Amar Gande

Shareholder-Initiated Class Action Lawsuits: Shareholder Wealth Effects and Industry Spillovers

This paper documents significantly negative stock price reactions to shareholder-initiated class action lawsuits. We find that shareholders partially anticipate these lawsuits based on lawsuit filings against other firms in the same industry and capitalize part of these losses prior to a lawsuit filing date. We show that the more likely a firm is to be sued, the larger the partial anticipation effect (shareholder losses capitalized prior to a lawsuit filing date) and the smaller the filing date effect (shareholder losses measured on the lawsuit filing date). Our evidence suggests that previous research that typically focuses on the filing date effect understates the magnitude of shareholder losses, and that such an understatement is greater for firms with a higher likelihood of being sued.

Commercial Banks in Investment Banking

I thank Mitchell Berlin for his thoughtful comments and help in focusing this chapter. Given that the scope of the chapter is limited to the activities of commercial banks in investment banking, I apologize for any relevant papers that may have been omitted inadvertently or represented inadequately in this chapter.

Sovereign Credit Ratings, Transparency and International Portfolio Flows

We examine the response of equity mutual fund flows to sovereign rating changes in a wide sample of countries during the crisis prone years from 1996-2002. We find that Sovereign downgrades are strongly associated with outflows of capital from the downgraded country while improvements in a country’s sovereign rating are not associated with discernable changes in equity flows. Transparency, as proxied by the level of corruption matters: more transparent (i.e., less corrupt) countries experience smaller outflows around downgrades. Moreover, abnormal flows around downgrades are consistent with a ‘flight to quality’ phenomenon. That is, less corrupt non-event countries are net recipients of capital inflows, and these inflows increase with the severity of the cumulative downgrade abroad. The results remain after controlling for country size, legal traditions, market liquidity, crisis versus non-crisis periods. Taken together, the results suggest that increasing transparency could mitigate some of the perceived negative effects often associated with global capital flows.

Why Do U.S. Securities Laws Matter to Non-U.S. Firms? Evidence from Private Class-Action Lawsuits

A continuing controversy is whether U.S. securities laws are enforced against foreign firms, since public enforcement actions by the SEC are infrequent and often result in insignificant penalties. We examine private enforcement actions of U.S. securities laws and find that 269 securities class-action lawsuits were filed against foreign firms from 1996 to 2008. We document the severity of the penalties imposed on foreign firms and show that while firms paid a total of

Bank incentives, economic specialization, and financial crises in emerging economies

9 billion to settle lawsuits brought against them, the monetary penalties levied by the market are even larger. During the three-day period surrounding the lawsuit filing date, there is a significant negative stock price reaction of -6.16%, which translates to an average loss of

Bank underwriting of debt securities: modern evidence

392 million dollars. Aggregating over all firms, the total dollar loss is

Bank Entry, Competition, and the Market for Corporate Securities Underwriting

73 billion. Even foreign firms without significant U.S. assets experience significant valuation losses. Moreover, insiders of the firm bear direct financial losses through their shareholdings. Our results provide evidence that enforcement actions of U.S. securities laws against foreign firms are neither uncommon nor economically insignificant events.

Are Banks Still Special When There Is a Secondary Market for Loans

We model the vulnerability of an economy to a financial crisis as arising from the interaction of the degree of economic specialization and bank debt financing. The probability of a financial crisis is shown to increase in the degree of economic specialization. Bank debt financing has the beneficial effect of lowering the degree of economic specialization by increasing access to financing of investment opportunities that would not have been financed due to wealth constraints of entrepreneurs (financial access effect). However, bank debt financing induces risk-shifting incentives (leverage effect). The net effect on the probability of a financial crisis depends on which of these two effects dominates. We show that commonly employed mechanisms in managing financial crises, particularly bailouts, induce an additional agency cost by distorting bank incentives to concentrate loans in specific sectors (bank debt concentration effect). We propose a tax-based ex ante solution mechanism that simultaneously induces optimal investment and eliminates the bank debt concentration effect. Implementation issues and empirical/policy implications are also discussed.