Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Pre-Test Assessment In The Introductory Finance Course, Thomas Berry

College of Business Faculty and Staff Works

The paper tests whether pre-tests, a non-graded assessment tool, can be used to improve student performance in the introductory corporate finance course. These pre-tests are essentially quizzes, but given on the material prior to it being covered in the class. The results confirm that the pre-tests improve student performance but that some issues remain which may hinder their implementation

Prior Debt And The Cost Of Going Public, Steven D. Dolvin, Merk K. Pyles

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

Previous studies find that firms with prior debt, particularly publicly rated, have lower information asymmetry and experience a lower opportunity cost of going public, as measured by underpricing. Subsequent research suggests that underpricing may be an inaccurate measure of indirect issuance costs. Thus, we replicate and extend existing studies to examine whether previously issued debt reduces the true opportunity cost of issuance. We find that private debt issues have little effect; however, firms with public debt (particularly rated) have both significantly lower levels of underpricing and lower issuance opportunity costs, as well as narrower filing ranges and smaller price revisions, …

Seasonal Affective Disorder And The Pricing Of Ipos, Steven D. Dolvin, Mark K. Pyles

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

Purpose - It has been found that stock market returns vary seasonally with the amount of daylight, and they attribute this effect to seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which is a psychological condition that causes depression and heightened risk aversion during the fall and winter months. The goal of this study is to examine whether this effect also manifests itself in the pricing of initial public offerings (IPOs).

Design/methodology/approach - The authors conduct an empirical analysis on IPO data

collected over the period 1986-2000. Specifically, we examine potential pricing differences between IPO that go public during the fall and winter months, …

Valuation And Classification Of Company Issued Cash And Share-Puts, William D. Terando, Wayne Shaw, David Smith

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

This paper examines whether investors’ valuations of cash and share-put warrants are influenced by their potential differential effect on firm solvency. It is motivated by the enactment of SFAS 150, which requires that all contingent put warrant obligations be classified as balance sheet liabilities regardless of put type. Consistent with the critics of SFAS150, we show that market participants differentially value cash and share-puts based on their solvency characteristics beyond the firm’s recorded assets and liabilities. Our results add to existing capital structure literature by suggesting that complex financial instruments (such as cash and share-puts) be reported separately from each …

Upping The Ante, Thomas Power

Articles

The aim of this essay is to present the inherent barriers to the achievement of full co-operative solutions to global environmental problems. It reviews the literature of Swanson, Barrett, Pearse and Helme to explain the problems associated with multilateral bargaining and to compare two types of bargaining, namely “ex-post” and “ex-ante”. It attempts to apply the theoretical guidelines on multilateral bargaining to GATT.,

Financing Port Dredging Costs: Taxes Versus User Fees, Wayne K. Talley

Economics Faculty Publications

The article examines the use of user fee and tax programs to finance the cost of port dredging. The article discusses the U.S. Water Resources Development Act, the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, the Harbor Maintenance Tax, which is an ad valorem tax on the cargo's value, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, articles from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, national user fee program proposals by the former U.S. President Bill Clinton administration, Moriarity's Rule, and the Shapley Value Rule.

The Impact Of The Return To Lagged Reserve Requirements On The Federal Funds Market, Vladimir Kotomin, Drew B. Winters

Faculty Publications – Finance, Insurance, and Law

We examine the impact on the settlement Wednesday effect in daily fed funds rates following the change from contemporaneous reserve requirements (CRR) to lagged reserve requirements (LRR). The Federal Reserve changed from CRR to LRR, in part, to make it easier for banks to settle their reserve accounts. Our hypothesis is that the switch to LRR will reduce the demand for reserves on settlement Wednesdays, thus reducing the settlement Wednesday effect in fed funds rates. Our empirical results provide strong support for our hypothesis.

The Delinquency Of Subprime Mortgages, Michelle A. Danis, Anthony Pennington-Cross

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

The lag between the time that a borrower stops making payments on a mortgage and the termination of the loan plays a critical role in the costs borne by both borrower and lender on defaulted loans. While the prior literature uses a multinomial logit approach, statistical tests indicate that we cannot accept the associated assumption of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA). Using a nested logit specification our results suggest that the recipe for delinquency involves young loans to low credit score borrowers with low or no documentation in housing markets with moderately volatile and flat or declining nominal house prices.

The Varying Effects Of Predatory Lending Laws On High-Cost Mortgage Applications, Giang Ho, Anthony Pennington-Cross

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

Federal, state, and local predatory lending laws are designed to restrict and in some cases prohibit certain types of high-cost mortgage credit in the subprime market. Empirical evidence using the spatial variation in these laws shows that the aggregate flow of high-cost mortgage credit can increase, decrease, or be unchanged after these laws are enacted. Although it may seem counterintuitive to find that a law that prohibits lending could be associated with more lending, it is hypothesized that a law may reduce the cost of sorting honest loans from dishonest loans and lessen borrowers’ fears of predation, thus stimulating the …

Investigate The Wealth Effect Of Investment Banks And Fairness Opinions They Provide In Corporate Mergers And Acquisitions, Weishen Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation studies the value of both investment banks' services on the whole and fairness opinions specifically, which the banks provide to the acquiring firms. In the first chapter, I examine how investment banks and acquiring firms' governance quality interact to affect shareholders' wealth in corporate mergers and acquisitions. Although the wealth impact of investment banks in mergers and acquisitions is widely studied in the literature, existing studies do not consider the interaction between governance quality and investment banks. I examine how investment banks and governance quality of acquiring firms interact to affect the wealth of acquiring firms' shareholders. I …

Crummer/Suntrust Portfolio Spring 2007, David Archer, Eric Bass, Justin Drahl, Dieter Hinrich, Shawn Read, Rie Ryo, Jakub Prozner

Crummer Truist Portfolios

The Cummer/SunTrust portfolio does not lie on the efficient frontier, but instead is positioned just below it. It is worth mentioning that the efficient portfolios are often not properly diversified, and the majority of their allocation is often composed of just one or two asset classes. The efficient frontier is not designed to tell investors a precise composition of asset classes in their portfolio. Instead, it is just another tool, or mathematical model, to help investors make prudent decisions. Consequently, the group believes that the Crummer/SunTrust portfolio is well positioned relative to the efficient frontier, which ensures high expected return …

Default Prediction For Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities, James Scott Dudley

Finance and Real Estate Theses - Archive

Commercial mortgage default has become a topic of interest for a large number of parties due to the emergence and continued growth of the secondary mortgage market. With the multitude of parties holding a vested interest, it is important to develop a highly efficient method of monitoring collateral performance and ultimately be able to confidently predict or anticipate default. This study shows the correlation between appearance of a loan on a Watchlist and its potential to become delinquent in the future. While testing this hypothesis, a model is created that incorporates several other variables readily used to predict collateral performance …

The Effectiveness Of Insider Trading Regulation: International Evidence, Art Durnev, Amrita S. Nain

Finance Faculty Publications

There is a long standing debate in the finance and law literatures about the need for insider trading regulation. Some scholars and practitioners argue that insider trading restrictions should be revoked because insider trading allows private information to be quickly incorporated into stock prices, thereby leading to more informationally efficient stock prices (Carlton and Fischel (1983); Dye (1984)). For example, Milton Friedman, laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, said: “You want more insider trading, not less. You want to give the people most likely to have knowledge about deficiencies of the company an incentive to make the public …

Managerial Ability And The Valuation Of Executive Stock Options, Tung-Hsiao Yang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The executive compensation literature argues that executives generally value stock options at less than market value because of suboptimal ownership and risk aversion. Implicit in this finding is the assumption that executives are, like shareholders, price takers. That is, they have no ability to influence the outcomes of the firm’s investments. Clearly, executives do have the ability to influence these outcomes, because that is the purpose of granting them the options. In this paper, we develop a model in which managers can exert effort and alter the distribution of the returns from the firm’s investments. We find that when executives …

Liquidity And Speculative Trading: Evidence From Stock Price Adjustments To Quarterly Earnings Announcements, Hsiao-Fen Yang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies whether stock price reactions to quarterly earnings announcements depend on stock liquidity. Baker and Stein (2004) and Scheinkman and Xiong (2003) develop models showing that liquidity can be affected by investor sentiment or speculative trading. With short-sale constraints, liquid stocks have more trading from optimistic, overconfident investors and tend to be overvalued. In this study, we hypothesize that if a liquid stock is overpriced due to intensive speculative trading, the overpricing should be corrected partially or fully after quarterly earnings announcements which convey the information about the fundamental value of stocks and synchronize investors' adjustment to mispricing. …

The U.S. Health Care System And Labor Markets, Brigitte C. Madrian

Faculty Publications

There is no universal provider of health insurance or health care in the United States. Rather, a patchwork system of institutions exists, each covering different subgroups of the population. Certain types of health insurance are provided as a condition of employment, while other types of health insurance are more readily available when individuals are not employed or not fully employed, and still others are available regardless of employment status. The two most significant sources of health insurance coverage in the United States are employers, who collectively insure 63 percent of the non-elderly (below age 65) population, and governments, who collectively …

Investing Your Lump Sum At Retirement, David F. Babbel, Craig B. Merrill

Faculty Publications

Imagine sitting down on the day of your retirement to plan your financial future. You know what your annual expenses have been and you want to maintain your current standard of living. So, you consult a recent mortality table and find that if you’ve made it to your 65th birthday, you can expect to live to 85 years old. You perform a little calculation and find that, together with your Social Security monthly payments, you have just enough savings to maintain your current standard of living and spend all of your savings and future expected earnings by the time you …

Information Sharing And Supply Chain Performance: The Role Of Connectivity And Willingness, Stanley E. Fawcett, Paul Osterhaus, Gregory M. Magnan, James C. Brau, Matthew W. Mccarter

Faculty Publications

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how information technology (IT) is used to enhance supply chain performance.

Design/methodology/approach – A large-scale survey and semi-structured interviews were used to collect industry data.

Findings – Two distinct dimensions to information sharing – connectivity and willingness – are identified and analyzed. Both dimensions are found to impact operational performance and to be critical to the development of a real information sharing capability. However, many companies are found to have placed most of their emphasis on connectivity, often overlooking the willingness construct. As a result, information sharing seldom delivers on …

A Monetary Union In East Asia: What Does The Common Cycles Approach Tell?, K Sato, David E. Allen, Zhaoyong Zhang

Research outputs pre 2011

There is controversy about whether a monetary union is feasible in the East Asian region. Amongst the criteria for establishing a monetary union, most of the existing studies focus on the symmetric issue of fundamental shocks and the extent of correlations by applying the Blanchard and Quah (1989) structural vector autoregression (VAR) technique, which includes the firstdifferenced variables in the model and examines only bilateral relationships. When forming a monetary union, the member countries need to renounce their monetary policy autonomy. If shocks to respective economies are symmetric, the cost of relinquishing the discretionary monetary policy is likely to be …

Thoughts On Var And Cvar, David E. Allen, Robert J. Powell

Research outputs pre 2011

Value at Risk (VaR) is an important issue for banks since its adoption as a primary risk metric in the Basel Accords and the requirement that it is calculated on a daily basis. VaR calculates maximum expected losses over a given time period at a given tolerance level. Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) measures extreme risk. It calculates the risk beyond VaR. Relative industry risk measurement is also very important to Banks in their management of risk, such as for setting risk concentration limits and developing investment and credit policy. This paper examines market Value at Risk (VaR) and Conditional …

Evaluating The Nordea Experiment: Evidence From Market And Accounting Data, Lawrence G. Goldberg, Richard J. Sweeney, Clas Wihlborg

Business Faculty Articles and Research

This paper discusses results and difficulties of comparing banks’ performance based on publicly available data for the case of Nordea, a pan-Nordic bank created through mergers of important national banks. The objective is to determine whether Nordea’s unique strategy of functional integration across four countries can be advantageous. For stock-market data, however, Nordea does not have stable betas on risk factors, and thus the comparables method must be used with great care. The Nordea holding company performed about as well as the comparables, both in terms of stock-market and accounting data. Nordea banks in individual countries outperformed comparable holding companies; …

Changes In Ceo Compensation Structure And The Impact On Firm Performance Following Ceo Turnover, David W. Blackwell, Donna M. Dudney, Kathleen A. Farrell

Department of Finance: Faculty Publications

We document changes in compensation structure following CEO turnover and relate them to future performance. Compared to outgoing CEOs, incoming CEOs derive a significantly greater percentage of their compensation from option grants and new stock grants. The voluntary turnover sample shows similar changes in compensation structure while the forced turnover sample results suggest that new stock grants drive the significant increase in incentive compensation following turnover. Post-turnover performance is positively associated with new stock grants as a percentage of total compensation in the full sample and when analyzing forced and voluntary turnovers separately. We find limited evidence that future operating …

Do Warrants Lead The Underlying Stocks And Index Futures?, Ying Kui Lin

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The lead-lag relation between options and stocks has been a subject of controversy for years with conflicting findings in the literature. In this thesis, we present an intuitive method to examine the lead-lag relation, if any, in the tick-by-tick data of covered warrants and their underlying stocks or underlying index futures. Our method is non-parametric and needs no assumptions which are critical to the regression-based methods. We find that the electronically traded warrants do not lead stocks or index futures; the movements in the warrants' quotes provide little information about the quotes of the underlying stocks or index futures. Instead, …

Interest Rate Uncertainty And Stock Market Volatility, Jincai Xu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The reason for volatility changing over time is still open. As stated in the extant papers uncertainty of Macroeconomic variable plays more important role in explaining the time varying of volatility than the volatility of Macroeconomic variable itself. In this paper we illustrate this with exploring the relationship between stock market volatility and the Interest Uncertainty. In the paper, we take the uncertainty of the decision of FOMC meeting as the uncertainty of interest rate. As we know, asset price is a tool for people to express their belief about the state of the economy, when uncertainty is high, a …

On The Calibration Of The Libor Market Model, U Lagunzad Demelinda

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This thesis presents a study of LIBOR market model calibration. In particular, the study builds on the prevailing calibration methodologies in an attempt to find a method that simultaneously recovers implied volatility and forward rate correlations structures from market prices of plain vanilla options. In order to ensure that complex derivative pricing and hedging requirements are jointly addressed, the study extends the performance analysis of calibration methods from a static level of goodness-of-fit with market prices test, to a dynamic level of approximation to next period's LIBOR (London Interbank Offer Rate) dynamics when tested on a series of market prices. …

It’S Sho Time! Short-Sale Price-Tests And Market Quality, Karl B. Diether, Kuan-Hui Lee, Ingrid M. Werner

Faculty Publications

We examine the effects of the SEC mandated temporary suspension of short-sale price-tests for a set of Pilot securities. While short-selling activity increased both for NYSE and NASDAQ-listed Pilot stocks, returns and volatility at the daily level are unaffected. NYSE-listed Pilot stocks experience more symmetric trading patterns and a slight increase in spreads and intraday volatility after the suspension while there is a smaller effect on market quality for NASDAQlisted Pilot stocks. The results suggest that the effect of the price-tests on market quality can largely be attributed to the distortions in order flow created by the price-tests in the …

Evaluating Predictive Performance Of Value-At-Risk Models In Chinese Stock Markets, Jianshe Ou

Lingnan Theses

Risk can be defined as the volatility of unexpected outcomes, generally for values of assets and liabilities. Financial risk, risk refer to possible losses in financial markets, includes markets risk, credit risk, liquidity risk, operational risk, and legal risk. This MPhil thesis is specializing on market risk, which involves the uncertainty of earnings or losses resulting from changes in market conditions such as asset prices, interest rates, and market liquidity.

The primary tool to evaluate market risk is VaR that is a method of assessing risk through standard statistical techniques. VaR is defined a measure for the worst expected loss …

An Empirical Analysis Of The Financial Impact Of Supply Chain Management On Small Firms, James C. Brau, Stanley E. Fawcett, Ladd Morgan

Faculty Publications

In this article we test the value proposition hypothesis of supply chain management (SCM) by examining survey results of 570 US managers. First, we find that large firms use SCM initiatives significantly more than small firms. Second, in univariate and multivariate tests, we find that SCM leads to significant improvements in asset utilization, revenue generation, and competitive performance, regardless of firm size. These two major findings suggest that managers at small firms that are not actively engaged in SCM should reevaluate their opportunity to capture the competitive benefits of SCM that many large firms currently enjoy.

Two Essays On Institutional Investors, Hoang Nguyen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays investigating the trading by institutions and its impact on the stock market. In the first essay, I investigate why changes in institutional breadth predict return. I first show that changes in breadth are positively associated with abnormal returns over the following four quarters. I then demonstrate that this return predictability can be attributed to the information about the firms' future operating performance. When I examine different types of institutions independently, I find that the predictive power varies across the population of institutions. More specifically, institutions that follow active management style are better able to …

Quality Models: Selecting The Best Model To Deliver Results, William Martin

College of Business Faculty and Staff Works

No abstract provided.