Asia-Pacific Journal of Financial Studies最新文献

We investigate the primary and secondary market reactions of US corporate bonds to the mandatory Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Disclosure Act of 2021 (hereafter, the ESG Disclosure Act). We compare ESG bonds with non-ESG bonds through a yield spread analysis for the primary market and a bond event study for the secondary market, assessing the impact on a sustainable premium (“sustainium”) following the enactment. Sustainium disappears from the primary market after the ESG Disclosure Act. Abnormal corporate bond returns in the secondary market are negative, and the impact on the sustainium is not economically different from zero. We also find that long-term corporate bonds are more vulnerable to the ESG Disclosure Act. These findings indicate that investors should assess ESG bonds according to long-term horizons if the sustainium is expected to persist.

We study the relation between CEO restricted stock, CEO incentives, and firm innovation. We first show that restricted stock is negatively associated with R&D investment. We also show that CEO restricted stock is positively related to the number of patents granted and citations received. However, further investigation shows that CEO restricted stock has a positive relation with firm exploitation but a negative relation with firm exploration and breakthrough innovation. The results suggest that restricted stock appears to incentivize CEOs to make efficient R&D investments and produce more innovative outputs in general, but only through exploitation rather than exploration and breakthrough innovations.

This study empirically examines the relationship between “investor attention” and aggregate stock returns, seeking to determine whether interest in South Korea can predict the returns of the Korean stock market. The results confirm a positive relationship between interest in Korea and future stock market returns. Furthermore, this relationship is observed to have emerged with the widespread dissemination of Korean culture starting in 2017. This impact is found to be more significant on the KOSDAQ market compared to the KOSPI market. Within the KOSPI market, the influence of interest on stock returns is particularly pronounced in the case of small-cap stocks. It is also observed that since 2017, as interest in South Korea has increased, information related to the improvement of Korea's corruption index has begun to significantly affect stock returns.

This paper investigates the underlying causes of the nonlinear link between financial asset holdings and innovative efficiency. It identifies an inverted U-shaped pattern linking corporate financialization to innovation, with financing restrictions, agency costs, and business risk serving as some of the relationship's partial mediating factors. By categorizing financial assets into short-term monetary and long-term nonmonetary types, it reveals heterogeneous effects on innovative efficiency, suggesting that the impact is not solely crowding out or a pulling effect but varies based on asset type and proportion. Additionally, it argues for continual adjustment of proper corporate financialization levels based on firm-specific factors and changing external conditions. Notably, excessive financialization appears less prevalent among Chinese firms, with internal governance and external environmental enhancements recommended to optimize financialization for innovation.

We examine the empirical performance in the Korean stock market of three new asset pricing factor models: the Stambaugh–Yuan (2017) mispricing factor model, the Daniel et al. (2020) three-factor model, Barillas-Shanken (2018) six-factor model and the Hou et al. (2021) q5-factor model. We find that all factors in these factor models have significantly positive risk premiums and are not explained by the Fama–French six-factor model. Compared to other prevalent models, the q5 model shows the highest maximum Sharpe ratio, mainly due to its profitability and expected growth factors. Further, the q5 model exhibits superior performance in explaining the returns of 97 anomaly portfolios in the Korean market.

The pitch of a male voice is an honest signal of his threat potential coming from testosterone. Recognizing endogenous matches between firms and CEOs, we propose to use voice pitch of the CEO as a proxy for the unobservable risk-taking strategy of the firm. Using digitally analyzed male CEO voice pitch in 167 CNBC interviews during the 2008 global financial crisis, we find that deep-voiced Wall Street CEOs (i) managed riskier firms, (ii) received more equity-based compensation before the crisis and (iii) were more likely to be fired after the crisis, controlling for economic incentives, overconfidence, and narcissism.

This study investigates whether employee characteristics are associated with corporate risk-taking activities. The analysis shows that employee tenure is negatively associated with corporate risk-taking. This association remains robust to the instrumental variable approach and propensity score matching method. Furthermore, the negative relation between employee tenure and corporate risk is stronger for firms offering lower wages and for more labor-intensive firms. Overall, this study highlights the importance of considering the interaction between managers and stakeholders such as employees when understanding corporate risk-taking.

We investigate whether the text of analyst reports can provide additional information beyond the recommendation and target price. Positive and negative word lexicons are generated through an automated Bayesian learning method applied to Korean analyst reports spanning from 2016 to 2018. Then, the textual tone of an analyst report is quantified as the difference between the frequencies of positive and negative words in the text. The announcement returns of portfolios sorted by textual tone exhibit significant differences ranging from 1.14% to 2.82% within the same recommendation or target price revision group. Regression analysis also reveals significant association between the textual tone of analyst reports and stock announcement returns, even when controlling for the recommendation and target price. Notably, the text proves to be more informative in negative tones and within firms with limited analyst coverage. Our results indicate that textual analysis can unveil nuanced analyst opinions not captured by numerical information.