International Journal of Finance & Economics最新文献

This paper focuses on the sovereign crisis of the Euro debt crisis era, and we address the existence of the relationship of CDS and bond markets sovereign credit risk pricing for selected core and periphery EMU countries, during and after the 2009 EMU crisis. We study this relationship in conjunction to geopolitical risk as a measure of macroeconomic uncertainty. We use daily observations for several bond maturities and CDS premium with reference to the core (France and Germany) versus periphery EMU countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland Spain, and Greece) for the period 2009 to 2014. To measure global geopolitical risk, we employ the Caldara and Iacoviello (2022) global geopolitics index (GPR). Using alternative econometric approaches, we find adequate evidence of volatility spillovers between the geopolitical risk index and sovereign risk markets mainly during the crisis period (2009–2012) and weaker during the easing of the eurozone debt crisis period (2012–2014). Moreover, based on Granger causality the estimation of the short- term dynamics reveals a significant linkage during the post-crisis period rather than during crisis. During the crisis period, we found significant dynamic responses between GPR and bond yields.

How do political crises affect the interaction between economic and political outcomes? In this paper, we study one of the consequences of political turmoil by empirically examining whether the Arab Spring influenced the relationship between corruption and income inequality. Using panel data from 1996 to 2019 for the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries, we find that while corruption is positively associated with income inequality, the interaction term between corruption and the Arab Spring is negatively associated with income inequality. This result is consistent with the view that corruption has become more democratized after the Arab Spring. We use instrumental variable (IV) analysis to address potential endogeneity issues. Our findings suggest that not only studying the direct effects of political crises on economic and institutional variables is important, but studying their effects on shaping the association between economic and institutional variables can be insightful.

Motivated by calls to explore corporate outcomes of gender diversity-related dependencies in a firm's upper echelons, we examine whether gender diversity in manager-owner(s) teams shapes innovation. Using the context of emerging markets and a large surveydataset drawn from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS), we find robust evidence suggesting that gender-diverse manager-owner(s) teams are associated with higher odds of undertaking innovation. Specifically, women (men) owned firms managed by a male (female) top manager are associated with a higher likelihood of undertaking innovation relative to women (men) owned firms managed by women (men). Additionally, we find that female-owned firms run by male (female) top managers are the most (least) innovative and male-owned firms run by female (male) top managers are the second (third) innovative. Our findings indicate that heterophilic manager-owner(s) teams have the potential to foster innovation in emerging markets. More importantly, our results suggest that initiatives promoting manager-owner(s) team's gender diversity have the potential to overcome the social and structural barriers that impede innovation in emerging economies.

This study investigates the relationship between star power, artistic excellence, and the commercial success of Chinese movies from 2009 to 2018 based on a two-path structural model. Artistic excellence was measured based on industry recognition; more specifically, the winners of seven major movie awards in the greater China region, which reflect the critical and popular evaluations of reviewers and consumers. The commercial success was measured by box office performance and the level of buzz among the audience. While the paths of artistic excellence and commercial movie success are essentially separable, as well as conceptually and empirically distinct, movie star power may influence both. Our findings indicate that star power had negative signal effects on critical and popular evaluation as well as industry recognition, but positive marketing effects on critical and popular buzz as well as box office performance. Indeed, star power has indirect positive effects that can outweigh its negative effects. Thus, star power is the key to success in these two seemingly unrelated paths in China. Moreover, these findings have several implications for international investors, producers, actors, and directors who are participating in the Chinese motion picture industry.

The study examines the impact of board committee indexes on the relationship between Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure, and accounting- and market-based performance measures of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Using quantile regression analysis and a large balanced panel data of 500 multinational companies operating in 40 countries from 2009 to 2019 (i.e., 5500 firm-year observations), we uncovered the following significant associations: (i) a positive relationship between ESG disclosure and accounting performance indicators for large-sized MNEs, but this relationship is counteracted by the negative influence of the audit and sustainability committee indexes; (ii) the association between market-based performance outcomes and ESG disclosure is positively affected by the compensation, nomination, and sustainability committee indexes, while it is negatively influenced by the audit committee index; (iii) the combined board committee index has varying impacts on the connection between the components of ESG disclosure, and accounting and market-relevant performance metrics for different sizes of MNEs; and (iv) while the audit and sustainability committee indexes exert negative effects on the relationship between the components of ESG disclosure and performance measures, these effects are countered by the positive moderating impacts of the compensation and nomination committee indexes. The study concludes by discussing the policy implications of these results.

In this paper, we conduct a detailed examination of the determinants of attitudes to financial risk among retail investors in six European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom). We find that respondents from the United Kingdom and Belgium are the most risk tolerant while those from Spain are the least. We observe remarkable similarities in the distributions of risk tolerance across countries despite cultural differences and considerable variations in the extent to which risky investing is undertaken as a routine part of financial planning. We further show that country effects in the cross-sectional variation of attitude to risk scores are swamped by the impacts of gender, salary and wealth, while financial knowledge and prior investment experience are much more important still. Our results have implications for regulators and those who wish to encourage European investors to consider going beyond bank savings and guaranteed products to more prevalent stock market investing in an era of negative real interest rates.

Recent evidence has shown that hybrid models for credit ratings are important when assessing the risk of firms. Within this stream of literature, we aim to provide novel evidence on how hard (quantitative), soft (qualitative), and market information predict corporate defaults for unlisted firms by implementing the Cox proportional hazard model. We address this research question by exploiting a unique proprietary dataset comprising of detailed information on internal credit ratings of European unlisted mid-sized firms and compute their Merton's distance-to-default (DD) measure of credit risk with market data collected on comparable publicly listed companies. Our results show that the bank's use of hard, soft, and market information when assessing the credit ratings of borrowers has a significant influence on the prediction of their defaults. Further, we investigate the significant influence of soft information in predicting corporate defaults by drawing on two separate processes through which loan officers can inject soft information in credit scoring, that is, ‘codified’ and ‘uncodified’ discretion. Finally, when we distinguish between the loan officer's discretion to upgrade or downgrade an applicant's credit score, we find that it is the upgrade that is likely to predict a lower probability of a firm defaulting. This study contributes to the policy debate on safeguarding the banking sector's continuity by positing that integrating market information into banks' hybrid methods of credit rating helps to improve the accuracy in predicting unlisted firms' credit risk that is useful to policy makers for the design of future forward-looking financial risk management frameworks.

Since the 1980s, Portuguese policy makers have engaged in a strong process of liberalization, deregulation and privatization of the financial system to adhere to the rules imposed by the European Economic Community and to promote financial growth, boost economic growth and reduce inequality. However, the Portuguese economic growth has exhibited a weaker performance and inequality has continued to widen in the last decades, a situation that seems to contradict the mainstream beliefs regarding the supportive role played by financial growth in the era of financialisation. This article undertakes an empirical assessment of the finance–inequality nexus by performing a time series econometric analysis for Portugal from 1980 to 2020 through the estimation of both linear and non-linear models. It finds strong evidence for a positive (linear) relationship between finance and inequality and some evidence for a convex quadratic (non-linear) relationship between finance and inequality in Portugal, corroborating the hypothesis that the financial growth has been prejudicial, enhancing inequality in Portugal. These findings highlight the urgent need to abandon the so-called ‘trickle-down theory’ or the ‘horse and sparrow theory’ and to implement the so-called ‘trickle-up theory’ with the support of pro-poor public policies to decrease inequality in Portugal.