Financial Management最新文献

This paper analyzes if lenders resolve managerial agency problems in loan contracts using sweep covenants. Sweeps require a (partial) prepayment when triggered and are included in many contracts. Exploiting exogenous reductions in analyst coverage due to brokerage house mergers and closures, we find that increased borrower opacity significantly increases sweep use. The effect is strongest for borrowers with higher levels of managerial entrenchment and if lenders hold both debt and equity in the firm. Overall, our results suggest that lenders implement sweep covenants to mitigate managerial agency problems by limiting contingencies of wealth expropriation.

We explore the relation between fund performance and the assets managed by the fund's managers that are outside the fund. Controlling for fund size, we find a negative relation between performance and the size of fund managers’ outside holdings, the number of other funds managed by a fund's managers, and the number of distinct fund categories managed by a fund's managers. This effect is driven by holdings that do not overlap with those held within the fund, and the effect's economic magnitude, while less than that of fund size, is comparable to that of fund family size and twice that of turnover. Endogeneity is addressed using fund mergers and recursive demeaning. Results suggest that manager responsibilities outside a fund significantly impact performance and that limited attention plays a role.

We examine the effect of minority state ownership on firm performance using the Chinese stock market crash in 2015. We find that treatment firms with minority state ownership accumulated from governmental purchases of equities experience significant reductions in operating performance. The negative impact is more severe in firms with higher riskiness and firms with less powerful large shareholders. We also find that treatment firms’ risk decreases and their employment increases after minority state shareholders step in, providing supportive evidence on the government's motives of reducing risk and preventing mass layoffs. Further tests reveal the channels through which minority state ownership impedes investment efficiency, productivity, and innovation. The negative impact diminishes when government institutions divest their shares in a timely manner. Overall, our results suggest there are unintended negative consequences of minority state ownership arising from the governmental rescue package in a market crisis.

This paper investigates the impact of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States on closed-end fund (CEF) discounts. I show that CEF discounts increased after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, while individual investor sentiment declined. Furthermore, CEFs with higher retail ownership had a larger discount increase, which suggests that individual investor sentiment is a potential contributor to CEF discounts. This finding seems less likely to be driven by rational channels or income-driven fire sales, as shown by further analysis. Overall, the results shed light on the CEF discount puzzle using a new setting.

Using proposal-level data in China, we document that online voting significantly increases minority shareholders’ participation in voting, and online voting is related to more dissenting votes. The association between online voting and minority shareholders’ participation and dissent is stronger in underperforming firms, indicating that minority shareholders tend to participate and dissent to express dissatisfaction. The association is stronger for shareholders with stronger voting power. Finally, we find that when minority shareholders’ dissent fails to veto a proposal, dissenting minority shareholders are less likely to participate and vote again the following year. Our results suggest that mechanisms designed to facilitate minority shareholder voting lead to greater and more informed participation in the corporate governance process.

We examine the impact of product market competition on firms' systematic risk. Using a measure of total product market similarity, we document a strong negative relationship between market power and market betas. The effect more than triples in the most recent period of low competition. Anticompetitive mergers result in a significant reduction in market betas. Firms facing less competition seem to be partially insulated from systematic discount-rate shocks. Lower equity costs therefore imply that market power is partly self-perpetuating.

This paper analyzes sustainability-linked loans (SLLs), a new category of debt instrument that incorporates environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations. Using a large sample of loans issued between 2017 and 2022, we assess the design of SLLs by evaluating their key performance indicators (KPIs) using a comprehensive quality score. Our findings suggest that SLLs only partially rely on KPIs that generate credible sustainability incentives. We document that SLL borrowers do not significantly improve their ESG performance post issuance and show that stock markets are rather indifferent to the issuance of SLLs by EU borrowers, while SLL issuance announcements by US borrowers are met with significantly negative abnormal returns by investors. These findings call into question the beneficial sustainability and signaling effects that borrowers may hope to achieve by issuing ESG-linked debt.

We examine whether increasing investor attention affects stock price efficiency. To identify the causal effect, we employ daily repeated quasi-natural experiments in China where investor attention difference is purely driven by price rounding effect without information regarding stock fundamentals. Stocks tend to draw significant more attention and show higher price efficiency after being exposed to the Winner List. We also find supporting evidence for two nonexclusive channels through which investor attention enhance stock price efficiency: increasing stock liquidity and stronger net inflows from large orders. The positive relationship between investor attention and price efficiency is more pronounced among stocks with lower institutional shareholdings, stocks without overseas or Big Four audit firms, and stocks without B- or H-shares. Our findings further shed light on the significant impact of saliency on the capital market.

The validity of asset pricing models implies white-noise pricing errors (PEs). However, we find that the PEs of six well-known factor models all exhibit a significant reversal pattern and are predictable by their lagged values up to 12 months. Moreover, the predictability of the PEs can produce substantial economic profits. Similar conclusions hold for recently developed machine learning models too. Additional analysis reveals that the significant PE profits cannot be explained by common behavioral biases. Our results imply that much remains to be done and there is a great need to develop new asset pricing models.