Asia-Pacific Journal of Financial Studies最新文献

This paper investigates whether and how controlling shareholders' value (i.e., the concentration of controlling shareholders' wealth within a business group) affects corporate tax planning using Korean chaebols. We find that firms with high controlling shareholders' value engage in a lower level of tax avoidance than other affiliates in the business group. We also find that controlling shareholders' concern about the costs of tax avoidance (i.e., regulatory penalties and reputational damages) are potential mechanisms that prevent firms with high controlling shareholders' value from aggressive tax planning. Lastly, we provide the value implication of tax avoidance for firms with high controlling shareholders' value.

This study examines the announcement effect of a green bond on the issuer's stock returns in the Indian Stock Market. The event study methodology for data analysis and abnormal returns were calculated using the market model for the 16-day event window that includes the 5 days prior and 10 days after the issuance of the green bonds. The findings of this study show that green bond announcements do not create any significant abnormal returns, thus suggesting investors' irrationality toward environmental factors. This study informs policymakers that investor education relating to the environment is needed in India.

This study examines the relationship between a hospitality and tourism (HT) firm's business strategy and the level and structure of compensation for its chief executive officer (CEO). Using the ordinary least square (OLS) estimation method, we find that firms in the HT industry that adopt an innovation-oriented business strategy increase their CEOs' total compensation. The increased compensation is not derived from a cash-based component but from an equity-based component of the total CEO compensation. The higher levels of risk exposure that HT firms encounter when adopting an innovation-oriented business strategy motivate these compensation dynamics. Further, HT firms that implement an innovation-oriented business strategy and possess a higher firm value are those that remunerate their CEOs using equity-based compensation. We find no such evidence for cash-based compensation. Therefore, we advocate for a strategy-induced compensation premium in the CEOs' compensation contracting for the HT industry.

This study investigates the impact of comment letter reviews on reporting quality in terms of financial restatements, using comment letters from the Chinese market between 2013 and 2020. The baseline results indicate that although receiving a comment letter increases the next year's (year t + 1) restatements, it reduces later years' (year t + 2 onwards) restatements. Moreover, this effect is more pronounced among firms with lower external auditor quality, poorer information transparency, and those located in less marketized provinces. The mechanism analyses show that comment letter reviews improve financial reporting quality because of deterrent effects in the form of increased litigation risk.

Open-book accounting is a practice to disclose the full cost structure of suppliers to customers to achieve cost efficiency in supply chains. However, the dominant market power of customers could interfere with this goal in practice. Using unique data on the suppliers of large Korean business groups, we find that open-book accounting is associated with profit rate regulation by customers. Suppliers' price growth is capped despite the increase in supplied goods. Profit rates of suppliers significantly co-move in times of low average profitability. Using an exogenous regulatory reform that outlawed coercive open-book accounting, we find the tendencies significantly reversed post-reform.

Previous studies show that institutional investors play an important role in shaping corporate social responsibility (CSR). The role of non-investor institutions such as media firms is largely unexplored, especially in China. This study examines the impact of site visits by non-investor institutions on visited firms' CSR ratings (excluding corporate governance (CG)) in China. The baseline result shows that site visits are associated with improved CSR ratings. The result is robust after controlling for potential endogeneity issues. It is also robust with alternative CSR ratings by different data providers. The channel test suggests that non-investor institutions' site visits improve CSR ratings by increasing both CSR disclosure and actual CSR activities. To highlight the difference between our study and recent research on corporate site visits by institutional investors, we perform a further test to show that non-investor institutions' visits improve the non-CG aspect but not the CG aspect of CSR ratings while institutional investors' visits improve the CG aspect but not the non-CG aspect of CSR ratings.

Motivated by the recent market turbulence triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the changing interest rate environment, we propose an improved investment strategy for extending retirement coverage in the pension decumulation stage. The newly proposed strategy with interest rate dependent volatility targets can significantly improve the durability of conventional retirement portfolios with constant risky and risk-free asset allocations. This conclusion follows from our analysis in the simulated financial market with stochastic interest rate and stochastic volatility, based on the Hybrid Heston-Vasicek model. Consequently, the proposed target volatility strategy could be a suitable option for more reliable retirement coverage after retirement.

This study employs novel data on patents filed in Korea to investigate whether there is an end-of-year rush phenomenon for innovation. Our findings indicate that patent applications tend to be concentrated in the second half of the year more than in the first half of the year, and the number of application filings gradually increases toward the end of the year. We also examine the quality of patents and find that applications filed near the end of the year are more likely to be low-quality innovations. Firms in our sample that filed more patent applications in the second half of the year engaged in incremental innovation, which entails the exploitation of existing knowledge or research areas rather than the exploration of new knowledge in new areas. Furthermore, our study reveals that this end-of-year rush on innovation is more prevalent among firms with high free cash flow and among firms belonging to business groups. Our findings demonstrate that the end-of-year rush has unintended consequences for innovation.

This paper examines whether credit rating agencies applied consistent rating standards to US corporate bonds in the periods surrounding the 2008 financial crisis. Based on estimates of issuing firms' credit quality from a structural model, I find that rating standards are in fact procyclical: ratings are stricter during an economic downturn than during an economic expansion. As a result, firms receive overly pessimistic ratings in a recession, relative to during an expansion. I further show that a procyclical rating policy amplifies the variation in corporate credit spreads, accounting for, on average, 11% of the increase in spreads during a recession. In the cross-section, firms with a higher rollover rate of debt, fewer alternative channels to convey their credit quality to the market, and firms with businesses that are more sensitive to economic cycles are more affected by the procyclical rating policy.

We examine the causal link between the geographical distance between firms and their main bank and the termination of main bank relationships, using the exogenous change in firm–main bank distances brought about by bank branch consolidations in Japan. Our findings are threefold. First, an increase in lending distance increases the likelihood that firms switch their main bank. Second, the average lending distance for firms that switched to a new main bank decreased after the switch. Third, the lending distance of new firm–main bank relationships after the switch had a positive impact on the probability of default of small firms.