Journal of Risk and Financial Management — Open Access Journal

Concerns about the negative consequences of the excessive underpricing of the current arrangement in the initial public offering (IPO) market for the provision of entrepreneurial finance—book building—have led to research into the viability of auctions for IPO pricing and allocation. IPO firms face a trade-off between the benefit of accurate and reliable IPO price discovery and the cost of underpricing. The main aim of this paper was to gain new scientific knowledge about this trade-off by measuring the impact of two key variables on this trade-off: capacity restraint and discount on the auction clearing price. Using controlled experiment methodology in multi-unit uniform price auctions we found that the most capacity-restricted auctions that also offer investors a discount are likely to produce the most accurate and reliable price discovery and consequently, the most predictable auction outcome. There are indications that a discount of 8% may suffice to incentivize investors to reliably contribute to price discovery. The resulting underpricing (and its variability) of these auctions is likely to be significantly lower than if book building would be used to price and allocate IPOs. Technological innovation in the IPO market through the application of recent advances in data science, experimental economics and artificial intelligence allows for the optimization of IPO mechanisms and crowdfunding platforms which in turn improves the access to equity required for entrepreneurial finance. Full article

Monetary historians argue that two types of currencies were circulating in the middle ages of Europe. The first was the standard historical form of money made up of gold and silver coins, and the second was a set of small pieces of copper and other metallic substances used mainly in towns and townships for local trade as currency. Jetton and tokens are monetized objects that are not official currencies; they were of lower quality of the inferior metallic object, which were used for day-to-day transaction needs. The drive for local monetary decentralization is pointed to build up fiscal autonomy and responsible local monetary institutions. This paper reasons that the monetary regime of the Renaissance was a real and genuine trimetallic currency regime. Full article

The purpose of the study presented in the paper is to highlight the influence of the microeconomic factors related to the evolutionary stage of the industry’s life cycle on the industry dynamics. The authors use the example of the Russian tourism industry to show that microeconomic factors are important, along with the macroeconomic, market, and demand characteristics external to the industry. Data mining was applied to obtain data from the industrial enterprise database and Rostourism official documents since there are no regular Russian statistics on firms’ exit and new entry. The authors used annual ranked listing of firms by their revenues to determine the structural indicators of the industry. The results confirm that it is important to consider not only the demand and macroeconomic indicators, which are external risks in relation to the industry, but also the internal processes at the different stages of the product cycle. In a sufficiently long period, the influence of microeconomic indicators may be no less strong than the business factors of financial risk. One should take this into consideration in econometric modeling on long time-series. Full article

The main objective is to answer the question: What role does the housing market play for the transmission mechanism and (in particular) is the impact constant over time? The research question also includes analyzing the importance of the housing market for the transmission mechanism. We estimate an eight-variable structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model of the Swedish economy over the period 1993 and 2018 using quarterly data, covering both the internet bubble in 2000 and the financial crises in 2008. The results indicate that interest rates have both a direct effect on housing prices and an indirect impact through the bank lending channel. Over time, the traditional interest rate channel importance has been stable. On the other hand, the role of the bank lending channel has increased over time. Household debt has increased substantially in Sweden and elsewhere. That means that the interest rate sensitivity in society has increased. Based on the results, it is possible to evaluate and forecast potential house price effects (both direct and indirect) when the interest rate changes. Full article

The existence of financial intermediaries is arguably an artifact of information asymmetry. Beyond simple financial transactions, financial intermediation provides a mechanism for information transmission, which can reduce the degree of information asymmetry and consequently increase market efficiency. During the process of information transmission, the bank is able to provide unique services in the production and exchange of information. Therefore, banks have comparative advantages in information production, transmission, and utilisation. In credit provision, it is possible for lenders to make Type I and Type II errors. These types of errors are associated with whether banks decide to lend money to borrowers with low repayment capacity or risk missing out on potentially profitable lending. However, the recent US subprime loan crisis and previous financial crises (such as the Mexican, Argentinian, Chilean and Asian financial crises) show it is possible that banks can make both good and bad lending decisions. Does this mean that banks have lost their comparative advantages in leveraging information asymmetry? This Special Issue includes contribution in empirical methods in banking such risk and bank performance, capital regulation, bank competition and foreign bank entry, bank regulation on bank performance, and capital adequacy and deposit insurance. Full article

As scholars and policy makers pay more attention to the environmental impact of economic activities, more focus has been placed on the corporate environmental responsibility (CER) of family firms, which accounts for the majority of businesses in both developed and developing countries. Using a sample of 4714 private enterprises across 23 provinces in China, the current study examines the effect of family ownership on CER investment, as well as the moderating effects of venture capital investment and local institutional development. Results show that concentrated family ownership leads to lower CER spending, however, when venture capital investment comes from developed markets, the negative relationship is reversed. In addition, the marketization level of the province in which a family firm is headquartered mitigates the negative relationship between family ownership and CER investment. Full article

This Special Issue publishes high quality papers on contemporary issues in business and economics in Vietnam and other Asian emerging markets. These papers were accepted and presented at the 2019 Vietnam’s Business and Economics Research Conference (VBER2019) organized by Ho Chi Minh City Open University, Vietnam in July 2019. Emerging issues in business and economics from Vietnam and other emerging markets in the Asian region have been addressed from various angles, from economics, finance, and statistics to management science. Five out of the 14 studies in this book were conducted to investigate various issues in relation to the Asian region such as the exchange rate regime in Asia, financial inclusion, and financial development and income inequality in Asian emerging markets. Seven studies were conducted in response to emerging business and economic issues in Vietnam such as fiscal decentralization, urbanization, foreign direct investment, and corporate financial distress. Other papers even considered various relevant aspects from the United States and Europe to the Asian region including double taxation treaties and agricultural shocks to the oil price. The findings from these papers are useful for practitioners, policymakers, and academics. Full article

Endogenous sunk-cost investments are optional fixed investment or capita, that a firm can choose to impact either upon its price-cost margin or its market share for capturing larger market spoils. Oft-cited examples are investments in vertical product (quality) differentiation, advertising outlays, and R&D type expenses for improving production processes. The importance of sunk-cost capital has been highlighted in the recent literature since these investments significantly influence the degree of competition in an industry mainly through forestalling entry and thereby limiting future competition in the industry. Sunk-cost investments play an important role in the debate on the competition-(in)stability perspectives for the banking industry. This paper is motivated by an important distinction, hitherto unrecognized, that some endogenous sunk-cost investments impact on the relative efficiencies of firms and thereby on its market spoils or profits, while others will only impact on its market share and thereby on profits. An example of this distinction is as follows: while quality improvement in a product or production processes will create efficiencies and, therefore, additional profits, while advertising expenses are used to snatch market shares from rivals. The unintended consequence of the first type of endogenous-sunk cost investment is to boost efficiencies and thereby shape the nature of competition in a market. The second type will have little effect on efficiencies. In this paper, by exploiting the above distinction and using a dataset created from the annual reports of nine major Islamic banks in Jordon during 1993–2010, we will apply the efficiency models and the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) methodology to test if information technology (IT) capital is strategically used by Islamic banks as an endogenous sunk-cost investment to boost their relative efficiencies. For the first time—to the best of our knowledge—we find that IT capital is strategically used by seven out of the nine Islamic banks. We then consider the implication of the strategic use of IT capital by Islamic banks for the nature of competition in the Islamic bank industry of Jordon. By so doing, we also argue that IT capital, through its effects on the nature of competition, will lend stability to the Islamic banking industry of Jordan. Full article

This paper examines the volatility of cryptocurrencies, with particular attention to their potential long memory properties. Using daily data for the three major cryptocurrencies, namely Ripple, Ethereum, and Bitcoin, we test for the long memory property using, Rescaled Range Statistics (R/S), Gaussian Semi Parametric (GSP) and the Geweke and Porter-Hudak (GPH) Model Method. Our findings show that squared returns of three cryptocurrencies have a significant long memory, supporting the use of fractional Generalized Auto Regressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) extensions as suitable modelling technique. Our findings indicate that the Hyperbolic GARCH (HYGARCH) model appears to be the best fitted model for Bitcoin. On the other hand, the Fractional Integrated GARCH (FIGARCH) model with skewed student distribution produces better estimations for Ethereum. Finally, FIGARCH model with student distribution appears to give a good fit for Ripple return. Based on Kupieck’s tests for Value at Risk (VaR) back-testing and expected shortfalls we can conclude that our models perform correctly in most of the cases for both the negative and positive returns. Full article

The purpose of this study was to investigate the capital structure adjustment rate in different levels of product market competitions. We classified Chinese non-financial listed firms into highly, moderately, and less competitive firms and applied an unbiased dynamic panel fractional estimator on unbalanced panel data of 10,941 firm-year observations during the period of 1998 to 2015. We find that the adjustment rate of highly and less competitive firms towards long-term target capital structure is higher (28.2–29.1%) as compared to the adjustment rate towards short-term target capital structure (18.8–18.9%). On the other hand, the adjustment rate of moderately competitive firms towards long-term target capital structure is slower (22.3%) as compared to the adjustment rate towards short-term target capital structure (25.3%). Further, the adjustment rate of highly and less competitive firms differs significantly between long-term and short-term target capital structure, while the adjustment rate of moderately competitive firms remains steady. Highly competitive large firms follow the limited liability model to adjust their target capital structure and support trade-off theory, while both small and large firms follow the limited liability and predation models in moderately and less competitive environments, respectively. Full article

The relative bargaining power of the buyer and seller is a key feature of real estate pricing models. Classic real estate studies have sought to address bargaining effects in hedonic regression models. Prior research proposes a procedure to estimate bargaining effects in hedonic regression models that depends critically on a substitution to eliminate omitted variables bias. This study shows that the proposed solution that is often cited in the real estate economics literature does not solve the omitted variables problem given that both models are merely different parameterizations of the same model, and thus produces biased estimates of bargaining power when certain property characteristics are omitted. A classic hedonic regression model of real estate prices using Corsican apartment data supports our contention, even when the assumption of bargaining power symmetry is relaxed. Full article

Multifractal processes reproduce some of the stylised features observed in financial time series, namely heavy tails found in asset returns distributions, and long-memory found in volatility. Multifractal scaling cannot be assumed, it should be established; however, this is not a straightforward task, particularly in the presence of heavy tails. We develop an empirical hypothesis test to identify whether a time series is likely to exhibit multifractal scaling in the presence of heavy tails. The test is constructed by comparing estimated scaling functions of financial time series to simulated scaling functions of both an iid Student t-distributed process and a Brownian Motion in Multifractal Time (BMMT), a multifractal processes constructed in Mandelbrot et al. (1997). Concavity measures of the respective scaling functions are estimated, and it is observed that the concavity measures form different distributions which allow us to construct a hypothesis test. We apply this method to test for multifractal scaling across several financial time series including Bitcoin. We observe that multifractal scaling cannot be ruled out for Bitcoin or the Nasdaq Composite Index, both technology driven assets. Full article

This study examines the impact of corporate governance, reflecting a wide spectrum of board characteristics and ownership structure on agency costs in 281 listed companies on Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange (HOSE) in Vietnam in the period 2013–2018. For this purpose, three board characteristics were chosen: (1) the size of board of directors, (2) equilibrium between non-executive and executive members of the board of directors, (3) the CEO chair duality and three types of ownership structures were chosen: (1) management ownership, (2) government ownership, (3) foreign ownership. An inverse proxy of agency costs is used: asset utilization ratio (asset turnover), which reflects the managerial efficiency. The research methodology includes three statistical approaches: Ordinary least squares (OLS), fixed effects model (FEM) and random effects model (REM) are considered to employ to address econometric issues and to improve the accuracy of the regression coefficients. The results can create effective corporate governance mechanisms in controlling the managerial opportunistic behavior to lower agency conflicts, and hence lower agency costs. Full article

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 disease led to the most significant change in the world order over the past century, destabilizing the global economy and financial stock markets, the world’s economy, social development, business, risk, financial management and financial markets, among others. COVID-19 has generated great uncertainty, and dramatically affected tourism, travel, hospitality, supply chains, consumption, production, operations, valuations, security, financial stress and the prices of all products, including fossil fuel and renewable energy sources. This Editorial introduces a Special Issue of the Journal of Risk and Financial Management (JRFM) on the “Risk and Financial Management of COVID-19 in Business, Economics and Finance”. This Special Issue will attract practical, state-of-the-art applications of mathematics, probability and statistical techniques on the topic, including empirical applications. This paper investigates important issues that have been discussed in tourism, global health security and risk management in business as well as the social and medical sciences. Full article

In a recent paper, Karadima and Louri use frontier-based measures of market power and bank competition in an application to Euro Area banking. The purpose of the present note is to access their paper in a critical way, as there are certain fallacies and errors. Full article

We provide an innovative methodological contribution to the measurement of returns on infrequently traded assets using a novel approach to repeat-sales regression estimation. The model for price indices we propose allows for correlation with other markets, typically with higher liquidity and high frequency trading. Using the new econometric approach, we propose a monthly art market index, as well as sub-indices for impressionist, modern, post-war, and contemporary paintings based on repeated sales at a monthly frequency. The correlations enable us to update the art index via observed transactions in other markets that have a link with the art market. Full article

The main aim of this article was to assess whether the level of competitiveness of accommodation facilities results from the level of safety and security provided to consumers of these services, measured by the number of security measures applied in them. The authors’ task was to examine the level of concentration of security measures in the accommodation facilities and to assess whether the quality of services measured by the star-rating system provided a higher level of safety and security for customers of the accommodation facilities, measured by the number of security measures applied in them. It was decided to examine whether the level of concentration of security measures at the accommodation facilities was treated by these entities as a factor of their competitiveness. Two locations in Central and Eastern Europe, one in Poland and one in Lithuania, were analyzed. The article calculated the frequency of these measures at the accommodation facilities by type of facility (according to the star-rating system) and type of security measure (as a weighted average) and their concentration using the Herfindahl–Hirscham Index. The results showed that the higher the quality of services provided (more stars), the higher the level of safety and security is ensured. It was also found that a higher level of security was not reflected in the prices of accommodation services. Full article

Prior studies found that analyst forecast dispersion predicts future market returns. Some prior studies attribute this predictability to the short-sale constraints in the market according to the overpricing theory. Using the U.S. data from 1981 to 2014, we find that the return predictive power of aggregate dispersion only exists prior to 2005. The investor sentiment index, as a proxy of short-sale constraints used by many studies, can only explain the dispersion effect prior to 2005. The investor sentiment index and other proxies such as institutional ownership and put options cannot explain the significant weakening of the dispersion effect after the global financial crisis. We argue that the dispersion-return relation is partly driven by the correlation between dispersion and conditional equity premium. Our evidence suggests that the short-sale constrained stocks do not experience a higher dispersion effect, which is contrary to what the overpricing theory predicts. Full article

This study examines the moderating effect of firm size on the relationship between innovation and firm performance of small and medium enterprises in 29 countries in Eastern European and Central Asia. The study also investigates whether the impact of innovation in products and processes on firm performance is affected by financial capital. The method applied is partial least square structural equation modelling. The findings indicate that firm size and the financial capital both moderate and mediate the impact of innovation on firm performance, positively or negatively. The findings have implications for decision makers by highlighting the significance of firm size and financial sources when planning to introduce innovations to enhance firm performance. Full article