Using a new dataset of UK-syndicated loans, we document a significant loan cost disadvantage incurred by privately held firms. For identification, we use the distance of a firm's headquarters to ...London's capital markets as a plausibly exogenous variation in corporate structure (i.e., public/private) choice. We analyze the channels of the loan cost disadvantage of being private by documenting the importance of: the higher costs of information production, the lower bargaining power, the differences in ownership structure, and the differences in secondary market trading. Interestingly, we find no evidence that lenders price expected future performance into the loan spread differential.
Although previous research shows that prices of homes in neighborhoods with foreclosures are lower than those in neighborhoods without foreclosures, it remains unclear whether the lower prices are ...the result of a general decline in neighborhood values or whether foreclosures reduce the prices of nearby non-distressed sales through a contagion effect. We provide robust evidence of a contagion discount by simultaneously estimating the local price trend and the incremental price impact of nearby foreclosures. At its peak, the discount is roughly 1% per nearby foreclosed property. The discount diminishes rapidly as the distance to the distressed property increases. The contagion discount grows from the onset of distress through the foreclosure sale and then stabilizes. This pattern is consistent with the contagion effect being the visual externality associated with deferred maintenance and neglect.
This paper revisits the results of Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2002) on returns to entrepreneurial investments in the United States. Following the authors' methodology and new data from the ...Survey of Consumer Finances, I find that the "private equity premium puzzle" does not survive the period of high public equity returns in the 1990s. The difference between private and public equity returns is positive and large period-by-period between 1999 and 2007. Whereas in the 2008-2010 period, overlapping with the Great Recession, public and private equities performances are substantially closer. I validate these results in the aggregate data going back to the 1960s.
We investigate how changes in the supply of fast food restaurants affect weight outcomes of 3 million children and 3 million pregnant women. Among ninth graders, a fast food restaurant within 0.1 ...miles of a school results in a 5.2 percent increase in obesity rates. Among pregnant women, a fast-food restaurant within 0.5 miles of residence results in a 1.6 percent increase in the probability of gaining over 20 kilos. The implied effects on caloric intake are one order of magnitude larger for children than for mothers, consistent with smaller travel cost for adults. Non-fast food restaurants and future fast-food restaurants are uncorrelated with weight outcomes.
In this paper we develop a two regime Markov-switching EGARCH model introduced by Henry Henry, O., 2009. Regime switching in the relationship between equity returns and short-term interest rates. ...Journal of Banking and Finance 33, 405–414. to examine the relationship between crude oil shocks and stock markets. An application to stock markets of UK, France and Japan over the sample period January 1989 to December 2007 illustrates plausible results. We detect two episodes of series behaviour one relative to low mean/high variance regime and the other to high mean/low variance regime. Furthermore, there is evidence that common recessions coincide with the low mean/high variance regime. In addition, we allow both real stock returns and probability of transitions from one regime to another to depend on the net oil price increase variable. The findings show that rises in oil price has a significant role in determining both the volatility of stock returns and the probability of transition across regimes.
While there is a large body of empirical studies on the relationship between crude oil price changes and stock market returns, they have failed to achieve a consensus on this subject. In this paper, ...we combine wavelet analysis and Markov Switching Vector Autoregressive (MS-VAR) approach to explore the impact of the crude oil (CO) shocks on the stock market returns for UK, France and Japan over the period from January 1989 to December 2007. Our procedure involves the estimation of the extended MS-VAR model in order to investigate the importance of the resultant wavelet filtering series (after removing random components) in determining the behavior of the stock market volatilities. We show that CO shocks do not affect the recession stock market phases (except for Japan). However, they significantly reduce moderate and/or expansion stock market phases temporarily. Moreover, this negative relationship appears to be more pronounced during the pre-1999 period. The empirical findings will prove extremely useful to investors who need to understand the exact effect of international oil changes on certain stocks prices as well as for policy managers who need a more thorough evaluation about the efficiency of hedging policies affected by oil price changes.
We use short interest as an investor-based measure of over- or undervaluation that distinguishes between the misvaluation and Q-theories of mergers. Using this measure, we find that misvaluation is a ...strong determinant of merger decision-making. Firms in the top quintile of short interest are 54% more likely to engage in stock acquisitions and 22% less likely to engage in cash acquisitions. Stock (but not cash) acquirers have higher short interest than their targets. Overall, our results suggest that the previously documented underperformance of stock acquirers and the overperformance of cash acquirers can be explained by misvaluation, as captured by short interest.
Reverse mortgages allow elderly homeowners to tap into their housing wealth without having to sell or move out of their homes. However, very few eligible homeowners used reverse mortgages to achieve ...consumption smoothing until recently, when the reverse mortgage market in the United States witnessed substantial growth. In this article, I examine 1989–2007 loan‐level reverse mortgage data and conduct three sets of analyses to better understand the demand for reverse mortgages among elderly homeowners. First, I study the ZIP code characteristics correlated with reverse mortgage originations. Second, I show that recent reverse mortgage borrowers are significantly different from earlier borrowers in many respects. Third, I investigate the reasons why the reverse mortgage market experienced substantial growth in the mid‐2000s. Combining the reverse mortgage data with county‐level house price data, I find that higher house prices lead to more reverse mortgage originations. Specifically, the increases in house prices account for about one‐third of the overall growth in the reverse mortgage market from 2003 to 2007.
Litigation Risk and Abnormal Accruals Boone, Jeff P.; Khurana, Inder K.; Raman, K. K.
Auditing : a journal of practice and theory,
05/2011, Letnik:
30, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
SUMMARY In this paper, we examine the relation between auditor litigation risk and abnormal accruals over the 1989–2007 time period. We address potential endogeneity in prior studies by jointly ...modeling abnormal accruals and litigation risk in a simultaneous equation system. Our findings suggest that client-specific litigation risk affects auditor incentives to acquiesce to client demands for earnings management, i.e., the higher the risk of auditor litigation, the greater the auditor's restraining influence on the abnormal accruals reported by the client. We also find evidence that abnormal accruals increase the likelihood of auditor litigation. We also document that the 1995 Public Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA) lowered the client-specific risk of auditor litigation. Litigation reform remains a topic of ongoing interest. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the effects of litigation reform (and related changes in legal exposure) on auditor incentives and earnings management.
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