Please join us in congratulating Jeff Burks on the acceptance of Competition and voluntary disclosure: Evidence from deregulation in the banking industry (with coauthors Cuny, Gerakos, and Granja) by the Review of Accounting Studies. Congratulations Jeff!…
Brad Badertscher's paper (co-authored with Sharon Katz, Dan Givloy, and Hanna Lee) "Private Ownership and the Cost of Public Debt: Evidence from the Bond Market" has been accepted for publication in Management Science.
A number of studies have examined the effect of public and private ownership on the cost of debt and conclude that the cost of debt of privately owned firms is higher, driven mainly by the poorer information environment in which these firms operate. We extend this strand of research in two ways. First, we identify and empirically establish the mechanisms that bring about a higher cost of debt to privately-owned firms, namely the limited access that these firms have to the equity capital market, their high rate of management and private-equity ownership, and their less conservative reporting. Second, we improve the reliability of the estimates of the effect of ownership type on the cost of debt by controlling for the different information environments in which privately- and publicly-owned firms operate. This is accomplished through the use of a sample consisting of publicly-owned and privately-owned firms that have public debt and are therefore subject to identical reporting and disclosure requirements. Certain data and design features allow us to better control for other factors that might lead to the observed difference in the cost-of-debt between the two groups of firms. The results contribute to our understanding of the role of ownership type on the cost of capital.…
Ram Ramanan's paper with Kirk Phillipich and Bruce Bublitz, "One Conspirator or Two in the Death of the Coal-Miner's Daughter", has been accepted for publication by Oil, Gas, & Energy Quarterly.
This research attempts to address the question of who was culpable in the market decline experienced by coal companies during the 2014 through early 2016 time period. Was the coal industry being creatively destroyed as more climate-friendly substitutes (e.g. natural gas) became more viable and less expensive? Alternatively, did the role played by the regulatory process, at a minimum, contribute to the coal industry’s demise?…
Stephannie Larocque's Paper, "Manager's Cost of Equity Capital Estimates: Empirical Evidence," will be published in the Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance. Larocque co-authored the paper with Alastair Lawrence, UC Berkeley, and Kevin Veenstra, McMaster University.
Abstract:
Using actual practice data from U.S. corporate treasury executives, we provide initial evidence of managers’ internal estimates of their firms’ cost of equity capital (COEC) and extrapolate managers’ estimation practices to the broader population of public firms. Our study provides insights into the assumptions managers use in applying the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), the model that managers generally use to estimate their firms’ COEC according to prior research. We show that COEC estimates based on managers’ surveyed estimation practices are positively correlated with realized returns only in the pre-survey period, suggesting that managers set their COEC estimates in a backward-looking manner. Moreover, managers’ estimates are most correlated with estimates reverse-engineered following Easton (2004) and Gode and Mohanram (2003).…
Many publicly traded banks wrapped up their second-quarter earnings reports before the end of July. Some banks didn’t, but for that group, investors actually might have had an early window into their performance: The banks’ quarterly regulatory filings, known as “call reports,” were likely already available, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Notre Dame.
There’s a hidden way to get detailed financial data on publicly traded U.S. banks days before the companies release their earnings. The information is accurate, free, and -- most important -- totally legal.
The source is the federal government, which publishes snapshots of banks’ financial pictures, known as call reports, on a hard-to-find website…
Independent research by the University of Notre Dame shows that bank call reports have a material effect on U.S. equity markets. Conclusions also state that the effect increases as asset size decreases, indicating that small and medium-sized banks are quietly releasing a flood of mandatory but market-moving information to the public with little to no fanfare.…