Thesis (Ph. D.)--Management, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007. / Dr. Rajesh Chakrabarti, Committee Member ; Dr. Narayanan Jayaraman, Committee Co-Chair ; Dr. Jonathan Clarke, Committee Member ; Dr. Ajay Subramanian, Committee Co-Chair ; Dr. Richard Phillips, Committee Member.

Esta dissertação explora a relevância empírica da regulação sobre o sistema bancário. O sistema bancário representa o mais importante setor e deverá sempre estar funcionando plenamente para não comprometer outros setores econômicos. O Estado pode intervir quando o sistema financeiro parecer instável. Esta instabilidade pode ser causada por quebras bancárias. A falência de um banco pode ser evitada se houver um controle sobre o risco de suas atividades. A regulação pode exigir o controle deste risco ao limitar a quantidade de captação que o banco realiza em relação aos seus recursos próprios. Esta relação é chamada de alavancagem. Portanto, altos índices de alavancagem representariam maior risco do banco. O trabalho pretende analisar o impacto da regulação sobre o perfil de alavancagem dos bancos comerciais brasileiros e verificar se a regulação é eficiente. A eficiência da regulação está relacionada com a sua real necessidade e se consegue atingir seus objetivos da maneira menos onerosa para a sociedade. Este estudo visa analisar a eficiência da regulação sobre o setor bancário brasileiro no período de 1950 a 2005. / This dissertation explores the empirical relevance of regulation on banking system. The banking system is a very important sector and it must be safe. Government can intervene when this system seems to be instable. This instability can be caused by bank failure. Financial leverage measure the degree to which a bank is utilizing borrowed money. Higher degree shows higher probability of default. We want to analyze the impact of regulation related to financial leverage on banks? risk taking and if this regulation is efficient. The regulation is efficient when its introduction is really necessary and it is not excessively costly. This dissertation analyzes the efficiency of regulation on Brazilian banking sector during 1950 to 2005.

I aim to explain significantly different industry abnormal returns and changes in risk as a result of the 1933 Bank Holiday imposed by President D. Franklin Roosevelt from March 3, 1933 to March 15, 1933. I identify no strong relationship between unregulated industry leverage and abnormal returns following the Bank Holiday, but find regulated industries, the most highly levered at the time, experienced the most statistically significant negative abnormal returns. I find a strong correlation between abnormal returns and leverage when including regulated and unregulated industries. Thus, the evidence is consistent with the story that highly regulated industries who experienced negative abnormal returns were not able to take advantage of the benefits brought on by the Bank Holiday. The addition of historically accurate leverage data fails to fully account for a lack of significant results from Ingram (2016), who analyzed industry specific returns and risk surrounding the Bank Holiday and attempted to explain industry differences by including measures of industry leverage by using a proxy for leverage. I find that industries related to manufacturing experience positive abnormal returns following the Bank Holiday, most likely due to the ability to borrow money and finance capital, brought on by newly established financial stability.

M.Comm. (Financial Management) / The purpose of this study is to show the influence of corporate debt on financial distress particularly during and after an economic/financial crisis on South African companies. It is assumed that companies that are highly leveraged prior to a crisis will experience financial distress during as well as after the crisis and that they will go through a process of deleveraging sometime after the financial crisis. The financial statements of 47 capital intensive companies that are traded on the main board of the JSE Limited are analysed for two crises that took place between 1994 and 2010. These crisis points coincide with the Asian crisis and the Dot.com bubble crash. The 2008 sub-prime crisis is excluded from the analyses due to the absence of post-crisis financial information for some of the companies sampled. The analysis examines the relationship between debt and financial distress and between debt and profitability before, during and after the crises. The evolution of debt levels before, during and after the crises is also examined. The empirical findings of the study are a departure from international literature and experience that suggest that during times of economic prosperity companies become over-indebted due to expansion plans and therefore in most cases experience financial distress as they are unable to meet their obligations or meet these with great difficulty during and after the crisis.

No description available.

A debate exists regarding the effect of labor protection laws on labor costs. Whether labor protection laws increase or decrease labor costs has implications for risk exposure of affected firms. If the labor costs go up, all else the same, the firm’s breakeven point goes up. Facing increased business risk, the firm must resort to strategies that inhibit the risk exposure, especially if the higher labor costs cannot be transferred, without adverse consequences, to consumers. The strategies include reigning in, if at all possible, operating leverage and financial leverage. Conversely, if the labor costs decrease, a firm’s business risk declines, and the firm has options to increase its operating leverage and/or financial leverage, lower the product price, or do nothing. By examining the Chinese firms’ reactions to the 2007 labor protection laws, we draw conclusions about laws’ directional impact on labor costs. We find that Chinese firms attempt to reduce business risk by lessening labor intensity, and labor-intensive firms are able to reduce the labor intensity at a significantly higher rate than capital-intensive firms. Neither group is able to significantly reduce asset tangibility. We also find that all firms significantly reduce their financial leverages. Consequently, firms’ investments, as measured by sales growth, decline in the post-reform period. These results are consistent with the cost of labor increasing as a result of the stricter labor protection laws.

The first chapter evaluates the zero-leverage effect on firms' financial constraints. Moreover, using investment- and cash-to-cash-flow sensitivities as financial constraint indicators, the results suggest that unleveraged firms are expected to face lower constraints relative to leveraged firms. Lastly, the results indicate that the zero-leverage effect on firms’ financial constraints is more likely stronger for smaller firms, zero-dividend firms, firms with lower proportions of tangible assets, and growth firms. The second chapter develops a new quantitative measure that reflects the extent to which a firm complies to Shariah relative to the other firms located in a certain region at a certain time. This measure can be customized to be consistent with each investor’s objectives, constraints, and beliefs. We argue that the use of this measure is preferable to the existing use of ratio thresholds for the following two reasons. First, it is more Shariah-appropriate because it provides the Shariah-compliant investor with a clear understanding of the relative compliance status of each firm he wishes to invest in. Second, it can be incorporated into any portfolio optimization model to create a balance between improving Shariah compliance and not compromising investment returns.

The validating roles of hedging and leverage as value-adding corporate strategies arise from their beneficial manipulation of deadweight market impositions such as taxes and financial distress costs. These roles may even be symbiotic in their value-adding effects, but they are antithetic in their effects on company risk. This study's modelling analysis indicates that hedging and leverage do interact for net benefit to company value; for sensible base-case exogenous parameters, the optimal (value-maximising) joint hedging and leverage strategy increases company value by about 4.0% compared to the unhedged optimal leverage strategy, by about 1.3% compared to the unlevered optimal hedge strategy, and by about 4.0% compared to the company being unlevered and unhedged. Furthermore an optimal joint hedging and leverage strategy is less financially risky than an unhedged optimal leverage strategy or an unhedged and unlevered strategy, and is often less financially risky than an unlevered optimal hedge strategy. Interestingly, the optimal joint hedging and leverage strategy entails some risk-seeking hedge reversal in response to weak price outcomes for production output.

This thesis investigates the theoretical and empirical relationships between a firm’s R&D investment intensity and the systematic risk of its common stock in Sweden. This is done by examining 38 Swedish firms between 1997 and 2005. An overlapping set of 5-year window is chosen to apply to calculate the variables of the samples. In this thesis, three factors are introduced as a proxy of main constituents of systematic risk: intrinsic business risk, degree of financial leverage and degree of operating leverage. And we use these three constituents to analysis the relationship between R&D investment and systematic risk. The results from Monte Carlos simulations and correlation analysis of our sample show that, in Sweden, firms with higher R&D intensity do face higher stock price volatility in the stock market. At the same time, we attempt to test the relationship among R&D and systematic risk’s three constituents, but find that R&D intensive firms have more financial leverage which is opposite to our expect, which might due to the shortage of data and limitation of our sample selection, and R&D intensive firms do not have obvious relations directly with intrinsic business risk, degree of financial leverage or degree of operating leverage.

Previous research on the tradeoff between operating and financial leverage has come to contradicting results, thus, there is no consensus of opinion regarding van Horne’s tradeoff theory. This study investigates whether there is support for the tradeoff theory on a sample of 347 Swedish, listed firms. Unlike previous studies, we employ a method with direct measures using guidance provided by Penman (2012), rather than using the more common degree of operating and financial leverage as proxies. During the time period 2006-2011 we find a statistically significant negative relationship of 0.214 using an OLS regression with financial leverage as the dependent variable, giving support for the tradeoff theory. The adjusted explanatory power (adjusted R2) is however rather low, despite adding four control variables, reaching only 7.4%.