Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Trusts Versus Corporations: An Empirical Analysis Of Competing Organizational Forms, A. Joseph Warburton

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This paper studies the effects of organizational form on managerial behavior and firm performance, from an empirical perspective. Managers of trusts are subject to stricter fiduciary responsibilities than managers of corporations. This paper examines the ramifications empirically, by exploiting data generated by a change in British regulations in the 1990s that allowed mutual funds to organize as either a trust or a corporation. I find evidence that trust law is effective in curtailing opportunistic behavior, as trust managers charge significantly lower fees than their observationally equivalent corporate counterparts. Trust managers also incur lower risk. However, evidence suggests that trust managers …

A Common Eurozone Bond, Erik Welin

WCBT Undergraduate Publications

Introduction

The sovereign bond yields of the Eurozone, or more correctly the euro area, have since the introduction of the Euro undergone a bond yield compression. However, as can be seen in table 1, these bond yields started to diverge considerably around mid 2008 following the recent financial crisis and increased sovereign risk. Yields on Greek, Irish, and Portuguese bond have diverged the most from for example German bonds. Based upon this and the ongoing economic integration within the EU and Eurozone, proposals for a common Eurozone bond have been raised. There are many pros and cons with such a …

Further Examination Of Equity Returns And Seasonal Depression, Steven D. Dolvin, Mark K. Pyles, Qun Wu

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) induces investors to shift resources away from risky investments (such as equity) and towards safer alternatives (such as fixed income) during the Fall, while stimulating the opposite action in the Winter. Existing studies, however, fail to account for the possibility that SAD could further motivate investors to shift exposure among different subsets of equity, rather than simply across broad asset categories. We explore this possibility by examining the impact of SAD on the returns of “safe” and “risky” equity sectors (i.e., industries), as well as on equity at different levels of market capitalization. We find the …

Procrastination Does Pay Sometimes: How The Delay In Implementing Basel Ii Reduced The Effect Of The Subprime Financial Crisis, Raymond Bart Simmons

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

Basel II, a major international regulatory capital revision, was supposed to have been implemented in the U.S. by 2004, but delays pushed it back more than five years. Basel II could have lowered minimum capital standards and made the largest banks even more vulnerable to the subprime financial crisis and economic downturn had it been adopted before its onset in 2007. Consequently, the procrastination in implementing Basel II made the banking industry more stable as it entered the financial crisis. In this study, the assets of the 11 largest bank holding companies at year-end 2006 were separated into broad asset …

The Impact Of Macroeconomic Uncertainty On Firms Changes In Financial Leverage, Atreya Chakraborty

Accounting and Finance Faculty Publication Series

We investigate the relationship between a firm’s measures of corporate gov- ernance, macroeconomic uncertainty and changes in leverage. Recent research highlights the role of governance in financing decisions. Previous research also indicates that macroeconomic uncertainty affects a firm’s ability to borrow. In this paper we investigate how both these channels of influence affects firms’ financing decisions. Our findings show that macroeconomic uncertainty has an important role to play, both by itself and in interaction with a measure of corporate governance.

Effectively Hedging The Interest Rate Risk Of Wide Floating Rate Coupon Spreads, Thomas Schröder, Kwamie Dunbar

WCBT Working Papers

Bond issuers frequently immunize/hedge their interest rate exposure by means of interest rate swaps (IRS). The receiving leg matches all bond cash-flows, while the pay leg requires floating rate coupon payments of form LIBOR + a spread. The goal of hedging against interest rate risk is only achieved in full if the present value of this spread is zero. Using market data we show that under a traditional IRS hedging strategy an investor could still experience significant cash flow losses given a 1% shift in the underlying benchmark yield curve.

We consider the instantaneous interest-rate risk of a bond portfolio …

Determinants Of Bank Profits And Net Interest Margins In East Asia And Latin America, Mui Tin Low

Student Works (2010-2019)

This paper identifies the determinants of bank profits and net interest margins using bank level data, macroeconomic indicators and concentration ratio for ten countries in the East Asia and Latin America economies for the period of 2003–2008. A balanced panel of 167 banks operating in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Thailand, Peru and Venezuela is used for this study. Of the 167 banks, 78 banks represent East Asia, while the balance 89 banks, Latin America. For purpose of this study, we first examine the determinants of bank profits and net interest margins based on the full sample of …

The Determinants Of Trade Credit Extension And The Problem Of Late Payment In The Malaysian Manufacturing Sector., Teh Chee Ghee

Student Works (2010-2019)

This study investigates the determinants of trade credit extension and the association between late payment from trade debtors and profitability in the Malaysian manufacturing sector. It is based on exploratory data analysis and ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions on a crosssectional sample of 383 and 287 public-listed manufacturing companies, respectively, using audited financial statements for the financial year ending 2007/2008.Investment in accounts receivables is even higher than in inventories in the Malaysian manufacturing sector. Contrary to previous studies, this study finds that large companies,manufacturers with higher liquidity and with higher collateral assets extend less trade credit, indicating that the listed …

Esops And Corporate Officers' Compensation., Stoyu Ivanov

Faculty Publications

In the literature two major hypotheses have been developed for Employee Stock Ownership Plans used as a takeover defense, the management entrenchment and shareholder interest hypotheses, with the existing research not finding conclusive evidence for either one. In this paper we provide evidence that the entrenchmenthypothesis is not supported by finding that Employee Stock Ownership Plan firms pay less to their managers than non-Employee Stock Ownership Plan firms. If managers were truly entrenched they would have been able to expropriate wealth from the existing shareholders, which appears not to be the case for Employee Stock Ownership Plan firms.

Pakistan’S Experience With The International Monetary Fund (Imf) 2000 – 2004, Ishrat Husain

Business Review

Pakistan’s relationship with the International Monetary Fund during the 2000 – 2004 period was quite unique and distinctive. Unlike the earlier eight agreements that were concluded with the IMF during 1988-99 and were never implemented beyond the first tranche release it was only in this period that two successive agreements – a nine month Stand-by Arrangement (SBA) in the year 2000 followed by a three year Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) were successfully completed. All the sixteen reviews by IMF staff were completed and eleven successive tranches were drawn on time without any extension or interruption 1 . The …

At A Crossroads: The Impact Of International Financial Reporting Standards In The U.S., Cindy K. Harris

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

Public companies in the United States face a new challenge. As set forth in its roadmap for implementation, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) is considering the potential use of financial statements prepared in accordance with international financial reporting standards (“IFRS”.) The chief goal of these global standards is to establish a uniform system to improve comparability of companies’ financial positions. For decades, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (“GAAP”) have been the framework of financial statement preparation for public companies in the U.S. The movement to IFRS represents an unprecedented change in the basis of financial reporting, since IFRS would supersede …

Regulation Of The Otc Derivatives Market: A Regulatory Proposal Of Cds, Erik Welin

WCBT Undergraduate Publications

According to many commentators the credit derivatives and especially CDS have been a leading cause to the development of the current financial crisis. During the last year, policy makers, regulators, and other commentators around the world have therefore focused their attention on how to regulate OTC derivatives and especially CDS.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze some of the proposed regulatory responses to OTC derivatives and especially CDS from an economic point of view. The paper proposes a twofold regulatory response. First it proposes that we return to the old common law rule of "rule against difference contracts". …

Finance Flies High: How Unilever Redesigned The Finance Function To Build Brand Value And Drive Growth, Barbara M. Tarasovich, Bridget Lyons

WCBT Faculty Publications

Unilever's finance team played a key role in the success of their brands. The company achieved its fourth consecutive year of accelerating organic sales growth from less than 0.5% in 2004 to more than 7% in 2008, according to Jim Lawrence, Unilever's CFO. Its strategy is to focus on volume growth and strengthening the competitive position of the company's brands. In this article, the authors examine how the finance function at Unilever was redesigned to deliver the firm's strategic goals, including an emphasis on volume growth and competitive position of its brands. Beginning in 2005, the finance team at Unilever …

2009 Private Capital Markets Report, John K. Paglia

Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Report

The Pepperdine private cost of capital survey was originally launched in 2007 and is the first comprehensive and simultaneous investigation of the major private capital market segments. This year’s survey specifically examined the behavior of senior lenders, asset‐based lenders, mezzanine funds, private equity groups, venture capital firms, angel investors, privately‐held businesses, investment bankers, business brokers, limited partners, and business appraisers. The Pepperdine survey investigated, for each private capital market segment, the important benchmarks that must be met in order to qualify for capital, how much capital is typically accessible, what the required returns are for extending capital in today’s economic …

The Predictive Content Of Aggregate Analyst Recommendations, John S. Howe, Emre Unlu, Xuemin (Sterling) Yan

Department of Finance: Faculty Publications

Using more than 350,000 sell-side analyst recommendations from January 1994 to August 2006, this paper examines the predictive content of aggregate analyst recommendations. We find that changes in aggregate analyst recommendations forecast future market excess returns after controlling for macroeconomic variables that have been shown to influence market returns. Similarly, changes in industry-aggregated analyst recommendations predict future industry returns. Changes in aggregate analyst recommendations also predict one-quarter-ahead aggregate earnings growth. Overall, our results suggest that analyst recommendations contain market- and industry-level information about future returns and earnings.

Market-Based Capabilities And Financial Performance Of Firms: Insights Into Marketing's Contribution To Firm Value, Sridhar N. Ramaswami, Rajendra K. Srivastava, Mukesh Bhargava

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

While there is recognition that market-based capabilities contribute to a firm’s financial performance, the exposition is largely conceptual (Srivastava et al. Journal of Marketing 62:2–18, 1998; Journal of Marketing 63:168–179, 1999). Using a resource based view of the firm, the present study proposes that (1) market-based assets and capabilities of a firm impacts (2) performance in three market-facing business processes (new product development, supply-chain and customer management), which in turn, influence (3) the firm’s financial performance. It develops related hypotheses and tests the framework empirically. The study also examines for the first time the interrelationship among the three business processes …

Financial Planning For High School Students, Evan Weissman

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The global financial crisis of the early 21^st century has taught us many things about human nature, our societal goals and the finance industry overall. Perhaps the most surprising finding, however, has been the observance of financial illiteracy among the general public. The combination of greed and ignorance towards financial responsibility has played an important role in the collapse of our financial system.

The financial illiteracy of our society has been an epidemic in our country for some time. Financial planning is a topic that has been rarely taught in high schools. This has lead to an influx of …

Safe & Cheap, Moon Li, Brian Burrow

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Summary

Our project bundles investment research reports spanning the authors’ time in the Orange Value Fund (OVF), a student run hedge fund in the Whitman School of Management. Each report exemplifies the fund’s unique, bottoms-up investment style. In contrast to traditional valuation methods that focus exclusively on projecting company earnings, the OVF adopts a micro-level approach to analyzing investment opportunities. Analysts study company documents such as annual reports, credit agreements, and proxy statements to identify safe and cheap opportunities.

Safe

A safe company has access to capital markets, a super-strong financial position, honest and competent management, and an understandable business. …

Paul M. Klekner (B), Roger R. Schnorbus

Robins School of Business White Paper Series, 1980-2022

This is a fictitious case study, including the name of the restaurant and the people involved.

Paul Klekner graduated first in his class from the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in 1998; his fellow students named him the chef most likely to succeed in the future. After graduation, he and his wife, Sarah, moved back to his home in Richmond, Virginia where he was employed as a chef at several restaurants including Bottega and Old Original Bookbinders. In 2003, he decided to open his own restaurant, Rogerios, in the Tobacco Row section of Richmond. With an inheritance of $300,000 he …

Futility Of Stimulus Funds In The Middle Of Huge Trade Deficits, Narendra C. Bhandari

Faculty Working Papers and Articles

The U. S. is facing an unprecedented environment of increasing unemployment, declining income, disappearing middleclass, and mounting trade deficit (about $731 billion in 2007). The government is providing stimulus funds to a selected number of organizations to help solve these problems. However, as long as the country continues to have huge trade deficits, these stimulus efforts may not help much, if at all. They may even worsen the economic situation. This could happen if the banking, insurance, construction, transportation, and other companies—receiving the stimulus funds—would offshore part of their production activities. Several American firms send certain number of jobs abroad …

The Case Against Exempting Smaller Reporting Companies From Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404: Why Market-Based Solutions Are Likely To Harm Ordinary Investors, John Orcutt

Law Faculty Scholarship

Section 404 is arguably the most controversial provision of Sarbanes-Oxley (“SOX”). The controversy focuses on whether Section 404’s substantial compliance costs exceed the statute’s benefits, with no consensus on Section 404’s cost-effectiveness. If Section 404 turns out to be cost-ineffective, the companies that are most threatened are smaller companies, as cost-ineffective regulations tend to disproportionately harm smaller companies. This Article considers whether Congress and the SEC should exempt smaller reporting companies from Section 404 compliance, as that would allow for a market-based resolution to the uncertain value of Section 404 for smaller reporting companies. Smaller reporting companies would be relieved …

Does Size Matter In The Hedge Fund Industry?, Song Wee Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We document a negative and convex relationship between hedge fund size and future risk-adjusted returns. Small hedge funds outperform large hedge funds by 3.65 percent per year after adjusting for risk. This over performance is not driven by fund age, leverage, serial correlation, or self-selection biases. The capacity constraints manifest across various investment styles and regions. In particular, they are strongest for funds managed by multiple principals who trade small, illiquid securities, suggesting that the observed diseconomies can be traced to price impact and hierarchy costs (Stein, 2002). While investors direct disproportionately more capital to smaller funds, they do not …

Hdtv Division Of Global Electronics, Inc., Alan J. Kirkpatrick, Leonard K. Gashugi

Faculty Publications

CASE DESCRIPTION: The primary objective of this case is to describe realistic capital budgeting issues within a large organization. The case illustrates ways that staff inside a corporate finance department (and in related departments) position themselves in the capital planning process. The case also stresses steps that a large firm can take to leverage its size to gain the maximum benefit of investment projects. Further,, the case demonstrates sensitivity analyses in the capital budgeting process, and the resulting internal rates of return. We suggest the case be used to follow the related case “HDTV Systems”, which shows the firm as …

Nigerian Stock Market Reflection Of The Global Finance Crisis: An Evaluation, Sere- Ejembi A. A.

Bullion

With its roots in banking, the sub-prime mortgage crisis that commenced in the United States in 2007 soon resonated in other sectors of its financial system, and the economy, at large. It spread quickly to the developed economies in Europe, including the United Kingdom, and Asia. In the case of the Nigerian stock market, following initial relative insulation, the speed of contagion and response was comparatively slower. However, the effects began to manifest in the first quarter of 2008. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to review the global financial crisis, in the context of its recent effects on …

Investing Africa's External Reserves In Africa: Issues, Challenges And Prospects, Onwioduokit A. E.

Bullion

The paper underlined the challenges and opportunities for managing Africa's external reserves by Africans after identifying several pre-conditions for an African currency to emerge as international currency and noted that these conditions have not yet crystallized in Africa. Although African external reserves have grown over time the benefits of such growth in terms of facilitation of domestic financial markets and even the earning are not commensurate with the reserves growth rate. The non-convertibility of African currencies, volatile macroeconomic and sometimes volatile political environment coupled with the shallowness of the domestic markets are the main challenges that are faced by the …

Sox Section 404 Material Weaknesses Related To Revenue Recognition, Dana R. Hermanson, Daniel M. Ivan, Susan H. Iva

Faculty Articles

The article analyzes disclosures of material weaknesses in internal control after the implementation of U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) 404 and summarizes the efforts of firms to remediate such material weaknesses. According to SOX section 404, management must issue a report on the effectiveness of the internal control of the firm over financial reporting. It notes that a report must be issued by the external auditor expressing an opinion on the effectiveness of internal control over financial reporting.

After The Acquisition: Here Are Seven Steps To Successfully Integrating Finance And Accounting Functions After A Merger Or Acquisition, Barbara M. Tarasovich, Bridget Lyons, John Gerlach

WCBT Faculty Publications

Although much has been written regarding the factors critical to successful integration after a merger or acquisition, very little research has focused on the particulars of integrating the finance and accounting functions of the companies involved. As with overall business integration, detailed planning, effective communication, and speed of execution are critical. The authors recommend a seven-step process that will help balance the needs of the business during an acquisition as well as ensure financial controls are established. The overall steps provide the key activities to be accomplished and provide specific and explicit guidance. This seven-step process includes: 1. Begin planning, …

Ceo Characteristics, Ceo-Firm Match And Corporate Refocus Value, Sheng Huang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper investigates how CEO characteristics affect firm value through divestiture. Using a novel dataset tracking CEO’s career path, from which CEO’s talent and expertise are reasonably inferred, I find when CEOs have differing abilities across divisions of conglomerates, they more likely divest divisions that they are less qualified to manage, and focus on divisions of better match with their talents and expertise. The better match of their talents with firms’ retained assets is the source of value creation from refocusing divestiture. Divestitures that increase corporate focus but not improve the talent-asset match do not create value in long run. …

Consolidated Supervision Of Banks: Concept And Practices, U. Kama

Bullion

The paper has considered two basic issues in financial supervision. These are the separation of financial supervision from central banking and the rationale and challenges of establishing an integrated supervision structure in Nigeria. lt identified three basic functions of financial supervision as micro prudential, macro prudential and conduct-of-business supervision, which address systemic stability, financial soundness of individual institutions and consumer protection respectively . The paper is divided into six sections. Following this introduction is section ll which examines the conceptual and theoretical issues in consolidated supervision. Section lll reviews the experience of other jurisdictions in the practice of consolidated supervision. …

Integrated Financial Supervision For Nigeria: Emerging Issues And Challenges., Anachi Arua

Bullion

In the supervisory architecture of financial institutions have been of interest to policymakers and the academic. It began to be discussed in the late eighties when the Scandinavian countries were establishing a single supervisory authority in their country. The discussion heated up in the late nineties when the United Kingdom created the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and continued in this decade as many developed and developing countries consider the adoption of more integrated supervision structures. The paper considers the issues of separation of financial supervision from central banking and the rationale and challenges of establishing on integrated supervision structure in …