Journal of Multinational Financial Management最新文献

We examine how political power, polarization, and economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in Canada and the US affect the Canadian equity market from 1985 to 2019. We document little evidence of significant liberal government return premiums and the corresponding risk for the overall market and many industry sectors. Only the IT sector witnesses the “second half effect” of election cycles. The Canadian equity market seems to outperform during strong Democratic control in the US, with mixed findings for the individual sectors. Political polarization in the two countries and trade uncertainty have little impact on Canadian equity returns except for the venture, small-cap, and IT sectors from the US polarization. The US EPU index affects the average returns of the overall Canadian equity market and the energy, industrials, retail, and transportation industries, while domestic EPU in Canada reduces the overall equity market, small-cap, and venture firm returns. The alignment of political ideology in the two countries has little impact on the equity market in Canada. Collectively, the results show that the impact of political environments on the Canadian equity market tends to be limited, dynamic, and industry-specific, suggesting that investors should not blindly mix their portfolios with their political views or affiliations.

We use data from 33 countries to study how a fund’s affiliation with large families shapes the flow–performance relationship internationally. Our results show that the effect of family size on the fund flows’ response to performance depends on the sophistication of investors in a country. While less sophisticated investors are persuaded by the great visibility and strategies of funds that are affiliated with large and established families, more sophisticated investors are not. Affiliation with a large family increases the convexity of the flow–performance relationship in countries where investors are less sophisticated, but decreases this convexity in countries with more sophisticated investors. These results are important for investors, mutual fund companies and regulators because the flow–performance sensitivity determines the assets under management, the level of fees, risk–taking, and the performance of the fund.

This paper examines the effect of geopolitical risk on corporate investment in emerging Asian countries. Using an extensive sample spanning 1995–2018, we find that geopolitical risk is negatively associated with corporate investment. Geopolitical risks in China and Russia have a greater impact on corporate investment, while a less significant influence is found in India and Turkey. Our findings are robust to using alternative measures of geopolitical risk, using alternative proxies of investment, even after controlling for endogeneity concerns by a two-stage least square estimation, a system generalized method of moments regression, and the incremental effect of geopolitical risk. The adverse impact of geopolitical risk on firm investment is more pronounced for firms with a higher degree of investment irreversibility. However, firms with greater cash holdings can better mitigate this negative impact. Overall, this paper shows that geopolitical risk is a crucial macrolevel shock influencing corporate investment.

This paper examines the alignment between initial price reaction and post-cross-listing performance for non-American firms cross-listed in the U.S. Using an event study methodology, we show that, while cross-listed firms exhibit long-term performance, short-term valuation gain is more important. We also find a significant difference between short and long-term price reactions, explained by legal investor protection considerations. Additional analysis shows that the change in the U.S. regulatory environment has no diminishing effect on cross-listing economic benefits. We also show more important short-run price reactions in crisis time, leading to more significant misalignment between short and long-term performance. Our results are robust to several control firm and country characteristics.

Previous research has shown that higher levels of firm globalization lead to a lower cost of private debt. However, this research generally treats globalization as a homogeneous attribute ignoring the specific countries in which a multinational corporation (MNC) operates. Using a sample of U.S. MNCs from 1999 through 2017, we relax this assumption and find that while the results from prior research hold with regards to the level of an MNC’s operations in segments reported at the regional or continent-wide level, the level of an MNC’s operations in countries with low institutional quality is associated with a higher cost of bank debt. Our results are robust to controlling for firms’ choice to operate in countries with low institutional quality using self-selection models and propensity score matching. In additional testing we find that the level of MNCs operations in countries with low institutional quality is negatively associated with the inclusion of collateral requirements in private lending agreements, but is not associated with the maturity of the loan or the number of covenants included in the lending agreement. Finally, we find that firms’ segment disclosure choices vary around new loan issuances in a manner consistent with management being aware that operations in low institutional quality are perceived by lenders to indicate higher credit risk.

Over the last two decades, the unprecedented expansion of cross-border banking on the African banking market has raised concern about their effects on host countries’ markets. This paper investigates to what extent this expansion has affected competition and cost efficiency in the African banking market using a sample of 429 active commercial banks from 2000 to 2015. Results show that CBB activities enhance competition, mainly driven by African CBB. At the regional scale, these effects are more substantial in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) because African CBBs have more expanded their activities in SSA. We also document that more efficient banks alleviate the competition induced by the expansion of African CBBs. The latter exhibit lower efficiency and therefore do not encourage bank efficiency. This study further shows that macroeconomic conditions and institutional variables are essential drivers of bank competition and cost efficiency in Africa. These results are robust to alternative estimation techniques (system-GMM, Quantile regression-Adaptative MCMC, Matching) and proxies of competition and cost efficiency.

This study identifies the determinants of domestic equity funds that fail to comply with the portfolio concentration limits of the EU Directive 2009/65/EC. This study also determines the characteristics of the stocks subject to these non-compliant portfolios. The empirical application to a comprehensive sample of domestic equity funds registered in the Eurozone provides significant information that can help to improve market supervision in terms of investors’ protection.

Operating segments reporting represents a potential source of information about corporate foreign operations. This paper investigates the country-segment disclosure related to Central and Eastern European (CEE) operations - regarded as potential reporting segments - of multinational corporations (MNCs). The empirical analysis indicates limited information on country segments in general, and a few country segments for CEE operations. The probability of country-segment disclosure depends on size of operations, and host-country economic conditions such as financial risk, competitiveness, ease of doing business and tax rates. The value relevance analysis indicates a significant negative influence of country-segment disclosure of CEE operations on stock prices. These findings provide insights about country-segment disclosure and suggest policy implications of managerial approach for operating segments reporting.

Financial institutions have adopted big data to a considerable extent to provide better investment decisions. Consequently, high-frequency algorithmic traders use a vast amount of historical data with various statistical models to maximize their trading profits. Until recently, high-frequency algorithmic trading was the domain of institutional traders with access to supercomputers. Nowadays, any investor can potentially make high-frequency trades because of easy access to big data and software to analyze and execute trades. With that in mind, Borsa Istanbul introduced real time big data analytics as a product to its customers. These analytics are derived in real time from order book and trade data and aim to level the playing field between investment firms and retail traders. Using classical benchmark models in the literature, we show that Borsa Istanbul’s order imbalance-based data analytics are useful in predicting both time-series and cross-sectional intraday excess future returns, proving that this product is extremely beneficial to market participants, particularly day traders.

The recent wave of liberalization in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has opened up a debate on the role of Islamic finance in the financial development of an economy. Using a comprehensive dataset of 43 Islamic and 49 conventional banks for the period 2007–2015, in this paper, we investigate the impact of trade and financial openness on financial development in the GCC region. We find that trade and financial openness have a positive effect on the profitability of both banking systems, while the interaction term of openness is negative for the profitability of Islamic banks. Moreover, trade and financial openness affect Islamic banks differently than conventional banks. Notably, we unveil that trade and financial openness decrease the loan volume of Islamic banks but increase their stability.