Financial Management最新文献

We document substantial time-series and cross-sectional variation in branch-level deposit account interest rates, maintenance fees, and fee thresholds, and examine whether variation in bank concentration helps explain variation in these prices. Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) alone is not correlated with any of the outcome variables. A “generalized HHI” (GHHI) capturing both common ownership (the degree to which banks are commonly owned by the same investors) and cross-ownership (the extent to which banks own shares in each other), is strongly correlated with all prices, even when we limit cross-sectional variation in bank ownership to only that predicted by the growth of index funds.

The issue of the presence of diverse directors on boards has attracted considerable attention among policymakers, practitioners, and academics. There is relatively less attention to the inclusion of diverse directors, or their onward trajectory after appointment. We study two outcomes related to inclusion—the retention of directors and their promotion to board leadership positions. Although gender is a key focus of many diversity discussions, we find significant inclusion results on skill diversity and nongender diversity dimensions. Retention and promotion are “less” likely for age- and ethnicity-diverse directors but both outcomes are more likely for skill-diverse directors.

Shareholder valuations are economically and statistically positively correlated with independent director power, gauged by a composite of social network power centrality measures. Powerful independent directors’ sudden deaths reduce shareholder value significantly; other independent directors’ deaths do not, consistent with powerful independent directors increasing firm valuations. Further tests associate more powerful independent directors with less value-destroying mergers and acquisitions, less free cash flow retention, more CEO accountability, and less earnings management. We interpret these findings as more powerful independent directors better detecting and countering CEO missteps because of better access to information, greater credibility in challenging errant top managers, or both.

By utilizing survey forecasts of macroeconomic statistics, we find that market participants’ expectations are not rational as they exhibit an anchoring bias. The forecasts systematically underpredict macroeconomic statistics and the forecast errors are predicted by past macroeconomic announcements. Most importantly, we find that the stock market does not see through this bias, that is, we find statistically significant stock price effects of “anticipated” components of macroeconomic announcements. Investors overweight the importance of historical information and do not make sufficient adjustments after the arrival of new information.

This paper studies the returns of credit default swap (CDS) indices over the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) cycle. We document that the CDS return is significantly higher in even weeks than in odd weeks of the FOMC cycle. The biweekly pattern in the CDS market is not a mere reflection of that in the stock market. A simple trading strategy based on the biweekly pattern yields an annual excess return of 8.8%. This pattern is linked to the resolution of macroeconomic uncertainty by the biweekly schedules of the Fed Reserve internal Board of Governors meetings. We provide further evidence that the Fed affects the CDS market via unexpected information signals and monetary policies that lead to reductions in the risk premium.

Do credit ratings affect the information content of corporate disclosure? Using novel data on rating analysts to obtain exogenous variation in rating information, we find that greater uncertainty in credit ratings increases the quality of information disclosed by the firm. This is consistent with the firm attempting to reduce overall uncertainty about value by improving the quality of its own disclosure. We further show that improved disclosure is beneficial to firms. Our results are consistent with theories in which improvements in one type of information can crowd out other types, and they suggest that policies aimed at improving rating accuracy may, in fact, reduce the quality of corporate disclosure.

We study the effect of a mandatory improvement in public disclosure due to the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on the stock return predictability of shorting activity. To assess the impact of the disclosure shock, we measure monthly changes in the demand for and supply of stocks for shorting and whether those changes predict negative returns in the following month. We provide international evidence that the ability of increases in shorting demand and supply to predict negative returns declines after the shock. The predictive ability of shorting in the month before a negative earnings surprise and news of a firm's questionable merger and acquisitions transaction also declines after the shock. These findings imply that the shock of the mandatory accounting change crowds out some of short-sellers’ value-relevant information in the equity lending market. Thus, although the democratization of information from a structured accounting change may make sophisticated investors worse off by reducing their ability to predict future returns, this change may also benefit all investors through timely stock price discovery.

We present a production-based model in which agents have heterogeneous risk aversion and heterogeneous discount rate. Compared to the exchange economy, the aggregate consumption-capital ratio and aggregate consumption volatility is reduced. The risk premium and the volatility of stock return increase when moving from the exchange economy to the production economy. We also find that the volatility of Tobin's q exhibits an inverted-U-shape and Tobin's q is procyclical.

We present evidence that spatially concentrated institutional investors enhance corporate innovation. These investors can coordinate more efficiently, leading to lower turnover of the holding firms’ stocks and more diversified portfolios, which enables the holding firms to increases corporate risk-taking and focus more on long-term investments. Consistent with this argument, we find that firms with spatially concentrated investors take higher risk, invest more heavily in innovative projects, generate more patents, and have more patent citations. Our results are robust to using instrumental variables and the introduction of a new airline route as an exogenous shock to spatial concentration among institutional investors.