International Review of Finance最新文献

We examine the effect of public trust on personal loan grants and the default risk of Chinese regional commercial banks during the bank branch regulation regime changes. Using exogenous shocks of bank branch regulation regimes in quasi-natural experiments, we find that public trust exhibits a more pronounced increase in personal loan grants for regional banks. Additionally, we report a negative relationship between public trust and default risk. Finally, we observe that city commercial banks that open branches in high public trust provinces during the deregulation period lead to an increase (decrease) in personal loan grants and (default risk).

This study examines how institutional investors influence workplace safety. Using data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, we find that firms with higher institutional ownership have significantly lower injury and illness rates, especially those with dedicated investors who are geographically proximate to their establishments and high union coverage levels. Our analysis indicates that such firms adopt employee-friendly corporate cultures and invest in organizational capital and workplace safety. Overall, this study offers novel and robust evidence of the monitoring role of institutional investors in shaping workplace safety outcomes.

This paper discusses the impact of regret aversion on Chinese stock market returns from the asset pricing perspective. From the intertemporal investment and consumption analytical framework, a representative investor determines the optimal wealth allocation by perceiving the stock's “expected rate of return” and “regret effect” to maximize utility. The simulation results show that the expected returns present a downward convex shape with the change in regret aversion. Using China's A-share market data, the empirical tests confirm the mechanism and different bull and bear market signals. Our findings reveal regret aversion in the A-share market, and “market return” is an essential measuring indicator, which improves the consumption-based Capital Asset Pricing Model (CCAPM) empirical results by more minor pricing errors and equity premiums. Comparatively, the variations in cross-sectional stock returns during bull markets illustrate the herd behavior prevalent in the Chinese market, and the cross-sectional data observed in bear markets demonstrate a superior fitting effect.

This study investigates the relationship between corporate culture and debt maturity structure. Utilizing a text-based measure of corporate culture derived from a cutting-edge machine learning approach, we uncover a strong positive link between corporate culture and short-term debt usage. We further find that this relationship is particularly pronounced for firms with high information asymmetry and heightened financing constraints. We conduct several sensitivity analyses that confirm the robustness of our findings. Overall, the findings enhance our understanding of how corporate culture influences corporate financing decisions.

We study the pricing implication of the climate change news index proposed by Engle et al. (2020). Specifically, we find the significant risk premium associated with climate change news. The risk premium increases for firms in fossil-fuel and carbon-intensive industries, while decreasing for firms in low-emission industries. Furthermore, we document that the impact of climate change news is more negative for “value” and “big” portfolios compared to “growth” and “small” portfolios, and the impact of climate change news varies for firms headquartered in Democratic states versus Republican states.

We analyze the optimal design of deferred compensation for bank executives under agency conflicts in a continuous time model with a bank liability structure. Our model demonstrates that a well-designed deferred compensation contract can effectively mitigate bank executives' asset substitution problem and significantly enhance the total value of the bank, which aligns with existing empirical studies. Moreover, we find that the motivation for bank executives to shift risk under deferred compensation is diminished when supervision is more stringent, the bank has greater market power, or the write-down ratio of debt is lower.

We apply variance ratio methodologies to examine market quality in the US corporate bond market. We find that the open-to-open to close-to-close return variance ratio is greater than one suggesting that the corporate bond market is less efficient during the opening hours than during the closing hours. We show that the higher variance ratio at the open is related to the market power of dealers at the open and the sources of power are from lower cost of inventory, lower asymmetric information, and more flexibility to intermediate a trade. Dealers appear to exert less market power for bonds with low volume and credit rating. The results are consistent with dealers behaving strategically to unload risky assets and take on safer assets.

Retail investors are known to favor stocks with lottery-like features and trade too much. Less is known about their intertemporal demand and risk-taking behavior in lottery-type stocks. We use intraday transaction data between September 2019 and June 2020 from the Stock Exchange of Thailand to test how individual's risk attitude changes with respect to decline in their wealth prospects during the COVID-19 lockdown. The behavior of the investors supports a reference dependent preference. Confronted with lowered wealth prospects, retail investors substantially reduce their underweighting in nonlottery stocks while increasing overweighting and turnover frequency in lottery stocks resulting in deteriorating portfolio performance.

This paper identifies culture as an important factor affecting corporate cash holdings by using China and its national culture, Confucianism, as the setting. We find that firms located in regions with stronger Confucian culture hold persistently higher levels of cash. We employ an instrumental variable to draw causal inference. Confucian culture strengthens the effect of cash flow risk on cash holdings of financially-constrained firms, suggesting precautionary motives as the underlying mechanism. We find that the culture effect remains intact after controlling for corporate governance heterogeneity, which rules out the agency motives. Lastly, firms' operating performance indicates that high cash holdings is an efficient outcome.

We investigate whether diversification stabilizes bank lending cyclicality on a sample of 25 conventional and 18 Islamic banks from Malaysia spanning 2008 to 2021. Our findings reveal that both bank types are nonlinearly procyclical during economic expansions, with Islamic banks also exhibiting countercyclical behavior during economic contractions. Diversification is positively associated with credit growth in conventional banks and Islamic bank subsidiaries, and it amplifies procyclicality across all Islamic bank types. Conversely, loan concentration stabilizes credit in Islamic banks. These results are robust to an alternative credit measure. Further analyses indicate that public and foreign banks are procyclical during booms and countercyclical during busts. At the same time, diversification heightens procyclicality in private, local, and foreign banks, whereas concentration mitigates it in public and local banks.