School Of Business Administration: Financial Review

This article is the keynote address from the Eastern Finance Association meeting in New Orleans in March 2007 with updated references and examples. In this keynote address, I discuss what we can learn about institutional investors' views on corporate governance and corporate social responsibility from research and surveys.

Earnings-Based Bonus Compensation

The Financial Review, vol. 44, no. 4, 469-488.

António Câmara

This article studies the cost of contingent earnings-based bonus compensation. We assume that the firm has normal and abnormal earnings. The normal earnings result from normal firm activities and are modeled as an arithmetic Brownian motion. The abnormal earnings result from surprising activities (e.g., introduction of an unexpected new product, and unexpected strike) and are modeled as a compound Poisson process where the earnings jump sizes have a normal distribution. We investigate, in a simple general equilibrium model, how normal and abnormal earnings affect the cost of contingent bonus compensation to the firm.

Excess Control, Corporate Governance and Implied Cost of Equity: International Evidence

The Financial Review, vol. 44, no. 4, 489-524.

Omrane Guedhami and Dev Mishra

We investigate whether the separation between ownership and control rights can be costly to controlling shareholders and firms in terms of capital-raising costs. Using estimates of the cost of equity capital implied by analyst earnings forecasts and growth rate for a sample of 1,207 firms from nine Asian and 13 Western European countries, we find strong, robust evidence that the cost of equity is increasing in excess control, while controlling for other firm-level characteristics. This core finding persists after controlling for legal institutions variables.

Director Compensation and the Reliability of Accounting Information

The Financial Review, vol. 44, no. 4, 525-539.

Anwar Boumosieh

This paper studies the effect of incentive-based compensation on directors' monitoring of management. Using total accruals to measure the level of earnings management, I find that director stock option compensation is associated with higher levels of total accruals. I interpret this result to suggest that director stock options are more likely to align interests of directors with those of managers and that this convergence of interest manifests in lower transparency and reliability of financial information. The results suggest that director stock option compensation provides incentive for directors to compromise their task in the financial reporting process.

The Intertemporal Risk-Return Relation in the Stock Market

The Financial Review, vol. 44, no. 4, 541-558

Xiaquan Jiang and Bong Soo Lee

We reexamine the intertemporal risk-return relation. We find a positive risk-return relation by measuring expected returns and conditional variance in a consistent manner using firm fundamentals. As measures of fundamentals, we use earnings and dividends. For the robustness of our results, we consider various sample periods and model specifications. Our finding of a positive relation is robust as long as we use firm fundamentals in measuring expected returns and conditional variances in a consistent manner.

Out of Sample Predictability in International Equity Markets: A Model Selection Approach

The Financial Review, vol. 44, no. 4, 559-582

Xiaojing Su, Tao Wang, and Jian Yang

For 13 major international stock markets, there is much evidence of out-of-sample predictability for growth stocks especially when evaluated with economic criteria, and to a noticeably lesser extent for general stock markets and value stocks. Our results shed light on the recent debate about stock return predictability, using different assets (growth-style indexes), forecasting variables (past returns), forecasting models (nonlinear models), and alternative forecasting evaluation criteria (economic criteria). Our analysis suggests that (growth) stock returns might be predictable.

Fractional Integration in Commodity Futures Returns

The Financial Review, vol. 44, no. 4, 583-602

Joon Elder and Hyun J. Jin

We reexamine commodity futures returns for evidence of fractional integration utilizing two estimators based on wavelets. We summarize basic wavelet methods for signal processing and decompose commodity futures returns by wavelet scale. We find the evidence for long memory is not conclusive based on visual inspection of the wavelet decomposition, but formal statistical tests suggest evidence of long memory, in the form of antipersistence, in about half of agricultural commodity futures. We find little evidence of long memory in metal futures. Our results are useful in interpreting previous disparate findings based on frequency domain estimators.

The Corporate Acquisition Ploicy of Financially Distressed Firms

The Financial Review, vol. 44, no. 4, 603-623

Dror Parnes

The paper examines a unique motive for corporate acquisitions among distressed firms: the desire to enhance creditworthiness by both the acquirer and the acquired firms. I develop a theoretical model of the creditworthiness conditions necessary for corporate acquisitions and identify the optimal policy in searching for an acquirer. I distinguish between strategic and nonstrategic acquisitions and find the necessary conditions and most favorable policy for a strategic acquisition to evolve. I demonstrate the importance of the cost of finding an acquirer, the impact of sharing bargaining leverage, and the economic significance of credit quality for the success of the accord.

The Forward Exchange Rate Bias Puzzle Is Persistent: Evidence from Stochastic and Nonparametric cointegration Tests

The Financial Review, vol. 44, no. 4, 625-645

Raj Aggarwal, Brian M. Lucey, and Sunil K. Mohanty

An important puzzle in international finance is the failure of the forward exchange rate to be a rational forecast of the future spot rate. We document that even after accounting for nonstationarity, nonnormality, and heteroskedasticity using parametric and nonparametric tests on data for over a quarter century, U.S. dollar forward rates for the major currencies (the British pound, Japanese yen, Swiss franc, and the German mark) are generally not rational forecasts of future spot rates. These findings deepen the forward exchange rate bias puzzle, especially as these markets are the most liquid foreign exchange markets with very low trading costs.

Personal Bankruptcy Law and New Business Formation

The Financial Review, vol. 44, no. 4, 647-663

Bill Francis, Iftekhar Hasan, and Haizhi Wang

Using a panel of all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia from 1990 to 1999, we report a nonlinear relation between state bankruptcy exemptions and new business formation. The rate of new business formation first increases as exemptions increase, but it then decreases. This result reflects the fact that bankruptcy exemptions tend to affect both demand for and supply of external financing to potential entrepreneurs.

The University of Mississippi: School of Business Administration