The inherent conflicts of interest in the auditor–client relationship and the unobservability of financial statement quality are likely culprits in the recent corporate scandals such as Enron and WorldCom. The solution proposed here is a financial statement insurance (FSI) mechanism. Instead of appointing and paying auditors, companies would purchase financial statement insurance that provides ...

We study the speculative value of a finitely lived asset when investors disagree and short sales are limited. In this case, investors are willing to pay a speculative value for the resale option they obtain when they acquire the asset. We characterize the equilibrium speculative value as a solution to a fixed point problem for a monotone operator F. A Dynamic Programming Principle applies and i...

This paper examines capital market effects of changes in securities regulation. We analyze two key directives in the European Union (EU) that tightened market abuse and transparency regulation and its enforcement. All EU member states were required to adopt these two directives but did so at different points in time. Our research design exploits this differential timing of the same regulatory c...

We examine whether institutional investors, and specifically underwriters, have an information advantage over other market participants in new public companies. We focus our attention on a sample of publicly traded firms that have become the target of an IPO-related securities class action lawsuit filed under Section 11 of the 1933 Securities Act between January 1991 and December 2006 and a mat...

This paper presents both the time-series and cross-country evidence on the growth of global equity markets and attempts to shed some light on the sources of equity market growth. I show that for developed countries market size is positively related to correlation of stock markets with the global portfolio, and that it is negatively related to government consumption. For emerging market countrie...

Ambivalence in the regulatory definition of capital adequacy for credit risk has recently steered the financial services industry to collateral loan obligations (CLOs) as an important balance sheet management tool. CLOs represent a specialised form of Asset-Backed Securitisation (ABS), with investors acquiring a structured claim on the interest proceeds generated from a portfolio of bank loans ...

Since 1996 the Basel risk-weighting regime has been based on the distinction between the trading and the banking book. For a long time credit items have been weighted less strictly if held in the trading book, on the assumption that they are easy to hedge or sell. The Great Financial Crisis made evident that banks declared a trading intent on positions that proved difficult or impossible to sel...

This paper investigates the mechanism through which short selling of a bank’s stocks can trigger the failure of the bank. In the model, creditors, who learn information from stock prices, will grow increasingly unsure about the bank’s true fundamentals in facing noisier stock prices; thus a run on the bank is more likely because of creditors’ concave payo¤. Understanding this, speculators condu...

If there are benefits to international risk sharing, consumption growth variability should decrease following the liberalization of the equity market. In addition, markets with open equity markets should display lower consumption growth variability than closed markets, everything else equal. However, the recent literature on financial liberalization suggests that volatile capital flows lead to ...

Since the demise of apartheid in South Africa, corporations have been encouraged to participate in the governmental goal of increasing corporate ownership by the black majority population. One vehicle that has arisen to help facilitate an increase in corporate ownership has been black economic empowerment (BEE) transactions. BEE transactions are essentially private placements of equity. Firms t...