International Review of Finance最新文献

Following an innovative approach, the effects of financial report quality on the use of trade credit in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are examined. This effect is considered in a direct and indirect way. Firstly, we analyze whether SMEs with low-quality information are more likely to use trade credit as a financial resource. Secondly, we investigate whether the relationship between trade credit and bank credit in SMEs is moderated by the quality of financial reports. For the empirical analysis, we use a sample of Spanish SMEs over the period 2004 to 2011, and apply a panel data model with fixed effects. The findings suggest that firms with low-quality financial reporting use more trade credit. Furthermore, the influence of bank credit on trade credit is found to be partially moderated by audit opinion.

This paper investigates the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic on investors' trading behaviors around ex-dividend dates in Europe. The sudden decrease in the number of companies paying dividends reduced the opportunities to capture dividends. Thus, the firms that maintained dividend payments during the pandemic attracted more interest than before. This led to a doubling in the magnitude of stock return patterns usually observed around ex-dividend days. Our evidence indicates that dividend-seeking investors are likely to be the main driver of the price patterns observed around ex-dividend dates.

We clarify the information value of changes in the textual information of analyst reports. The analyses reveal that stock prices react considerably to changes in the linguistic tone of reports. In addition, prices react asymmetrically to the levels and changes of report tone, overreact to the levels, and underreact to changes. Our evidence suggests that a change in the textual tone provides incremental information that investors overlook, supporting the informational value of changes in textual information.

We examine the forecasting power of a daily newspaper-based index of uncertainty associated with infectious diseases (EMVID) for real estate investment trusts (REITs) realized market variance of the United States (US) via the heterogeneous autoregressive realized volatility (HAR-RV) model. Our results show that the EMVID index improves the forecast accuracy of realized variance of REITs at short-, medium-, and long-run horizons in a statistically significant manner, with the result being robust to the inclusion of additional controls (leverage, realized jumps, skewness, and kurtosis) capturing extreme market movements, and also carries over to 10 sub-sectors of the US REITs market. Our results have important portfolio implications for investors during the current period of unprecedented levels of uncertainty resulting from the outbreak of COVID-19.

This paper examines cross-sectional return predictability in a real estate investment trust (REIT) market by using a continuing overreaction measure constructed based on the weighted average of signed volumes. We show that (a) trading strategies that involve buying REITs with an upward continuing overreaction and selling REITs with a downward continuing overreaction generate intermediate-term momentum and long-term return reversals; (b) the continuing overreaction measure provides superior predictive power in future REIT returns compared with the traditional predictor measured by past returns; and (c) overreaction-based momentum is more pronounced when the market state continues in the same direction. Evidence from the REIT market provides direct support for the return prediction of the model based on investor overconfidence and biased self-attribution rather than the model based on dividend growth theory.

We examine the pricing implications of monetary policy uncertainty (MPU) in the cross-section of stock returns in the Chinese stock market. Our results show that the long-short portfolio that is long stocks with the lowest exposures to innovations in MPU and short stocks with the highest exposures to innovations in MPU earns about 6% annualized alpha. The coskewness, idiosyncratic volatility, size, and book-to-market effects cannot account for the low (high) average returns earned by stocks with high (low) exposures to innovations in MPU. Furthermore, the exposure to innovations in MPU commands a significantly negative risk premium in the Fama-MacBeth regressions. These results indicate that investors have preferences for the early resolution of MPU.

This article empirically tests the association between environmental uncertainty and corporate cash holdings and whether CEO ability moderates this association. Based on the precautionary motive for holding cash, we predict that firms will hold more cash when operating in an environment of high uncertainty. To test this prediction, we utilize a panel of non-financial U.S. firms throughout 1980–2016. Using the coefficient of variation in sales as a proxy for environmental uncertainty, we find that environmental uncertainty increases firm cash holding. We then explore the moderating role of CEO ability and find that more-able CEOs weaken the positive association between environmental uncertainty and cash holding. Further, the results demonstrate that small-sized, financially sound, and low leveraged firms are likely to hoard more cash during periods of heightened uncertainty. Our study provides new insights for investors, shareholders, and policymakers into companies' decision-making concerning liquid assets.

Considering binary dependent variable, this study extends the panel threshold model into “panel threshold logit model (PTLM).” Our PTLM is applied on investigating the effect of early warning indicators on banking crises in 10 Asian economies. The ratio of short-term debt to foreign reserves serves as the threshold variable. Results confirm the existence of the threshold effect in the determinants of banking crises, and most of the early warning indicators perform differently in the two debt regimes. Our empirical results suggest that important information may be missed in analyzing crises when conventional logit model is used.

The COVID-19 outbreak and the subsequent lockdown were an unanticipated shock to the global stock market. Managers also had minimal time to counterbalance its effect through corporate policies. Therefore, this health crisis offers a unique opportunity to examine the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on shareholder value. We observe that firms engaged in more CSR activities outperform other firms. This suggests that CSR plays a positive role in determining shareholder value, particularly for an emerging market where minority shareholder rights are weak. Collaborating with our main finding, we further find that governance metrics play a significant role.

We propose applying partial least squares (PLS) to estimating the previously considered ineffective multivariate regression model when forecasting the market equity premium out-of-sample. First, PLS is a dimension reduction method that effectively addresses the issue of multicollinearity prevalent among financial variables. Second, PLS constructs factors with the supervision of past equity premiums, resulting in an explicit linkage between the forecasting target and PLS components. Our empirical results show that the PLS-estimated kitchen-sink model consistently and robustly outperforms many competing alternatives, such as shrinkage estimators and forecast combinations, by a statistically and economically significant margin. Our analysis differs from Kelly and Pruitt (2013) in factors such as data source, model estimation and specification, and economic rationale.