Asia-Pacific Journal of Financial Studies最新文献

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.

This study aims to provide economic insights to enhance the implementation of financial inclusion policies by advancing credit analytics through financial digital transformation. To this end, we examine whether integrating financial analytics innovation with large-scale financial data can boost the effectiveness of financial inclusion policies and ultimately contribute to better economic outcomes for financially vulnerable individuals. According to our analysis, the government funding program of KRW 200 billion (approximately USD 155 million) can potentially assist an additional 46.56% of financially excluded individuals in South Korea who struggle to obtain loans due to their current credit ratings.

Within the context of the investor–management interaction platforms “E-Interaction” and “Interaction Easy,” this paper investigates the influence of investor and management interaction on accounting conservatism and explores the strategic response behavior of management. The findings indicate that both the intensity and depth of investor inquiries contribute to the enhancement of accounting conservatism. Moreover, compared to “template” responses, management's “targeted” responses to investors significantly increase the accounting conservatism of companies. Mechanism tests reveal that investor–management interaction, by enhancing investor monitoring capabilities and increasing the litigation and reputational risks faced by companies, subsequently enhances the accounting conservatism of companies. Further analysis shows that in cases where companies are audited by non-Big Four auditor and have lower analyst coverage, indicating a weaker external information environment, investor–management interaction can yield better governance effects.

We investigate corporate bond defaults from 1995 to 2020 using hand-collected data from hard-copy publications in Korea. Using an under-sampling method, we construct default prediction models based on machine learning models as well as a logistic model. The empirical results show that the random forest model outperforms the others. However, regardless of the models used, model performance in financial crisis periods is significantly worse than it is in non-crisis periods. This finding suggests the need for additional information to improve model performance during crises when the default prediction is the most relevant. Furthermore, the dominant predictor of defaults before the global financial crisis was the debt ratio, while subsequently, the coverage ratio has become the most important predictor.

We investigate the relationship between CEO risk incentives and the innovation premium (IP) proposed by Forbes. We suggest that compared to traditional proxies of innovation, the IP is a comprehensive measure of a firm's overall innovation and, therefore, can measure innovation effectiveness in broader industries. We find that both option vega and vega-to-delta ratio, as measures of CEO risk incentives, have a positive relationship with the IP. Additional tests reveal that the traditional patent-related outputs are also motivated by CEO risk incentives, but only in the IT industry. Overall, our findings are consistent with (1) the empirical evidence of Coles et al. (2006, Journal of Financial Economics 79, 431) that a higher vega after controlling for delta motivates managers to implement riskier policy choices and (2) the argument (Dittmann et al. 2017, Review of Finance 21, 1805) that the strength of the risk-taking incentive relative to the performance-based incentive, the vega-to-delta ratio, captures CEO risk-taking incentives more accurately.

Family structure and characteristics are important factors that affect both economic development and CEOs' decision-making. Corporate risk-taking reflects the overall risk choices and preferences of decision-makers in relation to various decisions. Using data for Chinese non-state-owned enterprises between the years 2000 and 2019, we examine the association between CEO offspring gender and corporate risk-taking. We find that CEOs who have daughters are associated with a lower level of corporate risk-taking than CEOs who have sons only. Raising daughters significantly stimulates cautious attitudes and behaviors in CEOs and reduces firm overinvestment, thereby lowering the level of corporate risk-taking. Moreover, raising daughters has a more significant inhibitory effect on corporate risk-taking for female CEOs and CEOs who were born in regions with a strong patriarchal culture. Our findings also show that CEOs with daughters can help companies effectively avoid financial crises. Focusing on both parenting behavior and corporate financial behavior, we suggest that the parent–child relationship extends far beyond the scope of the family, providing a broader perspective for understanding corporate decision-making and financial behavior.

The paper explores how agency behavior of insiders within a company influences the risk of a stock price crash in the context of a continued expansion of the performance expectation gap. A panel data analysis of 10 727 observations of Chinese A-share listed companies over the period 2003–2020 shows that as the negative performance aspiration gap widens, stock price crashes are more likely to occur. Furthermore, the separated role of top management and chairperson and an increase in the ownership proportion of major shareholders significantly amplifies the positive effect, whereas the increase in managerial shareholding and the equity balance diminish the main relationship.