Organisation

Centre for International Finance and Regulation

Owning Institution:

University of New South Wales

Macquarie University

University of Technology Sydney

Government of Australia

Government of New South Wales

University of Sydney

University of Melbourne

Australian National University

The Centre for International Finance and Regulation (CIFR) was a Centre of Excellence operating from 2011 to 2016 to address fundamental issues affecting the Australian financial industry. CIFR’s mission was to promote financial sector vibrancy, resilience and integrity, supporting Australia as a regional financial centre through leading research and education on systemic risk, market and regulatory performance and financial market developments. CIFR funded 71 research projects, involving well over 100 researchers from domestic and international universities.

For Australia’s financial industry, CIFR provided a strategic link between academia, policy-makers, regulators and other industry participants. Now closed, the Centre's output of 148 papers are all available at this publisher page.

Working paper

Dividend imputation: the international experience

30 Mar 2016

Andrew Ainsworth

Centre for International Finance and Regulation

Along with Canada, Chile, Mexico and New Zealand, Australia is one of only five countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that continues to operate a full imputation tax system where all corporate tax is credited to domestic shareholders. Malta, a non-OECD country, also has a full imputation system. The OECD lists...

Working paper

Insiders’ profits in the Australian Equities Market

21 Mar 2016

Centre for International Finance and Regulation

In this paper we investigate if directors of Australian companies earn persistent profits on their reported trades, if these abnormal profits are significant enough to be mimicked by outsiders, and if these insider trades have an effect on returns of other investors. We find that insiders take advantage of their private information in stocks of...

Working paper

When Funds Diverge From Their Long-Term Factor Loadings: A Comparison of Australian and US Mutual Funds

18 Mar 2016

Zhe Chen,

David Gallagher

Centre for International Finance and Regulation

Using a replicating portfolio method to capture the long-term risk loadings of Australian active institutional funds, we investigate patterns in how actual disclosed fund returns diverge from those anticipated by their factor loadings. We find that Australian funds’ returns generate positive alpha, are tilted slightly towards big stocks, and tend to be convex to their...

Working paper

An empirical analysis of public enforcement of directors’ duties in Australia: preliminary findings

4 Mar 2016

Centre for International Finance and Regulation

The preliminary findings presented in this paper indicate that criminal enforcement was more prevalent than civil enforcement and there was a significant emphasis on incapacitative sanctions such as prison sentences and management disqualification orders. Monetary sanctions were less frequently imposed and tended to be of a low magnitude relative to the statutory maximum sanctions. Criminal...

Working paper

Global equity fund performance: an attribution approach

3 Mar 2016

Centre for International Finance and Regulation

We use portfolio holdings data to examine the performance of 143 global equity funds over the period 2002 to 2012. We find that the average global equity manager outperforms their benchmark by 1.2% to 1.4% per annum before fees. Attribution analysis reveals that the prime source of excess return relates to selecting stocks that beat...