Posts filed under ‘Financial Markets’
Miscellaneous Organizational Links
| Peter Klein |
- The much-anticipated KKR IPO turned out to be a snoozer. But what the heck is a publicly traded private-equity firm anyway?
- Is the flattening hierarchy an illusion, driven by job-title inflation?
- How call centers use behavioral economics.
- Belén Villalonga’s new paper on ownership concentration and internal-capital-market efficiency — highly recommended.
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Interview with Josh Lerner
| Peter Klein |
Paul Kedrosky interviews Josh Lerner for Kauffman’s “Infectious Talk” series. Josh is one of the top researchers and teachers working at the intersection of entrepreneurship and finance, and is always worth reading (or listening to, if you prefer the podcast version).
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CFP: “Law, Economics, and Finance”
| Peter Klein |
Mike Jensen keynotes this September 2010 conference at York University in Toronto on the links between ethics and finance:
As the world economy struggles out of the financially induced recession, the concept of ethical or socially responsible investment, along with corresponding calls for regulation, will play an increasingly important role in the study of finance for both privately held and publicly traded companies. While there has been a growing literature on law and finance, largely through cross-country studies of publicly traded companies, with somewhat less work on the ethics and finance of publicly traded companies, there has been comparatively little work at the intersection of these topics. As well, there has been comparatively little work on the intersection between law and finance and/or between the ethics and finance of privately held companies. We believe this gap needs to be filled.
The submission deadline is 1 June, so get your manuscripts ready. Full details below the fold: (more…)
Intro to The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur
| Peter Klein |
Here’s a nicely formatted HTML version of the introduction to The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur. I’d apologize for the self-promotion but, well, isn’t that the whole point of blogging?
(PS: Those of you who like to run your transactions through Amazon can get the book here. Not sure about a Kindle edition but I’m told an epub version will be available soon.)
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Manne on Fama and French
| Peter Klein |
An open letter to Gene Fama and Ken French from Henry Manne (also running today at Truth on the Market):
Dear Gene and Ken:
I must say that I was totally flabbergasted when I read your recent blog posting on insider trading. I know that your usual posts on investments, which I often cite to friends, are well-informed and empirically supported; your work over the years on these topics is important and influential — and rightly so. Unfortunately, in this post, you have deviated from your usual high quality. Anyone current on the topic of insider trading will recognize that you have been careless in your selection of anti-insider-trading arguments and that you omitted from your brief note the major part of the argument about insider trading: whether and how much it contributes to market efficiency. To say this is a strange omission coming from Fama and French would be an understatement.
Your first error is to assume that the insider trading debate is about informed trading only by “top management.” I suspect that this error may flow from my original argument for using insider trading to compensate for entrepreneurial services in a publicly held company, a matter you do not mention and which I will not pursue here except to note that “entrepreneurial services” does not equate to top management. Strangely no one seems to notice that most of the celebrated cases on the subject have not involved corporate personnel at all (a printer, a financial analyst, a lawyer, and Martha Stewart). (more…)
Scribd Version of Book
| Peter Klein |
I just learned I can embed the full document right here in a blog entry. Very cool!
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Goldman in the Dock
| Craig Pirrong |
I have several reactions to the SEC’s fraud complaint against Goldman.
First, some of the more sensationalist reporting emphasizes that Goldman was short the RMBS structures that it was selling to its customers. (Yeah, it’s the NYT, basing its opinion on reporting by Wretched Gretchen Morgenson, so take it for what it’s worth–meaning not much.) Well, that’s true, but Goldman was also long. After all, it was the counterparty, the protection seller, to Paulson’s CDS. It then entered into offsetting transactions. Goldman was essentially a conduit of risk between other financial firms and Paulson. Note paragraph 66 of the complaint, which indicates that Goldman paid most of the $840 million it received on short positions in the Abacus deals to Paulson. Goldman claimed in its response to the government’s Wells Notice that it was actually long because it retained a slice of the risk; the protection it sold to Paulson was for a larger portion of the potential losses than covered by the protection it bought from ACA Capital. (more…)
Quoted in the WSJ, Kinda Sorta
| Peter Klein |
Earlier this week AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka wrote a predictable WSJ piece blaming private equity for various economic and social ills. PE firms, you see, are “unregulated and shrouded in secrecy, and they extract big profits while the companies, their employees and many of their investors lose.” Um, OK. A few sentences later he says it again: PE firms “function with virtually no oversight. Despite managing trillions of dollars and employing millions of Americans, they operate as a shadow financial system — in secret, free to take on outsized risks, and make huge bets with no outside supervision.” Hmmmm, one might think the limited partners who provide the funds — usually sophisticated, experienced investors holding substantial equity stakes — would exercise a wee bit of supervision, but never mind. Trumka goes on to demand that PE firms be forced to make all their information public, defeating one of the main purposes of private equity. (Hey, Rich, when will the minutes of that last AFL-CIO board meeting show up on your Twitter feed?)
Today’s paper includes several responses, some supplying actual arguments and evidence on the nature and effects of private equity. One letter notes that “[r]esearchers at the University of Missouri found that private equity-backed companies that exited between 1984 and 2006 grew employment by an average of more than 13% a year over the life of the private-equity investment.” The writer is citing my paper with John Chapman, “Value Creation in Middle-Market Buyouts: A Transaction-Level Analysis,” which came out earlier this year in a Wiley finance handbook series. (You can download an SSRN version here.) We report financial, operating, and employment performance for a sample of 288 middle-market transactions collected, through surveys and interviews, from 13 US PE firms. The results suggest that PE firms create substantial economic value. A shout-out by name would have been nice, but it’s nice to be noticed.
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Why the Movie Industry Doesn’t Like “Trading Places” as a Reality Show
| Craig Pirrong |
The most recent derivatives/speculation kerfuffle involves something novel — futures contracts on movie box office receipts. Two entities, Cantor Fitzgerald and Movie Derivatives, Inc. have announced plans to introduce such contracts. The film industry is in a tizzy at the prospect, and has enlisted the help of the usual anti-speculation suspects on Capitol Hill.
The virulence of the reaction is interesting, and deserves explanation. Here’s my initial stab at the problem. (more…)
The Chris Dodd Strangle Entrepreneurship Act, or, Where’s Creative Destruction When You Need It?
| Craig Pirrong |
Back in January, Tool Time star Tom Friedman lamented that Mr. Cool had turned his back on the “amazing, young, Internet-enabled, grass-roots movement he mobilized to get elected.” Friedman all but begged Obama to spur entrepreneurship and innovation:
Obama should launch his own moon shot. What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”
How’s that working out for you, Tom? With all the taxes on capital in the health care law, and the implicit tax on business expansion in the law (e.g., insurance mandates on companies with more than 50 employees), and all the taxes to come (there are murmurs of a VAT), it is becoming the year of Shut-Down America. The whole Obama program is poison to entrepreneurship.
And that’s just the start. Dodd’s banking bill explicitly targets startups:
Dodd’s bill would require startups raising funding to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then wait 120 days for the S.E.C. to review their filing. A second provision raises the wealth requirements for an “accredited investor” who can invest in startups — if the bill passes, investors would need assets of more than $2.3 million (up from $1 million) or income of more than $450,000 (up from $250,000). The third restriction removes the federal pre-emption allowing angel and venture financing in the United States to follow federal regulations, rather than face different rules between states.
And just what are the apparatchiks in the SEC going to do in that 120 days? Just what knowledge and expertise can they bring to bear in evaluating the funding plans? The question answers itself; this adds costs and delay, for no perceivable benefit. And what reason is there to restrict the free flow of capital from consenting adults with over $1mm to startups? (more…)
Are Index Funds Immoral?
| Lasse Lien |
If I had money to invest, which I don’t, I would probably invest via an index fund. I know just enough empirical finance to realize that beating an index fund is very difficult (impossible according to some) unless you are either very lucky or an inside trader. The reason is of course the efficient markets hypothesis. The stock market factors in all relevant information at lightning speed and without bias. However, this can only be so because there are enough investors that do not invest via index funds. If everyone did, the pricing would not be informative at all. One might argue that index fund investors are free riders on those that do fundamental analysis, and a sinister threat to the very market efficiency that they thrive on.
I guess in equilibrium one would expect index investing to increase until market pricing is so inefficient that the expected returns from it is driven down to around the levels of the best alternative.
Financial Constraints and Innovation
| Peter Klein |
Why are firms in poor countries less productive than firms in rich countries? Is it lack of technical know-how? Poor infrastructure? Insufficient human capital? Weak intellectual-property protection? Actually, the evidence suggests a more prosaic explanation: financial constraints.
One stylized fact that appears from emerging markets and transition economies . . . is that foreign owned fi rms tend to be more productive than domestically owned firms. . . . To the extent that foreign owned fi rms embody the technological frontier, one can interpret this fact as suggesting that some forces prevent domestically owned firms from emulating the best practices and techniques. . . .
We show that a fi rm’s decision to invest into innovative and exporting activities is sensitive to fi nancial frictions which can prevent fi rms from developing and adopting better technologies. Furthermore, we demonstrate that in a world without financial frictions, innovation and exporting goods are complementary activities. Thus, easing financial frictions can have an ampli ed eff ect on firms’ innovation eff ort and consequently the level of productivity. However, as financial frictions become increasingly severe, these activities become eff ectively substitutes since both exporting and innovation rely on internal funds of fi rms.
That’s from “Financial Constraints and Innovation: Why Poor Countries Don’t Catch Up” by Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Monika Schnitzer. One implication is that diversified firms, whose operating units have access to the firm’s internal capital market, have particular advantages in developing countries, an argument explored in several papers by Khanna and Palepu (e.g., here). In the US, these advantages may not outweigh other drawbacks of unrelated diversification.
Mannepalooza at Austrian Scholars Conference
| Peter Klein |
Tune in here at 3:45 EST today for a live broadcast of the ASC session, “The Contributions of Henry G. Manne,” organized by yours truly. Panelists include me, Alexandre Padilla, Richard Vedder, Thomas DiLorenzo, and Henry Manne. And buy your copy of the Collected Works.
Update: audio files are now available: Klein, Padilla, Vedder, DiLorenzo, Manne.
Org. Structure and Diversification
| Peter Klein |
The March 2010 issue of the Journal of Industrial Economics has just come out, and it features my paper with Marc Saidenberg, “Organizational Structure and the Diversification Discount: Evidence from Commercial Banking.” I’m quite happy with the paper, which went through many rounds of revision and consumed a great deal of time and energy. I blogged the details earlier. The published version is behind a firewall; if you can’t get through I’d be happy to mail you a copy.
Gene Fama’s Autobiography
| Peter Klein |
Here’s an autobiographical essay by Gene Fama written for the Annual Review of Financial Economics. Fama’s work on agency theory (with Mike Jensen) and on corporate finance (with Ken French) should be of particular interest to O&Mers, though some may disagree with his introductory claim that “[f]inance is the most successful branch of economics in terms of theory and empirical work, the interplay between the two, and the penetration of financial research into other areas of economics and real-world applications.”
Fama’s Chicago-Booth colleagues add the following note about Fama’s institutional leadership, presumably directed at today’s Fama-bashers:
Rather than rest on his laurels or impose his own views on the group, Gene has always sought the truth, even when it appeared at odds with his own views. . . . The current finance group at Chicago includes a diverse set of people who specialize in all areas of modern finance including, behavioral economics, pure theory, and emerging, non-traditional areas such as entrepreneurship and development that were unheard of when Gene arrived at Chicago. Contrary to the caricatured descriptions, there is no single Chicago view of finance, except that the path to truth comes from the rigorous development and confrontation of theories with data.
Price Level Shocks, uhm, Screwed Up Relative Prices, and Organization
| Craig Pirrong |
Peter’s post on the relation between inflation, vertical integration, and markets brings a couple of other thoughts to mind.
First, and most importantly, the number and characteristics of markets are endogenous too, and respond to changes in the amount of uncertainty in the environment, including the amount of uncertainty resulting from monetary shocks that (in Sherwin Rosen’s unforgettable in-class phrase) “f*ck up relative prices.” In particular, the number and variety of futures markets depends on the amount of uncertainty. The big boom in the creation of futures markets in the 1970s corresponds with, and was arguably caused by, the coincident inflation of that period, and the associated volatility in relative prices.
Second, although Peter’s point, and previous research, focuses on the implications of inflation on organizational choices and market vs. firm choices, in the current environment it is worthwhile pondering the implications of deflation. Certainly we have more research on the effect of inflation on the variability of relative prices due to our more recent inflationary experiences, and this was a major source of concern about inflation among Austrians, but the current situation makes it worthwhile to consider the effects of deflation on the pricing system, and firms’ responses to that.
Perhaps an examination of Japanese experience since 1990 would be worth some in-depth analysis.
Personally I am torn as to whether inflation or deflation is the greater risk in the near to medium term. The huge monetary overhang in the US and around the world (resulting from quantitative easing and other extraordinary monetary policies), and the inability of the Fed to commit credibly to drain reserves from the system when money demand picks up make me believe that it will be hard to avoid a burst of inflation. But all current indicators point to flat or declining prices.
It is hard to see things ending in a Goldilocks moment — just right. Thus, it is likely that that there will be a shock to prices generally, arguably a large one, and that this will disrupt relative prices for a variety of reasons. (Including, notably, the very likely case where these price level shocks lead to government policy interventions that distort relative prices.)
Thus, Peter’s research program may be rejuvenated, courtesy of the Fed, ECB, the Chinese Central Bank, etc. It is indeed an ill wind that blows nobody any good.
Josh Lerner on Public Policy Toward Entrepreneurship
| Peter Klein |
Speaking of public entrepreneurship, here’s an interview with Josh Lerner about his new book Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed — and What to Do About It (Princeton, 2009). Excerpt:
There are two well-documented problems that can derail government programs to boost new venture activity. First, they can simply get it wrong: allocating funds and support in an inept or, even worse, a counterproductive manner. Decisions that seem plausible within the halls of a legislative body or a government bureaucracy can be wildly at odds with what entrepreneurs and their backers really need. . . .
Economists have also focused on a second problem, delineated in the theory of regulatory capture. These writings suggest that private and public sector entities will organize to capture direct and indirect subsidies that the public sector hands out. For instance, programs geared toward boosting nascent entrepreneurs may instead end up boosting cronies of the nation’s rulers or legislators. The annals of government venturing programs abound with examples of efforts that have been hijacked in such a manner.
Thanks to Ross Emmett for the tip.
Socialist Calculation Meets the OTC Markets
| Craig Pirrong |
A new Federal Reserve Bank of NY staff report by Darrell Duffie, Ada Li, and Theo Lubke, “Policy Perspectives on OTC Derivatives Market Infrastructure” has received a lot of attention in the press.
There are some good things in the paper. Notably, it is suitably cautionary about the potential systemic risks posed by central counterparties, and the consequent need for prudential regulation thereof. It also makes a good case for data repositories, and for the role of the Fed and other government agencies in reducing the costs that intermediaries incur to coordinate risk-reducing actions, such as portfolio compression and improvements in the process of confirming deals.
But overall the paper is extremely disappointing. Its tone is Olympian and prescriptive. The word “should” is used 61 times 21 pages of text (that includes several space-eating tables and charts).
This is extremely dangerous because these prescriptions and dictates are not based on a a rigorous analysis of costs and benefits. Most disturbingly, there is virtually no discussion whatsoever of the informational demands inherent in the prescriptions. We’re told that regulators should set the right capital and collateral requirements on non-cleared deals, and that CCPs should maintain “high collateral standards.” (more…)
A Tale of Two Papers, or, Humpty Dumpty Writes About Exchanges
| Craig Pirrong |
The American Economic Association/American Finance Association Meetings are just about over. I made a quick trip there to comment on a paper. Upon returning home, I downloaded a couple of the papers presented that seemed of interest. Good call on one, bad call on the other.
The bad one is “Centralized versus Over The Counter Markets” by Viral Acharya of LBS and NYU, and Alberto Bisin of NYU. Although the motivation of the paper is admirable, the execution is execrable, and is representative of a lot of what is wrong in the profession.
The motivation is to compare the efficiencies of alternative ways of organizing derivatives trades: centralized exchanges and over-the-counter (OTC) markets. Great. Big question. I’ve written a lot about it, and would be very interested in seeing other takes thoughtful on the subject.
The paper concludes that organized exchanges are (constrained) first best efficient, and more efficient than OTC markets. A quick review of the paper makes it clear, however, that they’ve rigged the game to produce that result. (more…)
The Collected Works of Henry Manne
| Peter Klein |
Via Geoff Manne, a description and ordering information for the new Collected Works of Henry Manne, produced by Liberty Fund. A great collection of scholarly articles, reviews, and shorter popular pieces divided into three volumes, “The Economics of Corporations and Corporate Law,” “Insider Trading,” and “Liberty and Freedom in the Economic Ordering of Society.” Order your copy today!
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