Journal of Corporate Finance最新文献

Using a sample of A-listed companies from 2010 to 2020, this paper investigates how investor–firm interactions on Easy Interaction and E-interaction affect corporate investment efficiency measured as investment-to-Tobin's Q sensitivity. The empirical results show that investor–firm interactions are positively correlated with corporate investment efficiency. Possible economic channels include information asymmetry and corporate governance channels. Moreover, investor–firm interactions have a greater impact on firms with fewer financial constraints, higher stock price efficiency, higher media coverage, and higher analyst coverage. When interaction sentiment is more positive, interaction quality is higher, and the topic pertains to technology research and development, the impact of investor–firm interactions is also more pronounced. The main conclusion still holds after adopting a series of endogeneity tests and robustness tests.

Using the positive shift in tone of Fox News coverage of macroeconomic news after the Republican Bush election in 2000, we investigate whether media slant influences the investment decisions of short sellers. We find that firms headquartered in Republican-leaning townships with Fox News availability experienced a relative decrease in short interest post the 2000 election. We further find that the relative decrease is more pronounced for firms that are more subject to investors' home bias. We interpret our findings to mean that short sellers, as sophisticated as they may be, are not immune to the slant in media coverage.

We study whether borrowers' opaque practices, such as tax aggressiveness, are affected by their lenders' engagement in mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Our findings suggest that borrowers' tax aggressiveness is negatively associated with bank mergers as banks increasingly rely on hard information in monitoring and lending practices following mergers. This relationship is more pronounced for borrowers that are more opaque in their information environments and have a greater need for credit, and when banks that have a greater intention to monitor borrowers and rely more on soft-information-based monitoring prior to the mergers. Our study contributes to the growing literature on whether and how bank consolidations affect borrowers' decision making.

We analyze how managerial beliefs about firm growth and business conditions change during unexpected shocks. Using the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in China as a natural experiment, we conduct an at-scale quarterly tracking survey with the People’s Bank of China on small business managers about subjective responses and objective information about their firms’ conditions. We find that managerial beliefs are consistent with firms’ performance before the pandemic; managers tend to be optimistic and underreact during the peak while becoming pessimistic and overreacting after the peak. We show that the existence of moderates and anchoring effects may explain such alternations in managerial beliefs, and government policy support could effectively mitigate the negative shifts in these beliefs. Further, managerial biases formed during the pandemic might affect firms’ decision-making in the future, leading to unintended aggregate inefficiency.

We investigate the relation between tax avoidance and offshore activities using a new text-based measure for offshore activities based on Hoberg and Moon (2017, 2019). Our evidence shows that, although providing cross-border tax-avoidance opportunities, offshore activities reduce the marginal benefits of tax avoidance by introducing incremental foreign-market risk exposure. We find that the intensity of offshore sales of outputs is positively associated with the cash effective tax rate. The effect is stronger when the offshore sales rely on overseas production rather than domestic production, when the offshore sales are located in countries with higher economic uncertainty, when the firm has a lower ability to pass on shocks, and when the firm has less flexibility in adjusting tax strategies.

This paper argues that there exists a fundamental asymmetry between relationship-specific investments (RSI) made for downstream firms (customer-specific investments – CSI) and for upstream firms (supplier-specific investments – SSI). Both types of RSI can create a hold-up problem, but everything else equal, suppliers have higher bargaining power, rendering hold-ups by suppliers more dangerous than hold-ups by customers. Using unique data on Vietnamese SMEs that allow for a clean separation between CSI and SSI, we demonstrate that this leads to less frequent SSI and that the few firms making SSI will be more risky and financially constrained. We discuss the implications of this finding for supply chain management and public policy destined to foster RSI.

This paper examines the impact of geographic proximity on suppliers' decisions to provide trade credit to their customers. To establish a causal relationship, we utilize the implementation of high-speed rail (HSR) services in China as a quasi-natural experiment. Our findings reveal a significant increase in trade credit received by firms after introducing HSR services. We propose and test three mechanisms to elucidate the influence of proximity on trade credit provision: the enhanced convenience for acquiring soft information, heightened competition among suppliers, and the potential development of social trust. Empirical evidence strongly supports the first two mechanisms, underscoring their importance in shaping trade credit decisions. However, limited evidence is found regarding the role of social trust. These findings contribute to understanding the complex interplay between geographic proximity, trade credit, and supplier decision-making processes.

Firms are embedded in the product market as well as the capital market. Their behavior in the product market will inevitably affect their performance in the capital market, and vice versa. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms, we empirically test the existence of spillover effect of advertising on financial constraints in the capital market. We find that product market advertising significantly alleviates the firm's financial constraints, especially when the information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders is more serious and when the firm is in a consumer-product industry. We also find that advertising improves brand value, increases attention, and alleviates peer firms' financial constraints, providing supplementary evidence that one alleviation mechanism is information asymmetry. Further analyses show that advertising significantly reduces the firm's financing costs. These findings provide valuable insights into how firms alleviate financial constraints.

This paper examines the relationship between capital inflows and import of capital goods to credit-constrained industries in developing countries. Using data of 11 industrial sectors in 57 countries for 2000–2020, we find that financially dependent industries import disproportionately more capital goods if they operate in countries that receive more foreign funds. A host of robustness tests, including instrumental variables estimation, confirm our main finding. We also document that: (i) the established nexus breaks down during the global financial crisis, (ii) the observed relationship is mainly due to the direct investment via equity, and (iii) host countries tend to import relatively more capital goods from G7 economies. Overall, our results suggest that one channel through which capital inflows affect economic growth is by alleviating firms' financial constraints, thereby enabling firms to acquire more advanced capital goods.

Historical rice cultivation practices have shaped cultural norms that significantly affect households' risk-taking behavior today. Using national survey data from over 90,000 Chinese households and a quasi-experimental design, we find that these culturally induced behaviors, in turn, contribute to significant economic differences at a large scale. Our tests show that households in regions with a higher historical rate of rice cultivation are more likely to invest in the financial market and buy lottery tickets, but less likely to buy insurance. The underlying mechanism is that collectivist rice agricultural practices increase trust, social capital, and social connections, and even allow for societal members to borrow without interest. Additional tests show that our findings are not driven by regional economic growth, government-provided social safety nets, Confucian values, or ethnic diversity. These deep-rooted, ancient practices have important policy implications for leaders in collectivist cultures trying to rectify behavioral biases in household financial decisions.