Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Essays On Moral Hazard, Bank Size, Influence, And Risk At The Federal Home Loan Banks, James Cash Acrey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Two chapters of research on the Federal Home Loan Bank advances, bank risk, and influence are presented. Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) advances are a growing source of debt financing for US banks. FHLB advances are not priced according to bank credit risk, creating potential for moral hazard. FHLB advances are positively related to contemporary bank risk, but the relation between prior advances and subsequent risk varies between large vs. small banks depending upon the risk measure used. The relation between FHLB advances and various measures of bank risk varies between pre-crisis (2005-07), crisis (2008-09), and post-crisis (2010-12) periods differently …

Real Estate Investment By Bank Holding Companies And Their Risk And Return: Nonparametric And Garch Procedures, Scott Deacle, Elyas Elyasiani

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

We investigate the association between real estate investment by US Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) and their return, risk and risk-adjusted returns. Three portfolios are formed of BHCs according to whether they do or do not invest in real estate, strictness of the regulation on real estate investment and the ratio of real estate investment to assets. Wilcoxon tests of differences in portfolio returns, risk, risk-adjusted returns and value at risk between each pair of portfolios are conducted to determine how engagement in real estate, stricter regulation and increased real estate investment affect BHC performance. These effects are also investigated within …

Financial Institutions And The Taxi-Cab Industry: An Exploratory Study In Canada, John D. Obradovich, Amarjit Gill, Nahum Biger, Leo-Paul Dana, Canadian Western Bank

Faculty Publications and Presentations

A current challenge taxicab owner/operators face in Canada is the lack of financing for taxicabs. This article examines business opportunities and lending risk; it also provides risk management strategies for financial institutions to manage the risk of lending to the taxi-cab industry. Members of the boards of directors and shareholders from the Canadian taxicab industry, and lenders from financial institutions that do not provide financing to taxicab owner/operators, were interviewed. Board members and shareholders were asked about their perceptions regarding business opportunity, risk, and their willingness to provide collateral for taxicab loans. Lenders of financial institutions were asked about their …

Democracy And Economic Growth: A Perspective Of Cooperation, Menghan Yang, Li Zhang

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Does democracy cause higher economic growth? We build a model taking culture and interpersonal cooperation into account and find that democracy increases economic productivity through giving people more equal rights, which allows people to build a larger interpersonal network so that they can reduce investment risk and employ high-productivity (high-risk) methods in production.

The Performance Of Listed Hedge Fund Firms, Lin Sun, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

We examine the impact of fund management company listing on hedge fund performance. We find that hedge funds managed by listed firms underperform those managed by unlisted firms by 1.89 per annum after adjusting for risk. Using an event study framework, we show that hedge fund performance deteriorates from 10.32 percent per year in the 36-month pre-listing window to 2.16 percent per year in the 36-month post-listing window. Over the same period, firm assets under management effectively double from US$1.54bn to US$3.04bn. There is no evidence to suggest that funds managed by listed firms are better able to manage operational …

Income Inequality And Stock Pricing In The U.S. Market, Minh T. Nguyen

Lawrence University Honors Projects

In this research, the effect of income inequality as measured by the share of national income going to the wealthiest 10% of the nation in the U.S. is assessed for its significance at explaining stock returns in the U.S from 1927 to 2012. Income inequality has always been an important economic indicator and it has the potential to become one of the fundamental sources of risk that affect stock prices. By utilizing the Fama-French three-factor model, this research obtains the inequality beta coefficient, and the inequality risk premium. In turn, the findings of this research suggest the existence of a …

An Evidence Of Profitability In Stocks Through The Test Of Logic, Muhammad Ikhlas Khan, Agha Ali Hassan

Business Review

In this world, people do one of two things with dollar, when they earn it. They either save it or consume it. Involuntarily, some of the money people consume is because they must pay tax or spending the dollar on something like food, clothing, or a car. For consumption at a later time, a person saves the dollar by putting it aside.

Capm And Irrational Market: Theories And Empirical Studies, Jaehan Koh

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

With a new interpretation of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), this dissertation explains that the CAPM has an implied assumption of no mispricing. The CAPM should work if mispricing is removed from all assets in the market, leading to the Rational CAPM. The Rational CAPM measures value changes of the market, and then yields value changes of an asset/portfolio by employing value changes of the market in the model. For the Rational CAPM, this dissertation explains that risk, mispricing, irrationality and (investor) sentiment all indicate the same. Using the value changes from the Rational CAPM and historical dividend yields, …

Hedging Effectiveness Under Conditions Of Asymmetry, Jim Hanly, John Cotter

Articles

We examine whether hedging effectiveness is affected by asymmetry in the return distribution by applying tail specific metrics, for example, Value at Risk, to compare the hedging effectiveness of short and long hedgers. Comparisons are applied to a number of hedging strategies including OLS, and both symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models. We apply our analysis to a dataset consisting of S&P500 index cash and futures containing symmetric and asymmetric return distributions chosen ex-post. Our findings show that asymmetry reduces out-of-sample hedging performance and that significant differences occur in hedging performance between short and long hedgers.

Risk Management Trends: Currency Trading Using The Fractal Market Hypothesis, Jonathan Blackledge, Kieran Murphy

Articles

We report on a research and development programme in financial modelling and economic security undertaken in the Information and Communications Security Research Group (ICSRG, 2011) which has led to the launch of a new company - Currency Traders Ireland Limited - funded by Enterprise Ireland. Currency Traders Ireland Limited (CTI, 2011) has a fifty year exclusive license to develop a new set of indicators for analysing currency exchange rates (Forex trading). We consider the background to the approach taken and present examples of the results obtained to date. In this ‘Introduction’, we provide a background to and brief overview of …

Risk And System-Of-Systems: Toward A Unified Concept, C. Ariel Pinto, Michael K. Mcshane, Rani Kady

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The scope of this paper is the survey of both fundamental and most recent publications in system-of-systems, business and insurance, as well as risk analysis, modeling, and management for the purpose of better describing the concept of risk in recognition of emergence and complexity which characterizes many systems within the concern of engineering and business managers. The ultimate goal is to provide engineering and business managers the necessary perspective on the concept of risk and in its management for the next generation of sustainable systems - including various descriptions of risk and discussion of the relevance of properties of system-of-systems …

Longevity The Ultimate Risk For Ageing Populations, Says John Piggott, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

The proportion of elderly people in the population is increasing with Japan leading the field globally. The long-run effect is to put an increased burden on the young to support them. John Piggott, research dean at the Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales, spoke on longevity as the ultimate risk in the 21st Century at a seminar organised by the Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics at the Singapore Management University at the end of last year.

Trust And Investments Across Cultures, Thomas Berry, Omur Suer

College of Business Faculty and Staff Works

This study uses survey data to examine notions of trust relative to investments and perceived risk. Rather than using nation cross-sectional household survey data we target a specific group across four distinct cultures. We survey graduate business students in four countries (Turkey, Bahrain, Czech Republic, and the USA). We attempt to gauge investor perceptions about trust and the potential impact of trust on equity investing. The groups are fairly homogeneous in terms of education and relative social and economic status leaving cultural differences as the main source of observed response differences.

Costly Arbitrage And The Lead-Lag Structure Between Value And Glamour Stocks, Meng Li

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Motivated by the findings of Lo and Mackinlay (1990) that size premium can be partially attributed to the lead-lag relation between the returns of large stocks and those of small stocks, in this thesis we hypothesize that a possible lead-lag structure between value and glamour returns can partially explain the value premium anomaly.

The thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter I documents a pronounced lead-lag structure between value and glamour stocks: the glamour stocks lead value stocks in terms of both mean returns and residual volatilities, suggesting that value stocks delay in price adjustment to new information. To further explore …

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 …

The Effects Of Asset Allocation And Active Management On Total Return Of Managed Funds, Florian Halili

Business and Economics Honors Papers

Portfolio managers are charged with maximizing returns for a given level of risk. There are practical problems that arise in creating an efficient portfolio and maintaining a target level of risk and return. This paper will identify two important factors that a manager needs to address in creating and managing a portfolio. The first step in creating a portfolio should be the establishment of the structure of the portfolio or the portfolio policy, what asset classes it holds and in what proportions. The structure of the portfolio is the main factor that shows how a portfolio is exposed to risk. …

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.

Extension Risk In Commercial Mortgages, Charles C. Tu, Mark Eppli

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

Historical data and Monte Carlo simulation is used to examine the likelihood of loan extension and potential losses associated with extension. It is found that extension probability is highly sensitive to property NOI growth, to NOI volatility, to the amortization schedule, and to the loan term. It is found that extension risk is largely unaffected by changing credit spreads, changing yield curve assumptions, and changing term default assumptions. It is found that changing the underwriting standards affects the probability of loan extension in a somewhat muted way. It is estimated that the loss during extension is approximately 2%-3% of the …

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 …

The Information Content Of Standard & Poor's Common Stock Ranking Changes, James Felton

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the information content of Standard & Poor's common stock ranking changes. These rankings are derived from a system which begins with a computer-generated score for per-share growth, stability, and cyclicality of earnings and dividends for the most recent ten years of available data. Standard & Poor's then makes adjustments to the scores based on firm size, sales volume, "relative current standing,'1 and special considerations. The eight rankings are as follows: A+ (Highest), A (High), A- (Above Average), B+ (Average), B (Below Average), B- (Lower), C (Lowest), and D (In Reorganization). Although the rankings are not purported to …