			Home About us Contact

Regulatory Risk (regulatory + risk)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	100%

Selected Abstracts

Political and Regulatory Risk in Water Utilities: Beta Sensitivity in the United Kingdom

JOURNAL OF BUSINESS FINANCE & ACCOUNTING, Issue 7-8 2001
Roger Buckland
UK utilities are generally regulated by the periodic setting of a price cap (the RPI-X mechanism). To establish these caps, regulators must determine what returns are appropriate on the capital employed by utilities. This paper addresses the issue of the level of risk inherent in investment in the equity of regulated water utilities in the UK. It uses the techniques of the Kalman Filter to estimate daily betas for the major utilities in the period from privatisation to mid-1999. The paper demonstrates that water utilities' risk is time-variant. It demonstrates, also, that there have been significant political and regulatory influences in the systematic risk faced by water utility shareholders. It finds beta to display little evidence of cyclical variation across the regulatory review cycle. The paper also confirms that significant excess returns have been generated over the history of the privatised water sector and suggests that over-estimation of systematic risk faced by investors in the sector may imply further excess returns in the next regulatory review period. [source]

Economies of Scale and Scope, Contestability, Windfall Profits and Regulatory Risk

THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL, Issue 6 2000
Michael J. Ryan
In this paper I introduce new results on economies of scale and scope and develop implications of these results for contestability and regulation. This is done using a goal programming approach which endogenizes regulatory frameworks in a multiperiod and multiregion monopolistic and oligopolistic analysis. This explicitly spatial approach leads to useful distinctions between industrial contestability and market contestability and a multiperiod contestability-based regulatory model. That model is then extended to a state preference framework with regulatory risk and windfall gains and losses. [source]

Accounting Choices and Risk Management: SFAS No. 115 and U.S. Bank Holding Companies,

CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTING RESEARCH, Issue 2 2002
Leslie Hodder
Abstract This paper provides evidence that regulatory contracts affect firms' accounting choices and risk-management decisions. Specifically, we investigate whether an exogenous shock to regulatory risk induced by Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 115, "Accounting for Certain Investments in Debt and Equity Securities" (SFAS 1993), encouraged U.S. banks to deviate from portfolio and risk benchmarks when they adopted the standard. Because we cannot observe relevant benchmarks, we model portfolio and risk decisions as functions of macroeconomic and firm-specific factors using data from a period when regulatory capital was immune to SFAS No. 115 accounting. We examine a sample of 230 publicly traded banks and find that (1) irrespective of adoption timing, banks classified too few securities available for sale (AFS) relative to estimated benchmarks; (2) weaker banks that adopted the standard early classified far more securities as AFS relative to benchmarks; (3) banks altered the size of their securities portfolios along with the levels of interest-rate risk and credit risk as regulatory capital decreased; and (4) the level of interest-rate risk on banks' loan portfolios increased at the time of SFAS No. 115 adoption. We also explore the 1995 Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) amnesty when firms could "readopt" SFAS No. 115. We find that banks used the 1995 FASB amnesty to undo strategic initial SFAS No. 115 adoption decisions. Taken together, our findings suggest that SFAS No. 115 caused some of the accounting and economic consequences predicted by bankers, analysts, and academics. [source]