Emerging Markets Review最新文献

The ever-changing global economy and sudden global public health events have posed challenges to financial resilience worldwide. As its important role in maintaining domestic economic stability, safeguarding national security, and enhancing international status, financial resilience has long been widely studied. However, few studies have empirically explored how technological progress affects financial resilience. Based on data from 30 provinces in China, this study adopts a panel two-way fixed effect model to identify the impact of technological progress on financial resilience and the underlying mechanisms. Results show that technological progress can significantly enhance financial resilience, and this impact is stronger in provinces with large population size, high employment proportion in the tertiary sector, high social consumption capacity, and provinces located in Central China. Further, technological progress have a positive impact on financial resilience through increased asset liquidity and government intervention.

This article explores catering behavior among security analysts by examining how firm-specific experience impacts forecast accuracy. Using analyst forecasts on listed companies in China from 2014 to 2018, we find that firm-specific experience significantly reduces analyst forecast accuracy, which indicates the existence of catering behavior. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that catering behavior primarily exists for analysts employed by large brokerage firms or who issue forecasts for large companies. Further analysis shows that catering behavior is more prevalent when analysts make forecasts for SOEs. These findings suggest multi-faced implications of firm-specific experience and call for better regulations on refraining analysts' catering behavior.

Using a sample of Chinese local listed state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from 2008 to 2020, we find that provincial State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) leaders' work experience at local companies significantly improves local SOEs' investment efficiency. This effect is stronger for local SOEs with shorter pyramidal layers and those in regions with weak institutional environments. Moreover, mechanism tests show that provincial SASAC leaders' work experience at local companies improves local SOEs' investment efficiency by decreasing agency costs and weakening policy burdens. Overall, our study highlights the important role of regulators' characteristics in determining the investment efficiency of SOEs.

Using a unique dataset comprising 6313 firm-year observations for Chinese listed firms between 2008 and 2017, we investigate the impact of CEO social capital on cost of debt. Our results show that CEO social capital is negatively related to cost of debt, and the impact of CEO social capital in environments with a low degree of marketization or social trust is more pronounced than in environments with a high degree of marketization or social trust. Moreover, our results reveal that two potential mechanisms, discretionary accruals and information disclosure quality, mediate the impact of CEO social capital on cost of debt.

Using hand-collected data on CEOs' hometown connections in Chinese A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2020, we find that such connections with suppliers are negatively associated with corporate risk-taking, reflected by the risk-taking behavior of CEOs with personal preference and self-interest. It is also found that the negative relationship between CEO hometown connections and corporate risk-taking is more pronounced for firms with greater economic policy uncertainty, firms in a period of tight monetary policy, firms with fewer analysts following, and firms with local CEOs, male CEOs, or CEOs without holding shares.

The paper adds to the literature on the issue of public debt in African economies, by investigating the role foreign exchange reserves play in improving the level of indebtedness and as buffer of the negative effect of exchange rate depreciation while considering the exchange rate policy. Our results show a direct link between the level of foreign currency reserves and that of external debt in Africa. Particularly, we demonstrate that higher foreign currency reserves tend to decrease the public debt stock to GDP. This effect is even more significant when countries go through high exchange rate depreciation episodes (10% or higher). This impact, however, is not homogenous among country groups, as only countries with a floating exchange regime tend to benefit from this buffer effect compared to anchored regimes. In a time where most African economies face severe exchange rate depreciation episodes following the U.S. monetary tightening policy, central bankers and policy makers need to consider a plethora of policy issues including interventions in the FX market to mitigate depreciations and maintain a sustainable public debt stock.

We investigate whether religious site density around a firm's headquarters is related to corporate default risk in China. We find that public firms surrounded by a higher number of Buddhist and Taoist temples are associated with lower default risk. In contrast to the widely documented impact of Western religiosity on corporate behavior, our mechanism tests indicate that lower default risk related to religious site density is primarily driven by better corporate governance and not by a surge in corporate conservatism. Finally, we find that this default risk lowering effect is more pronounced when firms also possess greater political resources.

Our study aims to investigate the role of financial inclusion as a mediator in the relationship between contextual factors and entrepreneurial willingness in Africa. While previous research has emphasized the importance of improving institutional and contextual factors to foster entrepreneurship, our study adds a new dimension by highlighting the critical need for tailored financial services that can cater to the unique needs of African entrepreneurs. In light of this, we have employed a robust and comprehensive methodology, leveraging micro-level data that covers 44,129 African adults and using Instrumental Variable Probit estimation. This approach allows us to offer valuable insights into the factors driving entrepreneurship in Africa. Our results suggest financial inclusion as a crucial determinant in the relationship between contextual factors and entrepreneurship in Africa, with the usage dimension being more important than the access dimension. Our findings reveal that the impact of contextual factors on entrepreneurship in Africa is strongly influenced by financial inclusion. By acting as a mediator, financial inclusion plays a pivotal role in shaping entrepreneurial willingness. Moreover, policymakers in Africa should focus on improving the business environment, addressing key contextual determinants of entrepreneurship where most African countries face a significant deficit compared to the world's top-ranking economies. These determinants include institutional quality, infrastructure, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) adoption, health, skills, product market, labor market, and innovation capability. Our study advances the field of research in two key ways. First, it provides empirically grounded evidence on both individual and contextual factors that can stimulate entrepreneurship in Africa. Given the representativeness of our sample, the policy implications of our study are valuable, offering useful insights for international institutions and policymakers working to promote entrepreneurship in Africa. Second, in contrast to previous studies on financial inclusion that use macroeconomic data to quantify the multidimensionality of financial inclusion, our study is unique in that it constructs a financial inclusion index based on microeconomic data to quantify the financial inclusion level of each individual in our sample.

This study investigates the effect of the clarity of monetary policy statements (MPSs) on financial market volatilities by employing linguistic analysis and a panel fixed effects estimator for a newly built dataset drawn from the MPSs of 21 developing countries. Our results show that MPS clarity, measured by complexity and readability indices, negatively affects foreign exchange rate volatility, a key policy variable in developing economies, suggesting that clear central bank communication can reduce financial market volatility. Given the low literacy levels in developing countries, their central banks should make an extra effort to write statements that are easy to comprehend.

We investigate the state-varying risk taking behavior of actively managed mutual funds by considering their transaction costs in trading securities. Our tournament model equilibrium suggests that, while transaction costs are low, interim winner funds tend to hold more volatile portfolios than interim losers. However, while transaction costs are high, the interim losers may take more risk than interim winners, and such behavior is more significant in the negative risk premium state for funds. We provide robust empirical evidence of state-varying risk-taking in both U.S. and China from 2005 to 2019. The U.S. mutual fund tournaments are less influenced given the bid-ask spreads on the stock market are 20 bps lower than that in China.