Financial Management最新文献

Political partisanship significantly shapes firm executives’ economic outlook. We find that firms, whose managers share political alignment with the US president, achieve superior innovation outcomes, including higher patent counts, increased patent citations, and greater patent value. We establish a causal relationship through a difference-in-differences approach, focusing on periods around US presidential elections. This effect is more pronounced in firms with overconfident CEOs and during periods of heightened policy uncertainty, suggesting that partisan optimism stimulates innovation incentives. Firms led by partisan-aligned managers generate patents with greater originality, generality, and an exploratory style.

This study investigates the effect of the US–China trade war on corporate innovation in the context of China. We find that the first-order effect of the trade war on corporate innovation is significantly negative. That is, Chinese firms exposed to the US–China trade war have lower numbers of patent applications and invention patent applications. Underlying mechanisms include reductions in market expansion and innovation input. Our findings are more pronounced for firms connected to the United States and those suffering financial distress and for non-state-owned enterprises. We further contribute to the literature by showing that firms with developed managerial ability, more confident managers, and better corporate social responsibility performance tend to increase innovation for competitiveness in response to the trade war. Finally, we explore the effect of Chinese retaliatory tariff shocks on corporate innovation and find that US tariffs and Chinese retaliatory tariffs hinder corporate innovation in China.

This study examines the influence of corporate site visits on information acquisition and dissemination by independent directors (IDs). Employing two unique sources of data from Chinese listed firms based on the mandatory disclosure of IDs’ (i) site visit activities and (ii) opinions about corporate decisions, we find that the acquisition of firm-specific information and the dissemination of such information to the market are greater among IDs who conduct visits than their counterparts without such visits. Moreover, this effect is more pronounced in firms with complex information environments, in firms with lower proprietary costs, and among IDs with greater internal information asymmetry, superior external information, and stronger incentives and abilities to perform their duties. Furthermore, the firm-specific information disseminated by IDs leads to stronger market reactions and improves stock price efficiency. Our study shows that site visits contribute to the informational role of IDs, and our evidence offers important corporate governance and regulatory implications.

Using hand-collected data from China's split share structure reform (SSSR) program, we show that foreign institutional investors’ certification mitigates domestic minority shareholders’ mistrust of controlling shareholders’ reform plans and facilitates the implementation of the SSSR. Domestic minority shareholders cast fewer dissenting votes, complete the SSSR more quickly but with lower compensation, and achieve higher stock return reactions in reforming firms with higher foreign institutional ownership. Foreign institutional investors’ prestige is a key factor in aligning domestic minority shareholders toward seeking long-term payoffs. Our work reveals the positive role of foreign institutional investors’ certification in a salient reform of corporate governance.

We examine the causal impact of climate uncertainty on companies’ cash holdings using local temperature trends. We find a notable increase in cash reserves among companies in response to rising climate-related risks. We also identify two significant channels through which climate uncertainty influences firms’ cash management: heightened environmental enforcement risk and increased physical risk. Furthermore, we observe that the positive effect of temperature trends on cash holdings is more pronounced for financially constrained firms and those with a lower level of environmental protection awareness. External financing through equity and debt issuance, as well as cost reduction strategies involving research and development and selling, general, and administrative activities, represent viable avenues for firms to bolster their cash reserves. However, financially constrained firms are less inclined to build up cash reserves through debt financing. Our findings underscore the precautionary nature of corporate cash policies and shed light on how temperature fluctuations can significantly shape corporate behavior.

Little is known about how executive gender shapes the inherent conflict of interest between shareholders and bondholders. Using a sample of almost 100,000 unique bond-year observations, this study investigates how the appointment of female chief executive officers (CEOs) lowers the default outlook. Our evidence indicates that bond yield and bond volatility are significantly lower after a female takes the helm at a firm. This executive gender effect remains highly statistically and economically significant across various robustness checks and after addressing endogeneity concerns. Female CEOs lower the default risk component of the bond yield but have no material impact on the liquidity component. Subsample analysis substantiates the conditional effect of female CEOs on bond yield and bond volatility. Our evidence indicates that female CEOs’ risk-averse attributes pass through the credit risk and information asymmetry channels.

Exploiting the 2015 central parity reform in China, we examine whether and how currency flotation affects corporate payout policies. The reform shifted China's currency regime from a crawling peg to the US dollar to partial flotation, significantly increasing its currency risk. We find that firms with high foreign currency exposures reduced their cash dividends postreform relative to firms with low foreign currency exposures. The dividend reduction is more pronounced for firms with less financial hedging or less financial flexibility before the reform. Firms display asymmetrical responses to foreign exchange gains versus losses. Specifically, while firms cut cash dividends when experiencing foreign exchange losses, they do not increase cash dividends when obtaining foreign exchange gains. A falsification test shows no changes in firms’ stock dividends that do not involve cash flows. Overall, our study shows that currency flotation, through increasing currency risks, dampens firms’ cash dividends.

We study whether fund managers’ industry experience is an important source of value creation in hedge fund activism. We find that the targets of industry-expert fund managers realize higher activism announcement returns and better operating performance, particularly when fund managers’ industry expertise is more valuable for targets. These targets also engage in more focused acquisition and divestiture activities in industries where fund managers have experience, allocate more employees to these industries, and cut investments more in the postacquisition period. The superior performance of targets of industry-expert fund managers is robust to controlling for the endogeneity concern and the attrition bias.

This paper incorporates reference-dependent preferences  into a consumption-based asset pricing model featuring Epstein–Zin utility. Three relevant results emerge from this extension. First, agents prefer the late resolution of uncertainty in recursive utility. Second, the late resolution of uncertainty helps replicate the downward-sloping term structure of market excess return. Third, the intertemporal substitution elasticity is more sensitive to asset prices through increasing precautionary saving motivations. A closed-form solution for the proposed model largely explains (i) high, volatile, and countercyclical equity premiums; (ii) low risk-free rates; and (iii) the downward-sloping term structure of equity premiums and variance ratios.

Academic finance faculty earn a premium relative to other business school faculty. We show that the rewards to publishing outside of the top journals (JF, JFE, RFS) are significantly lower in finance relative to a broader set of journals in other business school fields. Revealed preferences from a journal submission survey suggest these incentives influence behavior. We estimate a lower unconditional probability of a top publication in finance, which raises its marginal value, leading to higher compensation. The opportunity cost of academic finance versus industry is also larger relative to other departments. Our results complement a number of recent studies on the rise of finance industry wages and suggest a novel channel that raises the production costs of finance-educated workers.