J. Risk Financial Manag., Volume 12, Issue 3 (September 2019) – 48 articles

The great divide between official analyses and economists’ views of optimal bank equity capital is not as wide as appears at first sight if the economics of risk is properly addressed. Adapting the BoE’s analysis to take account of abnormal risk conditions, a less benign view of the effectiveness of resolution regimes in systemic crisis, an international rather than domestic perspective, and a consistent approach to risk, takes one a good distance towards the economists’ view. The economic rationale for capital levels in the region of Basel III is left looking thin. It looks thinner still when, as now, price-to-book ratios are calling regulatory capital measures into question for some important banks Full article

This paper examines the effect of the Global Financial Crisis on manufacturing firms in Sweden by analyzing the effect of trade exposure on firm performance. This study examines the decline in international trade during the global financial crisis by focusing on the relationship between global production linkages and firm performance. The trade exposure at the firm and industry levels were measured to assess the direct and indirect effects of the crisis on firm performance. Robust evidence was found of a negative relationship between trade exposure and the firms’ sales and value-added growth during the crisis. In addition, it was found that higher export dependence was associated with lower sales growth during the crisis. Our results also show that the effect of the decline in the external demand on firm performance depends on the international input-output linkages. In particular, industries that are upstream in the value chain experienced a less severe decline in performance during the crisis. Full article

This paper studies the forecasting ability of cryptocurrency time series. This study is about the four most capitalised cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple. Different Bayesian models are compared, including models with constant and time-varying volatility, such as stochastic volatility and GARCH. Moreover, some cryptopredictors are included in the analysis, such as S&P 500 and Nikkei 225. In this paper, the results show that stochastic volatility is significantly outperforming the benchmark of VAR in both point and density forecasting. Using a different type of distribution, for the errors of the stochastic volatility, the student-t distribution is shown to outperform the standard normal approach. Full article

Previous studies have shown that investor preference for positive skewness creates a potential premium on negatively skewed assets. In this paper, we attempt to explore the connection between investors’ skewness preferences and corresponding demand for a risk premium on asset returns. Using data from the Japanese stock market, we empirically study the significance of risk aversion with skewness preference that potentially delivers a premium. Compared to studies on other stock markets, our finding suggests that Japanese investors exhibit preference for positively skewed assets, but do not display dislike for ones that are negatively skewed. This implies that investors from different countries having dissimilar attitudes toward risk may possess different preferences toward positive skewness, which would result in a different magnitude of expected risk premium on negatively skewed assets. Full article

Raising capital efficiently for the operations is considered a fundamental decision for any firms. Since the 1960s, various theories on capital structure have been developed. Various empirical studies had also been conducted to examine the appropriateness of these theories in different markets. Unfortunately, evidence is mixed. In the context of Vietnam, a rising powerful economy in the Asia Pacific region, this important issue has been largely ignored. This paper is conducted to provide additional evidence on this important issue. In addition, different factors affecting the capital structure decisions from the Vietnamese listed firms are examined. The Generalized Method of Moment approach is employed on the sample of 227 listed firms in Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange over the period from 2008 to 2017. Findings from this study suggest that the Vietnamese listed firms follow the trade-off theory to determine their capital structure (i.e., to determine the optimal debt level). In contrast, no evidence has been found to confirm that the pecking order theory can explain the financing decisions of the Vietnamese listed firms, as previously expected. In addition, findings from this study also indicate that ‘Fund flow deficit’ and ‘Change in sales’ are the most two important factors that affect the amount of debt issued for the Vietnamese listed firms. Implications for academics, practitioners, and the Vietnamese government have also been emerged from the findings of this paper. Full article

The current literature has generally considered prices of the agricultural commodity as an endogenous factor to crude oil price. As such, the role of the agricultural market in the energy sector has been largely ignored. We argue that the expansion of agricultural production may trigger a significant increase in oil price. In addition, the world has recently witnessed a growth in biofuel production, leading to an increase in the size of the agricultural sector. This study is conducted to examine the impact of different agricultural shocks on the oil and agricultural markets in the US for the period from 1986 to 2018. The study utilizes the Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) model to estimate the relationship between the agricultural market and the crude oil market. Moreover, the variance decomposition is also used to quantify the contribution of agricultural demand shocks on oil price variations. Findings from this paper indicate that different agricultural shocks can have different effects on oil price and that corn use in ethanol plays an important role in the impact of corn demand shocks on oil price. We find evidence that the agricultural market can have an impact on oil prices through two main channels: indirect cost push effect and direct biofuel effect. Of these, the biofuel channel unexpectedly suggests that the expansion of bioethanol may in fact foster the dependency of the economy on fossil fuel use and prices. Full article

This paper explores the impact of urbanization on income inequality in Vietnam, using the regression estimation method with panel data including Driscoll and Kraay, and Pooled Mean Group. The research data cover 63 provinces in Vietnam from 2006 to 2016. The results show that in the long term, urbanization has an impact on reducing income inequality. In the short term, urbanization has a negligible impact on income inequality. The hypothesis of an inverted-U-shaped relationship between urbanization and income inequality is confirmed. The high school enrollment rate and the proportion of agriculture have an effect on reducing income inequality. Full article

The members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have made several attempts to adopt renewable energy targets given the economic, energy-related, environmental challenges faced by the governments, policy makers, and stakeholders. However, previous studies have focused limited attention on the role of renewable energy when testing the dynamic link between CO₂ emissions, energy consumption and renewable energy consumption. As such, this study is conducted to test a common hypothesis regarding a long-run environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). The paper also investigates the causal link between carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, energy consumption, renewable energy, population growth, and economic growth for countries in the region. Using various time-series econometrics approaches, our analysis covers five ASEAN members (including Indonesia, Myanmar, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand) for the 1971–2014 period where required data are available. Our results reveal no long-run relationship among the variables of interest in the Philippines and Thailand, but a relationship does exist in Indonesia, Myanmar, and Malaysia. The EKC hypothesis is observed in Myanmar but not in Indonesia and Malaysia. Also, Granger causality among these important variables varies considerably across the selected countries. No Granger causality among carbon emissions, energy consumption, and renewable energy consumption is reported in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Indonesia experiences a unidirectional causal effect from economic growth to renewable energy consumption in both short and long run and from economic growth to CO₂ emissions and energy consumption. Interestingly, only Myanmar has a unidirectional effect from GDP growth, energy consumption, and population to the adoption of renewable energy. Policy implications have emerged based on the findings achieved from this study for each country in the ASEAN region. Full article

The study attempted to fill a gap in the research on international business by providing fresh evidence of the effect of the degree of internationalization on firm performance and the influence of organizational slack on this relationship. By applying a fixed-effects model to data from 569,767 Vietnamese enterprises from 2007 to 2015, a significant W-shaped linkage between internationalization and firm performance was revealed. Importantly, the results also emphasized the importance of three types of slack in the first stage of the internationalization process: absorbed slack human resources, other absorbed slack resources, and unabsorbed slack resources. Full article

Fiscal decentralisation has attracted great attention from governments, practitioners, and international institutions with the aims of enhancing economic growth in the last 5 decades. However, satisfactorily measuring the degree of fiscal decentralisation across countries has appeared to be problematic. In addition, the link between fiscal decentralisation and economic growth across provinces has largely been ignored, in particular for emerging markets such as Vietnam. As such, this study is conducted to determine the extent of fiscal decentralisation and to assess its impact on economic growth based on data from all 63 provinces of Vietnam in the period after the 2008 financial crisis. Instead of using traditional measures of fiscal decentralisation, the study uses the Fiscal Decentralisation Index (FDI) together with the two most important and inseparable components of the index, those being (i) the Fiscal Importance (FI) and (ii) the Fiscal Autonomy (FA). The Difference Generalised Method of Moments (DGMM) is utilised to correct for the potential problem of endogeneity between fiscal decentralisation and economic growth. Results show that the two indicators (FI and FDI) have a negative impact while FA has a positive impact on economic growth across provinces. On the ground of these empirical findings, implications for specific policies have emerged for Vietnam and other emerging markets on the extent of fiscal decentralisation, and its major determinants, which positively support economic growth in the future. Full article

This study examines the impact of regulatory capital requirements and ownership structure on bank lending in Emerging Asian Markets. The findings of the study imply that banks with excess capital are less affected by capital constraints and enjoy opportunities to extend their credit portfolios. The monitory policy indicator has the expected negative and significant impact on bank lending. In case of well-capitalized banks, the interaction between the excess capital and monetary policy indicator has a significant positive relation with bank lending, which means that banks with excess capital have capability to raise uninsured financing and shield their loan portfolios as compared to less-capitalized banks that reduce their lending in the period of monetary tightening. In the case of bank ownership structure, banks with excess capital ratios and ownership concentration lead towards an increase in lending activity. The findings also show that well-capitalized banks with managerial ownership tend to reduce lending which validates agency theory of corporate governance. Full article

In this paper, we disentangle public spending components in order analyse their effects on the U.S. economy. Our Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Model (DSGE) model includes both civilian and military expenditures. We take into account the changes in the effects of these public spending components before and after the structural break that occurred in the U.S. economy around 1980, namely financial liberalisation. Therefore, we estimate our model with Bayesian methods for two sample periods: 1954:3–1979:2 and 1983:1–2008:2. Our results suggest that total government spending has a positive effect on output, but it induces a fall in private consumption. Moreover, we find important differences between the effects of civilian and military spending. In the pre-1980 period, higher civilian spending induced a rise in private consumption, whereas military spending shocks systematically decreased it. Our findings indicate that civilian spending has a more positive impact on output than military expenditure. Our robustness analysis assesses the impact of public spending shocks under alternative monetary policy assumptions. Full article

This empirical study estimates 18 single and 18 three-factor models and then tests for structural change. Break dates are identified where possible. In general, there is some empirical evidence for parameter instabilities of the estimated beta coefficients. In most cases there is no or one break point, and in some cases, there are two structural breaks examining the three factor models. The estimated factor sensitivities of single beta models seem to be even less strongly affected by structural change. Consequently, beta factors are probably more stable than some observers might believe. The break dates that have been identified generally seem to coincide with crises or recoveries after stock market slumps. This empirical finding is compatible with the point of view that bull-markets or bear-markets could matter when estimating beta coefficients. In general, the timing of structural change often seems to coincide with either the bursting of the dot-com bubble or the recovery of stock prices thereafter. The banking industry is the most notable exception. In this sector of the German economy, the global financial meltdown and the sovereign debt crisis in Europe have been of high relevance. Consequently, the internet hype of the late 1990s and the early 2000s seems to be more important for the German stock market than the US subprime debacle and the accompanying European sovereign debt crisis. Full article

This paper introduces a parsimonious and yet flexible semiparametric model to forecast financial volatility. The new model extends a related linear nonnegative autoregressive model previously used in the volatility literature by way of a power transformation. It is semiparametric in the sense that the distributional and functional form of its error component is partially unspecified. The statistical properties of the model are discussed and a novel estimation method is proposed. Simulation studies validate the new method and suggest that it works reasonably well in finite samples. The out-of-sample forecasting performance of the proposed model is evaluated against a number of standard models, using data on S&P 500 monthly realized volatilities. Some commonly used loss functions are employed to evaluate the predictive accuracy of the alternative models. It is found that the new model generally generates highly competitive forecasts. Full article

In the future, when the process of economic integration in the banking sector is more powerful, and competitive, diversifying revenue is an inevitable and objective trend to help the banks increase profits, minimize risks and improve their competitive position in the system. The research is on the relationship between revenue diversification, risk and bank performance using data from audited financial statements and annual reports of 26 commercial banks listed and unlisted in Vietnam during the period 2010–2018. The research method uses Generalized Method of Moment (GMM) modeling techniques to solve endogenous problems, variance and autocorrelation in the research model. Research results show that diversification negatively impacts profitability and the higher the diversification, the higher the risk of commercial banks. However, the more diversified listed banks, the more increased the bank’s stability. The banks show the weakness and lack of experience of the banking system in developing a reasonable profit transformation model. The revenue diversification of banks is currently passive and moves slowly. Interest income is still the motivation of bank development, boosting profit growth. Growth, as well as the contribution from service activities, is not commensurate with potentials; although there are many positive points, they are not enough to cover risks from net interest income activities. Full article

This is book review of “The Belt and Road Strategy in International Business and Administration”, edited by Wei Liu, Zhe Zhang, Jinxiong Chen and Sang-Bing Tsai. This book review focuses on discussing how “The Belt and Road Strategy” develops in the current studies of international business field based on the book’s content. The review begins with a literature review on current research in “The Belt and Road Strategy”, then gives a brief summary of each chapter of the book, and finally concludes with its practical implication and suggestion for readership. Full article

The paper aims to assess the level of competition in the Indian banking sector overall as well as within the three groups of banks: foreign owned, state owned (public sector), and privately owned. We use panel data for the period from 2005–2018. We found that the overall competition in the Indian banking sector is strong, although there are differences by type of bank ownership. The Indian banking market continues to be characterized by monopolistic competition. The various policy measures taken by the Indian government in recent years appear to have helped boost competition. A policy suggestion would be to further liberalize the banking sector for foreign investment. Full article

This paper investigates the level of liquidity of digital currencies during the very intense bearish phase in their markets. The data employed span the period from April 2018 until January 2019, which is the second phase of bearish times with almost constant decreases. The Amihud’s illiquidity ratio is employed in order to measure the liquidity of these digital assets. Findings indicate that the most popular cryptocurrencies exhibit higher levels of liquidity during stressed periods. Thereby, it is revealed that investors’ preferences for trading during highly risky times are favorable for well-known virtual currencies in the detriment of less-known ones. This enhances findings of relevant literature about strong and persistent positive or negative herding behavior of investors based on Bitcoin, Ethereum and highly-capitalized cryptocurrencies in general. Notably though, a tendency towards investing in the TrueUSD stablecoin has also emerged. Full article

Capital regulation has been among the most important tools for regulators to maintain the credibility and stability of the financial systems. However, the question whether higher capital induce banks to take lower risk remains unanswered. This paper examines the effect of capital on bank risk employing a meta-analysis approach, which considers a wide range of empirical papers from 1990 to 2018. We found that the negative effect of bank capital on bank risk, which implies the discipline role of bank capital, is more likely to be reported. However, the reported results are suffered from the publication bias due to the preference for significant estimates and favored results. Our study also shows that the differences in the previous studies’ conclusions are primarily caused by the differences in the study design, particularly the risk and capital measurements; the model specification such as the concern for the dynamic of bank risk behaviors, the endogeneity of the capital and unobserved time fixed effects; along with and the sample characteristics such as the sample size, and whether banks are bank holding companies or located in high-income countries. Full article

Monetary policy is forward looking and, in its pursuit of transparency, it communicates its economic projections to the public at large. As a result, there is interest in whether these projections are credible. We argue that central to that credibility is the public’s ability to replicate the FOMC’s projections using publicly available data only. In other words, is it possible to anticipate, reliably and independently, what the FOMC will anticipate for the federal funds rate? To address this question, we assemble FOMC projections from 1992 to 2017; examine their statistical properties; postulate models to predict FOMC projections; and estimate the parameters of these models. We are not arguing that the FOMC determines their projections using these models. Rather, these equations are the ones that the public could use to forecast FOMC forecasts and to anticipate interest-rate decisions. Full article

Exploring dependence structures between financial time series has been important within a wide range of applications. The main aim of this paper is to examine dependence relationships among five well-known cryptocurrencies—Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, and Stella—by a copula directional dependence (CDD). By employing a neural network autoregression model to avoid the serial dependence in each individual cryptocurrency, we generate residuals of the fitted models with time series of daily log-returns in percentage of the five cryptocurrencies and then we apply a Gaussian copula marginal beta regression model to the residuals to explore the CDD. The results show that the CDD from Bitcoin to Litecoin is highest among all ordered directional dependencies and the CDDs from Ethereum to the other four cryptocurrencies are relatively higher than the CDDs to Ethereum from those cryptocurrencies. This finding implies that the return shocks of Bitcoin have the most effect on Litecoin and the return shocks of Ethereum relatively influence the shocks on the other four cryptocurrencies instead of being affected by them. This allows investors to build the market-timing strategies by observing the directional flow of return shocks among cryptocurrencies. Full article

The banking industry is an essential financial intermediary, thus the efficient operation of banks is vital for economic development and social welfare. However, the 2008 global financial crisis triggered a reconsideration of the banking systems, as well as the role of government intervention. The literature has paid little attention to the banking industry in the Asia-Pacific region in the context of bank efficiency. This study employs double bootstrap data envelopment analysis to measure bank efficiency and examine the relationship between regulation, supervision, and state ownership in commercial banks in the Asia-Pacific region for the period 2005 to 2014. Our results indicate that excluding off-balance sheet activities in efficiency estimations lead to underestimating of the pure technical efficiency, while overestimating the scale efficiency of banks in the Asia-Pacific region. Cross-country comparisons reveal that Australian banks exhibit the highest levels of technical efficiency, while Indonesian banks exhibit the lowest average. Our bootstrap regression results suggest that bank regulation and supervision are positively related to bank technical efficiency, while state ownership is not significantly related to bank efficiency. Furthermore, our findings show that tighter regulation and supervision are significantly related to higher efficiency for small and large-sized banks. Full article

Separation of ownership and control plays a significant role in determining the agency cost, and there are many consequences of this agency problem. The control-enhancing mechanisms enhance control of controlling shareholders who expropriate small shareholders. Controlling shareholders are different in different countries; majorly, family firms are controlling firms in Pakistani context. The use of control-enhancing mechanism is rampant in emerging economies, and even some developed countries, related research especially in Pakistan requires evidence. This study exhibits a pooled cross-sectional analysis of listed companies in Pakistan between 2005 and 2016. In this research, we have examined the influence of control-enhancing mechanisms on firms’ earnings management and which mechanism (pyramid control, multiple control chains, and cross-holding control) is significantly influencing the earnings management of firms. We have analyzed both types of earnings manipulation techniques (accrual and real earning management). Our results explicate that the pyramid control and multiple control chain mechanisms are significantly positively related to the accruals earning management and real earnings management, unveiling that firms with these controls manipulate earnings with discretionary accruals as well as with real activity manipulation. Real activity manipulation enhances firms to overproduce the inventory (decreasing the unit price) and to reduce the discretionary expenses (increasing the reported earnings). Full article

We provide a methodology to estimate a global credit risk factor from credit default swap (CDS) spreads that can be very useful for risk management. The global risk factor (GRF) reproduces quite well the different episodes that have affected the credit market over the sample period. It is highly correlated with standard credit indices, but it contains much higher explanatory power for fluctuations in CDS spreads across sectors than the credit indices themselves. The additional information content over iTraxx seems to be related to some financial interest rates. We first use the estimated GRF to analyze the extent to which the eleven sectors we consider are systemic. After that, we use it to split the credit risk of individual firms into systemic, sectorial, and idiosyncratic components, and we perform some analyses to test that the estimated idiosyncratic components are actually firm-specific. The systemic and sectorial components explain around 65% of credit risk in the European industrial and financial sectors and 50% in the North American sectors, while 35% and 50% of risk, respectively, is of an idiosyncratic nature. Thus, there is a significant margin for portfolio diversification. We also show that our decomposition allows us to identify those firms whose credit would be harder to hedge. We end up analyzing the relationship between the estimated components of risk and some synthetic risk factors, in order to learn about the different nature of the credit risk components. Full article

Financial crisis is nothing new in the annals of history of the capitalistic path of economic development; it is a part of the business cycle. The theoretical basis is well entrenched in the concept of ‘Keynesian Cross’. The tale of crisis, dating back centuries, has taken a new turn with the call for more globalization—liberalize trade and open up the financial sector. This has made many nations vulnerable to crises that are likely to be repeated, perhaps frequently. Based on recent experience, warning signs can be read from the dollar-centric exchange rate, the mainstay for the stability of the current global financial system. To a careful observer, fatigue in the system cannot be overlooked. Full article

The takaful industry is searching for an optimal model for Islamic insurance operation, which has turned out to be a challenging task. This paper translates the abstract scientific knowledge accumulated in the optimal contracting literature into a simple, nontechnical, analytical framework to analyze alternative business models which could be used by regulators to align the best interest of shareholders and policyholders in the takaful industry. This paper shows that the wakalah–surplus-sharing hybrid serves as the optimal structure for takaful operation; in the presence of Akerlof’s (1982) gift-exchange, the wakalah fee reduces the adverse selection problem; and the wakalah fee could be used to protect infant takaful operators. Full article

Distributed ledger technology, also known as the blockchain, is gaining traction globally. Blockchain offers a secure validation mechanism and decentralized mass collaboration. Cryptocurrencies make use of this technology as a new asset class for investors worldwide. Cryptocurrencies are being used by companies to raise capital via initial coin offerings (ICOs). The substantial inflow of unregulated capital into a transactional and transnational industry has aroused interest from not just investors, but also national securities and monetary regulatory agencies. In this paper, we review the Security and Exchange Commission’s initial statements and subsequent pronouncements on ICO’s to illustrate the potential problems with applying an older legal framework to an ever-evolving ecosystem. Recognizing the inability of enforcement within existing regulatory frameworks, we discuss the importance of regulation of the crypto asset class and internal collaboration between government agencies and developers in the establishment of an ecosystem that integrates investor protection and investments. Full article

This paper reexamines the role of the Federal Reserve in triggering the recent housing crisis. Specifically, we explore if the relationship between the federal funds rate and the housing variables underwent structural changes in the wake of the housing crisis. Using quarterly data spanning 1960–2017, we estimate a VAR model involving federal funds rate, real GDP growth and a housing variable (captured by house price inflation or residential investment share or housing starts) and conduct time series analysis for the pre- and post-crisis periods. While previous studies mostly set break-dates based on events known a priori to split the full sample to subsamples, we endogenously determine structural break points occurring at multiple unknown dates. Our Granger causality analysis indicates that the federal funds rate did not cause house price inflation, although it caused residential investment share and housing starts in the pre-crisis period. In the post-crisis period, the real GDP growth caused residential investment and housing starts while house price inflation had a momentum of its own. Our impulse response and forecast error variance decomposition analysis reinforce these results. Overall, our findings suggest that housing volume fluctuates more than house prices over the business cycle. Full article

Undoubtedly, it is important to have an empirically effective credit risk rating method for decision-making in the financial industry, business, and even government. In our approach, for each corporate bond (CB) and its issuer, we first propose a credit risk rating (Crisk-rating) system with rating intervals for the standardized credit risk price spread (S-CRiPS) measure presented by Kariya et al. (2015), where credit information is based on the CRiPS measure, which is the difference between the CB price and its government bond (GB)-equivalent CB price. Second, for each Crisk-homogeneous class obtained through the Crisk-rating system, a term structure of default probability (TSDP) is derived via the CB-pricing model proposed in Kariya (2013), which transforms the Crisk level of each class into a default probability, showing the default likelihood over a future time horizon, in which 1545 Japanese CB prices, as of August 2010, are analyzed. To carry it out, the cross-sectional model of pricing government bonds with high empirical performance is required to get high-precision CRiPS and S-CRiPS measures. The effectiveness of our GB model and the S-CRiPS measure have been demonstrated with Japanese and United States GB prices in our papers and with an evaluation of the credit risk of the GBs of five countries in the EU and CBs issued by US energy firms in Kariya et al. (2016a, b). Our Crisk-rating system with rating intervals is tested with the distribution of the ratings of the 1545 CBs, a specific agency’s credit rating, and the ratings of groups obtained via a three-stage cluster analysis. Full article