Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale H: Cross-Border Regulation, Arwin G. Zeissler, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

As a global financial service provider, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is supervised by banking regulatory agencies in different countries. Bruno Iksil, the derivatives trader primarily responsible for the $6 billion trading loss in 2012, was based in JPM’s London office. This office was regulated both by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) of the United States (US) and by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), which served as the sole regulator of all financial services in the United Kingdom (UK). Banking regulators in the US and the UK have entered into agreements with one another to define basic parameters …

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale G: Hedging Versus Proprietary Trading, Arwin G. Zeissler, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

In December 2013, the primary United States financial regulatory agencies jointly adopted final rules to implement Section 619 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which is often referred to as the “Volcker Rule”. Section 619 prohibits banks from engaging in activities considered to be particularly risky, including proprietary trading and owning hedge funds or private equity funds. Banking regulators designed the final rule against proprietary trading in part to prevent losses like the $6 billion London Whale loss that took place in 2012 at JPMorgan Chase. Given the controversial nature of the Volcker Rule, it is …

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale F: Required Securities Disclosures, Arwin G. Zeissler, Giulio Girardi, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

On April 13, 2012, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) Chief Financial Officer Douglas Braunstein took part in a conference call to discuss the bank’s first quarter 2012 earnings. Coming just a week after media reports first questioned the risks taken by JPM derivatives trader Bruno Iksil, Braunstein made a series of assertions about the trades. On May 10, JPM finalized its first quarter financial results, which included some disclosures regarding Iksil’s trading that were substantially different from Braunstein’s statements of April 13. At issue is whether the regulatory filings on April 13 and May 10, as well as verbal comments by Braunstein …

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale E: Supervisory Oversight, Arwin G. Zeissler, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

As a diversified financial service provider and the largest United States bank holding company, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is supervised by multiple regulatory agencies. JPM’s commercial bank subsidiaries hold a national charter and therefore are regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Since the bank’s Chief Investment Office (CIO) invested the surplus deposits of JPM’s commercial bank units, the OCC was also CIO’s primary regulator. During the critical period from late January through March 2012, when CIO traders undertook the failed derivatives strategy that ultimately cost the bank $6 billion, JPM did not provide the OCC with …

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale C: Risk Limits, Metrics, And Models, Arwin G. Zeissler, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

Value at Risk (VaR) is one of the most commonly used ways to measure and monitor market risk. At JPMorgan Chase (JPM), very large derivative positions established by Bruno Iksil in the Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) caused the bank’s Chief Investment Office (CIO) to exceed its VaR limit for four days in a row in January 2012. In response, the CIO changed to a new VaR model on January 30, which appeared to immediately reduce VaR by half. However, JPM soon discovered that this new VaR model had not been properly implemented and the bank went back to using the …

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale A: Risky Business, Arwin G. Zeissler, Daisuke Ikeda, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

In December 2011, the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) instructed the bank’s Chief Investment Office to reduce the size of its Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) during 2012, so that JPM could decrease its RiskWeighted Assets as the bank prepared to adopt the impending Basel III bank capital regulations. However, the SCP traders were also told to minimize the trading costs incurred to reduce Risk-Weighted Assets, while still maintaining the opportunity to profit from unexpected corporate bankruptcies. In an attempt to balance these competing objectives, head SCP derivatives trader Bruno Iksil suggested in January 2012 …

What Is The Role Of Basel Iii In Creating Sufficient Risk Management In Banking Sector?, Dimitrios V. Siskos

Publications

This paper attempts to investigate the reasons that lead bankers into establishing Basel III agreement and, second, to examine whether it would be able to bring about prudent risk behavior among banks. Basel III was the third set of regulations, following Basel I and Basel II, and was developed in response to the financial crisis. The measures developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision aimed to reinforce banks liquidity, to protect the banking sector from systemic risks, as well as to solidify the regulation. Although most of the fundamental problems, that were responsible for the global financial crisis, had …

Systemic Risk In Financial Networks, Tathagata Banerjee

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation, I have used the network model based approach to study systemic risk in financial networks. In particular, I have worked on generalized extensions of the Eisenberg--Noe [2001] framework to account for realistic financial situations viz. pricing of corporate debt while accounting for network effects, asset liquidation mechanisms during fire sales, dynamic clearing and impact of contingent payments such as insurance and credit default swaps. First, I present formulas for the valuation of debt and equity of firms in a financial network under comonotonic endowments. I demonstrate that the comonotonic setting provides a lower bound to the price …

A Dynamical Systems Approach To Cryptocurrency Stability, Carey Caginalp

ESI Publications

Recently, the notion of cryptocurrencies has come to the fore of public interest. These assets that exist only in electronic form, with no underlying value, offer the owners some protection from tracking or seizure by government or creditors. We model these assets from the perspective of asset flow equations developed by Caginalp and Balenovich, and investigate their stability under various parameters, as classical finance methodology is inapplicable. By utilizing the concept of liquidity price and analyzing stability of the resulting system of ordinary differential equations, we obtain conditions under which the system is linearly stable. We find that trend-based motivations …

Pricing Of Idiosyncratic Risk In An Intermediary Asset Pricing Model, Hasib Ahmed

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Standard asset pricing theories suggest that only systematic risk is priced. Empirical studies report a relationship between idiosyncratic volatility or risk (IVOL) and asset price. The most common explanation for this anomaly is that households under-diversify creating a Bad Model problem. This paper uses an Intermediary Asset Pricing Model (IAPM) as a way to control for under-diversification in evaluating the relationship between IVOL and asset price. We find that IVOL premia is lower in an IAPM. Our findings indicate that under-diversification can explain the anomaly partially.

Corporate Leverage, Constraints, And Compliance, Abdullah Khaled Alnamlah

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The first chapter evaluates the zero-leverage effect on firms' financial constraints. Moreover, using investment- and cash-to-cash-flow sensitivities as financial constraint indicators, the results suggest that unleveraged firms are expected to face lower constraints relative to leveraged firms. Lastly, the results indicate that the zero-leverage effect on firms’ financial constraints is more likely stronger for smaller firms, zero-dividend firms, firms with lower proportions of tangible assets, and growth firms. The second chapter develops a new quantitative measure that reflects the extent to which a firm complies to Shariah relative to the other firms located in a certain region at a certain …

State Ownership, Financial Constraints, And The Determinants Of Capital Structure, Sultan Alshuwaier

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of state ownership in Saudi firms listed in the stock market. The first chapter studies the influence of state ownership on financial constraint on investment. Some scholars believe state ownership has a negative effect on the firm value. However, by using two measures of financial constraint, the investment cash flow sensitivity and the Kaplan and Zingales financial constraints index, the finding indicates that the existent of government ownership decreases financial constraint in firms. Also, the results show that the higher government ownership percentage the less financial constraint in firms. The …

Reliability Of Technical Stock Price Pattern Predictability, Matthew Lutey

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Academic research has shown throughout the years the ability of technical indicators to convey predictive value, informational content, and practical use. The popularity of such studies goes in and out over the years and today is being recognized widely by behavioral economists. Automated technical analysis is said to detect geometric and nonlinear shapes in prices which ordinary time series methods would be unable to detect. Previous papers use smoothing estimators to detect such patterns. Our paper uses local polynomial regressions, digital image processing, and state of the art machine learning tools to detect the patterns. Our results show that they …

The Fintech Revolution, Robert J. Kauffman

MITB Thought Leadership Series

The traditional dominance of established big-hitters in financial services is at an end. The market for many types of financial transaction is being disrupted by small businesses, start-ups and entrepreneurs. They are quicker off the mark in both spotting gaps in the market and developing state-of-the-art systems to respond to customer needs.

Ceo Network Centrality And Earnings Management, Huan Qiu

Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigates the relationship between CEO network centrality, choice of earnings management, and the consequences for the period from 1998 to 2016. From our empirical analysis, we find that CEOs with higher network centrality are more likely to use accruals-based earnings management, but less likely to use real earnings management to manage earnings upward in the current year. Although the use of accruals-based earnings management normally results in bad economic consequences for firms, CEO network centrality is associated with better (at least not worse) earnings quality, after controlling the use of accruals-based earnings management. As for longterm economic performance, …

Skbi Big 5 Survey 2019 August, Singapore Management University

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

On balance, our overall interpretation of the multiyear Big5 survey results implies the following economy-at-risk scale (least to most): India, China, US, Japan and Euro Area (i.e., India’s economy appears to be the least at-risk, while the Euro Area might be the most at-risk). Broadly, survey participants expect the risks to GDP growth to be tilted to the downside in 2019 and 2020 followed by a more balanced growth environment in 2021. But participants seem to lean toward a more balanced risk assessment on headline inflation from 2019 through 2021, with the exception of the Euro Area, where a modest …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Fin 4093 (Corporate Credit Risk), Michele Costello

Open Educational Resources

The course will provide students with an overview of key concepts in corporate credit risk through the lens of a commercial banking risk analyst. Students will be assigned a company to follow throughout the semester and will be required to use the tools of the course to build their own credit rating analysis in a term paper due at the end of the semester. Topics including country risk, industry risk, market risk, business risk (financial and management), and structure risk will be explored through lectures, industry publications, and access to industry analysis and tools. Upon completion of this course, students …

The Impact Of Post-Trade Transparency On Price Efficiency And Price Discovery: Evidence From The Taiwan Stock Exchange, Chiou-Fa Lin, Cheng-Huei Chaio, Bin Wang

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of post-trade transparency on price efficiency and price discovery.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors use an exogeneous change in market transparency in the Taiwan Stock Exchange that mandates the disclosure of unexecuted orders of the five best bid and ask prices after each trade, and conduct an event study analysis.

Findings

After the change, price efficiency enhances for both large and small firms, although the impact on stock prices is greater when the firm is larger. The authors also find that post-change trading reveals more private information for large firms but …

Collaborative Speculation And Overvaluation: Evidence From Social Media, Adam Barrett Booker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I use data from StockTwits and Twitter to provide evidence that investor attention on social media in the period before earnings is related to short-term overvaluation, consistent with bullish investors herding around common information. In the 2 to 60 days after earnings, returns for companies in the highest quintile of pre-earnings announcement investor attention are 4.2 percent lower than those of companies in the lowest quintile. I find evidence that the negative post-earnings drift result found in this study is related to investors waiting until after earnings are announced to enact costly arbitrage strategies. I further examine intra- and inter-network …

Essays On Corporate Finance And Interstate Risk Sharing, Liu Hong

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation consists of two topics: the relation between derivatives and corporate finance, and the relation between bank deregulation and interstate risk sharing.

In the first essay, I study the use of commodity derivatives among U.S. oil and gas producers. Using hand-collected data, I find large variations in hedging intensity and hedging profits. On average, firms generate significantly positive profits, and their profits relate positively to the intensity of hedging. I further decompose the hedge ratio into two components: the pure hedging component and the market timing component. I find that the hedging profits relate strongly and positively to the …

Time-Varying Contemporaneous Spillovers During The European Debt Crisis, Marinela Adriana Finta, Bart Frijins, Alireza Tourani-Rad

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper considers contemporaneous spillover effects between Germany and four peripheral European countries that were most affected by the European Debt Crisis, and provides evidence of bidirectional spillovers among these equity markets. We document that there is asymmetry and time variation in contemporaneous spillovers. Particularly, contemporaneous return spillovers from Germany to the peripheral equity markets is higher than the other way around. We show that European Debt Crisis led to a decrease in the contemporaneous spillover effects.

Mortgage Dollar Roll, Zhaogang Song, Haoxiang Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Mortgage dollar roll, the most common financing strategy for agency MBS, differs from repo in that the returned collateral can differ from those received. Also, MBS ownership changes hands in the funding period. We show that dollar roll “specialness,” how much implied financing rates fall below MBS repo rates, (1) increases in the value of the cheapest-to-deliver option, (2) decreases in the leverage of primary dealers, (3) decreases in prepayment risk exposure during the financing period, and (4) decreases in MBS returns. The Federal Reserve’s dollar roll sales in quantitative easing operations are associated with lower specialness.

Text Sophistication And Sophisticated Investors, Juha Joenvaara, Jari Karppinen, Song Wee Melvyn Teo, Cristian Ioan Tiu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that two novel measures of text sophistication, applied to hedge fund strategy descriptions, encapsulate incremental information about funds. Consistent with the linguistics literature, hedge funds with lexically diverse strategy descriptions outperform, eschew tail risk, and encounter fewer regulatory problems. In line with the literature, hedge funds with syntactically complex strategy descriptions report more regulatory violations and trigger more severe infractions. Fund investors recognize the dichotomy and direct flows accordingly, but not enough to erode away the alphas of lexically diverse funds. Our findings suggest that text sophistication measures provide texture on the cognitive ability and trustworthiness of sophisticated …

Swaption Portfolio Risk Management: Optimal Model Selection In Different Interest Rate Regimes, Poh Ling Neo, Chyng Wen Tee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We formulate a risk-based swaption portfolio management framework for profit-and-loss (P&L) explanation. We analyze the implication of using the right volatility backbone in the pricing model from a hedging perspective, and demonstrate the importance of incorporating stability and robustness measure as part of the calibration process for optimal model selection. We also derive a displaced-diffusion stochastic volatility (DDSV) model with a closed-form analytical expression to handle negative interest rates. Finally, we show that our framework is able to identify the optimal pricing model, which leads to superior P&L explanation and hedging performance.

The Information Content Of Sudden Insider Silence, Claire Yurong Hong, Frank Weikai Li

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We present evidence of investors underreacting to the absence of events in financialmarkets. Routine-based insiders strategically choose to be silent when they possessprivate information not yet reflected in stock prices. Consistent with our hypothesis,insider silence following routine sell (buy) predict positive (negative) future return aswell as fundamentals. The return predictability of insider silence is stronger amongfirms with poor information environment and facing higher arbitrage costs, and alarge fraction of abnormal returns concentrates on future earnings announcements. Along-short strategy that exploits insiders’ strategic silence behavior generates abnormalreturns of 6% to 10% annually

Product Categories As Judgment Devices: The Moral Awakening Of The Investment Industry, Diane-Laure Arjaliès, Rodolphe Durand

Business Publications

Product categories are more than classification devices that organize markets; when reflecting market actors' purposes, they are also judgment devices. Taking stock of the literature on product categories and drawing on the distinction between the faculties of knowing and judging, we elaborate a framework that accounts for how and why market actors include or exclude normative attributes in a product category definition. Based on a field study of the development of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) funds in France, we describe the phases and conditions of a judgment framework for category definition, for both established and nascent categories. We discuss implications …

Forecasting In Blockchain-Based Local Energy Markets, Michael Kostmann, Wolfgang Karl Hardle

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Increasingly volatile and distributed energy production challenges traditional mechanisms to manage grid loads and price energy. Local energy markets (LEMs) may be a response to those challenges as they can balance energy production and consumption locally and may lower energy costs for consumers. Blockchain-based LEMs provide a decentralized market to local energy consumer and prosumers. They implement a market mechanism in the form of a smart contract without the need for a central authority coordinating the market. Recently proposed blockchain-based LEMs use auction designs to match future demand and supply. Thus, such blockchain-based LEMs rely on accurate short-term forecasts of …

International Welfare Spillovers Of National Pension Schemes, James Staveley-O'Carroll, Olena Staveley-O'Carroll

Economics Department Working Papers

We employ a two-country overlapping-generations model to explore the international dimension of household portfolio choices induced by the asymmetric provision of government-run pensions. We study the resulting patterns of risk-sharing and the corresponding welfare effects on both home and foreign agents. Introducing the defined benefits pay-as-you-go system at home increases the welfare of all other agents at the expense of the home workers and improves the degree of intergenerational risk sharing abroad. Conversely, a defined contributions system leads to welfare losses of both home cohorts accompanied by gains abroad, but does increase the extent of intergenerational risk sharing at home.

Incumbency Or Innovation: Why A Collective Agency View Of Cross-Border Payments Means Private Blockchains Cannot Prevail, Boaz B. Goldwater

Cornell International Law Journal

The abstract below was generated using an artificial intelligence tool. It has not been endorsed by the author.   This Note examines the global cross-border payments system through the lens of collective action theory, arguing that the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) functions not merely as a financial messaging network but as a collective agent essential to the stability and legitimacy of international finance. While technological innovations—particularly blockchain-based platforms such as Ripple—promise improvements in speed, cost, and efficiency, the author contends that these advantages alone are insufficient to supplant SWIFT. The cross-border payments system requires not only technical functionality …

College Of Business Dean's Report: 2018-2019, Ryan Butt

College of Business Dean’s Reports

No abstract provided.