Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

This paper investigates Japanese bank managers' use of the discretionary component of loan loss provisions to manage earnings during the recession of the late 1990s. Although studies of US banks document that bank managers use loan loss provisions to smooth earnings, manage regulatory capital, and signal undervaluation, factors that may affect discretionary loan loss provisions in Japanese banks have not been empirically examined. We find that discretionary loan loss provisions for our sample of Japanese banks are positively related to the demand for external financing, realized securities gains, and prior year taxes and are negatively related to capital and pre-managed earnings.

Taking into account only financial factors does not provide complete information on performance. This paper takes into consideration of both financial and non-financial performances when evaluating 35 sampled publicly traded commercial banks in Taiwan. The performance of banks is measured using an indexing method consisting of financial and non-financial measures. Banks are classified into two categories according either to the year founded, or to the type of major stockholders of a bank when founded.

The results show that privatized government-owned/old banks are larger than private/new banks, respectively. Moreover, privatized government-owned banks have significantly higher financial performance index than private banks but both types of banks are not significantly different from each other in non-financial performance index. New and old banks are not significantly different from each other in both financial and non-financial performance indexes.

With relatively large scale, higher profitability and better management, banks will perform relatively better among competitors in the following year. Furthermore, non-financial factors are important predictors of future financial and total performance indexes, though individual factor may not be consistently significant.

More branch offices, better capital structure and solvency, and higher rates of growth in deposits and loans all result in more profits, and lead to higher customer satisfaction and more efficient management. Providing better technology to customers is an efficient way in promoting customer services, which in turn produces more profits and results in efficient management. CEOs, on average, have plans for better management and more profits.

Among the factors that have direct and positive impacts on profitability, increasing the efficiency of management is the most efficient way. On the contrary, adding more branch offices contributes the least profits. Therefore, to increase bank profits, CEOs should aim to improve bank management, capital structure and solvency, rather than to add more branch offices.

Following Bollerslev et al. (2000), this study characterizes the high-frequency volatility of the Japanese Government Bond (JGB) futures on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) in terms of intraday calendar effects, announcement effects and volatility persistence effects. The results indicate that, unlike the case for the US Treasury bond futures, only four out of 21 scheduled macroeconomic announcements are found to have a significant impact on volatilities, and their instantaneous and daily influences are rather small. At both instantaneous and daily frequencies, volatility persistence effects have the largest influence on volatility, while macroeconomic announcements have only a negligible impact.

In this paper, we study a sample of 179 corporate asset sales in Taiwan between 1993 and 2003. We find that corporate asset sales in Taiwan enhance parent firm value with cumulative abnormal returns of 1.7715% for the pre-announcement five-day period and 0.6086% for the two-day announcement window. This finding is consistent with the evidence discovered in both UK and US. We also examine whether asset-sale gains are positively related to managerial performance, private lender monitoring, the use of proceeds, the type of asset sales, the profitability of asset sales, and the relative size of asset sales. Our cross-sectional regression results indicate that all variables, except private debt monitoring and relative size, appear with their predicted signs, but not all of them are statistically significant. During longer event windows, we find that only managerial performance measured by Tobin's q and the use of asset-sale proceeds can explain the gains from corporate asset sales in Taiwan.

Previous studies show that the unsolicited ratings of S&P and Fitch are lower than the solicited ratings assigned by these two agencies. The unsolicited ratings of S&P and Fitch are based on publicly available information for a firm. However, no previous study has examined the unsolicited ratings of Moody's because Moody's does not disclose whether its ratings are solicited or unsolicited. Using Moody's solicited and unsolicited ratings collected from a survey of Japanese firms, we find that unsolicited credit ratings are still lower than solicited ratings even though firms with unsolicited ratings provide Moody's with some degree of inside information. We also compare the unsolicited ratings of S&P with those of Moody's and find that Moody's ratings are no different than those assigned by S&P although S&P's unsolicited ratings are based on public information. Therefore, we conclude that, regardless of the rating agency, unsolicited ratings are lower than solicited ratings because firms with unsolicited ratings provide incomplete private information to rating agencies.

This paper uses differing objective functions under the Longstaff model (1990) to discuss the strategic choices faced by the creditor when deciding whether to grant maturity extension on a defaulted loan. The results reveal that: (1) it ensures that the return per unit of risk is higher after maturity extension than before; (2) it recognizes that the risk profile of the firm substantially affects the strategic behavior of the creditor; and (3) it demonstrates that the higher the profit sharing percentage the creditor get, the more willing it will be to extend maturity.

The exchange-rate behavior of the Chinese yuan (RMB) and the Malaysian ringgit (MYR) indicates that the real exchange rate volatility of both the pegged currency/the anchor currency (the US dollar), and the pegged currency/the non-anchor currencies (Japanese yen and British pound) are lower under the pegged regime. The dynamic behavior of the pegged currencies' real exchange rates is consistent with the anchor currency as the speed of convergence of the Big Mac real exchange rates of the RMB, MYR, and the dollar against the floating currencies are almost identical during the pegged period. This may be due to similar inflation rate movements in the related economies. These results do not support the opinion that China has manipulated the value of its currency.