Clara C. Raposo

We use variation in the access to a credit certification program in Portugal to estimate the sensitivity of small and medium sized firms (SMEs)À investment and employment to the cost of debt financing. This government program provides a two-tier credit certification (rating) and a loan guarantee to firms with a minimum credit quality. The program design allows for a multidimensional regression discontinuity methodology to estimate its real effects over a decade. We find that eligible firms increase their borrowing, and obtain bank loans at significantly lower rates than non-eligible firms during crises. These firms increase investment and employment by more when compared to non-targeted firms. A decrease of 1 percentage point (pp) in the cost of debt financing is associated with a contemporaneous increase of 1 pp in fixed assets growth, 0.5 pp in working capital growth and 0.25 pp increase in employment growth. Fixed capital investment and employment effects persist for two years. Targeted firms also show an increase in sales growth, including exports. While these effects are mostly observed during the crisis period, ensuring that small firms continued to invest, financial and real effects of the program are modest post-crisis. Last, we exploit variation in the two ratings to estimate the real effects of having the top certification. Having the top rating mostly impacts sales growth directly in the post-crisis period.

Purpose: This paper aims to examine the relationship between regulation, market discipline and banking distress.Design/methodology/approach: To address the empirical question put forward above, a multivariate logit model is applied to an international sample of 586 banks from 21 European countries in the period between 2000 and 2012. To give robustness to the results, different variables have been used to test the role played by market discipline and regulation as well as an alternative methodology known as duration/survival analysis.Findings: It can be found that market discipline is a good indicator in signalling banking distress, that is, market discipline has penalized more banks with a higher likelihood of being in distress. Nonetheless, as broadly acknowledged, market discipline was not sufficient per se to avoid banking distress in Europe. With regard to regulation, this paper evidences that the adoption of other regulatory measures beyond the simple transposition of changes occurred in the EU Directives such as borrower-based measures and limits on pre-emptive exposures’ concentration, have contributed toward reducing the probability of distress of EU banks, showing that the introduction of this kind of measures was necessary and relevant. In addition, in this paper, it can be found that the NPL ratio, size, capital (including the well-known regulatory capital ratio, as well as the novel leverage ratio which discards the risk weights present in the former one) and liquidity are good indicators of banking distress which lead us to conclude that the new regulatory framework known as Basel III is on the right path to mitigate the probability that a new banking crisis similar to the last one takes place again.Research limitations/implications: The first limitation regards the period of time chosen, that is, from 2000 to 2012, empirically neglecting, to some extent the important regulatory changes occurred after the aforementioned period. Nonetheless, as mentioned in the Data and Methodology section, the period ends in 2012 because it is difficult to flag a reasonable number of banks’ bailouts afterwards, to properly run the type of model used in this paper. The second limitation is the fact that the possible changes in the risk management and risk assessment by institutions and in the behaviour of investors, acknowledge as weak and inappropriate before the on-set of the global financial crisis, albeit very relevant, are not in the scope of this paper.Practical implications: Despite the welcomed changes performed by regulators so far, some aspects are not complete yet and new areas deserve more empirical work and attention by the regulators and supervisors. Some of them stem directly from the results obtained from this paper such as the enhancement and a close monitoring of the current Pillar 3 framework the increase of the adoption of more targeted tools, in a more preemptive way, to counter the build-up of risks and the implementation of the leverage ratio.Originality/value: In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the identification of leading indicators signalling emerging risks to the banking system has become a major priority to central banks and supervisory authorities. As a consequence, several studies have formulated the aim of analysing predictive characteristics of a set of macroeconomic variables, such as GDP Growth, Credit-to-GDP, Inflation, M2-to-GDP, among others. Other studies take a different perspective and complement the analysis with bank-specific risk indicators. Nonetheless the aforementioned studies do not consider the relationship between regulation and market discipline and banking distress. This is the gap the authors wanted to fill, and this assessment is the main contribution of this paper.

We develop and test the hypothesis that private information incorporated into stock prices (price informativeness) affects the structure of corporate boards. We find a negative relation between measures of price informativeness and measures of board independence. This finding is robust to the inclusion of many firm-level controls - including firm fixed effects - and to the choice of the measure of price informativeness. Consistent with the hypothesis that price informativeness and board monitoring are substitutes, this relationship is particularly strong for firms more exposed to both external and internal governance mechanisms, firms for which firm-specific knowledge is relatively unimportant, and during periods of extreme abnormal stock performance. Our results suggest that firms with more informative stock prices have less demanding board structures.

According to the dividend signalling hypothesis, dividend change announcements trigger share returns because they convey information about management's assessment on firms' future prospects. We analyse the classical assumptions of the dividend signalling hypothesis, using data from three European countries. The evidence gives no support to a positive relation between dividend change announcements and the market reaction for French firms, and only weak support for the Portuguese and UK firms. After accounting for non-linearity in the mean reversion process, the global results do not give support to the assumption that dividend change announcements are positively related with future earnings changes. We also formulate two hypotheses in order to explore the window dressing phenomenon and the maturity hypothesis, finding some evidence in favour of both, especially in the UK market.

Assume leaders cannot coerce followers: effective leaders can make changes because other people want to follow them, while ineffective leaders are unable to make changes because others will tacitly resist. Assume followers and leaders share the same objectives for successful change, but leaders have a limited tenure while followers are long lived. This time pressure for the leader can lead to outcomes in which lame ducks are unable to attract support towards the end of their tenure. We show that entrenchment, as opposed to early removal of lame ducks, can be optimal because it improves incentives ex ante. We also consider heterogeneity in the underlying talent of leaders. If good leaders are those with a higher chance of forming a plan, there is a trade-off involving the benefits of sacking inactive leaders, but in our specification it remains true that entrenchment is optimal.

The dividend policy is one of the most debated topics in the finance literature. According to the dividend signalling hypothesis, which has motivated a significant amount of theoretical and empirical research, dividend change announcements trigger share returns because they convey information about management's assessment on firms' future prospects. Consequently, a dividend increase (decrease) should be followed by an improvement (reduction) in a firm's value. However, some studies have not supported the hypothesis of a positive relationship between dividend change announcements, and the subsequent share price reaction, such as the ones of Lang and Litzenberger (1989), Benartzi, Michaely and Thaler (1997), Chen, Firth and Gao (2002), Abeyratna and Power (2002) and Vieira (2005). Furthermore, some authors found evidence of a significant percentage of cases where share prices reactions are opposite to the dividend changes direction, like the works of Asquith and Mullins (1983), Benesh, Keown and Pinkerton (1984), Born, Mozer and Officer (1988), Dhillon and Johnson (1994) Healy, Hathorn and Kirch (1997), and, more recently, Vieira (2005). Consequently, we try to identify firm-specific factors that contribute in explaining the adverse market reaction to dividend change announcements. Globally, our evidence suggests that only for the UK sample we have firm-specific factors influencing the market reaction to dividend change announcements. We conclude that the UK firms with a negative market reaction to dividend increase announcements have, on average, higher size, lower earnings growth rate and lower debt to equity ratios.

The dividend policy is one of the most debated topics in the finance literature. According to the dividend signalling hypothesis, which has motivated a significant amount of theoretical and empirical research, dividend change announcements trigger share returns because they convey information about management's assessment on firms' future prospects. Consequently, a dividend increase (decrease) should be followed by an improvement (reduction) in a firm's value. Although there are empirical evidence supporting the positive relationship between dividend change announcements and the subsequent share price reactions, some studies have not supported this idea. Furthermore, several studies found evidence of a significant percentage of cases where share prices reactions are opposite to the dividend changes direction, like the works of Asquith and Mullins (1983), Benesh, Keown and Pinkerton (1984), Born, Mozer and Officer (1988), Dhillon and Johnson (1994) Healy, Hathorn and Kirch (1997), and, more recently, Vieira (2005). We introduce a new approach to investigate the relationship between the market reaction to dividend changes and future earnings changes with the purpose of understanding why the market sometimes reacts negatively (positively) to dividend increases (decreases). We find only weak evidence for the dividend information content hypothesis. The Portuguese results suggest that the adverse market reaction to dividend change announcements is basically due to the fact that the market does not understand the signal given by firms though dividend change announcements. Moreover, we find no evidence of the inverse signalling effect, except for the UK market. The results suggest that the UK market investors have more capability to predict future earnings than the investors of the Portuguese and the French markets.