Capital Structure And Institutional Ownership, Yuan Feng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters about how institutional ownership and trading affect capital structure.

Chapter 1

The literature documents that firms issue equity following periods of high stock return and such behavior only occurs in concert with high returns that coincide with large amounts of buying by new institutions. My findings suggest this is also associated with strong institutional selling, the opposite of what one would expect. This positive relationship is not driven by outflow-motivated selling, but rather by informed selling by short-term institutions.

Chapter 2

I document a strong negative relationship between institutional ownership and leverage. I find …

Funding Science With Science (And, Admittedly, A Lot Of Math), John R. Ziegler, Dylan Hunzeker, Edward Lehner

Publications and Research

Scientific funding within the academy is an often complicated affair involving disparate and competing interests. Private universities, for instance, are vastly outpacing public institutions in garnering large, prestigious grants. Inequities also extend to the kinds of research funded, with government, corporate, and even military interests privileging certain types of inquiry.This work proposes an innovative type of research fund using cryptocurrencies, a fast growing asset class. Although not a total funding solution, staking coins, specifically, can be strategically invested in to yield compound interest. These coins use central hub technology to collateralise the network and speed transaction pace. Additionally. These staking …

Credit Risk And Corporate Governance, Olivier Mugisho Mudekereza

Theses and Dissertations

Is the executive’s compensation structure influenced by the credit rating assigned to his company? I analyze a panel of U.S. public firms using the random-effects and fixed-effects estimations. Compared to firms with lower credit risk, I find that firms facing higher probability of default provide more incentives for their CEOs.

Global Market Liquidity And Corporate Investments, Abdulrahman Alhassan

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay investigates how oil market factors impact on liquidity commonality in global equity markets. I identify two transmitting channels of the effect on liquidity commonality, namely oil price return and volatility. Using a sample of firms drawn from 50 countries spanning from Jan 1995 to Dec 2015, I find that both effects in oil explain the liquidity commonality in countries with higher integration to oil market. In addition, I show that oil volatility effect is more pronounced in net oil exporters compared to net oil importers after controlling for oil sensitivity. My …

Social Norms And Stock Trading, Asem Alhomaidi

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation consists of two essays. In the first essay we compare the performance of Islamic and conventional stock returns in Saudi Arabia in order to determine whether the Saudi market exhibits characteristics that are consistent with segmented markets and investor recognition effects. We sample the daily stock returns of all Saudi firms from September 2002 to 2015 and calculate important measures, including idiosyncratic volatility (Ang et al, 2006), market integration (Pukthuanthong and Roll, 2009), systematic turnover (Loughran and Schultz, 2005), and stock turnover and liquidity (Amihud, 2002). Integration tests report that Islamic stocks are more sensitive to changes in …

Dividend Policy In A Frontier Market And Sector Equity Traded Funds In The United States, Abdulrahman Alharbi

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In chapter 1, we examine the nature and scale of the relationship between returns on sector Equity Traded Funds (ETFs) and their volatility. We discuss the source and direction of the effect between returns and risk and whether behavioral biases are prominent among sector ETFs. The study has implications for financial sector practitioners and investors, as it provides more information about the risk in sector ETF and whether that risk differs from that of other investment instruments. To this end, we test three hypotheses based on the relevant literature on volatility and returns: the leverage effect hypothesis, feedback hypothesis, and …

2017 Q3 Private Capital Access Index Report, Craig R. Everett

Pepperdine Private Capital Access Report

The Pepperdine Private Capital Access Index (PCA) is a quarterly indicator produced by the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University, and with the support of Dun & Bradstreet. The index is designed to measure the demand for, activity, and health of the private capital markets. The purpose of the PCA Index is to gauge the demand of small and medium sized businesses for financing needs, the level of accessibility of private capital, and the transparency and efficiency of private financing markets.

Public Hedge Funds, Lin Sun, Song Wee Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Hedge funds managed by listed firms significantly underperform funds managed by unlisted firms. The underperformance is more severe for funds with low manager deltas, poor governance, and no manager co-investment, or managed by firms whose prices are sensitive to earnings news. Notwithstanding the underperformance, listed asset management firms raise more capital, by growing existing funds and launching new funds post listing, and harvest greater fee revenues than do comparable unlisted firms. The results are consistent with the view that, for asset management firms, going public weakens the alignment between ownership, control, and investment capital, thereby engendering conflicts of interest.

Ceo Political Ideology And Mergers And Acquisitions Decisions, Ahmed M. Elnahas, Kim Dongnyoung

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

We examine the relation between CEOs political ideology and their firms' investment decisions, particularly their M&A decisions. Employing individual financial contributions data for the period from 1993 to 2006, we find that firm's investment decisions vary with CEO's political ideology. Our evidence indicates that Republican CEOs are less likely to engage in M&A activities. When they do undertake acquisitions, they are more likely to use cash as the method of payment, and their targets are more likely to be public firms and to be from the same industry. Further, Republican CEOs tend to avoid high information asymmetry acquisitions that involve …

Public Hedge Funds, Lin Sun, Song Wee Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Hedge funds managed by listed firms significantly underperform funds managed by unlisted firms. The underperformance is more severe for funds with low manager deltas, poor governance, and no manager co-investment, or managed by firms whose prices are sensitive to earnings news. Notwithstanding the underperformance, listed asset management firms raise more capital, by growing existing funds and launching new funds post listing, and harvest greater fee revenues than do comparable unlisted firms. The results are consistent with the view that, for asset management firms, going public weakens the alignment between ownership, control, and investment capital, thereby engendering conflicts of interest.

Hedge Fund Performance And Derivative Hedging, Yongjia Li

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is comprised of three essays which focus on hedge fund performance and derivative hedging. The first essay uses ETF returns as proxies for tradable risk factors in hedge fund performance evaluation and identifies contemporaneously relevant risk factors from the entire universe of ETFs. The model provides more informative estimates of alpha and beta coefficients for predicting hedge fund out-of-sample performance compared with other widely used hedge fund factor models. Portfolios of top alpha hedge funds selected by the model generate statistically significant out-of-sample performance that is substantially higher compared with portfolios selected by other models. In addition, the …

Powerful Blockholders And Ceo Turnover, Chi Shen Wei, Lei Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We identify the power of institutional blockholders to influence management using previous occurrences of forced CEO turnover at other firms in the blockholders’ overall portfolio. We create a “powerful blockholder linkage” measure that strongly predicts future forced CEO turnover. These effects are larger when “powerful” blockholders are more motivated to monitor and when they have had valuable monitoring experience. Moreover, firms with powerful blockholders display higher CEO turnover-performance sensitivity, pursue more value-increasing mergers, and have higher firm value. Overall, our results suggest that an identifiable group of powerful blockholders play an important role in corporate governance.

Analyst Effort Allocation And Firms' Information Environment, Rong Wang, Jarrad Harford, Feng Jiang, Fei Xie

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that a firm’s information environment is significantly impacted by the characteristics of the other firms its analysts cover. Analysts strategically allocate effort among portfolio firms by devoting more effort to firms that are relatively more important for their career concerns. Specifically, controlling for analyst and firm characteristics, we find that within each analyst’s portfolio, firms ranked relatively higher based on market capitalization, trading volume, or institutional ownership receive more accurate, frequent, and informative earnings forecast revisions and stock recommendation changes that contain greater information content from that analyst. Firms’ relative rank across analysts varies widely, so this is …

Are Capital Market Anomalies Common To Equity And Corporate Bond Markets?, Tarun Chordia, Amit Goyal, Yoshio Nozowa, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Qing Tong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper studies whether the commonly analyzed equity return predictors also predict corporate bond returns. Bond markets do price risk, but are also susceptible to delayed information transmission relative to equities. Firm size and profitability are negatively priced while idiosyncratic volatility is positively priced, suggesting that large firms, more profitable firms and relatively less volatile firms are more attractive to bond investors, thus requiring lower returns. Consistent with a relatively sophisticated institutional clientele, bonds are efficiently priced in that none of the behaviorally-motivated variables provide profitable trading strategies after accounting for transactions costs, though some risk-based variables continue to do …

Numerical Methods For Option Pricing Under The Two-Factor Models, Jiacheng Cai

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Pricing options under multi-factor models are challenging and important problems for financial applications. In particular, the closed form solutions are not available for the American options and some European options, and the correlations between factors increase the complexity and difficulty for the formulations and implements of the numerical methods.

In this dissertation, we first introduce a general transformation to decouple correlated stochastic processes governed by a system of stochastic differential equations. Then we apply the transformation to the popular two-factor models: the two-asset model, the stochastic volatility model, and the stochastic interest rate models. Based on our new formulations, we …

Social Network Impact On Corporate Performance And Governance, Jonathan Chew Hoe Khoo

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Motivated by the centrality measures constructed in Larcker, So and Wang (2013), I affirm that board connectedness positively affect firm performance in Singapore, and even if we were to measure firm performance by Tobin's Q. The impact on firm performance persists over at least four years. Controlling for Corporate Governance using a proprietary database, the Singapore Corporate Governance Index, only the Eigenvector centrality under simple-weighted and hyperbolic-weighted projections survives the robustness test, suggesting that firstly, the local proxy of Corporate Governance based on OECD principles possibly controls for what is proxied by the Betweenness, Closeness and Degree centrality measures, and …

Do High Ceo Pay Ratios Destroy Firm Value?, Qiang Cheng, Tharindra Ranasinghe, Sha Zhao

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

There is growing public concern over the rapid growth in CEO pay relative to average worker pay (CEO pay ratio). Critics contend that high CEO pay ratios could destroy firm value by damaging employee morale and/or signal CEO rent extraction. In this paper, we use a proprietary dataset to examine the relationship between CEO pay ratio and firm value/performance. Contrary to critics’ arguments, we find that industry-adjusted CEO pay ratios are positively associated with both firm value and performance. We also find that high CEO pay ratios are associated with higher quality acquisitions and stronger CEO turnover-performance sensitivity. Our results …

Internal Audit And Financial Reporting Quality In The Public Sector, Steven M. Desimone

Economics Department Working Papers

Using a unique set of hand-collected data, this study investigates the association of (1) the presence of an Internal Audit Function (IAF) and (2) the use of quality assurance programs for the IAF with financial reporting quality in public sector organizations. Specifically, I examine if the presence of IAFs and the use of quality assessments therein is associated with the presence of financial statement audit reportable conditions and restatements in municipalities in the U.S. Results indicate that both the presence of an IAF and use of external quality programs therein are positively associated with financial statement audit reportable conditions related …