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Little evidence exists on the financing decisions of newly founded firms or on the financing dynamics of these firms over their life cycle. We aim to help filling this gap by investigating the financing dynamics of 2,456 French manufacturing firms founded between 2004 and 2006 through their legally required and reported financial statements. Because we observe significant heterogeneity in the financing decision in the firms' founding year, we focus on analyzing whether these differences widen, persist, or converge by using different convergence concepts. We identify a persistence-cum-convergence pattern. We find the existence of ß-convergence (implying that e.g. firms with lower initial levels of debt accumulate more debt over time) but not of σ-convergence (i.e. we observe an increase in the cross-sectional dispersion of the financing structure). We also show that the dynamics of financing matter for the growth path of the firms.
I show that disruptions to personal sources of financing, aside from commercial lending supply shocks, impair the survival and growth of small businesses. Entrepreneurs holding deposit accounts at retail banking institutions that defaulted following the financial crisis reduce personal borrowing and are consequently more likely to exit their firm. Exposure to the corresponding investment losses from delisted publicly traded bank stocks strongly reduces the rate of firm survival, particularly for early-stage ventures. At the intensive margin, owners who remain in business reduce employees after personal wealth losses. My results suggest that personal finance is an important component of firm financing.
The dynamics of entrepreneurial careers in high-tech ventures: experience, education, and exit
(2016)
We investigate the career dynamics of high-tech entrepreneurs by analyzing the exit choice of entrepreneurs: to found another firm, to become dependently employed, or to act as a business angel. Our detailed data resting on the CrunchBase online database indicate that founders stick with entrepreneurship as a serial entrepreneur or as an angel investor only in cases where the founder (1) had experience either in founding other startups or working for a startup, (2) had a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ education, or (3) achieved substantial financial success upon a venture capital exit transaction.
Microeconomic modeling of investors behavior in financial markets and its results crucially depends on assumptions about the mathematical shape of the underlying preference functions as well as their parameterizations. With the purpose to shed some light on the question, which preferences towards risky financial outcomes prevail in stock markets, we adopted and applied a maximum likelihood approach from the field of experimental economics on a randomly selected dataset of 656 private investors of a large German discount brokerage firm. According to our analysis we find evidence that the majority of these clients follow trading pattern in accordance with Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky (1979)). We also find that observable sociodemographic and personal characteristics such as gender or age don't seem to correlate with specific preference types. With respect to the overall impact of preferences on trading behavior, we find a moderate impact of preferences on trading decisions of individual investors. A classification of investors according to various utility types reveals that the strength of the impact of preferences on an investors' rading behavior is not connected to most personal characteristics, but seems to be related to round-trip length.
Shortcomings revealed by experimental and theoretical researchers such as Allais (1953), Rabin (2000) and Rabin and Thaler (2001) that put the classical expected utility paradigm von Neumann and Morgenstern (1947) into question, led to the proposition of alternative and generalized utility functions, that intend to improve descriptive accuracy. The perhaps best known among those alternative preference theories, that has attracted much popularity among economists, is the so called Prospect Theory by Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and Tversky and Kahneman (1992). Its distinctive features, governed by its set of risk parameters such as risk sensitivity, loss aversion and decision weights, stimulated a series of economic and financial models that build on the previously estimated parameter values by Tversky and Kahneman (1992) to analyze and explain various empirical phenomena for which expected utility doesn't seem to offer a satisfying rationale. In this paper, after providing a brief overview of the relevant literature, we take a closer look at one of those papers, the trading model of Vlcek and Hens (2011) and analyze its implications on Prospect Theory parameters using an adopted maximum likelihood approach for a dataset of 656 individual investors from a large German discount brokerage firm. We find evidence that investors in our dataset are moderately averse to large losses and display high risk sensitivity, supporting the main assumptions of Prospect Theory.
Common systemic risk measures focus on the instantaneous occurrence of triggering and systemic events. However, systemic events may also occur with a time-lag to the triggering event. To study this contagion period and the resulting persistence of institutions' systemic risk we develop and employ the Conditional Shortfall Probability (CoSP), which is the likelihood that a systemic market event occurs with a specific time-lag to the triggering event. Based on CoSP we propose two aggregate systemic risk measures, namely the Aggregate Excess CoSP and the CoSP-weighted time-lag, that reflect the systemic risk aggregated over time and average time-lag of an institution's triggering event, respectively. Our empirical results show that 15% of the financial companies in our sample are significantly systemically important with respect to the financial sector, while 27% of the financial companies are significantly systemically important with respect to the American non-financial sector. Still, the aggregate systemic risk of systemically important institutions is larger with respect to the financial market than with respect to non-financial markets. Moreover, the aggregate systemic risk of insurance companies is similar to the systemic risk of banks, while insurers are also exposed to the largest aggregate systemic risk among the financial sector.
Systemic co-jumps
(2016)
The simultaneous occurrence of jumps in several stocks can be associated with major financial news, triggers short-term predictability in stock returns, is correlated with sudden spikes of the variance risk premium, and determines a persistent increase (decrease) of stock variances and correlations when they come along with bad (good) news. These systemic events and their implications can be easily overlooked by traditional univariate jump statistics applied to stock indices. They are instead revealed in a clearly cut way by using a novel test procedure applied to individual assets, which is particularly effective on high-volume stocks.
In the wake of the recent financial crisis, significant regulatory actions have been taken aimed at limiting risks emanating from trading in bank business models. Prominent reform proposals are the Volcker Rule in the U.S., the Vickers Report in the UK, and, based on the Liikanen proposal, the Barnier proposal in the EU. A major element of these reforms is to separate “classical” commercial banking activities from securities trading activities, notably from proprietary trading. While the reforms are at different stages of implementation, there is a strong ongoing discussion on what possible economic consequences are to be expected. The goal of this paper is to look at the alternative approaches of these reform proposals and to assess their likely consequences for bank business models, risk-taking and financial stability. Our conclusions can be summarized as follows: First, the focus on a prohibition of only proprietary trading, as envisaged in the current EU proposal, is inadequate. It does not necessarily reduce risk-taking and it likely crowds out desired trading activities, thereby negatively affecting financial stability. Second, there is potentially a better solution to limit excessive trading risk at banks in terms of potential welfare consequences: Trading separation into legally distinct or ring-fenced entities within the existing banking organizations. This kind of separation limits cross-subsidies between banking and proprietary trading and diminishes contagion risk, while still allowing for synergies across banking, non-proprietary trading and proprietary trading.
In the wake of the recent financial crisis, significant regulatory actions have been taken aimed at limiting risks emanating from banks’ trading activities. The goal of this paper is to look at the alternative reforms in the US, the UK and the EU, specifically with respect to the role of proprietary trading. Our conclusions can be summarized as follows: First, the focus on a prohibition of proprietary trading, as reflected in the Volcker Rule in the US and in the current proposal of the European Commission (Barnier proposal), is inadequate. It does not necessarily reduce risk-taking and it is likely to crowd out desired trading activities, thereby possibly affecting financial stability negatively. Second, trading separation into legally distinct or ring-fenced entities within the existing banking organizations, as suggested under the Vickers Report for the UK and the Liikanen proposal for the EU, is a more effective solution. Separation limits cross-subsidies between banking and proprietary trading and diminishes contagion risk, while still allowing for synergies and risk management across banking, non-proprietary trading and proprietary trading.
The equity trading landscape all over the world has changed dramatically in recent years. We have witnessed the advent of new trading venues and significant changes in the market shares of existing ones. We use an extensive panel dataset from the European equity markets to analyze the market shares of five categories of lit and dark trading mechanisms. Market design features, such as minimum tick size, immediacy and anonymity; market conditions, such as liquidity and volatility; and the informational environment have distinct implications for order routing decisions and trading venues' resulting market shares. Furthermore, these implications differ distinctly for small and large trades, probably because traders jointly optimize their trade size and venue choice. Our results both confirm and go beyond current theoretical predictions on trading in fragmented markets.