cost uncertainty and the rate of investment abstract this paper examines the effect of cost and price uncertainty on the optimal rate of investment by firms within a general equilibrium framework former works which have studied this issue like hartman 1972 and abel 1983 1984 1985 have come to the conclusion that this effect is positive since increased price uncertainty raises expected profitability but these studies assume a fixed discount rate which is equivalent to assuming that consumers are risk neutral this paper shows that if consumers are risk averse the effect of uncertainty may be reversed and investment may be depressed when price or cost uncertainty is increased

corporate social responsibility and profit volatility theory and empirical evidence corporate social responsibility csr implies extra care for the well being of stakeholders different from shareholders in our theoretical model we show that when this principle implies that more csr oriented companies incorporate stakeholders well being constraints it translates into higher sensitivity of profits to economic shocks our empirical analysis finds support for this hypothesis showing that csr attributes which relate to positive contributions to stakeholders well being significantly and positively affect idiosyncratic profit volatility our findings remain robust when controlled for endogeneity with instrumental variable estimates

the pricing of currency risk in japan abstract previous work on the pricing of exchange rate risk has primarily focused on us firms and surprisingly found stock returns were not significantly affected by exchange rate fluctuations in this paper we conduct an in depth investigation that examines whether exchange rate risk is priced in the equity market of japan using an intertemporal asset pricing testing procedure that allows risk premia to change through time in response to changes in macroeconomic conditions our multiperiod asset pricing tests show that the foreign exchange rate risk premium is a significant component of japanese stock returns specifically the results suggest that currency risk exposure commands a significant risk premium for multinationals and high exporting japanese firms the currency risk factor is found to be less influential in explaining the behavior of average returns for low exporting and domestic firms however it is shown to exhibit large return volatility that is likely to be perceived by investors who wish to control portfolio risk as an important underlying source of risk furthermore japanese stock returns are found to be related to the relative distress and size factors above and beyond the covariation explained by the currency risk factor

a stochastic model of investment marginal q and the market value of the firm this paper presents closed form solutions for the investment and valuation of a competitive firm with a cobb douglas production function and a constant elasticity adjustment cost function in the presence of stochastic prices for output and inputs the value of the firm is a linear function of the capital stock the optimal rate of investmentis an increasing function of the slope of the value function with respect to the capital stock marginal q a mean preserving spread of the distribution of future price increases investment an increase in the scale of the random component of a price can increase decrease or not affect the rate of investment depending on the sign of the covariance of this price with a weighted average of all prices this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

firm valuation earnings expectations and the exchange rate exposure effect consistent with previous research we fail to find a significant correlation between the abnormal returns of our sample firms with international activities and changes in the dollar we investigate the possibility that this failure is due to mispricing lagged changes in the dollar are a significant variable in explaining current abnormal returns of our sample firms suggesting that mispricing does occur a simple trading strategy based upon these results generates significant abnormal returns corroborating evidence from returns around earnings announcements as well as errors in analysts forecasts of earnings is also provided it is a widely held view that exchange rate movement should affect the value of a firm standard economic analysis implies that the profitability and value of most u s firms with foreign sales or operations abroad should increase decrease with an unexpected depreciation appreciation of the dollar as expected foreign currency cash flows translate into larger smaller u s

when is a lower exchange rate pass through associated with greater exchange rate exposure abstract we study the relationship between exchange rate pass through how exchange rates affect import prices and exchange rate exposure how exchange rates affect profits under flexible prices we note that the convexity of costs is an important determinant of both pass through and exposure and that an increase in the convexity of costs typically reduces both pass through and exposure hence the correlation between pass through and exposure should be positive across industries if cost functions differ across industries this effect can be mitigated by the negative correlation between pass through and exposure induced by changes in the price elasticity of demand

capacity investment and market power in the economic value of energy firms regulation of energy firms faces the complex problem of balancing private earning a fair rate of return on investment and public assure safe and reliable supply of energy at the lowest possible costs goals tobin s q is a forward looking indicator on investment opportunities and on market power of firms that energy regulators can use for more effective regulation this paper presents the empirical evidence on the determinants of differences in observed values of tobin s q for a sample of large listed energy firms from 10 different countries in the period 2000 2006 we find that adjustment costs represent around sixty percent of the difference between economic and book value of the assets for the representative firm while rents from market power represent the other forty percent therefore across countries there is room for regulatory actions aiming at reducing energy prices but less than what may be inferred from the observed average q values

exchange rates and cash flows in differentiated product industries a simulation approach how do exchange rate changes impact firms cash flows we extend a simulation method developed in industrial organization to answer this question we use prices quantities and product characteristics for differentiated products coupled with a discrete choice framework and an assumption of price competition to estimate marginal costs for all producers using a monte carlo approach we generate counterfactual prices and profits for different levels of exchange rates we illustrate the method using the market for bottled water our results stress that even in a relatively simple market such as this one different brands face very different exchange rate risks consider a firm that produces a good in france using mainly local inputs and sells it abroad in locations that have a floating exchange rate vis a vis the euro profits and in turn the value of the firm are potentially exposed to exchange rate changes if the euro appreciates profits when measured in euros are likely to decrease how large is the decrease in profits similarly what is the impact of such an exchange rate change on the profits of an import competing firm these are the questions that a large literature on exchange rate exposure attempts to answer

crossing the lines the conditional relation between exchange rate exposure and stock returns in emerging and developed markets this paper examines the importance of exchange rate exposure in the return generating process for a large sample of non financial firms from 37 countries we argue that the effect of exchange rate exposure on stock returns is conditional and show evidence of a significant return impact to firm level currency exposures when conditioning on the exchange rate change we further show that the realized return to exposure is directly related to the size and sign of the exchange rate change suggesting fluctuations in exchange rates as a source of time variation in currency return premia for the entire sample the return impact ranges from 1 2 to 3 3 per unit of currency exposure and it is larger for firms in emerging markets compared to developed markets overall the results indicate that foreign exchange rate exposure estimates are economically meaningful despite the fact that individual time series results are noisy and many exposures are not statistically significant and that exchange rate exposure plays an important role in generating cross sectional return variation moreover we show that the relation between exchange rate exposure and stock returns is more consistent with a cash flow effect than a discount rate effect

international competition and exchange rate shocks a cross country industry analysis of stock returns this article systematically examines the importance of exchange rate movements and industry competition for stock returns common shocks to industries across countries are more important than competitive shocks due to changes in exchange rates weekly exchange rate shocks explain almost nothing of the relative performance of industries using returns measured over longer horizons the importance of exchange rate shocks increases slightly and the importance of industry common shocks increases more substantially both industry and exchange rate shocks are more important for industries that produce internationally traded goods but the importance of these shocks is economically small for these industries as well economists journalists and politicians around the world argue that some of the industries in their country compete vigorously with the same industries in other countries and that exchange rate shocks affect their competitiveness in the united states it is routinely stated that some u s industries compete with japanese industries and that a depreciation of the yen is bad for these u s industries and good for the rival japanese industries if the yen falls trade tensions could intensify between the u s and japan as autos and machinery from japan gain a competitive edge 1 further the exchange rate literature shows that exchange rate shocks lead to persistent deviations from purchasing power parity 2 froot and klemperer 1989 and knetter 1989 1993 among others demonstrate that deviations from purchasing power parity lead to sharp changes in price markups and profit margins for exporters

exchange rates and firms liquidity evidence from adrs abstract exchange rate changes can in principle affect a firm s value by affecting the firm s earnings or its cost of funds existing studies using monthly data over long sample periods find little or no impact of changes in exchange rates on a firm s valuation we examine a different potential path for exchange rate effects namely the effect of exchange rate variability on a stock s liquidity using transactions data we examine the microstructure characteristics of united kingdom and mexican american depositary receipts adrs around two major exchange rate crises the pound sterling withdrawal from the european exchange rate mechanism in september 1992 and the mexican devaluation of december 1994 we conclude that these events of exchange rate turbulence had little or no effect on the trading costs of adrs in the united states the results suggest that the impact of exchange rate volatility on market liquidity is not a conduit by which stock values are affected

firm level effects of asymmetric intervention in foreign exchange markets evidence from the swiss currency floor in january 2015 the swiss national bank snb abandoned the swiss franc s exchange rate floor against the euro this paper is the first to study the firm level effects of this asymmetric type of central bank intervention in foreign exchange markets using weekly stock returns for a sample of swiss non financial firms i find significant reductions in total stock return volatility as well as market risk following the introduction of the currency floor accounting for the asymmetric nature of the intervention i show that the enforcement of this policy solely manifests in a significant reduction of incremental eur chf exchange rate risk exposures of exporting firms while importing firms experience reductions in proportion to the market portfolio only thus the asymmetric policy design is reflected in asymmetric responses of firm level currency exposures all effects however do not depend on the extent of business activity in the eurozone the overall results suggest that the currency floor was successful in supporting the performance of the swiss economy by effectively reducing stock return sensitivities to market fluctuations and eur chf exchange rate volatility

investment and the exchange rate an analysis with firm level panel data abstract this paper investigates the relationship between exchange rate fluctuations and the investment decisions of a sample of italian manufacturing firms the results support the view that a depreciation of the exchange rate has a positive effect on investment through the revenue channel and a negative effect through the cost channel the magnitude of these effects varies over time with changes in the firm s external orientation as measured by the share of foreign sales over total sales and the reliance on imported inputs consistent with the predictions of our theoretical framework the effect of exchange rate fluctuations on investment is stronger for firms with low monopoly power facing a high degree of import penetration in the domestic market and of a small size we also provide evidence that the degree of substitutability between domestically produced and imported inputs influences the effect through the expenditure side

a patent race in a real options setting investment strategy valuation capm beta and return volatility abstract in this paper we study financial properties of r d intensive firms through a continuous time real options patent race model numerical analysis in this study shows that intense competition drives a firm to invest more aggressively which then pushes up its cost of capital and return volatility while introducing negative return correlation with its competitor furthermore we find that a firm s position in competition has important impacts on its financial properties for instance a firm s cost of capital is a non monotonic function of its relative position in the race in addition the relationship between cash flow uncertainty and investment can be negative when a firm is far ahead or far behind or positive when firms are close in the race

multinational investment under uncertainty in the chemical processing industries this study uses a sample of chemical processing industries to evaluate the effect of two types of uncertainty on the decision to invest in an industry it analyzes the effects of relative price uncertainty through exchange rates and input prices and demand uncertainty on the probability of expansion in a particular country the study then focuses on the behavior of individual companies and distinguishes companies by whether or not they are multinationals in the production of the product the results confirm previous evidence that exchange rate uncertainty has a negative effect on capacity expansions by domestic corporations and no effect on investment by multinational corporations finally the study also shows that expansions of production capacity in this industry are more likely to occur in those countries where capacity utilization is higher

monopolistic competiton on the pyramid the purpose of this paper is to develop a model of monopolistic competition that has a simple locational interpretation and which allows for multifirm competition one of the major weaknesses of the standard circular road model is the fact that it allows only localized competition this creates problems when one wishes to analyze problems of international trade where one often has to work with firms with different production costs one of the major advantages of the pyramid model presented here is that one can easily compute the firms equilibrium profits even when their production costs differ copyright 1991 by blackwell publishing ltd

on the determinants of corporate hedging finance theory indicates that hedging increases firm value by reducing expected taxes expected costs of financial distress or other agency costs this paper provides evidence on these hypotheses using survey data on firm s use of forwards futures swaps and options combined with computstat data on firm characteristics of 169 firms in the sample 104 firms use hedging instruments in 1986 the data suggest that firms which hedge face more convex tax functions have less coverage of fixed claims are larger have more growth options in their investment opportunity set and employ fewer hedging substitutes

exchange rate exposure and industry characteristics evidence from canada japan and the usa abstract this paper examines industry level exchange rate exposures for canada japan and the usa measuring exposure by adding the change in the exchange rate to the domestic market model of industry portfolio returns some industries in all three countries display significant exposures moreover for each country the exchange rate is important for explaining industry returns at the economy wide level to explore whether exchange rate exposures are systematically linked to the activities of the industries we model exposure as a function of industry characteristics for all three countries the relation between exposure and industry characteristics is broadly consistent with economic theory jel f3

a dynamic analysis of exchange rate exposure the impact of china s renminbi this study examines the impacts of unexpected exchange rate movements of chinese renminbi cny usd on stock returns of standard poor s 500 corporations to gain better insight into the long standing exposure puzzle concerning the divergence between theoretical and empirical investigation and the critical issue regarding the determinants of exposure the time variation and asymmetry property associated with foreign exchange exposure are further taking into account we also broaden the scope of analysis to investigate unexpected risk exposure at 10 economic sectors in compliance with global industry classification standard unlike those from the static analysis or dynamic ones with the ordinary least squares model the empirical findings provide additional concrete evidence that unexpected exchange rate exposure varies substantially across time and market circumstances when using the quantile regression with a rolling method furthermore our dynamic analysis not only supports the existence of industrial effects across different economic sectors but also provides strong evidence that financial factors such as size debt ratio and book to market ratio have a significant impact on exposure

the foreign exchange exposure of japanese multinational corporations we find that about 25 percent of our sample of 171 japanese multinationals stock returns experienced economically significant positive exposure effects for the period january 1979 to december 1993 the extent to which a firm is exposed to exchange rate fluctuations can be explained by the level of its export ratio and by variables that are proxies for its hedging needs highly leveraged firms or firms with low liquidity tend to have smaller exposures foreign exposure is found to increase with firm size we also find that keiretsu multinationals are more exposed to exchange rate risk than nonkeiretsu firms it is conventional wisdom that exchange rate movements affect both the cash flows of a firm s operations and the discount rate employed to value these cash flows measuring foreign exchange exposure is now a central issue of international financial management and this issue has spawned a considerable amount of research existing empirical evidence on foreign exchange exposure however seems perplexing studies have so far documented a weak link between contemporaneous exchange rate fluctuations and stock returns of u s multinational firms 2 gendreau 1994 finds it difficult and unconvincing that the weak results imply that exchange rate changes have no effect on exporters stock returns bartov arnd bodnar 1994 attribute the observed insignificant relationship between exchange rate changes and st ock returns to probable problems associated with the previous studies samiple selection procedure or to mispricing caused by investors errors in estimat

resolving the exposure puzzle the many facets of exchange rate exposure theory predicts sizeable exchange rate fx exposure for many firms however empirical research has not documented such exposures to examine this discrepancy we extend prior theoretical results to model a global firm s fx exposure and show empirically that firms pass through part of currency changes to customers and utilize both operational and financial hedges for a typical sample firm pass through and operational hedging each reduce exposure by 10 15 financial hedging with foreign debt and to a lesser extent fx derivatives decreases exposure by about 40 the combination of these factors reduces fx exposures to observed levels

investment with uncertain tax policy does random tax policy discourage investment we consider the impact of tax policy uncertainty on firm level and aggregate investment comparing investment behaviour when uncertainty is due to a shock following geometric brownian motion gbm versus when random discrete jumps in tax policy occur expectations of the likelihood of a tax policy switch have an important negative impact on the gain to delaying investment in the latter model and time to investment can fall with increasing tax policy uncertainty aggregate investment simulations indicate that capital formation is adversely affected by increases in uncertainty in the traditional gbm model but can be enhanced in the jump process model

interest rate and exchange rate exposures of banking institutions in pre crisis korea this study empirically investigates interest rate and exchange rate exposures of banking institutions in pre crisis korea using the sensitivity of stock returns as a measure of the exposure it is shown that korean commercial banks and merchant banking corporations had been significantly exposed to both interest rate and exchange rate risks and that the subsequent profitability of commercial banks was significantly associated with the degree of pre crisis exposure the evidence suggests that along with the negative exposure of banking institutions the sharp depreciation of the korean won and high interest rates at the end of 1997 further deteriorated the banking sector s capital adequacy worsening the financial crisis the korean case highlights the importance of upgrading financial supervision and risk management practices as a precondition for successful financial liberalization

the effects of industry structure on economic exposure abstract a firm is subject to economic exposure if changes in exchange rates affect the firm s value as measured by the present value of its future cash flows this paper shows that in many forms of competition including the most commonly studied case of monopoly the economic exposure of an exporting firm is simply proportional to the firm s net revenues based in foreign currency this simple result breaks down under some but not all forms of competition between the exporting firm and foreign firms in that case the exporting firm needs to know about the price elasticity of its product demand and its marginal cost in order to assess its exposure to exchange rates the key determinant of economic exposure therefore is the competitive structure of the industry in which a firm operates

estimation of foreign exchange exposure an application to mining companies in australia abstract using stock market data this paper measures the foreign exchange exposure of mining firms in australia traditionally thought to be very sensitive to exchange rate movements the estimation is conducted at several levels single equation estimation for individual stocks and for portfolios of stocks from the same industry group and multivariate regression the sensitivity of stock returns to exchange rate movements and proportion of stock returns explained by exchange rate movements are found to be small results from such analysis can be used to assess the effectiveness of existing hedge policies and the need for and benefits of additional hedging jel g15

exchange rate exposure and competition evidence from the automotive industry this study examines the e ect of real exchange rate changes on multinational rms and incorporates the e ect of intra industry competition on the relation between exchange rates and rm value to test the relation more e ectively tests are conducted using a sample of automotive rms from the united states and japan consistent with theoretical predictions there is signi cant exposure to exchange rate shocks moreover there is evidence of time variation in exchange rate exposure which is consistent with changes in the competitive environment within the industry finally evidence is presented that is consistent with foreign sales being a major determinant of exposure and the e ectiveness of operational hedging through foreign production 2001 elsevier science s a all rights reserved jel classixcation f31 g30 g39

volatility transmission in emerging european foreign exchange markets abstract this paper studies the dynamics of volatility transmission between central european ce currencies and the eur usd foreign exchange using model free estimates of daily exchange rate volatility based on intraday data we formulate a flexible yet parsimonious parametric model in which the daily realized volatility of a given exchange rate depends both on its own lags as well as on the lagged realized volatilities of the other exchange rates we find evidence of statistically significant intra regional volatility spillovers among the ce foreign exchange markets with the exception of the czech and prior to the recent turbulent economic events polish currencies we find no significant spillovers running from the eur usd to the ce foreign exchange markets to measure the overall magnitude and evolution of volatility transmission over time we construct a dynamic version of the diebold yilmaz volatility spillover index and show that volatility spillovers tend to increase in periods characterized by market uncertainty

adjustment costs uncertainty and the behavior of the firm this paper examines the effects of demand and cost uncertainty on a firm s investment output and pricing decisions but unlike most earlier studies in which demand and cost are simply not known at the time an output or pricing decision is made here i consider uncertainties over future demand and costs it will be seen that the effects of such uncertainties depend critically on the characteristics of the firm s adjustment costs i treat demand uncertainty in a dynamic context by letting the market demand function shift randomly but continuously through time according to a stochastic process this means that today s demand is known exactly but future demand may be larger or smaller and has a variance that increases with the time horizon likewise uncertainty over factor costs is characterized by treating those variables as stochastic processes i combine this characterization of uncertainty with a dynamic model of the firm in which some factor inputs can be adjusted freely in response to stochastic demand changes but other factors are quasi fixed in that adjustment costs are incurred when they are changed in this model the firm s price and output are random processes but we can examine the firm s behavior in expected value terms of interest is whether the presence of uncertainty should cause competitive or monopolistic firms to invest and produce more or less than they would otherwise how the effects of uncertainty are influenced by the presence of risk aversion and how the use of inventories can alter the impact of uncertainty on capacity and sales of course these questions have been addressed by others in the past among the earliest studies of demand uncertainty are those of edwin mills 1959 1962 and samuel karlin and charles carr 1962 mills examined a single period monopolistic firm that sets both output and price and showed that additive demand uncertainty i e the demand function is of the form q q p u where u is a random variable leads to a lower price if marginal cost is constant so that the firm reduces the expected loss from discarding unsold production karlin and carr confirmed for both the static case and the multiperiod case with inventory carryover that additive uncertainty tends to reduce the price and increase the output of a risk neutral firm while multiplicative uncertainty does the opposite other papers have been concerned with the way in which the error term enters the demand function additively multiplicatively or nonlinearly the implications of choosing price ex ante instead of output the implications of risk aversion and the use of inventories for example agnar sandmo 1971 and david baron 1970 showed that a risk averse competitive firm will produce less when the price is a random variable or subject to an additive error term but a riskneutral firm will not alter its production hayne leland 1972 extended these results to a monopolistic firm whose demand can depend in a general way on a random error term for example q q p u and showed that uncertainty reduces the production of a

the effect of exchange rate variability on us shareholder wealth we examine the relationship between financial crisis exchange rate variability and equity return volatility for us multinationals empirical analysis of the major financial crises of the last decades reveals that stock return variability increases significantly in the aftermath of a crisis even relative to the increase in stock return volatility for other firms belonging to the same industry and market capitalization class in conjunction with this increase in total volatility there is also an increase in stock market risk for multinational firms moreover trade and service oriented industries appear to be particularly sensitive to these changing exchange rate conditions

testing for multiple regimes in the tail behavior of emerging currency returns it is by now generally accepted that foreign exchange returns exhibit heavy tails as measured by the so called tail index however it is unclear whether the tail behavior remains stationary in the presence of recurrent switches in the exchange rate regime we therefore test the null hypothesis of tail index constancy by applying a single breaks test in rounds which enables the detection of multiple breakpoints we are able to identify multiple jumps in the tail index of currency returns moreover some breaks coincide with documented shifts in monetary and exchange rate policies

risky business the allocation of capital abstract in models of the firm a mean preserving spread in the price of output increases the expected value of profits and frequently the firm s demand for capital these results seem to contradict the conventional wisdom from financial asset pricing models where an increase in an asset s risk decreases the demand for that asset this paper shows that in general equilibrium an increase in exogenous risk usually increases expected output in that technology the result from the theory of the firm but it may also increase the risk of that technology the results from finance an increase in exogenous risk always reallocates capital toward less risky businesses

dynamic effects of permanent and temporary tax policies in a q model of investment abstract this paper incorporates the tax policy analysis of hall and jorgenson into a dynamic optimizing model with adjustment costs to develop a q model of investment this framework is particularly useful for analyzing the dynamic effects on investment of permanent and temporary changes in tax policy it is shown that contrary to the conventional intertemporal substitution argument a temporary investment tax credit need not be nore expansionary than a permanent investment tax credit the role of depreciation allowances in determining the dynamic response of investment to temporary changes in the tax rate is also investigated

extreme us stock market fluctuations in the wake of 9 11 we apply extreme value analysis to us sectoral stock indices in order to assess whether tail risk measures like value at risk and extremal linkages were significantly altered by 9 11 we test whether semi parametric quantile estimates of downside risk and upward potential have increased after 9 11 the same methodology allows one to estimate probabilities of joint booms and busts for pairs of sectoral indices or for a sectoral index and a market portfolio the latter probabilities measure the sectoral response to macro shocks during periods of financial stress so called tail s taking 9 11 as the sample midpoint we find that tail s often increase in a statistically and economically significant way this might be due to perceived risk of new terrorist attacks copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

market structure and price cost margins in a paper that has become a standard reference in the structure conductperformance approach to industrial economics cowling and waterson 1976 developed a theoretical rationale for expecting industry profitability to be positively correlated with the level of concentration their model based on a simple algebraic description of oligopoly behaviour has been interpreted as providing a justification for the common empirical practice of cross industry regression analysis of price cost margins in terms of concentration levels in the present paper we show that on further examination this model implies a joint determination of margins and concentration this provides some interesting comparative static results of relevance to inter industry differences in concentration levels equally however it leads to various cautionary insights concerning the meaning of price cost margin versus concentration regressions

the share price reaction of u k exporters to exchange rate movements an empirical study contrary to prior research this u k based study finds a contemporaneous relation between the foreign exchange rate and the market value of large exporters we also find a weak lagged relationship which suggests that the stock market takes time to incorporate all of the implications of foreign currency movements into share prices evidence that the nature of this relationship changed when sterling was in the erm is also provided

investment in manufacturing exchange rates and external exposure abstract this paper introduces a new measure of external exposure which emphasizes exposure to external markets both through export sales and imported inputs into production and uses this measure to explore the linkage between exchange rates and investment in us industry on average manufacturing sectors have evolved to being primarily import exposed by the early 1980s in low price over cost markup sectors markups are relatively unresponsive to exchange rate changes whereas sectoral investment patterns are strongly affected by contrast high markup industries absorb much of the exchange rate fluctuations in markups and pass relatively little through to real investment

exchange rate exposure abstract in this paper we examine the relationship between exchange rate movements and firm value we estimate the exchange rate exposure of publicly listed firms in a sample of eight non us industrialized and emerging markets we find that exchange rate movements do matter for a significant fraction of firms though which firms are affected and the direction of exposure depends on the specific exchange rate and varies over time suggesting that firms dynamically adjust their behavior in response to exchange rate risk exposure is correlated with firm size multinational status foreign sales international assets and competitiveness and trade at the industry level

a currency preferential approach to international equity investment we propose a timex strategy for reducing the foreign exchange risk associated with international equity investment pertaining to countries with currencies correctly or undervalued by the standard of ppp the performance of timex is examined from the perspectives of eight developed nations with long histories of free floating currencies based on the data from 1986 q1 to 2014 q4 we find unambiguous evidence for the superior performance of timex in the foreign exchange market compared with the passive diversification strategy and the morgan stanley capital international msci world index timex offers higher total returns and risk adjusted total returns when rebalanced every 6 or 12 months for investors based in all eight countries under study when rebalanced at a 3 year interval timex outperforms the passive diversification and the msci world index for five and all eight countries respectively

exchange rate variability and the riskiness of u s multinational firms evidence from the breakdown of the bretton woods system abstract we examine the relation between exchange rate variability and stock return volatility for u s multinational firms and decompose this relation into components of systematic and diversifiable risk focusing on two five year periods around the 1973 switch from fixed to floating exchange rates we find a significant increase in volatility of monthly stock returns corresponding to the period of increased exchange rate variability even relative to the increase in stock return volatility for three control samples in conjunction with this increase in total volatility there is also an increase in market risk beta for multinational firms

the exchange rate exposure of u s multinationals this article examines the exposure of u s multinationals to foreign currency risk evidence is presented that the relationship between stock returns and exchange rates differs systematically across multinationals given these results the study focuses on the determinants of exchange rate exposure the comovements between stock returns and the value of the dollar is found to be positively related to the percentage of foreign operations of u s multinationals copyright 1990 by the university of chicago

an exact solution for the investment and value of a firm facing uncertainty adjustment costs and irreversibility this paper derives closed form solutions for the investment and value of a competitive firm with a constant returns to scale production function and convex costs of adjustment solutions are derived for the case of irreversible investment as well as for reversible investment optimal investment is a non decreasing function of q the shadow value of capital relative to the case of reversible investment the

adjusting to climate change implications of increased variability and asymmetric adjustment costs for investment in water reserves abstract in this paper we study the determination of optimal water storage capacity in a region taking into account that the supply of the resource the flow into the reserve is uncertain that a measure of the uncertainty the variance is likely to increase with climate change that building capacity is costly and that the development of water resources may entail alsoenvironmental costs we find that water storage capacity in the long run ispositivelyrelated to increases in uncertainty if the marginal benefit of water withdrawal isconvexand that for the case of costly reversibility of investment a range of inaction for investment appears and the stability of water storage capacity with respect to changes in variance increases

an extreme value analysis of the last century crises across industries in the u s economy the two large scale crises that hit the world economy in the last century i e the great depression and the great recession have similar outbreak and recovery patterns with respect to several macroeconomic variables in particular the largest depressions are likely to be accompanied by stock market crashes this study investigates the behavior of the u s stock market before during and after deep downturns focusing particularly on the tails of the return distribution we develop two automatic procedures to identify multiple change points in the tail of financial time series as well as in the co crash and co boom probabilities of different markets we then apply our methodology to twelve time series representative of the sectors of the u s economy we find that regime shifts in the lower tail of the distribution tend to co occur before deep downturns our results contribute to a better understanding of the origin and systemic nature of large scale events to make policy interventions more timely and effective

exchange rate exposure and foreign market competition evidence from japanese firms in this paper we focus on the impact of foreign competition on exposure or the responsiveness of profits to fluctuations in exchange rates we find that of the 15 four digit level japanese export industries in our sample 10 industries are better characterized as cournot competitors in foreign markets rather than colluding firms depending on the industry exposure elasticities range from 0 5 to 8 5 with an average of around 2 5 these elasticities on the whole are much higher than those found in earlier research collusive exporters tend to have higher elasticities than competitive exporters

the euro and european financial market dependence a time varying copula model is used to investigate the impact of the introduction of the euro on the dependence between 17 european stock markets during the period 1994 2003 the model is implemented with a gjr garch ma t model for the marginal distributions and the gaussian copula for the joint distribution which allows capturing time varying non linear relationships the results show that within the euro area market dependence increased after the introduction of the common currency only for large equity markets such as in france germany italy the netherlands and spain structural break tests indicate that the increase in financial market dependence started around the beginning of 1998 when euro membership was determined and the relevant information was announced the uk and sweden but not other european countries outside the euro area are found to exhibit an increase in equity market co movement which is consistent with the interpretation that these countries may be expected to join the euro in the future

emerging market exchange rate exposure abstract we estimate the exposure of emerging market companies to fluctuations in their domestic exchange rates we use an instrumental variable approach that identifies the total exposure of a company to exchange rate movements yet abstracts from the influence of confounding macroeconomic shocks in the sub period of 1999 2002 we find that depreciations tend to have a negative impact on emerging market stock returns in the sub period of 2002 2006 this tendency has largely disappeared since we estimate the exchange rate exposure of firms from different countries with a common set of instruments we can make coherent cross country comparisons of their determinants we find that the impact of various measures of debt on exchange rate exposure which is negative and significant in the early sub period becomes insignificant and even reverses sign in the recent sub period

adjustment costs and investment in a stochastic endogenous growth model abstract this paper introduces costly investment into a stochastic equilibrium macro model investment is determined by an endogenously determined tobin q that depends upon the structural parameters of the economy the model permits a sequence of economies allowing for an increasing role of government to be studied the effects of both a structural change taking the form of a higher variance of productivity shocks and fiscal policy on the equilibrium is analyzed paying particular attention to the impact on the growth rate and its variability the role of the tobin q in determining the response of the mean growth rate and its variance is emphasized

structural change tests in tail behaviour and the asian crisis this paper explores tests of the hypothesis that the tail thickness of a distribution is constant over time using hill s conditional maximum likelihood estimator for the tail index of a distribution tests of tail shape constancy are constructed that allow for an unknown breakpoint the recursive test is shown to be inconsistent in one direction and only a one sided test is recommended specifically the test can be used when the alternative hypothesis is that the tail index decreases over time a rolling and sequential version of the test is consistent in both directions the methods are illustrated on recent stock price data for thailand malaysia and indonesia the period covers the recent asian financial crisis and enables us to assess whether breakpoints in domestic asset return distributions are related to known changes in institutional arrangements in the foreign currency markets of these countries

financial analysts forecasts of earnings a better surrogate for market expectations abstract the specification of the market expectation of accounting numbers is a common feature of many empirical studies in accounting and finance givoly and lakonishok 1979 found that financial analysts forecasts have information content this study evaluates the quality of analysts forecasts as surrogates for the market expectation of earnings and compares it with that of prediction models commonly used in research results indicate that prediction errors of analysts are more closely associated with security price movements suggesting that analysts forecasts provide a better surrogate for market expectations than forecasts generated by time series models the study also identifies factors that might contribute to the performance of the financial analysts forecasts the broadness of the information set employed by analysts and to a lesser extent their reliance on information released after the end of the fiscal year appear to be important contributors to their performance

pass through and exposure firms differ in the extent to which they pass through changes in exchange rates into foreign currency prices and in their exposure to exchange rates the responsiveness of their profits to changes in exchange rates because pricing affects profitability a firm s pass through and exposure should be related this paper develops models of exporting firms under imperfect competition to study these related phenomena from these models we derive the optimal pass through decisions and the resulting exchange rate exposure the models are estimated on eight japanese export industries using both the price data pass through and financial data for exposure exchange rates can have a major inf luence on the pricing behavior and profitability of exporting and importing firms firms differ in the extent to which they pass through the change in exchange rates into the prices they charge in foreign markets they also differ in their exposure to exchange rates the responsiveness of their profits to changes in exchange rates previous papers have studied either pass through or exposure but none has studied these two phenomena together yet because pricing directly affects profitability the exposure of a firm s profits to exchange rates should be governed by many of the same firm and industry characteristics that determine pricing behavior this paper develops models of firm and industry behavior that are used to study these closely related phenomena together it also provides estimates of pass through and exposure behavior using data from japanese export industries to examine pass through behavior and exchange rate exposure we model a firm with sales to a foreign export market this exporting firm competes with a foreign firm in that export market the costs of the exporting firm are based primarily in the local domestic currency while the foreign firm

the cost of capital in international financial markets local or global abstract this paper analyzes to what extent international and domestic asset pricing models lead to a different estimate of the cost of capital for an individual firm under the maintained assumption of perfect international financial integration we distinguish between i the multifactor solnik sercu icapm including both the global market portfolio and exchange rate risk premia and ii the single factor domestic capm we use a sample of 3 293 stocks from nine countries in the period 1980 1999 the domestic capm yields a significantly different estimate of the cost of capital from the multifactor icapm for only five percent of the firms in our sample we attribute the close correspondence between local and global pricing to strong country factors in individual stock returns which are probably due to lack of real integration our results reinforce the home bias puzzle

is hedging successful at reducing financial risk exposure abstractthis article analyses whether firms use risk management instruments for hedging or speculative purposes first by analysing the relationship between the firm s stock returns and financial risks in 567 euronext firms we measure the firm s exposure to risk next we investigate the effect of hedging in such exposures addressing simultaneously the endogeneity of hedging decision through a treatment effect methodology we have found that firms in our sample display higher percentages of exposure when weighed against preceding studies and confirmed that hedging reduces the level of the underlying financial exposure concluding that firms use risk management instruments with hedging purposes

microeconomic origins of macroeconomic tail risks we document that even though the normal distribution provides a good approximation to gdp fluctuations it severely underpredicts macroeconomic tail risks that is the frequency of large economic downturns using a multi sector general equilibrium model we show that the interplay of idiosyncratic microeconomic shocks and sectoral heterogeneity results in systematic departures in the likelihood of large economic downturns relative to what is implied by the normal distribution notably we also show that such departures can happen while gdp is approximately normally distributed away from the tails highlighting the qualitatively different behavior of large economic downturns from small or moderate fluctuations we further demonstrate the special role that input output linkages play in generating tail comovements whereby large recessions involve not only significant gdp contractions but also large simultaneous declines across a wide range of sectors

strategic foreign exchange management this paper argues that it is possible to advise firms on how to hedge against foreign exchange risks only if one has detailed knowledge of the competitive environment they work in to illustrate this we compare firms hedging requirements in a number of different standard industrial organizations models in particular the cournot model a model with conjectural variations price taking firms and monopolistic competition consider the situation of a firm producing in germany and selling an important part of its total output in the us obviously its profitability may be seriously compromised by an unexpected appreciation of the dm relatively to the the company can react to this uncertainty in two ways either it can assume that the conditions of the modigliani miller theorem are approximately fulfilled and that it best serves the interests of its shareholders by behaving in a risk neutral fashion alternatively the firm may for a variety of reasons behave as a risk averter itself and try to obtain some coverage against exchange rate risk when looking at the amount of insurance taken up by companies on conventional insurance markets one gets the impression that the latter alternative risk averse firms is for many practical cases a realistic assumption the activities of many companies are more easily understood if one admits that they exhibit a certain degree of risk aversion if one accepts this one may go on to ask just how companies should go about insuring themselves against unexpected exchange rate fluctuations more specifically one has to study how much exchange risk the firms should insure against and which exchange rates are of relevance in the example above of a german company selling in the us the answer might at first sight seem obvious the company should obtain coverage against dm fluctuations for an amount approximately equal to its anticipated revenues on brief reflection it immediately appears that this is surely an excessively simplistic answer first the amount of coverage required must be affected by the question of how the price of the product varies when the dm exchange rate shifts second it may be the case that the german company s main competitors are located in say france in this case fluctuations of the

exchange rates and prices the adjustment of relative prices to exchange rate movements is explained in an industrial organization approach given labor costs in the respective currencies exchange rate movements change costs for firms selling in the home market and thus disturb the industry equilibrium the extent of absolute and relative price adjustment is shown to depend on market integration product substitutability the relative number of domestic and foreign firms and the market structure the impact of exchange rates on prices is illustrated in a variety of approaches including the cournot a dixit and j stiglitz 1977 and s salop 1979 models some empirical evidence is offered in support of the theory copyright 1987 by american economic association

breaking the silos distributed knowledge and strategic responses to volatile exchange rates a model of effective decision making in a situation of distributed knowledge is developed drawing on three perspectives the sociocognitive perspective which focuses on framing issues the economic perspective which focuses on the role played by incentives in the integration of knowledge and decision making authority and the process perspective which stresses the role of integrating mechanisms and of processes that either hinder or foster risk awareness and flexibility the model is tested on a sample of managers from different functional areas of fortune 500 firms using strategic responses to exchange rate volatility as the context the results show that all three perspectives framing incentives and process are significant in explaining the effectiveness of strategic responses to volatile exchange rates the findings suggest that simultaneously addressing managerial mindsets incentives and process may be crucial to generating effective strategic responses across functions