US Asset Backed Securities – Risk Symmetric Disclosures

This chapter examines disclosures of US asset-backed securities in terms of information asymmetry theory and risk symmetry.

US Asset-Backed Securities – Regulatory Reform, Dodd-Frank and Final Rules

This chapter examines the new rules proposed under regulatory reform since the credit crisis of 2008-09, including the major proposals of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 and some of the Final Rules thereto.

D1.4 – First version applied gaming asset methodology

This deliverable (D1.4) is an intermediate document, expressly included to inform the first project review about RAGE’s methodology of software asset creation and management. The final version of the methodology description (D1.1) will be delivered in Month 29. The document explains how the RAGE project defines, develops, distributes and maintains a series of applied gaming software assets that it aims to make available. It describes a high-level methodology and infrastructure that are needed to support the work in the project as well as after the project has ended.

The RAGE Software Asset Model and Metadata Model

Software assets are key output of the RAGE project and they can be used by applied game developers to enhance the pedagogical and educational value of their games. These software assets cover a broad spectrum of functionalities – from player analytics including emotion detection to intelligent adaptation and social gamification. In order to facilitate integration and interoperability, all of these assets adhere to a common model, which describes their properties through a set of metadata. In this paper the RAGE asset model and asset metadata model is presented, capturing the detail of assets and their potential usage within three distinct dimensions – technological, gaming and pedagogical. The paper highlights key issues and challenges in constructing the RAGE asset and asset metadata model and details the process and design of a flexible metadata editor that facilitates both adaptation and improvement of the asset metadata model.

Building public policy on shifting sands: the case of the National Asset Management Agency

Over the last thirty years, there has been an increased demand for better management of public sector organisations (PSOs). This requires that they are answerable for the inputs that they are given but also for what they achieve with these inputs (Hood 1991; Hood 1995). It is suggested that this will improve the management of the organisation through better planning and control, and the achievement of greater accountability (Smith 1995). However, such a rational approach with clear goals and the means to measure achievement can cause difficulties for many PSOs. These difficulties include the distinctive nature of the public sector due to the political environment within which the public sector manager operates (Stewart and Walsh 1992) and the fact that PSOs will have many stakeholders, each of whom will have their own specific objectives based on their own perspective (Boyle 1995). This can
result in goal ambiguity which means that there is leeway in interpreting the results of the PSO. The National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) was set up to bring stability to the financial system by buying loans from the banks (which were in most cases, non-performing loans). The intention was to cleanse the banks of these loans so that they could return to their normal business of taking deposits and making loans. However, the legislation, also gave NAMA a wide range of other responsibilities including responsibility for facilitating credit in the economy and protecting the interests of taxpayers. In more recent times, NAMA has been given responsibility for building social housing. This wide-range of activities is a clear example of a PSO being given multiple goals which may conflict and is therefore likely to lead to goal ambiguity. This makes it very difficult to evaluate NAMA’s performance as they are attempting to meet numerous goals at the same time and also highlights the complexity of policy making in the public sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine how NAMA dealt with goal ambiguity. This will be done through a thematic analysis of its annual reports over the last five years. The paper’s will contribute to the ongoing debate about the evaluation of PSOs and the complex environment within which they operate which makes evaluation difficult as they are
answerable to multiple stakeholders who have different objectives and different criteria for measuring success.

Repositioning a Multifamily Asset

Multifamily investments, particularly value-added strategies, have been of keen interest to real estate investors for years now. Successful execution of a multifamily investment offers excellent risk-adjusted returns when compared to other classes of real estate such as industrial, retail, and office. From a volatility standpoint, multifamily enjoys relatively stable long-term cash flows with less downside risk during periods of recession due to stable tenancy in most major markets. The stability during downturns is also supported by the fact that recessions tend to make renters out of owners, increasing demand for apartments.

Asset Management and Investment Banking

We find evidence that conflicts of interest are pervasive in the asset management business owned by investment banks. Using data from 1990 to 2008, we compare the alphas of mutual funds, hedge funds, and institutional funds operated by investment banks and non-bank conglomerates. We find that, while no difference exists in performance by fund type, being owned by an investment bank reduces alphas by 46 basis points per year in our baseline model. Making lead loans increases alphas, but the dispersion of fees across portfolios decreases alphas. The economic loss is $4.9 billion per year.

Books for asset management in hospitals in Seville.

Hospitals from ancient Seville had an important heritage for survival of the institution and its patients. In order to keep this heritage, the officialdom settled down several control mechanisms that would serve to manage a profitable management of their income and rights. For this purpose, they developed devising instruments able to preserve their possessions and put them into operation. This article attempts to identify the defining elements of these books, called “protocolos de bienes” (protocols goods), indicating their characteristics and evolution from archaic models until the final form. This final form was reached late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, at which time devoted use main codex of hospitality. To do this, we used the documentary collec-tions of Seville, preserved in different archives of the city, from where they have taken several significant examples showing the changes that occurred in both its internal structure and its mate-rials manufacturing, underlining the participation of official, booksellers, illuminators and calligraphers. Similarly, it has high-lighted the multifaceted and multifunctional character of this ins-titutions that became also a corporate identity. The multiplicity of hospitals in Sevilla had different types and features of protocols, which were modificated according to the different needs of each institution.

Tangibilidade, classe de ativos e estrutura de capital das empresas listadas na BM&FBOVESPA

This study aims to investigate the influence of the asset class and the breakdown of tangibility as determinant factors of the capital structure of companies listed on the BM & FBOVESPA in the period of 2008-2012. Two current assets classes were composed and once they were grouped by liquidity, they were also analyzed by the financial institutions for credit granting: current resources (Cash, Bank and Financial Applications) and operations with duplicates (Stocks and Receivables). The breakdown of the tangible assets was made based on its main components provided as warrantees for loans like Machinery & Equipment and Land & Buildings. For an analysis extension, three metrics for leverage (accounting, financial and market) were applied and the sample was divided into economic sectors, adopted by BM&FBOVESPA. The data model in dynamic panel estimated by a systemic GMM of two levels was used in this study due its strength to problems of endogenous relationship as well as the omitted variables bias. The found results suggest that current resources are determinants of the capital structure possibly because they re characterized as proxies for financial solvency, being its relationship with debt positive. The sectorial analysis confirmed the results for current resources. The tangibility of assets has inverse proportional relationship with the leverage. As it is disintegrated in its main components, the significant and negative influence of machinery & equipment was more marked in the Industrial Goods sector. This result shows that, on average, the most specific assets from operating activities of a company compete for a less use of third party resources. As complementary results, it was observed that the leverage has persistence, which is linked with the static trade-off theory. Specifically for financial leverage, it was observed that the persistence is relevant when it is controlled for the lagged current assets classes variables. The proxy variable for growth opportunities, measured by the Market -to -Book, has the sign of its contradictory coefficient. The company size has a positive relationship with debt, in favor of static trade-off theory. Profitability is the most consistent variable in all the performed estimations, showing strong negative and significant relationship with leverage, as the pecking order theory predicts

Three Essays in Empirical Asset Pricing

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 led to extraordinary government intervention in firms and markets. The scope and depth of government action rivaled that of the Great Depression. Many traded markets experienced dramatic declines in liquidity leading to the existence of conditions normally assumed to be promptly removed via the actions of profit seeking arbitrageurs. These extreme events motivate the three essays in this work. The first essay seeks and fails to find evidence of investor behavior consistent with the broad 'Too Big To Fail' policies enacted during the crisis by government agents. Only in limited circumstances, where government guarantees such as deposit insurance or U.S. Treasury lending lines already existed, did investors impart a premium to the debt security prices of firms under stress. The second essay introduces the Inflation Indexed Swap Basis (IIS Basis) in examining the large differences between cash and derivative markets based upon future U.S. inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI). It reports the consistent positive value of this measure as well as the very large positive values it reached in the fourth quarter of 2008 after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. It concludes that the IIS Basis continues to exist due to limitations in market liquidity and hedging alternatives. The third essay explores the methodology of performing debt based event studies utilizing credit default swaps (CDS). It provides practical implementation advice to researchers to address limited source data and/or small target firm sample size.

From engaging to enabling : could an asset-based approach transform Indigenous affairs?

Essays in asset price bubbles

This thesis studies the field of asset price bubbles. It is comprised of three independent chapters. Each of these chapters either directly or indirectly analyse the existence or implications of asset price bubbles. The type of bubbles assumed in each of these chapters is consistent with rational expectations. Thus, the kind of price bubbles investigated here are known as rational bubbles in the literature. The following describes the three chapters. Chapter 1: This chapter attempts to explain the recent US housing price bubble by developing a heterogeneous agent endowment economy asset pricing model with risky housing, endogenous collateral and defaults. Investment in housing is subject to an idiosyncratic risk and some mortgages are defaulted in equilibrium. We analytically derive the leverage or the endogenous loan to value ratio. This variable comes from a limited participation constraint in a one period mortgage contract with monitoring costs. Our results show that low values of housing investment risk produces a credit easing effect encouraging excess leverage and generates credit driven rational price bubbles in the housing good. Conversely, high values of housing investment risk produces a credit crunch characterized by tight borrowing constraints, low leverage and low house prices. Furthermore, the leverage ratio was found to be procyclical and the rate of defaults countercyclical consistent with empirical evidence. Chapter 2: It is widely believed that financial assets have considerable persistence and are susceptible to bubbles. However, identification of this persistence and potential bubbles is not straightforward. This chapter tests for price bubbles in the United States housing market accounting for long memory and structural breaks. The intuition is that the presence of long memory negates price bubbles while the presence of breaks could artificially induce bubble behaviour. Hence, we use procedures namely semi-parametric Whittle and parametric ARFIMA procedures that are consistent for a variety of residual biases to estimate the value of the long memory parameter, d, of the log rent-price ratio. We find that the semi-parametric estimation procedures robust to non-normality and heteroskedasticity errors found far more bubble regions than parametric ones. A structural break was identified in the mean and trend of all the series which when accounted for removed bubble behaviour in a number of regions. Importantly, the United States housing market showed evidence for rational bubbles at both the aggregate and regional levels. In the third and final chapter, we attempt to answer the following question: To what extend should individuals participate in the stock market and hold risky assets over their lifecycle? We answer this question by employing a lifecycle consumption-portfolio choice model with housing, labour income and time varying predictable returns where the agents are constrained in the level of their borrowing. We first analytically characterize and then numerically solve for the optimal asset allocation on the risky asset comparing the return predictability case with that of IID returns. We successfully resolve the puzzles and find equity holding and participation rates close to the data. We also find that return predictability substantially alter both the level of risky portfolio allocation and the rate of stock market participation. High factor (dividend-price ratio) realization and high persistence of factor process indicative of stock market bubbles raise the amount of wealth invested in risky assets and the level of stock market participation, respectively. Conversely, rare disasters were found to bring down these rates, the change being severe for investors in the later years of the life-cycle. Furthermore, investors following time varying returns (return predictability) hedged background risks significantly better than the IID ones.