European Financial Management最新文献

Using a novel sample covering 3783 US public firms from 2007 to 2020, we examine how negative media coverage of firm-level environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices affects a firm's debt choice. We find that firms with higher ESG reputation risk rely more on public bond than bank loan. The social and governance components, in particular, matter. Moreover, firms that receive more negative news coverage display a higher propensity to issue new bonds as opposed to securing new bank debt. Overall, our study presents empirical evidence on the relation between firm ESG reputation risk and debt financing.

We investigate the effect of funding constraints and the financial crisis on the pricing dynamics between the spot and futures markets. Tighter funding constraints and the presence of a financial crisis deter informed investors from utilizing their informational advantage in the futures market, reducing the leading role and information shares of futures prices. Funding constraints negatively affect the probability of informed trading and large trading in the futures markets. Our findings are in line with the recent theoretical perspective that indicates both factors significantly affect informed trading, the cross-market process of price discovery, and financial stability.

Momentum stocks are exposed to aggregate volatility risk. This paper estimates an exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic model of market volatility to introduce a new volatility risk factor. Winners have negative loadings on this factor, whereas losers have positive loadings. Because volatility risk carries a negative price of risk, the new factor explains 73% of momentum profits. The paper rationalizes the volatility risks of momentum portfolios using growth option arguments and explains why momentum profits are short-lived, depend on market states, and concentrate among firms with high idiosyncratic volatility. Results are robust to controlling for other risk factors and using alternative estimation procedures.

We examine how financial analyst forecasts could be influenced by local political forces. Using Chinese data, we find that financial analysts from brokerage houses controlled by provincial governments issue more optimistic forecasts for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) headquartered in the home province (i.e., home SOEs) than for nonhome SOEs, and this effect is more pronounced for nonhome SOEs located in competing provinces. Our results remain unchanged in a battery of robustness checks. Further, local officials are more likely to enjoy political career advancement when they pressure analysts to issue optimistic forecasts for home SOEs relative to nonhome SOEs from competing provinces.

This study examines the impact of non-Chief Executive Officer (non-CEO) executives' intraorganizational promotion-based incentives, also known as tournament incentives, on corporate labour investment efficiency. We find that tournament incentives lead to inefficient labour investment, measured as the absolute deviation from optimal net hiring warranted by firm fundamentals. This positive relationship is weakened when non-CEO executives are less eager to compete in the tournament. Mediating analysis demonstrates that reduced team cohesion, captured by non-CEO executive turnover, mediates the relationship between tournament incentives and labour investment inefficiency. Our evidence is consistent with the dysfunctional view of tournament incentives and highlights the importance of non-CEO executives' incentives in corporate labour investment.

Illiquid assets require a return premium; illiquidity is also a limit-to-arbitrage. We find that Amihud's illiquidity premium is significantly higher among underpriced stocks than among overpriced stocks. Excluding the most mispriced stocks leads to a higher and more reliably estimated illiquidity premium. Amihud's illiquidity measure is positively correlated with overpricing, consistent with arbitrage asymmetry, while inconsistent with Lou and Shu's contention that the return premium associated with the Amihud measure reflects mispricing rather than compensation for illiquidity. Our results demonstrate that it is important to account for their role as limits-to-arbitrage when evaluating the pricing of illiquidity measures.

The second Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) mandated the unbundling of payments for research and trading. This research explores whether the impact of MiFID II differs between large and small firms in terms of analyst coverage and stock liquidity. Focusing on the UK stock markets we find a significant drop in analyst coverage on the Main Market, which leads to a deterioration in market liquidity. In contrast, the requirement of AIM firms to retain a Nominated Adviser, who often provides research coverage, has mitigated the impact of MiFID II.

This study examines the impact of geographic income diversification of large European banks on performance and risk-taking by using unique data. By dividing the total operating income into three regions as the home country, the rest of Europe and the rest of the world, we find evidence that geographic income diversification reduces bank performance and increases risk-taking. Particularly, shifting operations from home countries to other European countries or the rest of the world reduces bank performance and enhances risk-taking unless the bank is highly concentrated in these areas. We also identify contributing channels, including the “follow-the-customer” hypothesis, new subsidiaries and board diversity, to explain the adverse effect.

Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) have often tracked indices and charged low fees so their incentives to improve firm performance are questionable although little empirical work has investigated this issue. Theoretically, however, we expect firms to perform better when held by more engaged ETFs. We develop a new measure of engagement using a weighted-average concentration measure which captures the combined effect of the concentration of the portfolios of the ETFs investing in a firm and the ownership of the firm by those ETFs. Using ETFs' investment in US-listed firms for the period 2000–2019, we confirm our expectations that more engaged ETFs improve firm performance.