Asia-Pacific Journal of Financial Studies最新文献

During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Korean regulators imposed a 200% leverage cap to curb excessive debt and restore economic stability. We examine the real effects and externalities of mandated capital structure changes resulting from this leverage ratio regulation. Our findings indicate that firms that met the leverage requirement experienced a significant decrease in firm risk. However, the effect varied depending on how firms adjusted their capital structure. Firms that chose to issue equity to lower their leverage ratio, as opposed to firms repaying debt, exhibited higher firm risk, lower investment-q sensitivity, and lower profitability in the post-regulation period.

We investigate the role of the local media in curtailing undesirable behaviors of local corporations. We examine the effects of local newspaper layoffs on the workplace safety levels of local firms, finding that firms' total case rates of workplace injuries increase following newspaper layoffs. We also show the mechanisms of reductions in safety-related expenditures and increased workloads. Cross-sectional tests find that the monitoring role of these newspapers is more important for firms with weaker labor unions or lower institutional ownership. Overall, our results suggest that local newspapers serve as key corporate monitors and essential information intermediaries, mitigating firms' undesirable behavior.

Using a large sample of publicly listed firms in China, we examine the relation between local financial agglomeration and corporate green innovation. We document that local financial agglomeration positively affects corporate green innovation output. This positive effect is more pronounced when firms have better environmental performance, when the market-level sentiment for corporate environmental responsibility is higher, or prior to the implementation of a green credit policy in China. Further analysis reveals that local financial agglomeration enhances corporate green investments and the quality of green innovation. Collectively, our findings reveal the real and environmental effects of local financial agglomeration.

Recent studies find that investors prefer funds with lottery-like payoffs. Using a sample of Chinese open-end funds, we show that investors' preference for funds' extreme positive payoffs (MAXs) depend on the state of the market: it is significant for MAXs in an unfavorable market but weak or reversed for those in a favorable market. Such state-dependent preference is irrational because, inconsistent with the flow–MAX relationship, higher MAXs under market downturns are associated with worse performance. We further document support for the salience-theory-based explanation for investors' preference and provide counter-evidence for alternative mechanisms based on rational choice or changes in aggregate flows.

An implicit tax is a reduction in the pretax rate of return driven by tax preferences. With increasingly stringent requirements of sustainable development, Chinese government actively promotes environmental protection with the direct corporate income tax rate preferences, which provide a unique opportunity to examine whether implicit taxes remain a significant tax cost in the environmental protection industry. This paper finds the existence of implicit taxes in environmental protection firms and the market structure impedes the realization of implicit taxes. The market power and market concentration reduce the negative effect of tax preferences on the firm's pretax rate of return. The environmental protection firms with lower competition bear lower implicit taxes. These findings are important to evaluate the effectiveness of the tax incentives on environmental protection firms and other tax-favored industries.

Agency theory has shown that multiple large shareholders have competing monitoring and entrenchment governance effects. Therefore, this paper studies the governance effects of multiple large shareholders to determine the dominant effect in the Chinese setting. A panel data model and F-test demonstrate that a significant positive relationship exists between multiple large shareholders and firm performance, but the positive relationship between multiple large shareholders and firm performance will be weakened by state-owned enterprises and politically connected enterprises. Furthermore, our findings suggest that multiple large shareholders can enhance firm performance by mitigating the agent–principal problem and the principal–principal problem. Additionally, a threshold model is introduced to explore the impact of other governance mechanisms on multiple large shareholders' governance, and our findings show that enhancing controlling shareholder governance and board size significantly weakens multiple large shareholders governance, but increasing the proportion of independent directors strengthens the positive relationship between multiple large shareholders and Tobin's Q and weakens the positive relationship between multiple large shareholders and ROA.

As shareholder capitalism has revealed its limitations since the outbreak of Covid-19, there has been a growing demand for a shift toward stakeholder capitalism. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) management seeks an optimal way to allocate resources to both financial and social values in order to enhance stakeholder utility. Given the various legal, theoretical, and empirical limitations of pluralistic stakeholder capitalism, it is necessary to focus on achieving instrumental stakeholder capitalism. In this regard, we present three roles that finance should play in promoting more firms to adopt ESG management. First, infrastructure needs to be established to measure and assess ESG value in a fair and objective manner. Financial firms should make efforts to develop a non-financial disclosure and certification system, create an ESG index, expand research and investment in this area, and improve credit ratings. Second, there is a need to boost the intermediation of ESG-linked finance in order to enhance utility for firms, investors, and governments. Third, it is crucial to facilitate the trading of ESG value in the market, as this could provide incentives for firms and help them cover the costs associated with ESG investments.

We identify succession as a novel determinant of risk-taking in family firms. We find significantly higher risk-taking (mergers and acquisitions and cash flow volatility) and lower operating efficiency in firms controlled by families with multiple sons during the pre- rather than the postsuccession period compared to family firms with one or no sons. Presuccession risk-taking by sons decreases the following inheritance law amendments that require sharing of wealth among heirs, bolstering the causal interpretation of our findings. An infusion of outside talent via daughters' marriages also alleviates the relative rank-seeking behaviors of sons during succession tournaments.