Business Commons^™

Social Network Impact On Corporate Performance And Governance, Jonathan Chew Hoe Khoo

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Motivated by the centrality measures constructed in Larcker, So and Wang (2013), I affirm that board connectedness positively affect firm performance in Singapore, and even if we were to measure firm performance by Tobin's Q. The impact on firm performance persists over at least four years. Controlling for Corporate Governance using a proprietary database, the Singapore Corporate Governance Index, only the Eigenvector centrality under simple-weighted and hyperbolic-weighted projections survives the robustness test, suggesting that firstly, the local proxy of Corporate Governance based on OECD principles possibly controls for what is proxied by the Betweenness, Closeness and Degree centrality measures, and …

Essays On Corporate Finance, Sili Zhou

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Economic, Policy uncertainty under political opaqueness imposes great impact in the capital market. I construct ex ante cross-section of firm sensitivity to China Economic Policy Uncertainty (CEPU) index from Baker, Bloom and Davis (2013). This measure of policy sensitivity is significantly negatively predictive of a firm’s market value and Tobin’s Q. Cross sectional tests show that the negative effects are stronger in SOEs= for firms with higher agency problems, and for firms operating in market with lower degree of competition or market disciplining. The evidence suggests that high level of policy influence causes significant value destruction in the capital market.

Essays In Corporate Cash Holdings, Chenxi Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

This dissertation addresses three topics in corporate cash holdings. The first paper provides a new determinant of cash holdings by examining the impact of earnings transparency on corporate cash holdings. Motivated by Barth et al. (2013), who show that firms with less earnings transparency tend to have higher cost of equity, this paper shows that the cross-section differences in earnings transparency cause variations in firm cash holdings because firms with less earnings transparency have more incentives to hold cash in order to avoid costly external financing. Using data of US firms from 1980 to 2013, it is found that earnings …

Essays On Investor Sentiment In Asset Pricing, Liya Chu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

The dissertation addresses three topics on investor sentiment in asset pricing.

The first essay investigates the impact of market sentiment on the recent debate on equity premium forecasting. Particularly, market sentiment may break the link between fundamental economic predictors and equity premium. We find that economic predictors tend to lose their power and various remedies proposed in recent studies, such as non-negativity constraints, no longer work during high sentiment periods. In contrast, economic predictors actually do have strong performances even without using any such remedies, as long as the sentiment stays low enough so as not to distort the link. …

Essays In Corporate Finance, Yiwei Yu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Innovation is vital to companies’ competitive advantages and is an important driver of economic growth. However, innovation is costly, since the innovation process is long, idiosyncratic, and uncertain, often involving a very high failure probability and great positive externalities .We thus launch the investigation from the following three aspects to explore how to create a better environment for producing innovation: Financing of innovation; dual-class share structure of innovation; and regulation and policy (e.g. SOX Act.)'s impact on innovation.

First of all, we study the effect of firms’ real estate collateral on innovation. In the presence of financing frictions, firms can …