Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance最新文献

State-contingent debt has the potential to eliminate costly debt crises. Yet, markets for this type of debt remain essentially closed. This paper uses a simple model to show conditions under which specialized risk-averse foreign lenders prefer non-contingent debt to state-contingent debt. Borrowers always prefer state-contingent debt as non-contingent debt increases the probability of default and reduces investment and output. However, lenders face a trade-off between the total surplus generated by the investment project and the share that they appropriate through the financial trade. Even though total surplus is smaller with non-contingent debt when compared to state-contingent debt, the share of the surplus that goes to lenders is larger under non-contingent debt. The paper then characterizes environments where state-contingent debt is more likely to be preferred by both borrowers and lenders under risk aversion.

We investigate the impact of family ties on the performance of family firms in East Asia. To measure family ties, we used both objective and subjective indicators from the World Value Survey. Our findings indicate that family firms that are nurtured in a society with strong family ties tend to have better performance compared to family firms that operate in a culture with weak family ties. Furthermore, family firms that have strong familial relationships are more likely to gain a competitive advantage over nonfamily firms. Conversely, family firms with weak ties tend to underperform nonfamily firms. Our results are robust across various measures of firm performance, classifications of family firm, considerations of heteroskedasticity and endogeneity, and different econometric methods.

The environmental courts represent institutional innovation in the judicial system independent of administrative regulations, this study examines whether and how environmental courts promote corporate green innovation by breaking collusion in Chinese heavily polluting listed firms from 2003 to 2020. Based on a staggered difference-in-difference analysis, our findings show that environmental courts have a stronger stimulating effect on green innovation quality and no effect on low-quality green patents. This effect is particularly more pronounced for firms with lower risk-taking ability, higher green agency costs, and state-owned firms. We also confirmed that environmental courts enhance authoritative judicial constraints on local governments, thereby curbing collusion and forcing them to implement environmental protection subsidies and administrative penalties to optimize corporate green innovation structure. Our fine-grained analysis indicates that independent green patents are more sensitive to environmental courts than collaborative ones. However, corporate green R&D efficiency does not improve following the establishment of environmental courts. Overall, our study underscores the importance of strengthening environmental justice as an effective mechanism for facilitating a just transition to a low-carbon green economy.

In this paper, we investigated the effect of network structures on stock’s systemic risk contribution, which measures the connection characteristics of investment network from different aspects. Firstly, we find that network centrality increases systemic risk contribution, and empirical results hold even after controlling for other factors and are also robust to alternate measures. Secondly, this paper further proposes two possible explanations. Specifically, investment network connection could increase the possibility of collusion with firms, facilitate the relevant institutional investors to hollow out the listed company, and firms at the center of network can amplify the sentiment of market participants through the generation and dissemination of information, thereby increasing stock’s systemic risk contribution. Besides, economic policy uncertainty (EPU) could strengthen the positive effect of network centrality on stock’s systemic risk contribution. Finally, we document that other important network features (including structural holes, clustering coefficients, and core-periphery structure) can also increase stock’s systemic risk contribution.

In this paper I estimate the impact of Targeted Longer-Term Refinancing Operations (TLTRO) on the evolution of lending amounts and rates in Slovenia, with a specific focus on distinct effects of TLTRO-I and II. I use a combination of difference-in-differences and instrumental variable approach, which together with detail credit register data enable the identification of supply side effects of the TLTRO policy. The results show a supporting impact of targeted operations on bank loan supply, resulting in higher credit growth and lower rates. I find that the TLTRO-I was supportive through both the quantity and price channels, whereas the TLTRO-II only shows a significant impact on the credit amount. Further, I find the transmission of TLTRO-I was higher through better capitalized banks, whereas both policy waves supported lending to safe and stable firms with higher credit ratings.

A two regime switching model is developed in an attempt to relate expected US stock market returns to deviations from fundamentals and to Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU). The analysis is based on monthly data that cover the period from January 1900 to October 2022 and the EPU index is used as an explanatory variable. The findings suggest that the US stock market spends most of the time in a low-volatility regime, periodically switching to a high-volatility regime during times of financial instability. In an attempt to examine the forecasting ability of the model, out-of-sample probabilities of a crash and a boom are estimated recursively. The results provide evidence that our model is able to depict periods of abrupt movements in the US stock market. Finally, the estimated model and the associated probability of a crash are used to develop and evaluate a proposed trading strategy, in order to analyse the financial usefulness of the model. A simple simulation reveals that our trading rule produces statistically significant abnormal returns and manages to outperform the simple buy-and-hold strategy for the period before the Covid-19 crisis.

This paper presents the empirical liquidity study of Islamic fixed-income securities during 2020–2021. Using bid-ask and Z-spread metrics we demonstrate that the apogee of both, liquidity and credit stresses in international sukuk market is reached in early April 2020. Contrasting results for non-Islamic fixed-income instruments, we show that sukuk credit spreads recover to pre-Covid levels faster than their bid-ask spreads. However, we find that the share of liquidity component in the yield spread of sukuks always remains below 1%, revealing that Covid-19 does not worsen in relative terms the economic attractiveness of this financing channel for Shariah-concerned entities and investors.

We develop a network-based probabilistic model to analyze systemic risk within a network of interconnected institutions. Harnessing the power of economic connections, we construct a weighted network that effectively captures the extent of direct risk spillovers. Then the risk contagion probabilistic model is constructed with the aid of the risk orbit contagion idea and inter-institutional dependencies. Our model examines contagion characteristics, uncertainty, and interdependence, revealing that neither a ring nor a complete financial network is optimal. We discover that the expected loss of the network does not have a monotonic relationship with the number of partners, depending on the trade-off between the network density and direct risk spillovers to mitigate systemic risk.

This paper extends the fundamentals-based valuation model in Nichols et al. (2017) to global, developed equity markets. The model is able to explain, on average, 81% of the cross-sectional share price variation among global stocks. To be applicable among international markets, actual cash-flow streams instead of clean surplus accounting figures are used to reflect the different importance of dividends and share repurchases around the world. Firms identified as undervalued outperform overvalued firms by 0.62% p.m. after controlling for size, book-to-market, operating profitability, investment, and momentum. This premium is further not explained by lottery-like stock preferences (MAX, idiosyncratic volatility, skewness), mispricing related variables (FSCORE, $\Delta$XFIN), or stock issuances. In support of a mispricing related explanation, we detect a significant post publication return decline in the easily exploitable long portfolio leg comprising undervalued stocks. Together with our analysis on investor sentiment, portfolio transitions, and arbitrage asymmetry, we provide evidence that deviations of the share price from the model’s estimated value indicate actual mispricing and according returns are unlikely to be a compensation for risk exposure.

Asset market dynamic interconnectedness poses significant challenges to investors, fund managers, and policymakers, particularly in periods of prolonged uncertainty and economic crisis. This study investigates the asymmetric connection between the Bitcoin, gold, and oil markets and the bond markets in the United States, Australia, China, and the European Union. The study employed nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) on data ranging from January 1, 2017, to January 26, 2023, that accounted for the COVID-19 pandemic period and the Russian-Ukraine war. The results indicate that a fall in the Bitcoin price leads to a rise in bond prices, most profoundly in the European Union, where a 1% rise in the Bitcoin price leads to a 0.032% fall in bond prices. Similarly, the oil price index indicated a negative asymmetric shock in bond prices, with the most profound rise in the US bond market. The gold market index exhibited a positive connection to the bond market (US bond market falls by 0.476%) as the market overreacts to a fall in prices rather than a rise, and often in the long run rather than the short run, except for Bitcoin. The Bitcoin and oil markets act as strong safe-havens, while gold plays the role of a weak hedge during the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. While our results are consistent over multiplier impact and stability tests, fund managers may find these significant due to the involvement of Russia and Ukraine as the two largest producers and exporters of several important commodities and energy. We discuss practical implications of our findings.