Nancy D. Ursel

Market reaction to announcements of legislative changes and Canadian bank takeovers of Canadian investment dealers

This study examines the market reactions of Canadian banks and investment dealers to regulatory changes regarding the ownership of investment dealers and to announcements of bank takeovers of investment dealers. The statistically significant and negative abnormal returns for the acquiring banks suggest that any potential benefits from economies of scope in joint bank/brokerage activities were totally reflected in the offering prices banks paid to target investment dealers. Consistent with the literature on mergers, positive and statistically significant excess returns are exhibited by the acquired investment dealers prior to takeover announcements. In-play and out-of-play rival (nontarget) investment dealers exhibit statistically significant positive and no abnormal returns, respectively. The findings of this study are consistent with competition in the market for the corporate control of investment dealers, and not with decreased competition in the brokerage industry. The findings imply that consumers of brokerage services are not harmed by takeovers. These findings may be useful to participants in the U.S. and Japanese financial markets as these countries undergo reforms similar to those recently experienced in Canada.

Investing in Emerging Equity Markets: The Case of Chinese ADRs versus B Shares

Chinese companies have recently started listing ADRs in North American stock exchanges and thus offered an alternative venue for Western investors whose access to the Chinese market has largely been limited to the illiquid B shares. Are ADRs a good substitute for investing in Chinese B Shares? We examine characteristics of return distributions for indices of Chinese shares and an index of Chinese ADRs. We also compare efficient frontiers for portfolios including Chinese shares and Chinese ADRs and compute possible portfolio allocations. We find that investing in Chinese ADRs does not provide a risk/return tradeoff similar to direct investment in Chinese stock exchanges.

Re-examining the Glass Cliff Hypothesis using Survival Analysis: The Case of Female CEO Tenure

We use the glass cliff to study the appointment and employment duration of 193 female CEOs between 1992 and 2014 in a sample of large, small and mid-size North American firms. Consistent with the glass cliff, we find that women are appointed as CEOs in precarious situations. However, we find female CEOs are 40% less likely to face turnover at any point after appointment than male CEOs. This conflicts with an implication of the glass cliff and differs significantly from existing research which shows that female CEOs have only a slightly lower risk of turnover than male CEOs. Our larger, more recent sample captures changes in the labour market that explain the departure from the results of earlier studies. We find evidence that the lower turnover rate of female CEOs is related to firms’ desire to avoid the negative publicity that would accompany their termination, and we also show that greater education has a positive impact on CEO job security.

Public Utility Equity Financing Practices: A Test of Market Efficiency

One of the persistent challenges facing financial researchers is to find a set of satisfactory answers to the related questions: 1. Why do firms acquire new equity capital via public underwritten issues rather than employing the apparently less costly non-underwritten rights offering alternatives? 2. Why do those firms which do employ rights offerings not set the subscription price sufficiently low so that the risk of failure is effectively reduced to a negligible level? Both Brealey and Myers (1984) and Jensen and Smith (1984) list this ‘equity issue paradox’ as being among the most important unsolved prob?lems in finance.

Underwriter Competition in Accelerated Seasoned Equity Offerings

We show competition between underwriters even when fees are clustered. We study accelerated seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), which are now the predominant form of public SEO in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Underwriters compete by establishing capacity sufficient to allow them to maintain close relationships with issuers, in order to be able to identify when issuers will need funds and conduct issues quickly. Speed of issue is the key consideration for issuers using accelerated SEOs, and managing capacity is a key concern of underwriting firms. We test predictions from a model of strategic choice with field study data.