Journal of Banking & Finance最新文献

We show that syndicated loan spreads are lower as borrowers’ shareholders cross-hold more lenders’ equity. Apart from controlling for borrower and lender fixed effects and various other ownership measures, we address endogeneity concerns by conducting a difference-in-differences analysis exploiting the mergers of institutional investors. Additional tests on cross-holding shareholders’ holding period, the impact of active cross-holders, subsamples of borrowers subject to different degrees of shareholder–creditor conflicts, changes in borrower risk around loan initiation, and the number of financial covenants provide support for the hypothesis that borrower shareholders’ equity holdings of lenders reduce agency costs of debt.

We examine the real effects of credit supply volatility in emerging economies. In countries with highly effective governments, government-owned banks play a significant role in reducing the effect of credit supply volatility on macroeconomic volatility. Conversely, foreign banks do not significantly change this effect. Furthermore, the presence of government-owned banks as development banks plays a positive role in stabilizing the economy during a sovereign or currency crisis. In countries where foreign banks dominate the banking sector, these banks amplify the adverse effect of a volatile credit supply on the volatilities in output, consumption, and investment growth rates, especially during a banking crisis.

This paper examines the role of intellectual property (IP) law as a determinant for external debt financing of innovative firms. For identification, we exploit exogenous variation in patent right enforcement arising from the 2004 EU Enforcement Directive. This major policy reform strengthened IP rights and, thus, raised patent owners' asset position. We find that patenting firms significantly increase their use of debt and benefit from lower interest rates in response to the amendment, especially if they own valuable patent portfolios. These effects are most pronounced for relatively small and financially constrained firms, emphasizing the importance of the legal framework in fostering debt financing activities of innovation-oriented firms.

This paper examines the effect of financial literacy on mortgage stress. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we find that borrowers with high levels of financial literacy are over 60 percent less likely to suffer from mortgage stress than borrowers with low levels of financial literacy after controlling for observables. Our findings remain robust to various potential issues, including sample selection bias and functional misspecifications. Moreover, we find that the effect of financial literacy varies across different age groups of borrowers. Further analysis reveals strong cross effects of financial literacy and quantitative reasoning on mortgage stress.

In this paper, we survey a large sample of Swiss households to measure sustainable finance literacy, which we define as the knowledge and skill of identifying and assessing financial products according to their reported sustainability-related characteristics. To this end, we use multiple-choice questions. Furthermore, we measure Swiss private investors' level of awareness about sustainable financial products using open-ended questions. We find that Swiss households, which are generally highly financially literate by international standards, exhibit low levels of sustainable financial literacy compared to the current working definitions of sustainable finance. Moreover, despite its low level, knowledge about sustainable finance is a significant factor in the reported ownership of sustainable products. The empirical results also show a relatively low level of awareness. Generally, these empirical findings suggest a need to create transparent regulatory standards and strengthen information campaigns about sustainable financial products.

We employ textual analysis to identify mergers and acquisitions (M&As) financed by corporate loans and show that acquirer announcement returns are higher in loan-financed M&As. Utilizing an instrumental variable approach and a quasi-natural experiment, we provide evidence that lenders contribute to the higher acquirer returns in loan-financed M&As. Our findings support the view that lenders differ in their ability to screen and monitor borrowers and that their ability is persistent. We also find evidence that lenders’ participation in the M&A market can resolve uncertainty about M&A deal quality, improve corporate governance by preventing value-destroying M&As, and provide long-term monitoring benefits to acquirer shareholders.

We argue a positive association between common ownership and liquidity creation because common ownership increases risk-absorption capacity through higher profit margins, greater equity capital, and improved disclosure quality. Accordingly, we find solid evidence that banks with greater common ownership create 3.56%–4.54% more liquidity. The beneficial effect on liquidity creation is dominant for banks with high risk-absorption capacities, enhanced disclosure quality, low competition, greater long-term shareholdings, and low performance-sensitive managerial incentives, substantiating our theoretical conjectures and establishing five significant channels. Finally, we show that banks have incentive to create more liquidity when they have significant co-ownerships among themselves. Our main findings remain robust to multiple proxies, alternative specifications, and three methods to address endogeneity concerns – difference-in-differences based on the Blackrock–Barclays Global Investors merger in 2009, two-stage least squares analysis with instrumental variables based on Russell 2000 index inclusion, and propensity score matching.

We find that firms with CFOs who have extensive social connections within the finance industry hold less precautionary cash. CFO connections matter more than CEO connections, reflecting the preeminence of CFOs among C-level executives in cash management and negotiating access to corporate finance. Firms reduce the proportion of assets held in cash by seven percentage points in the two years following CFO turnover and the appointment of a CFO with finance industry connections. The stock market valuation of incremental cash holdings of firms with well-connected CFOs is lower than for other firms, consistent with investor recognition of CFO social capital as an alternative means to address constraints on external capital.

This study examines the impact of controlling shareholders’ ownership on trading activity under regimes with different disclosure rules. In regimes with ambiguous disclosure rules, trading volume and turnover are higher when controlling shareholders’ ownership is low and their control rights potentially exceed their cash flow rights. However, this impact diminishes in regimes with strict and unambiguous disclosure rules. These findings are robust to endogeneity concerns, suggesting that investor beliefs about potential agency conflicts are less heterogeneous, as evidenced by their trading behavior when disclosure rules are stringent and well defined. The results highlight the role of disclosure credibility and readability in influencing trading activity, offering new insights into the relationship between ownership structure and market behavior.