Business Commons^™

To Retrench Or Invest? Turnaround Strategies During A Recessionary Time, Manveer Mann, Sang Eun Byun

Department of Marketing Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

By analyzing retail news published between 2008 and 2011, we examined retrenchment and investment strategies employed by retailers in the U.S. in response to the Great Recession. We found four categories of retrenchment (store closings, buyouts, bankruptcies, and pull backs) and five categories of investment (market expansion, product development, service development, strategic partnerships, and corporate social responsibility). Retrenchment decisions were constrained by retailers' financial strength, whereas investment decisions varied with firms' strategic orientations and resource capabilities. Findings of this study enhance theoretical understanding of underlying factors of specific retrenchment and investment decisions that retailers pursued during a challenging economic time.

The Real Effect Of The Initial Enforcement Of Insider Trading Laws, Zhihong Chen, Yan Huang, Yuanto Kusnadi, K. C. John Wei

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Based on a difference-in-differences approach, we find strong evidence that the initial enforcement of insider trading laws improves capital allocation efficiency. The effect is concentrated in developed markets and manifests shortly after the enforcement year. Further analysis shows that the improvement is positively associated with the increase in liquidity around the enforcement year and the opaqueness of the information environment before the enforcement year. The improvement is more pronounced for firms operating in more competitive markets, being more financially constrained, and with more severe agency problems. Finally, we find increased accounting performance after the enforcement and the increase is positively …

Corporate Financial Flexibility, Investment Activities, And Cash Holding: Evidence From Indonesia, Rahmat Heru Setianto, Addenver Kusumaputra

Indonesian Capital Market Review

This paper examines empirically the impact of financial flexibility on investment activities. Furthermore, we also investigate how financial flexibility determines the sensitivity of investment activities to cash flow. Using annual data of Indonesian manufacturing firms spanning five years, our analyses reveal that financial flexibility enhances investment ability and decreases sensitivity of investment activities to cash flow. Further analysis indicates that financially flexible firms in Indonesia tend to hold higher cash as a buffer to achieve financial flexibility. These findings yield important implications to managers and investors as Indonesia’s domestic market is expanding rapidly and large business opportunities are created. This …

Fossil Fuel Asset Risk Analysis: Clark University Endowment, Travis A. Dodge, B. Maiwand Akbari

Student Works

The environmental and social risks of climate change are well known and perhaps inevitable. The economic and financial risks are less so. The many financial risks associated with climate change embedded in endowment portfolio fossil fuel holdings are leading many institutional stakeholders to enter into dialogue and take action. Divestment is emerging as an effective strategy for limiting portfolio exposure and tackling climate change itself.

Our team’s goals were to assess whether the Clark University endowment portfolio faces any of these risks and evaluate the impacts on asset values. Our findings show that the Clark endowment does face these same …

Public Fund Strategic Asset Allocation To Hedge Funds: A Time Series Analysis, Morgan Steadwell

Honors College Theses

Public funds represent some of the U.S.’ largest institutional investors. These funds are a pool of money saved for retirement by those who are still working. Boards of Directors of these funds have strict standards for their investments, as the money they are investing is not their own; rather, it comes from the thousands of workers that pay into the funds. Alternative investments such as private equity, private debt, real assets, real estate, and hedge funds are historically more risky than traditional public equities or fixed income investments. Recently, public funds’ investments in hedge funds have been called into question …

Foreign Institutional Investment, Ownership And Liquidity: Real And Information Frictions, Mingfa Ding, Birger Nilsson, Sandy Suardi

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

The literature widely documents the negative liquidity impact of foreign participation in firms that permit high foreign institutional ownership. This paper employs a unique setting for the limited participation of qualified foreign institutional investors (QFII) in China’s A-share market and examines how this impacts on stock liquidity in emerging markets. Contrary to the findings in the literature, foreign investor participation helps enhance the liquidity of affected stocks by promoting trade activities and price discovery. The improvement in liquidity does not occur through the information friction channel, but rather the real friction channel. Our results are robust to endogeneity issue and …