Journal of Financial Research最新文献

We examine the impact of organizational capital (OC) on the performance of firms that engage in private equity placements. We document larger discounts in stock sales where issuers have more OC, which suggests that private equity investors demand a higher risk premium to compensate for OC risk. We also find the private placements completed by high-OC issuers elicit more favorable announcement-period returns and superior postissue performance than those completed by low-OC issuers. These findings are consistent with the certification hypothesis and support research showing that OC improves firm efficiency and productivity. Our study sheds light on the importance of OC as a determinant of issuer outcome in private stock sales. Overall, our empirical results imply that OC reflects value-relevant information that is consistent with certification benefits.

We examine the evolution of lead venture capital firm (VC) ownership after their portfolio companies (PCs) are publicly listed. We find that, on average, lead VCs retain their shares for three years post-IPO. Higher liquidity pressure and better stock market performance lead to faster VC exits, while higher VC reputation, better VC monitoring, and higher quality PCs lead to slower exits. VCs mostly use sales in the open market, share distributions, and mergers and acquisitions to divest their shares. Higher liquidity pressure incentivizes VCs to use majority share distributions, while better stock market performance increases their preference for continuous sales.

In this article, we examine whether and how small investors’ social media activity is associated with subsequent bond credit spreads. We use extensive data from posts/comments on social media 30 days before the bond issuance announcement date to identify their implied power and find that the more posts/comments, the smaller the bond issuance spreads. We further find that information quality improvement of posts increases this negative relation between social media activity and bond cost, and that posts directly related to issuers’ fundamentals and/or debt financing drive our main results. Additional tests show that the effect is more salient when there is a greater demand for information quality or when macroeconomic conditions worsen.

In this paper we investigate the role a monitored credit line plays in managing a firm's liquidity needs and influencing the firm's project risk. We develop a theoretical model where a firm finances a risky project that is subject to a liquidity shock. External lenders are imperfectly informed about both project risk and the firm's liquidity, which leads to moral hazard. We identify conditions under which it is optimal for the firm to fund the project using a term loan from a less informed lender and manage liquidity using a line of credit from an informed lender.

Cash holdings are significantly lower for firms with dispersed debt maturity, and this finding is robust to entropy balancing and allowing for the simultaneous selection of dispersion and cash holdings. The relation is strongest for firms with shorter debt maturity and firms that rely on precautionary cash, such as financially constrained firms and firms with volatile cash flows. Markets place a lower value on the cash of firms with high or increasing dispersion, and these firms retain less cash. Collectively, the evidence implies that firms can hedge rollover risk with dispersed debt maturity as an alternative to holding costly cash.

In this article, we investigate how the participation of firms’ existing shareholders affects the pricing and valuation of private investments in public equity (PIPEs). Using a large sample of PIPEs issued by Chinese listed firms from 2006 to 2019, we find that the effective discount and long-term buy-and-hold abnormal stock returns of PIPEs with existing shareholder participation are significantly higher than those with only new investor participation, after controlling for heterogeneous types of PIPE investors. However, the superior post-PIPE stock performance of deals with existing shareholders is not driven by improved operating performance but by tunneling activities such as frequent dividend announcements, related-party transactions, and positive earnings management during the lock-up period. Our findings suggest that the effect of existing shareholders’ participation in private equity placements is more consistent with the tunneling hypothesis than the certification hypothesis. We document that the tunneling incentives are stronger when firms face greater financial constraints and can be mitigated when the firm's corporate governance is stronger.

We theoretically and empirically identify synthetic long stock as an alternative driver of option trading. Our model proves that the use of synthetic long stocks by capital-constrained traders contributes to at-the-money (ATM) option trading. Using an event study based on stock splits, we document empirical evidence consistent with the model's predictions. ATM option trading declines after stock splits, and these declines are more pronounced for stock splits with higher stock split factors and for more illiquid stocks but are less pronounced for more illiquid options. Our study implies that option trading can occur even without information or opinion dispersion.

We examine dividend growth predictability and the excess volatility puzzle across a large sample of international equity markets using a mixed-frequency data sampling (MIDAS) regression approach. We find that accounting for dividend seasonality under the MIDAS framework significantly improves dividend growth predictability compared to simple regressions with annually aggregated data. Moreover, variance bounds tests that allow for nonstationary dividends consistently fail to reject the market efficiency hypothesis across all countries. Our findings suggest that the common rejection of market efficiency in the literature is most likely driven by the annual aggregation of dividend data as well as by the assumption of stationary dividends.

In this article, we empirically examine the relation between democracy level and stock index returns in a sample of 74 countries. Compared with democracies, autocratic states are characterized by lower returns despite exhibiting higher return volatility. Even though this higher volatility can be mostly attributed to diversifiable country-specific risk, the capital asset pricing model cannot explain the return differential. Instead, it is the level of investor protection that can fully account for the phenomenon described here. Autocratic leaders may be reluctant to promulgate regulations shielding investors, and the resultant expropriation depresses the returns realized by outsiders.

In this article, we examine the relation between independent directors with past military service and merger activity. We find that firms with a greater proportion of independent directors with military experience complete fewer mergers, and the deals are of smaller value. Our results are robust to instrumental variable estimation. The reduction in merger and acquisition activity is concentrated in firms with weak CEOs, suggesting independent directors with military service do not improve firm agency problems.