Financial Markets, Institutions and Instruments最新文献

The emission of greenhouse gases (GHG), particularly carbon dioxide (CO₂), within the atmosphere poses serious threats to society and the environment. In this paper, we examine the effect of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions on the association between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and stock valuation. Using a sample of listed non-financial US firms from 2002 through 2018, we find that CO₂ emission plays a moderating role in reshaping the CSR-stock valuation nexus. Further analysis showed that our results are robust for using alternate proxies of CSR, CO_2, additional control and methods to alleviate endogeneity concerns. Additionally, we explored how increasing carbon footprints reshape this association only for firms with strong governance structures. Overall, our results indicate that the positive impact of CSR on stock valuation is overlaid by corporate CO₂ emission. The practical and theoretical insights of this study were explored.

The relationship between air temperature and sovereign bond returns is founded on competing paradigms: macroeconomic, behavioral and energy demand-based. Which of these theoretical mechanisms receives support from data? To answer this, we examined four decades of bond data from 31 countries. Overall, daily temperature positively affects government bond returns. A 10°F rise leads to an increase in sovereign bond returns between 0.22 and 0.85 basis points. We also document evidence of asymmetric and nonlinear price responses to both temperature levels and shocks. Our results survive a battery of robustness checks and lend support to the macroeconomic and behavioral paradigms, albeit not the energy demand-based view.

We study the empirical association between corporate pollution and reputational exposure using a sample of 745 U.S. firms from 2007 to 2019 and an ordered probit model. Our results reveal an inverse relationship between chemical emissions and reputational exposure rating, after controlling for various firm attributes. We examine the roles of corporate governance structure and the demographic background of the top management team in the transmission process from polluting chemical emissions to reputation. Further, the negative impact of corporate pollution on reputational exposure rating is much stronger in areas where residents are convinced that climate change is happening. We perform several tests and analyses designed to mitigate endogeneity issues and correct sample bias to ensure the robustness of our findings. Finally, our results suggest that the negative effect is stronger for companies with higher information asymmetry, which indicates the importance of information transparency for firms' credibility.

We examine how environmental performance affects future stock price crash risk. Previous literature shows that legitimacy threats, stemming from environmental risk, lead firms to be particularly sensitive about environmental disclosure and performance. However, we hypothesise and find that under specific conditions, relating to lower operating performance, firms that have higher environmental performance also have higher future stock price crash risk. Further analysis shows that such firms may also have lower readability and more confident tone in their 10-K annual reports. We attribute these findings to impression management utilising environmental performance along with disclosure misdirection practices, where managers of firms with negative news, attempt in some cases to draw the attention of the users of financial reports by obfuscating annual reports for bad news hoarding purposes. Even though in the current year such practices may have a negative effect for stock price crash risk, future stock price crash risk increases due to the dissemination of the negative news in the market. Overall, our results show that environmental disclosure may be used, under certain conditions, as a tool for impression management, which along with financial reporting distraction practices, leads to higher future stock price crash risk.

We investigate the role of financial uncertainty in forecasting aggregate stock market returns. Our results suggest that financial uncertainty, along with its change, are more powerful predictors of excess US monthly stock market returns than 14 macroeconomic predictors commonly used in the literature. Financial uncertainty is shown to outperform short interest, which has been suggested to be the strongest known predictor of the equity risk premium. These results persist using robust econometric methods in-sample, and when forecasting out-of-sample.

This paper analyzes the impacts of decreased shareholder litigation risk on firm productivity. Shareholder litigation provides shareholders a mechanism to enforce rights and mitigate agency conflicts. We use a staggered state-level adoption of universal demand (UD) laws as an exogenous shock that suppressed the number of shareholder derivative lawsuits. We show that the resulting deterioration in corporate governance, coupled with increased managerial attention, had mixed effects on productivity. Adverse effects resulting from lower litigation risk are primarily observed in firms facing low takeover threats. Conversely, firms with incentivised management achieved a higher productivity growth.

We assess the impact of the leverage ratio capital requirements on the risk-taking behaviour of banks both theoretically and empirically. Conceptually, introducing binding leverage ratio requirements into a regulatory framework with risk-based capital requirements induces banks to re-optimise, shifting from safer to riskier assets (higher asset risk). Yet, this shift would not be one-for-one due to risk weight differences, meaning the shift would be associated with a lower level of leverage (lower insolvency risk). The interaction of these two changes determines the impact on the aggregate level of risk. Empirically, we use a difference-in-differences setup to compare the behaviour of UK banks subject to the leverage ratio requirements (LR banks) to otherwise similar banks (non-LR banks). Our results show that LR banks did not increase asset risk, and slightly reduced leverage levels, compared to the control group after the introduction of leverage ratio in the UK. As expected, these two changes led to a lower aggregate level of risk. Emperical results indicate that credit default swap spreads on the 5-year subordinated debt of LR banks decreased relative to non-LR banks post leverage ratio introduction, suggesting the market viewed LR banks as less risky, especially during the COVID 19 stress.

In 2013, the European Union's Emission Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) entered Phase III. The majority of emission permits in Phase III are auctioned instead of being allocated for free as in Phases I and II. Using a difference-in-differences method, we show that this change has led to an increase in the financial distress risk of the EU-ETS-regulated firms when compared to unregulated firms, suggesting that the EU-ETS imposes a significant financial burden on regulated firms. This result is robust to an array of validation tests, alleviating concerns that it is driven by unobserved factors. In additional analyses we show that the increase in distress risk of regulated firms during Phase III can be explained by, (i) an additional climate regulation cost to purchase pollution permits and (ii) a low average environmental score that possibly (via high sustainability risk) lowers investors expectations regarding firms’ performance. Our findings also show that the distress risk increase is higher for regulated firms operating within countries with lower control of corruption, government effectiveness, political stability, regulatory quality, rule of law, and voice accountability before the EU-ETS implementation.

Bank depositors and creditors are expected to play an important role in banks’ dividend policy since they can either discipline or incentivise managers to pay larger dividends. We provide evidence suggesting that depositors are more influential than subordinated debtholders in disciplining banks facing extreme solvency situations from wealth expropriation, which is consistent with the monitoring hypothesis. The results for solvent banks show that deposits and subordinated debt explain larger dividends, suggesting that signalling incentives drive these cash payments. Diving deeper into our groups of banks, we observe that the risk-shifting hypothesis becomes more nuanced as listed banks exercise wealth expropriation after the crisis through the uninsured deposits channel. Our results provide significant support for major dividend theories, unravelling the debt channels through which these theories may hold.