International Review of Finance最新文献

I find a strong positive association between firms' implied cost of equity capital and firm-level political risk. This effect is above and beyond the firm-level cost of equity implications of economywide political risk. Firm-level political risk contributes to elevating stock illiquidity, increases dispersion of analyst forecasts and dampens analyst coverage and these attributes, in turn, have positive cost of equity capital implications. Overall, the findings of this study suggest firm-level political risk has a non-trivial effect on increasing equity market illiquidity, increasing dispersion of earnings forecasts and decreasing analyst coverage thus increasing financing costs.

Utilizing a large sample of actively managed equity funds and a recently developed EPU index for New Zealand, we show that fund flow performance sensitivity decreases with policy uncertainty. The role of policy uncertainty as a determinant of fund flow performance sensitivity is found to be stronger, particularly for funds with global focus, large sized funds, high momentum funds and those with high idiosyncratic volatility and low downside risk. The findings support the argument that high policy uncertainty dampens investors' ability to process information that allows them to distinguish fund manager skill from luck. The results remain strong after accounting for various macroeconomic factors.

This study explores the co-movement among oil and the stock, bond, and housing markets of the U.S. and major developed countries across Europe and Asia. The results indicate that oil is long-run integrated with each asset class, and that the extent of convergence has increased after the onset of the 2007–2009 global financial crisis (GFC). Moreover, oil contributes most heavily toward the common trends, implying that oil is the “leader” sector that drives each asset class toward long-run equilibrium relationships. Short-run analyses indicate that oil shocks induce a negative response in stock and housing returns and a positive reaction in bond returns, showing a tendency to become more intense and persistent after the GFC. When oil shocks are disentangled, the results indicate that supply and demand have heterogeneous effects on the three global asset classes. Over the long-run, demand shocks make the most significant contribution to the common trends and “lead” the other asset classes, whereas supply shocks have either a negligible or a weaker impact. Over the short-run, demand shocks positively impact the stock and housing markets and negatively impact bonds, while supply shocks induce negative and weaker impacts on all three asset classes.

Using the DCC-GARCH model, this study considers distinctive features of China's foreign exchange market to investigate the impacts of RMB internationalization on exchange rates in onshore and offshore markets in different stages during 2010–2017. The results show that policies concerning RMB internationalization, such as interest rate liberalization, exchange rate liberalization, and capital market internationalization, have different impacts on the central parity rate, onshore exchange rate, and offshore exchange rate. In terms of exchange rate liberalization, as the daily trading band was gradually widened in 2012–2015, the onshore exchange rate followed the offshore exchange rate more closely. The central parity rate functioned as a managed floating role. It stabilized onshore and offshore exchange rate fluctuations, while allowing partial marketization. After the exchange rate reform on August 11, 2015, the central parity rate plays a benchmark role based on a more market-oriented price formation mechanism. It makes the central parity rate regain pricing power in onshore and offshore markets. Further, it promotes exchange rate liberalization and RMB internationalization. Nevertheless, with the slowdown of China's economic growth and the narrowing of the interest rate differential between China and the US, the RMB is under pressure to depreciate, and its volatility increases significantly.

In this study, we construct a directional global financial network using portfolio investment data from more than 200 countries during the first two decades of the 21st century and analyze the properties of the network. Through macroscopic analysis, we show that the network became denser and could be divided into central and peripheral groups. Microscopic analysis shows that, in addition to well-known financial-central countries, relatively less well-known countries played important roles in the global financial network. Further, each country's per capita GDP is positively correlated with its centrality in the network, and the correlation is stronger when measured with inbound investments than when measured with outbound investments.

In a standard continuous time asset pricing model, this paper provides an explosion time characterization of asset price bubbles that extends the existing characterization theorems in the literature from diffusion processes to general semimartingales (which can include jumps). This characterization has a nice economic interpretation, not emphasized in the existing literature.

This study examines the association between institutional investors' corporate site visits (CSVs) and the visited firms' investment efficiency. Using unique CSVs' data from China, this study provides empirical evidence that institutional investors' CSVs lessen the visited firms' corporate investment inefficiency, including both over- and underinvestment. The negative relationship between CSVs and investment inefficiency is less pronounced for firms with higher quality financial reporting and better corporate governance. In addition, CSVs show a decrease in corporate overinvestment by monitoring the risk-taking activities of younger CEOs and expansionary firms, and supervising the use of excess free cash flows. Meanwhile, CSVs could mitigate underinvestment by reducing managerial shirking from entrenched CEOs, such as dual or longer-tenured CEOs. The possible economic mechanism behind this association is that CSVs increase institutional shareholding percentages. All the main findings are robust to a battery of endogeneity and robustness tests.

This paper studies the predictive power of the trend strategy in the international stock market. Using data from 49 markets, we find that a trend signal exploiting the short-, intermediate-, and long-term price information can predict stock returns cross-sectionally in the international market. The significance of the trend strategy is associated with market-level characteristics such as macroeconomic conditions, culture, and the information environment. The trend premium is more pronounced in markets with a more advanced macroeconomic status, a higher level of information uncertainty and individualism, and better accessibility to foreign investors. Nevertheless, the trend strategy only outperforms the momentum strategy in a relatively short horizon.

We examine the predictive value of the uncertainty associated with growth in temperature for stock-market tail risk in the United States using monthly data that cover the sample period from 1895:02 to 2021:08. To this end, we measure stock-market tail risk by means of the popular Conditional Autoregressive Value at Risk (CAViaR) model. Our results show that accounting for the predictive value of the uncertainty associated with growth in temperature, as measured either by means of standard generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models or a stochastic-volatility (SV) model, mainly is beneficial for a forecaster who suffers a sufficiently higher loss from an underestimation of tail risk than from a comparable overestimation.