Download Free Two Essays In Finance Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Two Essays In Finance and write the review.

Based on data on publicly traded insurance firms, the first essay examines questions about the effect of large catastrophic events on insurance firms. Rather than looking at a single event, thirty catastrophic events were aggregated into quintiles and the cumulative abnormal returns around these events were found to be significantly positive over a 25 day trading window. There is no significant evidence that post-catastrophic stock returns are correlated to the magnitude of the catastrophe. The second essay analyzes the effect of a large land grant university, the University of Illinois, on the State Treasury of Illinois. If the State Treasury were acting as its own agent trying to maximize revenues, would it choose higher education as an investment versus other alternative investments. While it is true the State makes large expenditures for the operations of the University, it is also true that individuals receiving degrees on average receive higher incomes. Taxes or higher incomes offset the cost of operating the University. The study is broken out by the level of student: undergraduate, masters, doctorate, medical professional, and by function of the University. It was found that all levels of education have a positive return not only for the individual, but also for the State Treasury. This is in excess of any non-pecuniary benefits to the State of having a better educated population, or the local taxation effects on the county or city where the campus is located. These returns are found to be higher than other types of investments.
In the first essay, "Do Firms Knowingly Sell Overvalued Equity?", I develop a simple equilibrium model which shows that insider trading around seasoned equity offerings (SEO) depends on both the quality of issuing firms and insiders' exogenous consumption shocks, neither of which are known by outside investors in the model. The empirical evidence indicates that insider trading is not reliably related to the future long-term stock returns of issuing firms even though it is reliably related to their announcement period abnormal returns. Issuing firms underperform their benchmarks regardless of the prior insider trading pattern. This suggests that insiders who have purchased shares before issuing do not realize that the market has overcapitalized prior good news, and are not knowingly selling overvalued equity. The second essay, "Deposit Insurance with Changing Volatility: An Application of Exotic Options", develops a model to incorporate the bank managers' incentives to change the bank's volatility into the pricing of deposit insurance. It is assumed that the volatility of the bank's assets changes or can be changed when the assets first hit a certain level. The results show that the shareholders' equity and the deposit insurance premium can be represented as combinations of generalized versions of particular barrier options known as down-and-out and down-and-in options. Numerical examples are used to illustrate the properties of the model.
The essays in this volume explain the key structural features of financial inflation that give rise to financial crisis. These features include excessive reliance on finance to maintain economic activity through rising asset prices. Reliance on asset inflation induces a preoccupation with property values and a new social divide between the asset-rich and the asset-poor that undermines the culture of the welfare state. When debt can no longer be supported by cash flow from asset markets, excess debt plunges economies into economic depression.
This dissertation comprises two essays. In the first essay we show that accruals management, sales manipulation, and reckless growth in operating capacity are used in conjunction with forward splits by hundreds of firms in schemes to manipulate stock prices that help justify an average 32% increase in executives’ salaries and additional gains from aggressive stock sales. This is a path to destruction that ultimately leads to shedding of labor and physical assets and substantial declines in both return on assets and stock price that often necessitates a reverse stock split. Our results highlight agency problems in the context of deceptive stock splits that can be part of complex financial chicanery.In the second essay we show that during 2000-2004 Doral Financial Corporation, a leading banking holding company, overstated its pre-tax income by 100 percent, which enabled Doral to report 28 consecutive quarters of record earnings. Our results show that the proportion of equity related incentives and the timing of option grants likely played a significant role in prompting Doral’s earnings misstatements. After the restatement announcement, Doral’s new management adopted several corporate governance improvements such as increasing the board size and independence and separating the chair and CEO roles. However, these actions were not sufficient to restore Doral’s pre-restatement good reputation.