European Financial Management最新文献

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.

The current study investigates the extreme risk dependence between green bonds and financial markets by employing the dual approaches of time-varying optimal copula and extreme risk spillover analysis of dynamic conditional Value-at-Risk. We report significant symmetric (asymmetric) tail-dependent copulas in the upper (lower) tails characterizing independent regimes. Green bonds offer sufficient diversification, safe-haven, and hedging opportunities during stable and distressing times to financial markets. The extreme risk spillovers revealed that COVID-19 transformed the spillovers between green bonds and financial markets except Bitcoin. We proposed insightful implications for policymakers, governments, investors, and portfolio managers to relish the findings for their investment avenues.

Substantial remunerative benefits accrue to managers of new hedge funds launched after the implementation of the Volcker Rule if their previous employer is a large US bank. After the rule, ex-bankers' funds charge higher management fees and receive more flows as compared with other new hedge funds established during the same period. This phenomenon is related to changes in investor perception of the distribution of skills of new fund managers rather than to the actual differences in skills. Ex-bankers' funds are indistinguishable from other funds in terms of performance, risk, and liquidation probability, both before and after the Volcker Rule.