Journal of Financial Research最新文献

We investigate the impact of the Dodd–Frank Act (DFA) on the credit risk behavior of complex bank holding companies (BHCs). Specifically, we assess the effectiveness of the DFA in reducing the credit riskiness of complex banks. Consistent with the moral hazard hypothesis, we find that complex BHCs affected by the DFA increase their credit risk. We argue that possible explanations are that BHCs decreased their lending portfolio quality, loan monitoring, and strength and independence of the risk management function after the DFA. The results are robust to endogeneity concerns, different sample selection criteria, various model and treatment specifications, and placebo tests.

Firms managed by the scions of founders continue to be prevalent in the United States despite the increase in shareholder activism over the last few decades, calling into question the argument that such organizational structures reduce firm value. Founder-family successions are rare in high-growth industries where the benefits of selecting from a larger pool of managers is significant. Rather, they tend to happen in low-growth industries, in manufacturing/retail firms. Once we account for the differences in firm characteristics, we do not find that founder-family successions reduce firm value. We explore a mechanism that compensates for the costs of choosing from a smaller pool of managers and document evidence consistent with family firms benefiting from improved labor relations.

Using a panel smooth transition regression framework on a new proxy of the business cycle (BC) index and quarterly data of US bank holding companies from 1993Q1 to 2020Q1, our results provide empirical support for the theory that the BC has a nonlinear effect on liquidity creation. We find a positive and highly significant nonlinear effect of the BC on liquidity creation, which not only supports the pro-cyclicality of liquidity creation but also improves the liquidity creation estimation compared to previous studies. The results are robust to different proxies of the BC and model specifications. We also document that US bank holding companies create liquidity more during the expansion phase (normal times) than during the recession phase (crisis times) of the BC, suggesting an asymmetrical effect of BC changes on liquidity creation. Our findings have important implications for financial market participants by suggesting that banks should keep alternative sources of funding on hand during the BC recession phase. Insights from our study also provide policy implications for central banks and prudent supervisors to consider when incentivizing banks, for instance, by lowering regulatory requirements, adjusting the policy rate, or implementing any other quantitative easing policy during the BC recession phase to keep the financial system efficient.

We establish a model in which speculators use feedback trading characteristics to infer the behavior of irrational investors and induce them to trade. We also discuss the stability and time series of asset prices. Our results show that: (1) speculators have speculation and arbitrage demands and make “noise” to induce irrational investors to trade, (2) the time series of asset prices show stable momentum and a reversal effect when fundamental traders dominate the market, and (3) momentums are unstable and perform poorly under extreme circumstances. Our article offers a unique approach to understanding the micro mechanism of different momentum effects in various markets and suggests a plausible theoretical framework to illustrate such differences.

We investigate the causal effect of increasing shareholder rights on employee satisfaction. To ensure causality, we use close shareholder votes on antitakeover provisions included in the Entrenchment Index (E-Index) as exogenous shocks to the corporate governance of a company. A 1-point increase in shareholder rights on the E-Index scale causes a 10% decrease in employee satisfaction. The channels that drive our results are decreases in employees' opinion about firm culture, in their view about the company's CEO, in the number of employees, and in capital expenditures.

We study the potential factors that determine the large and persistent price deviations in Chinese equity exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Our results suggest that ETF liquidity and arbitrage activity are positively correlated with ETF price efficiency, and the relation is more pronounced with higher institutional ownership. We also evaluate the effect of two exogenous shocks in the Chinese market. Using a policy change that added market makers to ETFs on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) and Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), we find that market makers improve price efficiency and that the impact is stronger for ETFs with lower liquidity. We also exploit a change in trading rules on the SZSE and show that the relaxation of arbitrage restrictions improves price efficiency. Altogether, these findings provide evidence that lack of liquidity, due to the unique market structure and regulations of the Chinese market, contributes to price inefficiency of Chinese ETFs.