Economics Letters最新文献

This study examines the impact of risk culture on the cost of capital (i.e., WACC, Cost of equity and cost of debt) in European banks. We measure risk culture using comprehensive textual analysis approach. Based on 134 banks from 2005 to 2022, findings reveal that risk culture is negatively associated with all cost of capital measures. This indicates that robust risk culture reduces information asymmetry and boosts investor confidence, leading to lower costs of capital. Our findings reflect the importance of aligning risk management practices with regulatory requirements and investor expectations.

We quantify the FinTech development level by textual analysis. The results show that the intensification of the COVID epidemic adversely affects corporate investment efficiency, but the development of FinTech mitigates such a negative effect by alleviating financing constraints.

Identification of smooth-transition VAR structural parameters using an external instrument requires supplementary assumptions relative to the benchmark linear case. This paper shows that such additional discretion may have relevant implications for impulse response functions estimates.

We explore the impact of fiscal policy uncertainty (FPU) on corporate leverage in the context of Chinese firms. The analysis reveals a significant negative association between FPU and leverage, consistent across various leverage measures. Additionally, trade credit, financial distress risk, state ownership, and nonlinear dynamics significantly influence this relationship. These findings offer new insights into the effects of fiscal uncertainty on corporate leverage, highlighting the broader implications for corporate financial strategies.

Utilizing China's Fair Competition Review System (FCRS) as a quasi-natural experiment, our study explores the relationship between administrative monopoly regulation and firms' cross-regional resource allocation. By analyzing data from China's listed firms from 2009 to 2022, we find that the FCRS significantly enables firms to diversify their customer bases across regions, facilitated by reduced transaction costs and enhanced market competition. Additionally, the FCRS boosts both the sales revenue and rankings of cross-regional customers. Moreover, the positive effects of the FCRS are especially pronounced in regions where the policy is implemented more robustly. Our research contributes to the understanding of how governmental actions impact resource allocation and highlights a novel micro-level mechanism that promotes the development of a unified domestic market.

Analyzing 1238 documents from the Elsevier Finance Journal Ecosystem, this study identifies key financial research trends during the pandemic. It explores four thematic clusters as well as the contributors’ network, and highlights Finance Research Letters as the most influential journal with 438 publications.

We examine whether textual sentiment (from news and social media) explains the cross-section of stock returns. Sentiment scores are used to sort stocks into tercile portfolios daily. Various asset pricing models, including CAPM and Fama-French models, are used to assess the sentiment's impact on returns after accounting for traditional risk factors. Results show that portfolios with higher (optimistic) sentiment consistently yield better average returns across the two sentiment measures and the different asset pricing models.

This study provides first empirical evidence on the impact of entrepreneurs’ financial literacy on borrower discouragement. Using novel survey data on Italian micro-enterprises, we find that less financially knowledgeable entrepreneurs are more likely to be discouraged from applying for new financing, especially due to higher application costs. Our results are robust to several sensitivity checks, including accounting for potential endogeneity. Furthermore, we show that the observed self-rationing mechanism is rather inefficient, suggesting that financial literacy might play a key role in reducing credit market imperfections.

We document the improvements in short term forecasts of real output growth for the United States and the euro area from incorporating daily financial data and using mixed data sampling (MIDAS) regressions. Furthermore, we show that a significant share of forecast improvements are driven by information embedded in stock returns of large, capital-intensive firms. In comparison, labor-intensive firms contribute less to improvements in output forecasts within a MIDAS framework.

This paper employs a novel approach to model the conditional distribution of China’s GDP growth with time-varying location, scale, and shape parameters. By decomposing the parameters into permanent and transitory components and introducing a series of macroeconomic variables, this study examines the factors that influence the time-varying risks of China’s GDP growth. The findings suggest a significant difference between permanent and transitory changes in the Chinese economy and show that macroeconomic variables impact all three moments. Despite being occasionally susceptible to adverse downside risks, China’s economy exhibits strong resilience and rapid recovery.