Journal of Banking & Finance最新文献

We show that investment decisions of country ETF market participants measured by ETF market order imbalances are driven by global shocks rather than local risks. We argue that the ETF price discovery mechanism is one of the key channels through which global shocks propagate to local economies, leading to increased return correlation with the U.S. market and limiting the benefits of international diversification. ETF order imbalance is predictive of the underlying MSCI index returns. The staggered introduction of country ETFs alters return correlations between underlying foreign and U.S. market indices. We find that countries with stronger ETF price discovery have higher comovement with the U.S. market lending further support for the proposed mechanism.

High secrecy cultures are characterized by a preference for confidentiality and non-disclosure of information. This study documents the impact of cultural differences in secrecy on firms’ access to credit. We use data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys for a large sample of firms operating in 35 countries from 2010 to 2019. We show that firms operating in countries with higher levels of secrecy are less likely to apply for credit when they need it—they are more discouraged—and also less likely to receive credit when they do apply—they are more rationed. The underlying economic channels are greater opacity and corruption in cultures with high secrecy. The effect of cultural secrecy on credit discouragement and credit rationing is moderated by trust in banks, interpersonal trust, and firms’ financial dependence on external sources. We control for several potential alternative drivers and conduct several robustness tests. The results confirm that firms have better access to credit in cultures that promote transparency and information disclosure.

We examine the information content of off-exchange retail order flow relative to off-exchange institutional and on-exchange order flow. We use alternative sources of retail order identification and account for the fact that market opacity affects the order routing choices of both institutions and the brokers who sell retail orders. After controlling for volume effects, we find that retail order flow is more informed than off-exchange institutional order flow. Off-exchange price discovery comes mostly from retail order flow. However, on days with greater Robinhood activity, the information content of retail order flow drops. Our results reconcile some mixed findings in this literature.

This paper investigates the importance of U.S. macroeconomic news in driving low-frequency fluctuations in the term structure of interest rates in Canada, Sweden, and the U.K. We follow two complementary approaches: First, we apply a regression-based framework that aggregates the impact of daily macroeconomic news on bond yields to a lower quarterly frequency. Next, we estimate a macro-finance affine term structure model linking the daily news to lower-frequency changes in bond yields and its expectations and term premia components. Both approaches show that U.S. macroeconomic news is an important source of lower-frequency quarterly fluctuations in bond yields in these open economies, and even more important than their respective domestic macroeconomic news. Furthermore, the macro-finance model shows that U.S. macroeconomic news is particularly important in explaining low-frequency changes in the expectation components of the nominal, real, and break-even inflation rates.

We document that employee bankruptcy costs affect corporate capital structure decisions via their impact on the bargaining power of labor unions. We employ difference-in-differences and triple-difference research designs surrounding a major bankruptcy reform that increased personal bankruptcy costs. Our results suggest that, on average, this reform reduced unions’ bargaining power, resulting in a decrease in the financial leverage of unionized firms relative to nonunionized firms. Our results provide new evidence for a relatively unexplored determinant of capital structure—personal bankruptcy costs.

We use lottery jackpot winnings in a neighborhood as an exogenous shock to investing in stocks. We find that retail investors whose brokerages are near the stores that sell winning tickets buy more stocks than their counterparts after the shock. These purchases lead to lower returns. We use a survey to identify the behavioral factors like regretfulness and probability weighting that are the main drivers of our findings. Moreover, these investors tend to buy more lottery-like stocks, but the shock does not affect their selling decisions. Finally, we perform several falsification tests and robustness checks and find consistent results.

We provide for the first time the emerging market variance risk premium (EMVRP) from 2006 to 2023, based on nine emerging stock and option markets—Brazil, China, India, South Korea, Mexico, Poland, Russia, South Africa, and Taiwan. The EMVRP significantly predicts international stock returns and currency appreciation rates, especially for horizons longer than six months. This is in sharp contrast with the predictive pattern of the developed market variance risk premium (DMVRP), which is more important over horizons shorter than six months. These findings are consistent with an illustrative model incorporating partial market integration and heterogeneous economic uncertainty.

This paper studies the measurement of forward-looking tail risk in US equity markets around the COVID-19 outbreak. We document that financial markets are informative about how pandemic risk has spread in the economy in advance of the actual outbreak. While the tail risk of the market index did not respond before the outbreak, investors identified less pandemic-resilient economic sectors whose tail risk boomed in advance of both the market drawdown and the implementation of social distancing provisions. This pattern is consistent across different methodologies for measuring forward-looking tail risk, using option contracts, and across various horizons.

We show that time-series variation in investment opportunities and labor demand create heterogeneity in the effects of labor mobility on corporate investment over the business cycle. To isolate variation in labor mobility, we create an annual state-level index from 1984 through 2017 that captures the degree to which state courts enforce covenants not to compete. We find that firms located in more mobile labor markets increase investment rates more during economic expansions but have similar investment rates during periods of low or negative growth. This increased investment during expansions is greater for firms that rely more on recruiting skilled and experienced workers to grow their businesses, and it translates into higher sales growth rates, profits, and valuations. Overall, our results suggest that the benefits of being able to recruit qualified workers with relevant experience during expansions outweigh the costs associated with losing key workers.

We analyze price discovery in the options and CDS markets during the 2008 short-sale ban. Among the banned stocks, those with high open-purchased put–call ratios, low synthetic-to-stock price ratios, or high CDS rates exhibit poor performance in the following days. Additionally, options prices are more efficient for unbanned stocks during the ban period. These findings suggest that informed investors engage in derivative trading during highly distressed market conditions and that derivative prices contain more information about stock prices during the ban.