I investigate if all-equity firms are a heterogeneous group as it relates to agency costs and accounting quality. All-equity firms are a unique group of firms that choose a “corner solution” as their capital structure. Extant research, supported by well-established theories such as trade-off theory, free cash flow theory, and Jensen’s (1986) control hypothesis, generally conclude that agency conflicts motivate such structure. Research also supports the alternative argument that poor accounting quality makes debt so prohibitive that such firms are driven to this capital structure. I propose that an all-equity structure is not necessarily symptomatic of agency conflicts and poor accounting quality overall. I investigate if different motivations, within an all-equity setting, reflected by free cash flows and growth opportunities, result in different levels of agency cost and accounting quality. By anchoring on theories that link implicit costs of debt to free cash flow levels and growth opportunities, I hypothesize that free cash flows and growth opportunities are strongly linked to the justification or lack thereof for the pursuit of such strategy. I hypothesize and show that firms in the extremes of the free cash flow to growth rate spectrum exhibit significantly different levels of agency cost and accounting quality within the all-equity setting. These results support my main prediction that there exists agency costs and accounting quality differences within the all-equity setting which are associated with free cash flow levels and growth opportunities and that the pessimistic conclusions for pursuing an all-equity strategy reached by prior research should not be generalized to all such firms. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015 / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

In essay I, I empirically examine theoretical inferences of real options models regarding the effects of business risk on the pricing of firms engaged in corporate control transactions. This study shows that the risk differential between the merging firms has a significant effect on the risk dynamic of bidding firms around control transactions and that the at-announcement risk dynamic is negatively related to that in the preannouncement period. In addition, the relative size of the target, the volatility of bidder cash flows, and the relative growth rate of the bidder have significant explanatory power in the cross-section of announcement returns to bidding firm shareholders as does the change in the cost of capital resulting from the transaction. Essay II provides an empirical analysis of a second set of real options models that theoretically examine the dynamics of financial risk around control transactions as well as the link between financial leverage and the probability of acquisition. In addition, I present a comparison of the financial risk dynamics of firms that choose an external growth strategy, through acquisition, and those that pursue an internal growth strategy through capital expenditures that are unrelated to acquisition. / by Jeffrey M. Coy. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

The main objective of this thesis is to simulate, evaluate and discuss three standard methodologies of calculating Value-at-Risk (VaR) : Historical simulation, the Variance-covariance method and Monte Carlo simulations. Historical simulation is the most common nonparametric method. The Variance-covariance and Monte Carlo simulations are widely used parametric methods. This thesis defines the three aforementioned VaR methodologies, and uses each to calculate 1-day VaR for a hypothetical portfolio through MATLAB simulations. The evaluation of the results shows that historical simulation yields the most reliable 1-day VaR for the hypothetical portfolio under extreme market conditions. Finally, this paper concludes with a suggestion for further studies : a heavy-tail distribution should be used in order to imporve the accuracy of the results for the two parametric methods used in this study. / by Kyong Chung. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

This dissertation traces the genealogy of systemic risk as a pathology of monetary government of the economy and systemic risk regulation as a regulatory regime to govern this governmental problem as instituted under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act of 2010. Using resilience and vulnerability as diagnostic categories, it reconstructs the history of economic government since the New Deal as a recursive problem-solving process, plagued with negative feedback loops. It shows how different groups of experts, acting as policy entrepreneurs, problematized and framed the economy as a crisis-prone system and how they tried to reduce the catastrophe risk in the economy without restricting economic activity and growth. In doing this, the dissertation details the proposals as well as the actual governmental apparatuses set up to represent and format the economy. It argues that systemic risk regulation emerges at the intersection of two distinct, but historically interrelated genealogical threads, systemic risk and vulnerability reduction. It shows that while systemic risk has been articulated in different ways since the 1920s, its emergence in its contemporary form took place with the rise of the monetary government in the 1970s. Under monetary government, the financial system was reformatted as a vital credit-supply infrastructure that functioned as a monetary policy transmission mechanism. A critical aspect of this reformatting was the cultivation of an increasingly leveraged financial system that relied on short-term lending markets for operational liquidity. The outcome of this development, in turn, was the reframing of systemic risk as the catastrophe risk that the failure of a firm participating in these markets would result in a system-wide collapse and thereby a depression. Vulnerability reduction, in contrast, was conceived by a group of experts working in New Deal resource planning agencies between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s. This governmental technology was concerned with the resilience of the economic system to low probability but high impact macroeconomic shocks. Within this governmental strategy, the primary objective was to reduce the vulnerability of certain points of interdependence that were considered to be critical and strategic nodes within the economic system. The dissertation argues that the rise of systemic risk regulation signifies the convergence of systemic risk and vulnerability reduction for the first time since these two genealogical threads were separated in the post-Truman period. In this respect, this development points to the remapping of vulnerability reduction onto financial ontology of substantive credit flows and thus the rearticulation of monetary government with systemic tools such as network and catastrophe modeling in a substantive form.

Following the recent financial crisis, financial regulators have placed a strong emphasis on reducing expectations of government support for banks, and on better managing and assessing risks in the banking system. This thesis considers three current topics in credit risk and the statistical problems that arise there. The first of these topics is expectations of government support in distressed banks. We utilize unique features of the European credit default swap market to find that market expectations of European government support for distressed banks have decreased -- an important development in the credibility of financial reforms. The second topic we treat is the estimation of covariance matrices from the perspective of market risk management. This problem arises, for example, in the central clearing of credit default swaps. We propose several specialized loss functions, and a simple but effective visualization tool to assess estimators. We find that proper regularization significantly improves the performance of dynamic covariance models in estimating portfolio variance. The third topic we consider is estimation risk in the pricing of financial products. When parameters are not known with certainty, a better informed counterparty may strategically pick mispriced products. We discuss how total estimation risk can be minimized approximately. We show how a premium for remaining estimation risk may be determined when one counterparty is better informed than the other, but a market collapse is to be avoided, using a simple example from loan pricing. We illustrate the approach with credit bureau data.

Liu, Weiyang. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-113). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.iii / Chapter 1 --- Introduction and Literature Review --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1.1 --- Background and Motivating examples --- p.2 / Chapter 1.1.2 --- Basic Concepts --- p.4 / Chapter 1.1.3 --- Outline of the thesis --- p.6 / Chapter 1.2 --- Literature Review --- p.8 / Chapter 2 --- Multi-period Cooperative Re-investment Games: The Basic Model --- p.11 / Chapter 2.1 --- Basic settings and assumptions --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2 --- The problem --- p.13 / Chapter 3 --- Three sub-models and the allocation rule of Sub-Model III --- p.17 / Chapter 3.1 --- Three possible sub-models of the basic model --- p.17 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Sub-model I --- p.17 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Sub-model II --- p.18 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- Sub-model III --- p.19 / Chapter 3.2 --- The allocation rule of Sub-model III --- p.19 / Chapter 4 --- A two period example of the revised basic model --- p.25 / Chapter 4.1 --- The two period example with two projects --- p.25 / Chapter 4.2 --- The algorithm for the dual problem --- p.29 / Chapter 5 --- Extensions of the Basic Model --- p.35 / Chapter 5.1 --- The model with stochastic budgets --- p.36 / Chapter 5.2 --- The core of the model with stochastic budgets --- p.39 / Chapter 5.3 --- An example: the two-period case of models with stochastic bud- gets and an algorithm for the dual problem --- p.46 / Chapter 5.4 --- An interesting marginal effect --- p.52 / Chapter 5.5 --- "A Model with stochastic project prices, stochastic returns and stochastic budgets" --- p.54 / Chapter 6 --- Multi-period Re-investment Model with risks --- p.58 / Chapter 6.1 --- The Model with l1 risk measure --- p.58 / Chapter 6.2 --- The Model with risk measure --- p.66 / Chapter 7 --- Numerical Tests --- p.70 / Chapter 7.1 --- The affects from uncertainty changes --- p.71 / Chapter 7.2 --- The affects from budget changes --- p.71 / Chapter 7.3 --- The affects from the budget changes of only one group --- p.71 / Chapter 8 --- Conclusive Remarks --- p.77 / Chapter A --- Original Data and Analysis for Section 7.1 (Partial) --- p.79 / Chapter B --- Data Analysis for Section 7.2 (Partial) --- p.95 / Chapter C --- Data Analysis for Section 7.3 (Partial) --- p.98

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.

<p> </p><p>The statistics has shown that men and women have different investing strategies, where men tend to choose riskier investments and women lean towards less risky investments. The financial theory states that individuals are risk averse in general, and some prior studies have shown that women are more so than men. Moreover, financial knowledge and experience have been pointed out to be one of the factors affecting one’s financial risk tolerance. This paper researches these issues by addressing the following to questions: Are there any gender differences in Financial Risk Tolerance? Does knowledge and experience have impact on Financial Risk Tolerance? A literature search has been done and relevant theory has been gathered and review, which served as a base and a framework for conducting this study. A quantitative methodological study has been carried out by handing out questionnaires, based on a 13-item Financial Risk Tolerance scale developed by Grabble & Lytton (1999). The target population was the Umeå University students. The size of the sample was 139. The findings of this paper confirm prior studies which state that women, in general, are less risk tolerant then men – female students scored lower on the Financial Risk Tolerance Score than male students. Furthermore, this study also shows that one’s Financial Risk Tolerance is affected by experience and knowledge in the field of finance – students that are studying economics had higher Financial Risk Tolerance score than students that were studying other subjects.</p><p> </p>

Companies need capital in order to run their business, do necessary investments and grow larger. These actions are combined with high costs where both internal and external financing might be appropriate. Capital structure is the relation between debt and equity. In this thesis we have focused on the decision behind the capital structure. We have focused on the road freight industry and we have tried to find out how management reason about their decision. The purpose of this thesis is therefore to describe and analyze SMEs’ decision of capital structure within the road freight sector in the Jönköping region. Emphasise is put on the different aspects that influence the capital structure decision and to what extent this is a strategic issue coloured by personal beliefs. To fulfill the purpose mainly a qualitative approach with primary data from structured interviews has been used. The interviews were conducted face-to-face with six owner and/or managers. Further on, secondary data from the firms’ annual reports were used and analyzed. The pecking order theory explains that firms, especially SMEs, prefer to finance their businesses with internally generated funds. Focus of the theoretical part are on theories of what factors that affects the capital structure decision, how this can be argued to be a strategic question for SMEs, how risk affects the capital structure decision and how this decision is made in a family business. These theories are presented to shed light on the capital structure decision making process of SMEs. From this study it is found that the majority of the companies’ prefer internal financing i.e. reinvested earnings, and as a second alternative to use debt in form of bank loans. The study also shows that the reasons behind this preferred order are the will of being independent, previous experience and managements’ risk-taking propensity. We believe that these factors combined with beliefs about debt and realized need for debt works as a base for how a capital structure strategy is discussed, formed and developed. From this study it can also be concluded that risk indirect affects the capital structure decision and that a restrictive view on debt leads to a restrictive desire to grow since a fast growth in most cases needs to be financed by debt. Last, the study concludes that even though the studied firms prefer to finance with retained earnings they all use debt more or less.

The statistics has shown that men and women have different investing strategies, where men tend to choose riskier investments and women lean towards less risky investments. The financial theory states that individuals are risk averse in general, and some prior studies have shown that women are more so than men. Moreover, financial knowledge and experience have been pointed out to be one of the factors affecting one’s financial risk tolerance. This paper researches these issues by addressing the following to questions: Are there any gender differences in Financial Risk Tolerance? Does knowledge and experience have impact on Financial Risk Tolerance? A literature search has been done and relevant theory has been gathered and review, which served as a base and a framework for conducting this study. A quantitative methodological study has been carried out by handing out questionnaires, based on a 13-item Financial Risk Tolerance scale developed by Grabble &amp; Lytton (1999). The target population was the Umeå University students. The size of the sample was 139. The findings of this paper confirm prior studies which state that women, in general, are less risk tolerant then men – female students scored lower on the Financial Risk Tolerance Score than male students. Furthermore, this study also shows that one’s Financial Risk Tolerance is affected by experience and knowledge in the field of finance – students that are studying economics had higher Financial Risk Tolerance score than students that were studying other subjects.