financial analysts forecast revisions and managers reporting behavior abstract this paper studies an analyst s forecasting strategy and a manager s earnings management policy when reporting earnings the manager trades off the disutility he obtains from falling short of the analyst s forecast against the costs of manipulating earnings the model predicts that i the analyst s forecast exceeds median reported earnings ii the analyst is more likely to revise his forecast downward than upward iii mean and median forecast errors are larger in magnitude when the analyst has less precise information and iv the stock market is on average more sensitive to reported earnings than to the analyst s forecasts

analysts incentives and street earnings we examine whether analysts incentives are associated with street earnings because prior research argues that analysts incentives to promote stocks increase in the extent to which the stock exhibits glamour characteristics we predict that analysts are more likely to make income increasing adjustments in determining street earnings for glamour stocks than for value stocks we find that analysts are more likely to exclude expense items from street earnings for glamour stocks than for value stocks and that excluded expense items help predict future earnings for glamour stocks but not for value stocks overall our results suggest that analysts self interest influences street earnings and this self interest leads to street earnings that are less useful in predicting future earnings for glamour stocks

asset management and affiliated analysts forecasts the interaction between the various departments of a full service brokerage firm can have positive effects an asset management department operates the firm s mutual funds and has a need for high quality information thus the firm s sell side analysts in the research department are motivated to gather information about particular securities and to use the asset management department as an additional information source the outcome can be to raise the quality of sell side analysts earnings forecasts in the study reported here affiliated analysts earnings forecasts for a security became significantly more accurate as the fund family s percentage ownership of that security increased also the study found a significant positive relationship between the accuracy of an affiliated analyst before the new investment and the percentage of the company s shares acquired by that fund family the implication is that fund families make the largest purchases of stocks for which their affiliated analysts provided th

rising inequality as a cause of the present crisis the article argues that the economic imbalances that caused the present crisis should be thought of as the outcome of the interaction of the effects of financial deregulation with the macroeconomic effects of rising inequality in this sense rising inequality should be regarded as a root cause of the present crisis i identify four channels by which it has contributed to the crisis first rising inequality creates a downwards pressure on aggregate demand since poorer income groups have high marginal propensities to consume second international financial deregulation has allowed countries to run larger current account deficits and for longer time periods thus in reaction to potentially stagnant demand two growth models have emerged a debt led model and an export led model third in the debt led growth models higher inequality has led to higher household debt as working class families have tried to keep up with social consumption norms despite stagnating or falling real wages fourth rising inequality has increased the propensity to speculate as richer households tend to hold riskier financial assets than other groups the rise of hedge funds and of subprime derivatives in particular has been linked to rise of the super rich

analyst reputation communication and information acquisition earlier studies have shown that reputational concerns tend to reduce agents opportunistic behavior however a recent study by morris argued that analysts experts reputational concerns may discourage truthful communication when they try to avoid being perceived as being misaligned with investors in this paper i examine the effect of reputational concerns on communication in a setting where analysts can choose their precision endogenously because both misaligned and aligned analysts want investors to trust their reports in the future both will aim to build a reputation for being aligned in equilibrium aligned analysts will acquire more information than misaligned analysts as a result investors may favorably update their beliefs about the analysts type when the report is proven to be accurate therefore both types of analysts will have reputational incentives to communicate truthfully the paper also derives conditions under which the analysts reputational concerns have a nonmonotonic impact on aligned analysts equilibrium precision choices and investors welfare

the characteristics of individual analysts forecasts in europe abstract this study investigates the determinants of financial analysts forecasts differential accuracy in 14 different european stock markets using the i b e s detail history database i find that european financial analysts forecast accuracy is positively associated with analyst firm specific experience forecast accuracy is negatively associated with the number of countries followed by analysts and the age of the forecast surprisingly i find no relationship between forecast accuracy and analysts job experience and the size of the bank employing the analyst

attack defence and contagion in networks sanjeev goyal acknowledges support from a keynes fellowship cambridge inet institute and european research area complexity net resilience and interaction of networks in ecology and economics adrien vigier acknowledges support from a gates cambridge fellowship as well as a core fellowship from universite catholique de louvain

a theory of disclosure in speculative markets this paper presents a theory of disclosure in a market where investors have heterogeneous beliefs and face short sale constraints assets trade above fundamentals reflecting the value of the option to sell to more optimistic investors in the future the initial seller has an incentive to commit to an imprecise disclosure policy despite the negative effect this has on the fundamental value of the asset in order to increase the potential for disagreement and hence the magnitude of the speculative premium i show that there is a strategic complementarity between sellers in their disclosure decisions this explains why financial misreporting and episodes of speculation occur together in waves and demonstrates that the endogenous choice of imprecise disclosure amplifies the extent to which assets are overpriced this paper was accepted by amit seru finance

predictability in financial markets what do survey expectations tell us abstract there is widespread evidence of excess return predictability in financial markets for the foreign exchange market a number of studies have documented that the predictability of excess returns is closely related to the predictability of expectational errors of excess returns in this paper we investigate the link between the predictability of excess returns and expectational errors in a much broader set of financial markets using data on survey expectations of market participants in the stock market the foreign exchange market the bond market and money markets in various countries the results are striking first in markets where there is significant excess return predictability expectational errors of excess returns are predictable as well with the same sign and often even with similar magnitude this is the case for foreign exchange stock and bond markets second in the only market where excess returns are generally not predictable the money market expectational errors are not predictable either these findings suggest that an explanation for the predictability of excess returns must be closely linked to an explanation for the predictability of expectational errors

does director affiliation lead to analyst bias this study examines the ability of security analysts to provide objective earnings forecasts for firms with which the analyst s brokerage firm has a director affiliation the affiliation that we examine is where the brokerage firm has on its board of directors a director or an upper management individual from the firm which an analyst at the brokerage firm provides coverage we find that affiliated analysts tend to provide earnings forecasts that are insignificantly different from unaffiliated analysts in terms of accuracy however we also find that forecasts provided by affiliated analysts tend to be significantly more pessimistic than those provided by their unaffiliated counterparts this pessimistic bias in their earnings forecast will more easily allow the covered firm to beat earnings expectations when earnings are realized we find that this bias surfaced after the global settlement decision an enforcement agreement between large investment banks and the securities and exchange commission sec

discrete expectational data and portfolio performance in this article we examine the information content in analysts recommendations which are made on a five point buy hold or sell scale our data set includes data on 10 000 forecasts per month unlike most prior studies our data set does not suffer from selection or survivorship bias we find information in analysts changes in recommendations approximately 4 5 extra return can be earned by purchasing new buys rather than new sells

analyzing the analysts career concerns and biased earnings forecasts this paper examines the career concerns of security analysts we relate long histories of their earnings forecasts to job separations we find that relatively accurate past forecasts lead to favorable career outcomes such as remaining at or moving up to a high status large prestigious brokerage house controlling for accuracy optimistic forecasts relative to the consensus increase the chances of favorable job separations job separations depend much less on accuracy for analysts who cover stocks that are underwritten by their brokerage houses such analysts are also much more likely to be rewarded for optimistic forecasts than other analysts furthermore job separations were much less sensitive to accuracy and somewhat more sensitive to optimism during the stock market mania of the late 1990s these findings suggest that the well documented analyst forecast optimism bias is likely due to incentives to promote stocks

the role of financial analysts in the strategy formation process of business firms increasingly financial analysts are influencing the strategy formation process of corporations but so far little attention has been paid to the complex processes of interaction and the corresponding strategic outcomes this article discusses these influences through different theoretical lenses strategic management finance and accounting theory and economic sociology institutional and systems theory based on case study evidence from three companies we describe how the interactions between financial analysts and business firms take place and formulate several propositions on the relationship between financial analysts and business firms as well as on its influence on the strategic outcome of business firms the results suggest that the influence of financial analysts is indeed significant but depends on a number of contextual factors such as the financial situation of the company or the need for capital practicing managers can learn how to handle a turbulent environment such as the financial analyst community and how they can change their planning processes to absorb as much information as possible

pinocchio s pupil using eyetracking and pupil dilation to understand truth telling and deception in sender receiver games we conduct laboratory experiments on sender receiver games with an incentive for senders to exaggerate such as security analyst s painting a rosy picture about earnings prospects our results show that overcommunicati on messages are more informative of the true state than they should be in equilibri um is consistent with a level k model eyetracking shows that senders look much more on the payoff rows corresponding to the true state and much less at receiver payoffs than at their own payoffs senders pupils also dilate more when their deception is larger in magnitude together these data are consistent with the hypothesis that figuring out ho w to deceive another player is cognitively difficult as assumed in the level k mod el a combination of sender messages and lookup patterns predicts the true state about t wice as often as predicted by equilibrium using these measures would enable receiver subjects to hypothetically earn up to 16 21 percent more than they actually do

the economics of spam we estimate that american firms and consumers experience costs of almost 20 billion annually due to spam our figure is more conservative than the 50 billion figure often cited by other authors and we also note that the figure would be much higher if it were not for private investment in anti spam technology by firms which we detail further on based on the work of crafty computer scientists who have infiltrated and monitored spammers activity we estimate that spammers and spam advertised merchants collect gross worldwide revenues on the order of 200 million per year thus the externality ratio of external costs to internal benefits for spam is around 100 1 in this paper we start by describing the history of the market for spam highlighting the strategic cat and mouse game between spammers and email providers we discuss how the market structure for spamming has evolved from a diffuse network of independent spammers running their own online stores to a highly specialized industry featuring a well organized network of merchants spam distributors botnets and spammers or advertisers we then put the spam market s externality ratio of 100 into context by comparing it to other activities with negative externalities lastly we evaluate various policy proposals designed to solve the spam problem cautioning that these proposals may err in assuming away the spammers ability to adapt

information content of equity analyst reports abstract we catalog the complete contents of institutional investor all american analyst reports and examine the market reaction to their release including the justifications supporting an analyst s opinion reduces and in some models eliminates the significance of earnings forecasts and recommendation revisions analysts both provide new information and interpret previously released information the information in a report is most important for downgrades target prices and the analyst s justifications are the only significant elements for reiterations no correlation exists between valuation methodology and either analyst accuracy or the market s reaction to a report our adjusted r 2 s are much larger than those of studies using only summary measures

direct sale of information when precision is unobservable this paper studies the incentives of an information seller to produce precise information in a setting where precision is not observable and investors with rational expectations can extract information from the equilibrium asset price i show that the seller can verify her unknown precision by employing a nonlinear contract proposed by bhattacharya and p eiderer 1985 although precision is not observable buyers can perfectly deduce it from the contract apart from incentives to produce precise information and reveal it truthfully the nonlinear contract also insures against the portfolio risk of information buyers and causes them to trade aggressively for a given precision this increases the extent of information that is built into the equilibrium asset price the seller s equilibrium fee depends on i her inferred precision ii the value of portfolio insurance for buyers and iii the extent of information that leaks from the equilibrium asset price

career concerns of banking analysts we study how career concerns influence banking analysts forecasts banking analysts first last earnings forecast of the year is relatively more optimistic pessimistic for a bank that could be their future employer this pattern is not observed when the same analysts forecast earnings of banks unlikely to be their future employer we use the global settlement as an exogenous shock on career concerns and show that this forecast pattern is more pronounced after the settlement moreover we find evidence that analysts benefit from this behavior as analysts that are more biased in their forecasts of potential future employers are more likely to move to a higher reputation bank

ratings quality over the business cycle credit rating agencies cras have long held that reputational concerns discipline their behavior the value of reputation however depends on economic fundamentals that vary over the business cycle in a model of ratings incorporating endogenous reputation and a market environment that varies we find that ratings quality is countercyclical specifically a cra is more likely to issue less accurate ratings when fee income is high competition in the labor market for analysts is tough and securities default probabilities are low persistence in economic conditions can diminish our results while mean reversion exacerbates them the presence of naive investors reduces overall quality but quality remains countercyclical finally we demonstrate that competition among cras yields similar results

financial fraud a literature review financial fraud a literature review this paper describes the empirical universe of financial fraud as it has been documented in the academic literature specifically it describes the different forms of fraudulent behaviour in the context of financial market activities the prevalence and consequences of such behaviour as identified by previous research and the economic and market structures that scholars believe facilitate it to structure the discussion a conceptual distinction is made between three types of financial fraud false financial disclosures financial scams and financial mis selling the findings of the literature review highlight a number of recent developments that scholars think have facilitated the occurrence of financial fraud including 1 the development of new fundamental conflicts of interest and perverse incentive structures in the financial industry 2 an influx of unsophisticated gullible participants in the financial marketplace 3 the increasing complexity involved in financial market transactions as a result of rapid technological legal and financial innovation and an ever widening menu of financial products 4 an increase in the use of justified secrecy in the form of a mystification of trading models adopted by fund managers

securitization bubbles structured finance with disagreement about default risk abstract an additional reason for the structured finance boom of the 2000s may have been disagreement about default risk of collateral assets when risk neutral investors disagree about average default probabilities structuring collateral cash flow raises prices by concentrating optimists demand on risky tranches with disagreement about default correlation low correlation investors believe in diversification and pay high prices for senior tranches they deem riskless high correlation investors value junior tranches they expect to pay whenever aggregate conditions are good risk aversion and short selling through credit default swaps reduce the prices of both pass through and structured securitizations but may increase the return to tranching

did credit rating agencies make unbiased assumptions on cdos article appears in papers and proceedings of the 123rd annual meeting of the amerian economic association denver co usa 6 9 january 2011

cdos and the financial crisis credit ratings and fair premia abstract we study risk and return characteristics of cdos using the market standard models we find that fair spreads on cdo tranches are much higher than fair spreads on similarly rated corporate bonds our results imply that credit ratings are not sufficient for pricing which is surprising given their central role in structured finance markets this illustrates limitations of the rating methodologies that are solely based on real world default probabilities or expected losses and do not capture risk premia we also demonstrate that cdo tranches have large exposure to systematic risk and thus their ratings and prices are likely to decline substantially when credit conditions deteriorate

timid choices and bold forecasts decision makers have a strong tendency to consider problems as unique they isolate the current choice from future opportunities and neglect the statistics of the past in evaluating current plans

modelling price movements in housing micro markets identifying long term components in local housing market dynamics this study identifies housing sub markets micro markets that may be price leaders within local housing market areas and relates their performance to potentially relevant economic factors this ca

individual security contagion and network design sanjeev goyal and diego cerdeiro were supported by european research area complexity net http www complexitynet eu through grant resilience and interaction of networks in ecology and economics resinee diego cerdeiro acknowledges financial support from queens college and the cambridge overseas trust marcin dziubinski was supported by the strategic resilience of networks project realized within the homing plus programme of the foundation for polish science co financed by the european union from the regional development fund within operational programme innovative economy grants for innovation sanjeev goyal acknowledges financial support from a keynes fellowship and the cambridge inet institute

competition and bias we attempt to measure the effect of competition on bias in the context of analyst earnings forecasts which are known to be excessively optimistic because of conflicts of interest our natural experiment for competition is mergers of brokerage houses which result in the firing of analysts because of redundancy e g one of the two oil stock analysts is let go and other reasons such as culture clash we use this decrease in analyst coverage for stocks covered by both merging houses before the merger the treatment sample to measure the causal effect of competition on bias we find that the treatment sample simultaneously experiences a decrease in analyst coverage and an increase in optimism bias the year after the merger relative to a control group of stocks consistent with competition reducing bias the implied economic effect from our natural experiment is significantly larger than estimates from ols regressions that do not correct for the endogeneity of coverage this effect is much more significant for stocks with little initial analyst coverage or competition

do security analysts speak in two tongues why do security analysts issue overly positive recommendations we propose a novel approach to distinguish strategic motives e g generating small investor purchases and pleasing management from nonstrategic motives genuine overoptimism we argue that nonstrategic distorters tend to issue both positive recommendations and optimistic forecasts while strategic distorters speak in two tongues issuing overly positive recommendations but less optimistic forecasts we show that the incidence of strategic distortion is large and systematically related to proxies for incentive misalignment our two tongues metric reveals strategic distortion beyond those indicators and provides a new tool for detecting incentives to distort that are hard to identify otherwise

investor reaction to celebrity analysts the case of earnings forecast revisions we examine the effects of analysts celebrity on investor reaction to earnings forecast revisions we measure celebrity as the quantity of media coverage analysts receive in sources included in the dow jones interactive database and find that media coverage is positively related to investor reaction to forecast revisions the effect of celebrity on the reaction to forecast revisions remains significant after controlling for forecast performance variables examined in prior studies ex post forecast accuracy ex ante accuracy award status and other variables shown to be related to forecast accuracy while these results are consistent with the familiarity of the analyst s name affecting the market reaction we cannot rule out that our measure of celebrity is correlated with error in the performance measures we examine and or correlated with other unexamined dimensions of forecast performance a content analysis of a random subsample of the media coverage of our sample analysts suggests that our

truth telling by third party auditors and the response of polluting firms experimental evidence from india in many regulated markets private third party auditors are chosen and paid by the firms that they audit potentially creating a conflict of interest this article reports on a two year field experiment in the indian state of gujarat that sought to curb such a conflict by altering the market structure for environmental audits of industrial plants to incentivize accurate reporting there are three main results first the status quo system was largely corrupted with auditors systematically reporting plant emissions just below the standard although true emissions were typically higher second the treatment caused auditors to report more truthfully and very significantly lowered the fraction of plants that were falsely reported as compliant with pollution standards third treatment plants in turn reduced their pollution emissions the results suggest reformed incentives for third party auditors can improve their reporting and make regulation more effective jel codes q56 m42 d22 copyright 2013 oxford university press

self selection and analyst coverage this paper examines the relation between analysts information about a stock s future prospects and their decisions to issue investment recommendations and earnings forecasts for that stock and the implications of this relation for the observed distribution of recommendations and earnings forecast errors articles in the financial press have long argued that analysts are reluctant to issue unfavorable investment information perhaps because they fear jeopardizing potential investment banking

vested interest and biased price estimates evidence from an auction market this study employs a new data set from art auctions to examine the relationship between auctioneer presale price estimates and the long term performance of artworks we find that the price estimates for expensive paintings have a consistent upward bias over a long period of 30 years high estimates at the time of purchase are associated with adverse subsequent abnormal returns moreover the estimation error for individual paintings tends to persist over time these results are consistent with the view that auction house price estimates are affected by agency problems and that

good booms bad booms credit booms usually precede financial crises however some credit booms end in a crisis bad booms and others do not good booms we document that while all booms start with an increase of total factor productivity tfp and labor productivity lp such growth falls much faster subsequently for bad booms we then develop a simple framework to explain this firms finance investment opportunities with short term collateralized debt if agents do not produce information about the collateral quality a credit boom develops accommodatingfirms with lower quality projects and increasing the incentives of lenders to acquire information about the collateral eventually triggering a crisis when the average quality of investment opportunities also grows the credit boom may not end in a crisis because the gradual adoption of low quality projects is not strong enough to induce information about collateral finally we also test the main predictions of the model

decision fatigue and heuristic analyst forecasts abstract psychological evidence indicates that decision quality declines after an extensive session of decision making a phenomenon known as decision fatigue we study whether decision fatigue affects analysts judgments analysts cover multiple firms and often issue several forecasts in a single day we find that forecast accuracy declines over the course of a day as the number of forecasts the analyst has already issued increases also consistent with decision fatigue we find that the more forecasts an analyst issues the higher the likelihood the analyst resorts to more heuristic decisions by herding more closely with the consensus forecast self herding i e reissuing their own previous outstanding forecasts and issuing a rounded forecast finally we find that the stock market understands these effects and discounts for analyst decision fatigue

appraisal smoothing and price discovery in real estate markets this paper reviews the literature on price determination in the private and public real estate markets in particular it discusses the processes of appraisal smoothing in the private market and of price discovery between the public and the private markets in real estate markets the absence of good quality information on price whether because of lack of trades or confidentiality has led to the widespread use of appraisals for market tracking and as the basis for performance measurement appraisers have to make an optimum assessment of value based on fundamental variables and market information including transactions and a market wide appraisal index however transaction prices are a noisy signal and it is the appraiser s role to extract the signal from the noise in an efficient manner this involves a process of optimal combination of past and current information and leads to appraisal smoothing price discovery is the process by which the opinions of market participants about the value of an asset

commercial real estate and equity market bubbles are they contagious to reits this paper uses a regime switching approach to determine whether prices in the us stock direct real estate and indirect real estate markets are driven by the presence of speculative bubbles the results show significant evidence of the existence of periodically partially collapsing speculative bubbles in all three markets a multivariate bubble model is then developed and implemented to evaluate whether the stock and real estate bubbles spill over into reits the underlying stock market bubble is found to be a stronger influence on the securitised real estate market bubble than that of the property market furthermore the findings suggest a transmission of speculative bubbles from the direct real estate to the stock market although this link is not present for the returns themselves

reputation and performance among security analysts members of the institutional investor all american research team supply more accurate earnings forecasts than other analysts when forecasts are matched by the corporation followed and by the date of brokerage house issuance this contemporaneous advantage is complemented by a timing advantage all americans supply forecasts more often than other analysts stocks returns immediately following large upward forecast revisions suggest that all americans impact prices more than other analysts however there is virtually no difference in returns following large downward revisions nevertheless the collective results suggest a positive relation between reputation and performance and assuming that all americans are better paid pay and performance

macroeconomic policy and growth some lessons of experience this paper asks how macroeconomic policies affect growth it draws on the experiences since 1974 of seventeen developing countries brazil cameroon chile colombia costa rica c6te d ivoire india indonesia kenya the republic of korea mexico morocco nigeria pakistan sri lanka thailand and turkey first the paper looks at the effects of the foreign financed public spending booms of the 1 970s which tended to destabilize economies and lead to debt crises initially raising and then lowering growth rates next the paper compares reactions to the 1980 82 crises and adjustment policies in four countries that were relatively successful colombia turkey thailand and indonesia the paper reviews the varying experiences with inflation of the countries in the study and assesses the effects of inflation on growth the generally low inflation countries experienced short bursts of high inflation caused by external shocks finally the paper analyzes the relation between inflation and exchange rate regimes and describes the exchange rate policies of indonesia and mexico in detail the paper draws a number of policy lessons notably the need to do cost benefit analyses for public investments the need to avoid euphoria when the economic outlook appears favorable and the need to react speedily to crises nominal exchange rates should be adjusted to avoid unstable real rates and a flexible exchange rate policy should be combined with a commitment to a noninflationary monetary policy

does conflict of interest lead to biased coverage evidence from movie reviews media outlets are increasingly owned by conglomerates inducing a conflict of interest a media outlet can bias its coverage to benefit companies in the same group we test for bias by examining movie reviews in media outlets owned by news corp such as the wall street journal and time warner such as time we find higher ratings for 20th century fox movies in news corp outlets compared to movies by other studios to disentangle bias from correlation of taste we introduce and validate a novel matching procedure using individual movie ratings from online platforms using this procedure we find no evidence of bias in news corp nor time warner outlets we reject even small effects such as bias of one extra star out of four every thirteen movies we test for differential bias when the return to bias is plausibly higher examine bias by media outlet and by journalist as well as editorial bias we also consider bias by omission whether media outlets are more likely to review highly rated movies by affiliated studios and conflict of interest within a movie aggregator in none of these dimensions do we find evidence of bias we relate to previous work and discuss three explanations for the lack of bias in our setting high values of media reputation organizational features in a conglomerate and low returns to bias

monitor objectivity with important clients evidence from auditor opinions around the world we examine whether monitors are likely to compromise their monitoring objectivity in the face of economically important clients in international business settings in the context of external auditing and assurance services we measure monitor objectivity by whether auditors are more or less likely to issue to their important clients modified audit opinions that is audit opinions provided to outside investors about the firm that demotes explicit areas of concern using a large cross country sample we document that auditors are more likely to issue modified opinions to their economically important clients relative to other clients furthermore we find that this association is stronger 1 for big n auditors 2 for multinational audit clients and 3 in countries with stronger legal regimes these results suggest that monitors prioritize the protection of their reputation over lucrative economic relationships and such information certification function is more pronounced for international auditors multinational client firms and in strong legal regimes

the economics of online crime this paper will focus on online crime which has taken off as a serious industry since about 2004 until then much of the online nuisance came from amateur hackers who defaced websites and wrote malicious software in pursuit of bragging rights but now criminal networks have emerged online black markets in which the bad guys trade with each other with criminals taking on specialized roles just as in adam smith s pin factory specialization has led to impressive productivity gains even though the subject is now bank card pins rather than metal ones someone who can collect bank card and pin data electronic banking passwords and the information needed to apply for credit in someone else s name can sell these data online to anonymous brokers the brokers in turn sell the credentials to specialist cashiers who steal and then launder the money we will examine the data on online crime discuss the collective action aspects of the problem demonstrate how agile attackers shift across national borders as earlier targets wise up to their tactics describe ways to improve law enforcement coordination and we explore how defenders incentives affect the outcomes

signalling by underpricing in the ipo market abstract empirical evidence suggests the existence of hot issue markets for initial public offerings in certain periods and in certain industries new issues are underpriced and rationing occurs this paper develops a model consistent with this observation which assumes the firm itself best knows its prospects in certain circumstances firms with the most favorable prospects find it optimal to signal their type by underpricing their initial issue of shares and investors know that only the best can recoup the cost of this signal from subsequent issues

quality disclosure and certification theory and practice this essay reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on quality disclosure and certification after comparing quality disclosure with other quality assurance mechanisms and describing a brief history of quality disclosure we address two sets of theoretical issues first why don t sellers voluntarily disclose through a process of unraveling and given the lack of unraveling is it desirable to mandate seller disclosure second when we rely on certifiers to act as the intermediary of quality disclosure do certifiers necessarily report unbiased and accurate information we further review empirical evidence on these issues with a particular focus on healthcare education and finance the empirical review covers quality measurement the effect of third party disclosure on consumer choice and seller behavior as well as the economics of certifiers jel d18 k32 l15 m31

imperfect information transmission from banks to investors macroeconomic implications abstract our goal is to elucidate the interaction of banks screening effort and strategic information production in loan backed asset markets using a general equilibrium framework asset quality is unobserved by investors but banks may purchase error prone ratings the premium paid on highly rated assets emerges as the main determinant of banks screening effort the fact that rating strategies reflect banks private information about asset quality helps keep this premium high conventional regulatory policies interfere with this decision margin thereby reducing signaling value of high ratings and exacerbating the credit misallocation problem we propose a tax subsidy scheme that induces efficiency

can institutional investors bias real estate portfolio appraisals evidence from the market downturn this paper investigates the extent to which institutional investors may have influenced independent real estate appraisals during the financial crisis a conceptual model of the determinants of client influence on real estate appraisals is proposed it is suggested that the extent of clients ability and willingness to bias appraisal outputs is contingent upon market and regulatory environments ethical norms and legal and institutional frameworks the salience of the appraisal s to the client financial incentives for the appraiser to respond to client pressure organisational culture the level of moral reasoning of both individual clients and appraisers client knowledge and the degree of appraisal uncertainty the potential of client influence to bias ostensibly independent real estate appraisals is examined using the opportunity afforded by the market downturn commencing in 2007 in the uk during the market turbulence at the end of 2007 the motivations of different types of owners to bias appraisals diverged clearly and temporarily provided a unique opportunity to assess potential appraisal bias we use appraisal based performance data for individual real estate assets to test whether there were significant ownership effects on performance during this period the results support the hypothesis that real estate appraisals in this period reflected the differing needs of clients

global debt dynamics the elephant in the room this introduction analyses the nature and characteristics of global debt dynamics in the post global financial crisis gfc period first we attempt to map the ways in which debt has been moving from sector to sector and from one group of countries to another within the global economy by capturing this inter sectorial inter national inter regional movements of global debt we aspire to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of global debt and its mode of operation second we attempt to analyse what is wrong with global debt dynamics i e we examine the broken link between what global debt was supposed to do and what it does here we point to three interrelated dynamics the accumulation of unproductive debt growing inequalities of income and wealth and the increase in privately created interest bearing money we conclude by discussing how each paper in this special issue contributes to the current state of the art on the analysis of global debt dynamics in emerging and developing economies

ratings shopping and asset complexity a theory of ratings inflation abstract many identify inflated credit ratings as one contributor to the recent financial market turmoil we develop an equilibrium model of the market for ratings and use it to examine possible origins of and cures for ratings inflation in the model asset issuers can shop for ratings observe multiple ratings and disclose only the most favorable before auctioning their assets when assets are simple agencies ratings are similar and the incentive to ratings shop is low when assets are sufficiently complex ratings differ enough that an incentive to shop emerges thus an increase in the complexity of recently issued securities could create a systematic bias in disclosed ratings despite the fact that each ratings agency produces an unbiased estimate of the asset s true quality increasing competition among agencies would only worsen this problem switching to an investor initiated ratings system alleviates the bias but could collapse the market for information

auctions vs bookbuilding and the control of underpricing in hot ipo markets market returns before the offer price is set affect the amount and variability of initial public offering ipo underpricing thus an important question is what ipo procedure is best adapted for controlling underpricing in hot versus cold market conditions the french stock market offers a unique arena for empirical research on this topic since three substantially different issuing mechanisms auctions bookbuilding and fixed price are used there using 1992 1998 data we find that the auction mechanism is associated with less underpricing and lower variance of underpricing we show that the auction procedure s ability to incorporate more information from recent market conditions into the ipo price is an important reason copyright 2003 oxford university press

the secondary circuit of capital reconsidered globalization and the u s real estate sector1 the author examines the u s real estate sector to show how the state shapes global real estate flows and networks of activity through the creation and control of liquid resources the analysis focuses on the role of state laws and regulations in the expansion of the mortgage backed securities markets and the development of real estate investment trusts reits these institutional developments represent a series of ad hoc state efforts to delocalize residential and commercial property and embed real estate financing within global capital markets rather than viewing globalization as weakening the state the author argues that the u s state s capacity to influence the degree and development of liquidity is a powerful mechanism of globalization

conflict of interest and the credibility of underwriter analyst recommendations brokerage analysts frequently comment on and sometimes recommend companies that their firms have recently taken public we show that stocks that underwriter analysts recommend perform more poorly than buy recommendations by unaffiliated brokers prior to at the time of and subsequent to the recommendation date we conclude that the recommendations by underwriter analysts show significant evidence of bias we show also that the market does not recognize the full extent of this bias the results suggest a potential conflict of interest inherent in the different functions that investment bankers perform

credit rating industry a helicopter tour of stylized facts and recent theories the recent subprime crisis and the ongoing euro zone crisis have generated an enormous interest in the credit rating industry not only among economists but also among average citizens as a consequence we have seen an explosion of the economic literature on the industry the objective of this survey is to introduce readers to the key stylized facts of the credit rating industry and to the recent theoretical economic literature on this industry

discretionary ratings and the pricing of subprime mortgage backed securities using a dataset of home equity loan securities issued up to june 2007 and rated by moody s and or sp however these alternative thresholds do not appear to play a role as relevant as that of the ig sg boundary rating bias is also found to have an asymmetric impact on spreads the relevance of actual over expected ratings is greater for tranches receiving evaluations that are higher rather than lower than expected taken together these pieces of empirical evidence point toward ratings based regulation as an important explanation for the observed mispricing of structured finance products

event study methodologies and the size effect abstract this study of 862 press recommendations demonstrates that the size effect can distort longer term performance measures and hence event studies relative to similar sized companies post publication performance is neutral however market adjustments the capm and market model with equally or capitalization weighted indexes all produce biased results event studies are most exposed to such bias when the measurement interval is long event securities differ systematically in size or weighting from the index constituents the size effect is large and or volatile and when capm type methodologies are used these distortions are avoided by explicitly controlling for size

rationality and analysts forecast bias this paper proposes and tests a quadratic loos utility function for modeling corporate earnings forecasting where financial analysts trade off bias to improve management access and forecast accuracy optimal forecasts with minimum expected error are optimistically biased and exhibit predictable cross sectional variation related to analyst and company characteristics empirical evidence from individual analyst forecasts is consistent with the model s predictions these results suggest that positive and predictable bias may be a rational property of optimal earnings forecasts prior studies using classical notions of unbiasedness may have prematurely dismissed analysts forecasts as being irrational or inaccurate

information aggregation in polls we study information transmission via polling a policymaker polls constitu ents who differ in their information and ideology to determine policy full rev elation is an equilibrium in a poll with a small sample but not with a large one in large polls full information aggregation can arise in an equilibrium where constituents endogenously sort themselves into centrists who respond truth fully and extremists who do not we find polling statistics that ignore strate gic behavior yield biased estimators and mischaracterize the polvs margin of error we construct estimators that account for strategic behavior finally we compare polls and elections jel c42 d83

bank ratings what determines their quality this paper examines the quality of credit ratings assigned to banks by the three largest rating agencies we interpret credit ratings as relative assessments of creditworthiness and define a new ordinal metric of rating error based on banks expected default frequencies our results suggest that on average large banks receive more positive bank ratings particularly from the agency to which the bank provides substantial securitization business these competitive distortions are economically significant and contribute to perpetuate the existence of too big to fail banks we also show that overall differential risk weights recommended by the basel accords for investment grade banks bear no significant relationship to empirical default probabilities harald hau sam langfield and david marques ibanez

transaction based timberland investment returns using property level data of 1987 quarter 1 2014 quarter 2 provided by the national council of real estate investment fiduciaries ncreif transaction based timberland indices are constructed via the heckman procedure results show that liquidity of private equity timberland assets varies with business cycles variance of transaction based timberland indices is twice as large as that of the appraisal based ncreif timberland index the role of private equity timberland in a mixed portfolio is overstated by using the appraisal based index and the average of estimated ask and bid prices well captures the mean price of identified timberland sales although timberland sellers reserve higher prices than buyers

retracted relationship incentives and the optimistic pessimistic pattern in analysts forecasts we examine whether analysts incentives to maintain good relationships with management contribute to the optimistic pessimistic within period time trend in analysts forecasts in our experiments 81 experienced sell side analysts from two brokerage firms predict earnings based on historical information and management guidance analysts forecasts exhibit an optimistic pessimistic pattern across the two timing conditions early and late in the quarter and the effect is significantly stronger when the analysts have a good relationship with management than when their only incentive is to be accurate debriefing results indicate that analysts are aware of this pattern of forecasts and believe that this benefits their future relationships with management and with brokerage clients the analysts most frequently cite favored conference call participation and information access when describing benefits from maintaining good relationships with management our results suggest the following the optimistic pessimistic pattern in forecasts is in part a conscious response to relationship incentives information access is perceived to be a major benefit of management relationships and recent regulatory changes may have lessened but have not eliminated this conflict of interest source

firm characteristics and analyst following abstract this paper examines the major determinants of the number of analysts following a firm a simple model of analyst following is proposed and several firm characteristics are suggested that are likely to influence the extent of a firm s analyst following by either affecting the aggregate demand for or supply of analyst services or both for the firm almost all of these characteristics are found to be strongly significant in affecting the extent of analyst following of firms and the empirical results generally accord well with economic intuition

the effect of issuing biased earnings forecasts on analysts access to management and survival this study offers evidence on the earnings forecast bias analysts use to please firm management and the associated benefits they obtain from issuing such biased forecasts in the years prior to regulation fair disclosure analysts who issue initial optimistic earnings forecasts followed by pessimistic earnings forecasts before the earnings announcement produce more accurate earnings forecasts and are less likely to be fired by their employers the effect of such biased earnings forecasts on forecast accuracy and firing is stronger for analysts who follow firms with heavy insider selling and hard to predict earnings the above results hold regardless of whether a brokerage firm has investment banking business or not these results are consistent with the hypothesis that analysts use biased earnings forecasts to curry favor with firm management in order to obtain better access to management s private information

unkind roll of the dice drivers of lottery crimes in the united states using data on u s states this paper studies the factors driving lottery related crimes focusing on spillovers from other gambling and corruption although state sponsored lotteries have become q