Hung-Neng Lai

Managerial Ownership Structure and Earnings Management

This study examines the relation between managerial ownership structure and earnings management. Unlike previous research which treats insiders as a homogeneous group, we further classify insiders into executives, outside directors, and blockholders to conduct an in‐depth study. Earnings management is captured by discretionary accruals that are estimated using the modified Jones model. For a large sample of Taiwanese listed firms over the period 1997 and 2004, we find that discretionary accruals first increase and then decrease with executive ownership, forming an inverted U‐shaped relationship. However, discretionary accruals are positively affected by director ownership and blockholder ownership. The results suggest that equity stake owned by top officers of a firm should be encouraged in order to reduce agency cost, thus enhancing information content of earnings.

A Real Option Approach to the Comprehensive Analysis of Bank Consolidation Values

This study applies a modification of the Schwartz and Moon (Financial Analysts Journal 56:62–75, 2000) model to the evaluation of bank consolidation. From our examination of a bank merger case study (the first example of such a bank merger in Taiwan), we find that, from an ex-ante viewpoint, the consolidation value is, on average, about 30% of the original total value of the independent banks. We also find that the probability of bankruptcy was considerably lower following the merger than it would have been prior to the merger. Our case study therefore indicates that the merger was indeed a worthwhile venture for both banks involved. Furthermore, on completion of the merger, we are also able to determine that, in terms of the magnitude of the increased consolidation value, the most crucial roles are played by the resultant changes in the growth rates of the integrated loans and integrated deposits, as well as the cost-saving factors within the cost functions.

Industrial Effects and the CAPM: From the Views of Robustness and Longitudinal Data Analysis

The traditional approach by Fama and Macbeth (1973) to the validity of an asset pricing model suffers from two drawbacks. Firstly, it uses the ordinary least squares (OLS) method, which is sensitive to outliers, to estimate the time-series beta. Secondly, it takes averages of the slope coefficients from cross-sectional regressions which ignore the importance of time-series properties. In this article, robust estimators and a longitudinal approach are applied to avoid the problems of these two kinds. We use data on the electronics industry in Taiwans stock market during the period from September 1998 to December 2001 in order to examine whether betas from the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) are a valid measure of risk and whether industries to which the firms belong explain excess returns. The methods we propose lead to more explanatory power than the traditional OLS results.