Financial Markets, Institutions and Instruments最新文献

This paper documents that in distress periods, liquidity constrained investors sell liquid corporate bonds and hold onto illiquid ones, a phenomenon which we refer to as flight from liquidity. Performing within issuer-time analysis to properly control for credit risk, we find that flight from liquidity results in a decline in the liquidity premium. In other words, liquid bonds that are significantly more expensive in normal market conditions, lose more value in distress periods and trade at a closer, and sometimes at an indistinguishable, yield spread to their illiquid peers from the same issuer. We also find that these shocks to the liquidity premium are short-lived and do not have a long-lasting pricing impact. We provide suggestive evidence that the liquidity clientele effect derives these results. Our findings suggest that investment exposure to liquid bonds entails a unique risk arising during periods of distress.

Based on a sample of more than eleven thousand unique 10-K reports of US companies filed with SEC in period 2013 to 2018, this study examines the relationship between actual sustainability performance of companies, evaluated by MSCI ESG performance scores, and the extent and the scope of environmental, social, and governance information disclosure in their annual reports. The study shows empirical evidence supporting the signalling theory view of voluntary disclosure of ESG information in annual reports for most industries, while environmentally unfriendly companies belonging to the Mining industry division show excessive reporting behavior favoring environmental topics, which is consistent with incentives to improve public image and mitigate social, political, and legal risks in line with the legitimacy theory of information disclosure. When differentiating between forward-looking and non-forward-looking ESG statements, the study shows that companies providing more forward-looking ESG information in annual reports show better next-year ESG performance. This study implements established content analysis techniques with focus on ESG reporting and performance, building up on the study of Baier, Berninger, and Kiesel (2020) that proposed an ESG-tailored dictionary for textual analysis purposes.

This paper investigates how security analysts’ corporate site visits impact listed firms’ stock-price informativeness. Examining a sample of security analysts’ visits to Chinese listed firms from 2010 to 2019, we find that security analysts incorporate firm-specific information into share prices through site visits, significantly reducing the visited firms’ stock price synchronicity. This finding is robust to an alternative measure of stock price informativeness and a two-stage least-squares approach using the introduction of high-speed rail as the instrumental variable. We also find that the impact of analysts’ site visits on firms’ stock price synchronicity is more pronounced for firms with lower information disclosure quality and poor corporate governance than for other firms. Further analysis on firm characteristics documents that this effect is stronger for large-size firms, firms in the manufacturing industry, and state-owned enterprises.

This paper traces the reaction of US banks to ROE underperformance on liquidity creation, equity capital, and loan loss provisions. We find that banks change their structures in the subsequent quarter after underperformance by increasing their on-balance and off-balance sheet liquidity creation to increase profitability. Banks tend to increase their equity capital and improve their loan quality by lowering non-discretionary loan loss provisions to become safer. Banks signal their ability to overcome underperformance by increasing their discretionary loan loss provisions. Our results reveal that large banks rely mainly on off-balance sheet liquidity creation as their primary tool to recover from underperformance while medium-size and small banks adjust their equity capital to increase their safety.

According to the pecking order theory, firms with potential investment projects should raise external capital if and only if sufficient internal funds are not available. The theory can be violated if equity issuers are motivated by market timing and increasing funds for insiders’ benefits, indicating that firms may already have internal funds surplus without including external funds, but still issue equity. By controlling for future funds needs, the analyses show that issuers that engage in market timing and spend the SEO proceeds on value-destroying projects are strongly associated with their internal funds surplus. Moreover, SEO announcement returns are lower for issuers with internal funds surplus. This pattern strongly supports the predictive ability of internal funds surplus to detect the need for external capital and ultimately to determine timing incentives and agency spending of SEO proceeds.

We design a novel across-the-curve credit spread index, AXI, a measure of the recent cost of wholesale unsecured debt funding for publicly listed US bank holding companies and commercial banks. AXI, a benchmark for bank lending and risk management, is the weighted average of credit spreads for unsecured debt instruments with maturities ranging from overnight to five years, with weights that reflect both transaction and issuance volumes. We provide illustrative output of the bond-based component of AXI. By widening coverage to include all corporate debt issuers, we also build a financial conditions index (FXI).

In this paper, we empirically investigate the impact of intensified competition on rating quality in the credit rating market for residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) in the period 2017–2020. We provide evidence that competition between large credit rating agencies (CRAs) (Moody's and Standard & Poor's) and newer smaller ones (Dominion Bond Rating Service Morningstar and Kroll Bond Rating Agency) creates credit rating inconsistencies in the RMBS market. While a credit rating should solely represent the underlying credit risk of a RMBS, irrespective of the competition in the market, our results show that this is not the case. When competitive pressure is higher, both large and small CRAs tend to adjust their rating standards (smaller CRAs react to large CRAs and vice versa).

We show that high yield (HY) mutual funds own and trade ETFs to manage liquidity needs driven by fund flows, whereas investment grade (IG) funds do not. The use of ETFs by HY mutual funds to manage liquidity shifts some trading away from bonds and into ETFs, which reduces the liquidity of the underlying bonds. This substitution effect outweighs the better-understood inclusion effect, whereby bond liquidity benefits from increased ETF ownership, such that the net effect of ETFs is to reduce HY liquidity. In IG, the substitution effect is not significant and ETFs result in increased bond liquidity.

Tracing negative media attention, this paper investigates the effect of reputational risk on firm value. Decomposing reputational damage into environmental, social and corporate-governance dimensions, it reports that environmental reputational risk has the most significant negative effect on price earnings, i.e., firms exposed to environmental risk are likely to be priced at a discount or charged a higher risk premium when discounting future earnings.

While ESG initiation and disclosure may help newly listed companies maintain a social license to operate, mitigate information asymmetry, and attract investor attention, it may impose significant costs on initial public offering (IPO) firms and magnify agency problems. Using a sample of 1102 IPOs issued in the U.S and the ESG data from MSCI between 1999 and 2016, the paper empirically tests the competing hypotheses and examines the influence of ESG disclosure and performance on the survivability of IPOs. We document that (1) voluntary ESG disclosure reduces IPO failure risks and improves long-run performance of IPO; (2) the sooner ESG information is disclosed after the IPO, the greater the likelihood of survival and better long-run performance; and (3) IPOs with better ESG score are less likely to fail, with the impact largely attributable to the company's social and governance performance. Our findings identify new failure risks for IPOs, supply evidence of value-relevance of ESG, and provide practical guidance for managers.