Journal of Empirical Finance最新文献

This paper documents that economic policy uncertainty reduces future stock price crash risk by increasing firms’ disclosure of bad news. Our tests show that firms release more bad news during periods of high policy uncertainty – they use more conservatism accounting, exhibit stronger future earnings response coefficients, use more negative tones in their financial reports, and have managers that express more negative sentiment in earnings conference calls than during periods of low policy uncertainty. Additional analyses show that the negative relation between EPU and future stock price crash risk is more pronounced among firms with more short-sale constraints, with no actively traded credit default swap contracts, with lower options-implied negative skewness, or with higher firm-level political risks. The results from regressions adopting the instrumental variable approach and from a quasi-natural experiment suggest that the negative relation observed between policy uncertainty and stock price crash risk is unlikely to be driven by potential endogeneity.

This study examines whether suppliers modify trading strategies upon their customers’ unionization. The study demonstrates that when customers unionize, suppliers experience negative stock returns and rely less on the unionized customers for sales. Results are robust for alternatively using a regression discontinuity design. Suppliers reduce their exposure to unionized customers due to the demand uncertainty arising from potential labor disruptions, the customers’ reduced competitiveness in the product market, and customers’ potential shifting of unionization costs to suppliers. Furthermore, suppliers with unionized customers mitigate risks by seeking new customers and diversifying their customer concentration.

The leverage effect hypothesis of Black (1976) and Christie (1982) posits that time-series variation in debt causes an inverse relation between stock return volatility and stock returns. Hasanhodzic and Lo (2019) test this hypothesis in a novel sample of firms with no debt and yet they still find an inverse relation, motivating them to espouse volatility feedback as an alternative. Under standard assumptions governing the risk-return relation from the asset pricing literature, I explain why the stock returns of all-equity-financed firms will still have leverage effects on par with those of debt-financed firms and why the absence of debt at the firm level has no bearing on the leverage and volatility feedback hypotheses.

Non-venture capital private equity funds (PEs) have become increasingly interested in investing in entrepreneurial firms. We investigate how PEs invest and perform in comparison to VCs, and the implication of PEs’ participation on ventures. We show that PEs are more likely to invest in ventures after typical investment period and when there was substantial capital overhang. PEs prefer the expansion and late-stage ventures. Investment size and valuation are larger/higher with PEs’ participation. We further find that IPOs and secondary buyout are more prevalent among ventures with PE investments. PEs’ participation also allows ventures more time to get ready for exit.

Activist hedge funds are more likely to target unionized firms. When they do, the short-term stock performance is higher, especially when the hedge funds’ targeting strategy is hostile. Employees and labor organizations at target firms tend to oppose activist hedge funds. Firms are more likely to unionize after being targeted by hedge funds, and employee satisfaction deteriorates at target firms. Moreover, unionized firms are more likely to strike after being targeted, and those strikes in opposition to hedge fund intervention are more severe and more detrimental to the firms. This paper further explores potential costs and harmful consequences to the firm value due to the tension between activist hedge funds and labor unions. After being targeted, unionized firms tend to have lower profitability, weakened corporate governance, exposure to a higher degree of competitive and product market threats, and a higher crash risk in stock prices.

Uncertainty is known to be crucial in asset pricing, yet evidence from a comprehensive analysis of various uncertainty measures remains sparse. By machine learning, we construct a novel economic uncertainty index derived from a heterogeneous range of uncertainty measures and investigate its predictability of stock returns. Our composite uncertainty index exhibits robust in- and out-of-sample predictability of stock market returns over the one- to 12-month horizon. The predictive power stems from the volatility-orthogonal components of individual uncertainty measures and becomes more pronounced during high uncertainty and high sentiment periods. The predictability of our economic uncertainty index aligns with theoretical frameworks linking uncertainty to future investment, cash flows, and market expectations.

Pseudo-market prices of infrequently traded assets with scheduled cash flows – commercial real estate appraisals and matrix prices of commercial mortgage backed securities – are compared against a VAR model to assess the extent to which these widely-used proxies are grounded in economic fundamentals. Property appraisals fail to fully incorporate the economic fundamentals underlying commercial real estate transactions. During the financial crisis, CMBS matrix prices captured underlying economic fundamentals and exhibited little pricing bias. However, matrix prices no longer exhibited such economic discipline after the financial crisis. Incorporating VAR forecasts considerably improves the predictive ability of appraisals and matrix prices.

The global version of Samuelson's Dictum is the conjecture that there is more informational inefficiency for global information than for country-specific information. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that sovereign CDS spreads can predict future sovereign bond yields of their underlying countries and this predictive power arises almost entirely from CDS spread's global—rather than country-specific—component. Noting the striking similarities between the evidence in stock and sovereign bond markets, we examine the underlying mechanism for the results in both markets in parallel and find further similarities across these two markets. In both cases, information appears to flow in one direction: from the sovereign CDS market to stock and sovereign bond markets and not the other way around. Information transmission occurs mostly during the days surrounding announcements of credit-rating or outlook changes, especially downgrades. These results are broadly consistent with a setup in which information acquisition and processing is costly.

This paper evaluates the improvement in option pricing brought about by realized volatility (RV) through nonaffine dynamics as advocated by Christoffersen et al. (2014). We complement their studies by developing a closed-form approximation of option pricing for the nonaffine models with RV, and then study the trade-off between the degradation in data fitting and the computational convenience offered by the analytical formula. Our studies confirm the literature that the nonaffine dynamics consistently outperform the affine in option pricing. In particular, we find that RV can significantly improve return fitting and option pricing through both affine and nonaffine models. For the affine models, we find strong evidence in favor of the RV information for both returns and options; for the nonaffine models, the evidence is less convincing for option pricing. We also provide additional new evidence that RV and nonaffine structures are equally competent at improving option pricing; moreover, these two features are complements rather than substitutes for GARCH option pricing, and the importance of one feature for option pricing is further enhanced when the other is present. All of these results are robust across moneyness, maturity, and volatility levels, and point to the necessity of including RV in nonaffine option pricing models.

We use a new international setting to test and strengthen identification of the “target leverage” hypothesis in the payout policy literature. We conduct a quasi-natural experiment induced by staggered share repurchase legalization in 17 economies and analyze its influences on leverage dynamics. After controlling for other repurchasing motives, firms under-leveraged before legalization are more likely to buy back shares immediately after legalization. Post-legalization repurchases also facilitate firms’ movement toward target leverage, especially when firms are under-leveraged. This facilitating effect is stronger under lower repurchasing restriction, higher dividend tax penalty, and lower financial constraint.