European Financial Management最新文献

We investigate whether firms engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) can preserve firm value during normal and unprecedented exogenous adverse events. Our evidence shows, in regular times, a negative relation between CSR engagement and firm value, but under adverse economic conditions, CSR protects firm value by decreasing firm risks. We also find that firms with high managerial attributes engage in greater CSR activities that benefit shareholders in both normal and aberrant financial times. Despite the controversy surrounding CSR, our evidence points out that CSR can be viewed as a set of intangible assets that can improve firm value across good and bad economic states when firms are run by high-attribute managers.

This paper investigates how private information affects the joint determination of the payment method and the bid premium in M&As. The focus is on the uncertainty of the stand-alone valuations of the firms involved in the transaction induced by their opacity. First, we model M&A negotiations as a signalling game with two-sided private information and derive correlations between firm opacity and bid characteristics from equilibrium analysis. Then, we analyze a sample of U.S. deals, using an index based on market measures of adverse selection to quantify firm opacity. We find that the likelihood of stock offers and the bid premium increase with the target's opacity, while more opaque bidders are associated with fewer stock offers and smaller bid premiums.

In this paper we provide new evidence of investor inattention by showing that personal occurrences such as birthdays are able to drive attention away from the stock market. We document that individual investors significantly reduce their trading activity in the 3 days around their birthday. The reduction in the propensity to trade is larger for more active traders, in the event of a decade birthday and when this celebrative event falls on a Friday. Results are robust to analyses focusing only on days when investor attention should be at its peak, as expressed by excess news coverage and trading volumes.

We propose a firm-level measure of exposure to trade policy shifts that combines characteristics (tradability of goods, share of output exported and corporate risk disclosures) with information from stock returns. We show that the measure reliably captures out-of-sample differences in price responses and sentiment related to trade tensions, both in US and international data. Differences across firms are economically important with return effects of 140 bp around tariff announcements. We argue that such a multidimensional measure is a useful tool for future research on trade policy risk.

This paper analyzes the role of newborn gender in household investment decisions. Parenting a new baby is associated with a reduction of the share of financial wealth held as cash and an increase in risky investments. The reallocation is however gender-heterogeneous: the increase in the share of both total and financial wealth allocated to risky assets when parenting girls is reduced for households parenting boys. The effect is driven by the first child. Parents of newborn girls hold riskier portfolios because they make financial decisions influenced by their expectations on the autonomy and financial independence of newborns in adulthood.

This study explores the relationship between environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reputational risk and investment efficiency. We provide evidence that ESG reputational risk relates to higher corporate suboptimal investment (underinvestment) and a lower speed of adjustment back to the optimal investment level. Our findings hold for parametric and nonparametric estimations of underinvestment and are robust to several techniques that address endogeneity and self-selection. Overall, our study highlights the important role of ESG reputational risk in determining corporate investment efficiency.

We study the fundamental properties of the “Buy the dip” (BTD) investment heuristic. Looking into cash holdings versus a stock market exchange-traded fund, we find that BTD does not necessarily maximize investors' real terminal wealth and is sensitive to market conditions at the beginning year of investment. While under certain conditions, BTD may improve risk-adjusted performance over a passive investment policy or a classical dollar-cost averaging approach, its optimality is subject to estimation risk. Given the vast popularity of BTD, our results have important implications for asset managers and retail investors alike.

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.