J. Risk Financial Manag., Volume 2, Issue 1 (December 2009) – 5 articles , Pages 1-189

A challenge in enterprise risk measurement for diversified financial institutions is developing a coherent approach to aggregating different risk types. This has been motivated by rapid financial innovation, developments in supervisory standards (Basel 2) and recent financial turmoil. The main risks faced - market, credit and operational – have distinct distributional properties, and historically have been modeled in differing frameworks. We contribute to the modeling effort by providing tools and insights to practitioners and regulators. First, we extend the scope of the analysis to liquidity and interest rate risk, having Basel Pillar II of Basel implications. Second, we utilize data from major banking institutions’ loss experience from supervisory call reports, which allows us to explore the impact of business mix and inter-risk correlations on total risk. Third, we estimate and compare alternative established frameworks for risk aggregation (including copula models) on the same data-sets across banks, comparing absolute total risk measures (Value-at-Risk – VaR and proportional diversification benefits-PDB), goodness-of-fit (GOF) of the model as data as well as the variability of the VaR estimate with respect to sampling error in parameter. This benchmarking and sensitivity analysis suggests that practitioners consider implementing a simple non-parametric methodology (empirical copula simulation- ECS) in order to quantify integrated risk, in that it is found to be more conservatism and stable than the other models. We observe that ECS produces 20% to 30% higher VaR relative to the standard Gaussian copula simulation (GCS), while the variance-covariance approximation (VCA) is much lower. ECS yields the highest PDBs than other methodologies (127% to 243%), while Archimadean Gumbel copula simulation (AGCS) is the lowest (10-21%). Across the five largest banks we fail to find the effect of business mix to exert a directionally consistent impact on total integrated diversification benefits. In the GOF tests, we find mixed results, that in many cases most of the copula methods exhibit poor fit to the data relative to the ECS, with the Archimadean copulas fitting worse than the Gaussian or Student-T copulas. In a bootstrapping experiment, we find the variability of the VaR to be significantly lowest (highest) for the ECS (VCA), and that the contribution of the sampling error in the parameters of the marginal distributions to be an order or magnitude greater than that of the correlation matrices. Full article

To date, research which integrates corporate governance and risk management has been limited. Yet, risk exposure and management are increasingly becoming the core function of modern business enterprises in various sectors and industries domestically and globally. Risk identification and management are crucial in any business strategy design and implementation. From the investors’ point of view, knowledge of the risk profile, risk appetite and risk management are key elements in making sound portfolio investment decisions. This paper examines the relationships between corporate governance mechanisms and risk disclosure behavior using a sample of Canadian publicly-traded companies (TSX 230). Results show that Canadian public companies are more likely to disclose risk management information over and above the mandatory risk disclosures, if they are larger in size and if their boards of directors have more independent members. Minority voting control ownership structures appear to negatively impact risk disclosure and CEO incentive compensation shows mixed results. The paper concludes that more research is needed to further assess the impact of various governance mechanisms on corporate risk management and disclosure behavior. Full article

The performance of analysts’ forecasts has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, as yet, no empirical study has investigated the nexus between the analyst forecast dispersion (AFD) and excess returns surrounding stock market crashes in any depth. This paper attempts to fill this void by estimating a Fama-French model regression with AFD as a factor. Instead of an expected linear relationship, a nonlinear U-shape relationship between the AFD and excess returns is found. Full article

Current integration and co-movement among international stock markets has been boosted by increased globalization of the world economy, and profit-chasing capital surfing across borders. With a reputation as the fastest growing economy in the world, China’s stock market has continued gaining momentum during recent years and incurred growing attention from academicians, as well as practitioners. Taking into account economic and geographical considerations, the US and Hong Kong are considerably the most comparable stock markets to China. The usual vector error correction model (VECM) could overlook the long memory feature of cointegration residual series, which can in turn exert bias on the resulting inferences. To overcome its limitations, we employ a fractionally integrated VECM (FIVECM) in this paper to investigate the long-term cointegration relations binding China’s stock market to the aforementioned stock markets. In addition, by augmenting the FIVECM with multivariate GARCH model, the return transmission and volatility spillover between market return series were revealed simultaneously. Our empirical results show that China’s stock market is fractionally cointegrated with the two markets, and it appears that China’s stock market has stronger ties with its neighboring Hong Kong market than with the world superpower, the US market. Full article

In this study, we evaluate the impact of R&D intensity on acquiring firms’ abnormal returns by examining 925 Canadian completed deals between 1993 and 2002 that have information on R&D expenditures. While examining the returns to acquiring firm shareholders in the R&D intensive firms we evaluate two competing hypotheses: ‘growth potential hypothesis’ and ‘integration failure hypothesis’. According to the ‘growth potential hypothesis’, in light of the growth potential of the targets acquired by R&D intensive firms, investors are likely to react positively. ‘Integration failure hypothesis’ focuses on integration difficulties of a target by an R&D intensive firms and suggests that investor might be skeptical of such acquisitions and react negatively. Our results show that R&D intensity (i.e. R&D expenditure by sales) has a positive and significant effect on cumulative abnormal returns of the acquiring firms around the announcement dates. This implies that market generally favors the M&A deals by R&D intensive firms. An analysis of the differentiating characteristics reveal that R&D firms have a significantly higher growth potential and undertake more stock financed deals compared to the non R&D firms. Further, our results show that there is no significant change in long-term operating performance subsequent to the M&A deals for both R&D firms and non R&D firms. In general, our results show support for ‘growth potential hypothesis’. Full article