Using 196 reverse leveraged buyout (RLBO) transactions between 1981 and 2006, I examine the operational benefits to leveraged buyouts (LBO). Operational drivers of firm value are defined as: increases in gross profits, operating income, return on assets, net income, working capital management, and cash flow generation. Initial analysis supports the literature of minimal deterioration of post-IPO performance. Where most studies analyze RLBOs as a whole, I find that when broken into top and bottom performance group pre-IPO, data show performance increases for bottom performers and performance decreases for top performers. Top performing firms pre-IPO lose up to 50% of industry adjusted performance by five years after going public, consistent with the hypothesis that LBO structures increase efficiency.

Security Transaction taxes have been in place in many countries for many years now. Yet we do not fully know how these taxes effect prices, volumes, bid-ask spreads and volatility and in turn if they are good for the economy or not. This paper is an attempt to understand how security transaction taxes decrease volume of trading, decrease prices of stocks and increase bid-ask spreads. It analyses the effect the STTs implemented by the state and federal government in New York on June 1st 1905 and December 1st 1914 respectively, had on the stocks of the New York Stock Exchange. These results will help us analyze whether future implementations of STTs will harm or benefit the market.

This paper explores the relationship between presidential elections and sovereign credit default swap (CDS) returns, as well as, equity returns in the Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. In particular, this paper tests whether or not presidential elections, which potentially represent political uncertainty and risk, affect sovereign CDS returns. I also analyze stock returns during the elections of each country to establish benchmarks that I compare to the CDS returns. Specifically, I evaluate the movement of CDS and equity adjusted returns (i.e. returns measured as deviations from average returns) over 7 presidential elections from 2005 to 2011. The baseline panel regression did not find statistical significance in the dummy election coefficients, but did find significance in the equity intercept coefficient at the 10 percent level. This result suggests that, on average, adjusted equity returns were higher during election periods than adjusted equity returns outside of election periods. I discuss the implications of these results later in the paper.

This study utilizes a sample of private equity backed acquisitions to test whether certain factors, evaluated and quantified on the date of transaction completion, serve as indicators of future transaction bankruptcy. The results of this paper suggest that the effective federal funds rate is significantly and positively correlated with the bankruptcy of private equity backed transactions. Other measured factors specific to the private equity sponsor, the target firm in the acquisition and the characteristics of the transaction are found to be insignificant. Analysis on the influence of these factors is performed using two types of binary-response models, which predict the likelihood of the occurrence of bankruptcy, and a matched sample model that tests for the difference of means between a non-bankrupt transaction group and a bankrupt transaction group. Limitations in the availability of data derived from the private nature of the industry resulted in a limited sample size of 259 transactions completed from 1989 to 2008. General insignificance in the results of this study merits further analysis on the contributing factors to private equity transaction failure.

Critics often cite poor executive compensation schemes as one of the leading causes of the recent credit crisis. This paper investigates whether compensation structures at the end of the 2006 fiscal year created incentives for Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in the oil industry to take on excessive risk, which subsequently may have lead to weaker firm performance during the crisis. I find no evidence to support the argument that higher pay sensitivity through option and other incentive awards lead to worse firm performance. In fact, results do not provide any evidence that company performance during the crisis was related to CEO incentives.

This paper utilizes a sample of firms over the years 2000–2009 to test the effects of credit rating changes, the financial crisis, interest rates, and other variables on short-term, long-term, and total debt levels on the balance sheet. Each independent variable was created using a one year lag in order to run the regressions. The values of these variables from the previous year are being analyzed to see if they can predict debt levels for the following year. The results of this paper suggest that levels of long-term and total debt are somewhat reliant on and are positively correlated with the federal funds rate. The results indicate that short-term debt levels are much harder to predict, but they appear to be negatively correlated with the financial crisis. Long-term debt levels were also affected by this variable, but were positively correlated with it. Z-score was a significant predictor of all types of debt, and was positively correlated with each. In an effort to acquire as many data points as possible for the regressions, strict data filtration techniques were used. This limited the sample to 177 firms. The overall insignificance of the results in this study suggest that further research on what drives debt levels on the balance sheet is necessary. This will generate a greater understanding of firm behavior both inside and outside of a financial crisis.

The compensation of CEO’s has been at the forefront of the public’s mind for the past few years. During the recession, one could not go a day without hearing about the atrocious salaries and bonuses that executives were being paid. Although it only recently became an explosive topic, academics have been researching all aspects of compensation for many years. One of the earliest looked at the idea of pay for performance (Jensen and Murphy 1990), and the field has taken off from there. Many studies have been done on the determinants of compensation, and I was interested in how age relates to compensation. I created a model for determining compensation, but also took it one step further and looked at the compensation structure across different industries as well. I found that age did indeed influence compensation levels, but that it only had some effect on pay structure and only in certain industries.

Non-arbitrage asset pricing has been an avenue of unending interest to financial academics and practitioners alike. With increased capital outflow being permitted by developing economies, investors now have easy access to securities issued by foreign firms. The issue investigated in this research is concerned with the persistent presence of arbitrage opportunities between depository receipts and domestic stocks of Indian firms during the recent financial crisis. Instead of being priced in parity with one another during the crisis, ADRs of Indian firms were overpriced by as much as 70% for months on end. This thesis investigates the reasons giving rise to this premium by analyzing causes like benefits from diversification and liquidity.

The website, Plastic Jungle, is taking advantage of the rapidly growing gift card phenomena by creating a secondary market that enables consumers to buy, sell, and exchange gift cards online at a discount. This paper examines the relationship between this secondary gift card market and the corporate bankruptcy risk of companies with gift cards listed on the market. When a company issues a gift card, the card is unsecured debt and the cardholder becomes an unsecured creditor to the company. This paper investigates whether the cardholder acts similarly to other unsecured creditors or as someone who is merely holding another form of cash. As was expected, this paper finds evidence indicating the spot price on the gift card is correlated to some forms of bankruptcy risk. Specifically, the gift cardholders act like unsecured creditors in terms of excess stock returns, CDS price, and the idiosyncratic risk of companies.

Credit Default Swaps have become a large part of financial markets and recently the center of debate between academics and regulators alike. Transferring the techniques to measure information flow between the CDS market and stock markets presented by Acharya and Johnson (2007), this paper looks at the relationship between a countries sovereign CDS spread level and its predominate stock exchange. Under the back drop of the Greek Credit Crisis in Spring of 2010 I measure contagion effects in the Euro Zone comparing the level of Granger causality significance between the stock and CDS market. I find that the greatest information flow from the CDS market to the stock market is during credit shocks or times of high credit distress. My results also point to the significance of the contagion effect in the CDS market but not in the stock market.