Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Board Composition, Board Diversity And Stock Performance, Chiyachantana N. Chiraphol, Siripen Pattanawihok, Pattarawan Prrasarnphanich

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The study investigates the relationship between six board compositions and stock returns. The results indicate a significant association between various board compositions and stock returns. Specifically, board size and executive directors have a negative impact, whereas independent directors enhance stock returns. Busy directors positively impact the abnormal stock returns for the companies in the non-financial industry, which implies that busy directors who serve on more boards tend to be well connected. More importantly, the results indicate a significant positive relationship between board tenure and stock returns. Board service time is perceived as the board quality of knowledge and experience from …

Cleaning Corporate Governance, Jens Frankenreiter, Cathy Hwang, Yaron Nili, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Although empirical scholarship dominates the field of law and finance, much of it shares a common vulnerability: an abiding faith in the accuracy and integrity of a small, specialized collection of corporate governance data. In this paper, we unveil a novel collection of three decades’ worth of corporate charters for thousands of public companies, which shows that this faith is misplaced.

We make three principal contributions to the literature. First, we label our corpus for a variety of firm- and state-level governance features. Doing so reveals significant infirmities within the most well-known corporate governance datasets, including an error rate exceeding …

The Role Of Mutual Funds In Corporate Social Responsibility, Zhichuan Li, Saurin Patel, Srikanth Ramani

Business Publications

This paper examines the role of mutual funds in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Using a fund-level, holdings-based CSR score, we find that CSR-friendly mutual funds improve firms’ CSR standings. This effect is more pronounced for firms with higher mutual fund ownership and stronger corporate governance. We further show that while CSR-friendly mutual funds have influence on almost all CSR categories, they focus on increasing CSR strengths rather than reducing CSR concerns. We also discover that CSR-friendly funds are more likely to vote in favor of CSR proposals, and that firms owned by CSR-friendly funds are more likely to link their …

Too Big To Fool: Moral Hazard, Bailouts, And Corporate Responsibility, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

Domestic and international regulatory efforts to prevent another financial crisis have been converging on the idea of trying to end the problem of “too big to fail”—that systemically important financial firms take excessive risks because they profit from success and are (or at least, expect to be) bailed out by government money to avoid failure. The legal solutions being advanced to control this morally hazardous behavior tend, however, to be inefficient, ineffective, or even dangerous—such as breaking up firms and limiting their size, which can reduce economies of scale and scope; or restricting central bank authority to bail out failing …

Rethinking Corporate Governance For A Bondholder Financed, Systemically Risky World, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This Article makes two arguments that, combined, demonstrate an important synergy: first, including bondholders in corporate governance could help to reduce systemic risk because bondholders are more risk averse than shareholders; second, corporate governance should include bondholders because bonds now dwarf equity as a source of corporate financing and bond prices are increasingly tied to firm performance.

Controlling Systemic Risk Through Corporate Governance, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

Most of the regulatory measures to control excessive risk taking by systemically important firms are designed to reduce moral hazard and to align the interests of managers and investors. These measures may be flawed because they are based on questionable assumptions. Excessive corporate risk taking is, at its core, a corporate governance problem. Shareholder primacy requires managers to view the consequences of their firm’s risk taking only from the standpoint of the firm and its shareholders, ignoring harm to the public. In governing, managers of systemically important firms should also consider public harm. This proposal engages the long-standing debate whether …

Does It Pay To Be Different? Relative Csr And Its Impact On Firm Value, David K. Ding, Christo Ferreira, Udomsak Wongchoti

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Conventional aggregation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) raw scores and its interpreted impact on firm value have provided mixed evidence in the literature. We show that the value impact of CSR activities relies heavily on the industry-specific relative position of the firm. Only firms that distinguish themselves over their peers are associated with increased firm value. This finding is robust and holds for both responsible and irresponsible behaviors. Information concerns and portfolio construction can allude to a possible CSR clientele, suggesting the existence of an optimal CSR level. Our peer-effect results are robust to unobserved heterogeneity along the lines of …

Liquidity, Governance And Adverse Selection In Asset Pricing, Sascha Strobl

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A plethora of recent literature on asset pricing provides plenty of empirical evidence on the importance of liquidity, governance and adverse selection of equity on pricing of assets together with more traditional factors such as market beta and the Fama-French factors. However, literature has usually stressed that these factors are priced individually. In this dissertation we argue that these factors may be related to each other, hence not only individual but also joint tests of their significance is called for.

In the three related essays, we examine the liquidity premium in the context of the finer three-digit SIC industry classification, …

Shareholders And Social Welfare, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter

All Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses the question whether (and how) the shareholders matter for social welfare. Answers to the question have changed over time. Observers in the mid-twentieth century believed that the socio-economic characteristics of real world shareholders were highly pertinent to social welfare inquiries. But they went on to conclude that there followed no justification for catering to shareholder interest, for shareholders occupied elite social strata. The answer changed during the twentieth century’s closing decades, when observers came to accord the shareholder interest a key structural role in the enhancement of economic efficiency even as they also deemed irrelevant the characteristics …

Creditor Rights And R&D Expenditures, Bruce Seifert, Halit Gonenc

Finance Faculty Publications

Manuscript Type: Empirical

Research Question?Issue: This study examines the impact of creditor rights on R&D intensity (R&D/total assets). We argue that managers in countries with strong creditor rights have more incentives to reduce cash flow risk and therefore limit expenditures on R&D more than managers located in countries with weak creditor rights.

Research Findings/Insights: Using a sample of over 21,000 firms from 41 countries, our research is one of the first to document that strong creditor rights are indeed associated with reduced R&D intensity. This negative relationship is observed in market‐based countries, but not in bank‐based countries. Moreover, the results …

Inside-Out Corporate Governance, David A. Skeel Jr., Vijit Chahar, Alexander Clark, Mia Howard, Bijun Huang, Federico Lasconi, A.G. Leventhal, Matthew Makover, Randi Milgrim, David Payne, Romy Rahme, Nikki Sachdeva, Zachary Scott

All Faculty Scholarship

Until late in the twentieth century, internal corporate governance—that is, decision making by the principal constituencies of the firm—was clearly distinct from outside oversight by regulators, auditors and credit rating agencies, and markets. With the 1980s takeover wave and hedge funds’ and equity funds’ more recent involvement in corporate governance, the distinction between inside and outside governance has eroded. The tools of inside governance are now routinely employed by governance outsiders, intertwining the two traditional modes of governance. We argue in this Article that the shift has created a new governance paradigm, which we call inside-out corporate governance.

Using the …

Securities Intermediaries And The Separation Of Ownership From Control, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

The Modern Corporation and Private Property highlighted the evolving separation of ownership and control in the public corporation and the effects of that separation on the allocation of power within the corporation. This essay explores the implications of intermediation for those themes. The article observes that intermediation, by decoupling economic ownership and decision-making authority within the shareholder, creates a second layer of agency issues beyond those identified by Berle and Means. These agency issues are an important consideration in the current debate over shareholder empowerment. The article concludes by considering the hypothetical shareholder construct implicit in the Berle and Means …

The Impact Of Macroeconomic Uncertainty On Firms Changes In Financial Leverage, Atreya Chakraborty

Accounting and Finance Faculty Publication Series

We investigate the relationship between a firm’s measures of corporate gov- ernance, macroeconomic uncertainty and changes in leverage. Recent research highlights the role of governance in financing decisions. Previous research also indicates that macroeconomic uncertainty affects a firm’s ability to borrow. In this paper we investigate how both these channels of influence affects firms’ financing decisions. Our findings show that macroeconomic uncertainty has an important role to play, both by itself and in interaction with a measure of corporate governance.

Government Ownership And The Performance Of Government-Linked Companies: The Case Of Singapore, James Ang, David K. Ding

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In an emerging economy, the alternative to government control is often no governance. We investigate the governance structure of government-linked companies (GLCs) in Singapore under the ownership/control structure of Temasek Holdings, the government holding entity, which typically owns substantial cash flow rights but disproportional control rights and exercises no operational control. We compare the financial and market performance of GLCs with non-GLCs, where each has a different set of governance structure, the key difference being government ownership. We show that Singaporean GLCs have higher valuations and better corporate governance than a control group of non-GLCs. The results hold even when …