Ph.D. Mellado-Cid, Cristhian

We study the link between measures of stock options’ volatility and firms’ real earnings management (RM). We hypothesise that RM causes uncertainty in the value of a firm’s common stock and, as a result, increases the volatility spread and skew of the firm’s options. Spread and skew proxy for investors’ uncertainty in the value of the options underlying a stock. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find an association between a firm’s use of RM, and the volatility spread and skew in the firm’s options, more precisely in its put options. We also study the link between short selling and the extent of RM but do not find a consistent relationship between the two.

In this paper, we study the link between real earnings management and firm value. Consistent with prior studies, we expect the ability of a firm to generate future cash flows to be significantly impaired by its use of real activities manipulations. Using a cross-section of companies from the Standard & Poor’s Compustat database from 1990 to 2013, we find that firms with higher real earnings management are associated with lower industry-adjusted Tobin’s Q and firm-specific misvaluation measure. Our results are consistent under several regression techniques addressing potential endogeneity issues and alternative proxies for real earnings management after controlling for known factors to affect firm market values.

We examine real activities manipulation by firms prior to their debt issuances and how such manipulation activities affect bond yield spreads. We find that bond-issuing firms increase their real activities manipulation in the five quarters leading to a bond issuance. We document an inverse association between yield spread and pre-issue real activities manipulation,i.e., firms engaged in abnormally high levels of real activities manipulation are associated with subsequent lower cost of debt.

The identification of periods of price exuberance in equity markets is of great interest to policy makers and financial investors. In this paper, we identify financial bubble periods within the major equity markets in Latin America. We use the recently developed recursive Augmented Dickey-Fuller methods and propose similar recursive procedures based on Phillips-Perron. We find that conditional on bubbles in the S&P 500, there are strong links between bubble episodes across equity markets in Latin America. In addition, the financial bubble periods in Latin America begin earlier and last longer than bubble periods in the United States during the 2008 financial crisis. Price bubbles were identified prior to the establishment of the Integrated Latin American Market (MILA).

This paper investigates the role of virtual integration of financial markets on stock market return co-movements. In May of 2011 the Chilean, Colombian, and Peruvian stock markets virtually integrated their stock exchanges and central securities depositories to form the Latin American Integrated Market (MILA). We utilize the dynamic conditional correlation model propose by Engle (2002) to identify a statistically significant positive correlation between these markets. Moreover, we find strong evidence that the creation of the MILA increased the levels of dynamic correlation between stock returns. A higher correlation was also found during the dot-com bubble and the 2007 financial crises. Our results imply a decline in gains from international diversification by holding portfolios consisting of diverse stocks of these countries.