Finance Commons^™

Bundling In Advance Sales: Theory And Evidence From Round-Trip Versus Two One-Way Tickets*, Diego Escobari, Paan Jindapon, Nicholas G. Rupp

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We theoretically derive an optimal price for a bundle of two goods that are sold in advance to risk-averse buyers. The theory predicts that a round-trip ticket is less expensive than two one-way tickets when demands for the outbound and the inbound are uncertain and positively correlated. Using a unique airlines dataset, we find evidence that is consistent with the theory; round-trip bundle discounts exist and they are larger for passengers who buy early in advance, stay on a Saturday night, and have higher valuations. We also find that the bundle discounts decrease with competition.

Late-Arriving Votes And Electoral Fraud: A Natural Experiment And Regression Discontinuity Evidence From Bolivia, Diego Escobari, Gary A. Hoover

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper uses a unique data set and a natural experiment to test if electoral fraud can exist in late-arriving votes. On the night of the 2019 Bolivian elections, the official vote counting system that was expected to publish the results real-time, suddenly stopped. When it resumed, the results had flipped. We estimate several difference-in-differences specifications using a 2016 referendum and the votes of other political parties. We find that the extent of the fraud is 2.51% of the valid votes, sufficient to change the outcome of the election. Our results are robust to polling-station-level shocks common across 2019 and …

Hubris Or Talent? Estimating The Role Of Overconfidence In Chinese Households’ Investment Decisions, Jing Xu, Maroula Khraiche, Xi Mao, Xuan Wang

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We document the extent to which overconfidence in one’s financial literacy (FL overconfidence) plays a role in households’ reported financial risk aversion and their actual investment behavior, using data from the China Household Finance Survey. We measure FL overconfidence by estimating the gap between people’s self-reported financial literacy and their objectively measured financial knowledge. Our results indicate that FL overconfidence is negatively associated with self-reported financial risk aversion. Additionally, FL overconfidence is positively associated with the likelihood of having a brokerage account, holding risky financial instruments (other than just stock), and a proportion of assets allocated towards risky assets. We …

The Effect Of Covid-19 Uncertainty On Corporate Default Risk: International Evidence, Md Ismail Haidar, Md Showaib Rahman Sarker, André Varella Mollick

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper investigates the effect of COVID-19 uncertainty on corporate default risk using an international sample of firms from 71 countries. We document that corporate default risk increases with higher COVID-19 uncertainty, even after controlling for a wide range of firmlevel and country-level characteristics. The effect is weaker for firms in highly religious adherence countries, stronger for firms in developed countries, and for firms geographically closer to China and Italy. Further, the effect is weaker for highly innovative firms and less financially constrained firms. Our findings are robust to propensity score matching and entropy balancing methods to address selection bias, …

Study On The Effectiveness Of Environmental Regulations And Its Spatial Spillover In China’S High-Quality Human Habitat Cities, Chuansheng Wu, Weixuan Fan, Lingling Qi, Levent Kutlu

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

High-quality human habitat cities in developing countries are facing new urban environmental problems as a result of the significant resource footprints of wealthy urban populations in the process of rapid urbanization. These areas are desperate for solutions to the coexistence of old and new pollutants, as well as inorganic and organic compounds. The authors of this study propose a comprehensive framework and methods for evaluating the effectiveness of environmental regulation in high-quality human habitat cities for a state-of-the-art path of improving environmental governance and optimizing environmental policies in these regions. This paper aims to analyze the effectiveness of environmental regulation …

Supermajority Politics: Equilibrium Range, Policy Diversity, Utilitarian Welfare, And Political Compromise, Aseem Mahajan, Roland Pongou, Jean-Baptiste Tondji

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

Highlights

• We study static and dynamic supermajoritarian economies with totally ordered policy spaces.

• We count equilibria in the core and the largest consistent set under single-peaked preferences.

• We assess the depth of policy diversity across similar supermajoritarian political economies.

• We analyze how supermajority rules affect utilitarian welfare and political compromise.

• We find that majority rule maximizes both utilitarian welfare and political compromise under uncertainty.

Abstract

The standard Bowen model of political competition with single-peaked preferences (Bowen, 1943) predicts party convergence to the median voter’s ideal policy, with the number of equilibrium policies not exceeding two. This result assumes majority rule …

Gender Equity In Labor Market Opportunities And Aggregate Technical Efficiency: A Case Of Equity Promoting Efficiency, Gautam Hazarika, Maroula Khraiche, Levent Kutlu

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study applies a panel data stochastic frontier analysis to country data towards examining the effect of gender equity in labor market opportunities upon efficiency in the production of GDP. It finds that aggregate technical efficiency is improved by a widening of women’s labor market opportunities as indicated by a rise in their share of employment, but that this effect is dampened by patriarchal cultural norms whose strength is measured by the proportion of the population tracing its ancestry to ethnic groups who adopted the plough as an agricultural implement. That aggregate technical efficiency rises in women’s share of employment …

Climate Change And Corporate Cash Holdings: Global Evidence, Siamak Javadi, Abdullah Al Masum, Mohsen Aram, Ramesh P. Rao

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

Using data from 41 countries, we provide novel empirical evidence that firms’ cash holdings are positively associated with their climate change exposure. This evidence is robust to different model specifications and survives a battery of tests to ease concerns related to spurious correlation and omitted variable bias. Using the release of the Stern Review as an exogenous shock to climate change awareness, we show that this association becomes significantly stronger after the release of the Review and particularly so for firms with higher exposure to regulatory and transition risk dimensions of climate change as well as financially constrained firms. Overall, …

Optimal Interventions In Networks During A Pandemic, Roland Pongou, Guy Tchuente, Jean-Baptiste Tondji

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We develop a model of optimal lockdown policy for a social planner who balances population health with short-term wealth accumulation. The unique solution depends on tolerable infection incidence and social network structure. We then use unique data on nursing home networks in the US to calibrate the model and quantify state-level preference for prioritizing health over wealth. We also empirically validate simulation results derived from comparative statics analyses. Our findings suggest that policies that tolerate more virus spread (laissez-faire) increase state GDP growth and COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes. The detrimental effects of laissez-faire policies are more potent for nursing …

Calculating Efficiency For Spatial Autoregressive Stochastic Frontier Model, Levent Kutlu

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

When there are efficiency spillovers, we can use a spatial autoregressive stochastic frontier model to estimate total (spillover-corrected) efficiencies. Glass et al. (2016) provide a formula for total efficiency in this context, which is an approximation. We provide the exact formula for the spillover-corrected efficiency. Moreover, we derive total, direct, and indirect marginal effects of environmental variables on spillover-corrected efficiency.

The Effect Of Corruption Control On Efficiency Spillovers, Levent Kutlu, Xi Mao

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We examine the effect of corruption control on efficiency and its implications for efficiency spillovers by a stochastic frontier model. Our dataset covers 102 countries from 1996 to 2014. We find a positive relationship between corruption control and efficiency. If neighboring countries have difficulty in handling corruption, the country would be negatively affected by its neighbors' corruption through efficiency spillovers. We then compare the efficiency differences across countries for three time periods: 1996–2002, 2002–2008, and 2008–2014. On average, technical efficiencies slightly increased in the second period compared to the first period. In the third period, the efficiencies declined, particularly in …

Price Exuberance And Contagion Across Housing Markets: Evidence From Us Metropolitan Areas, Md Shahedur R. Chowdhury, Damian S. Damianov, Diego Escobari

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

Contagion occurs when cross-market correlation increases because of a shock to one market. Identifying shocks as episodes of house price exuberance, we provide evidence for contagion effects among the largest metropolitan markets in the US. We find that changes in income, interest rates, and unemployment also create contagion effects. These empirical findings are consistent with a model in which shocks to house prices and economic variables relaxes households down payment constraints and increases household mobility and housing demand. These effects are established in an equilibrium framework in which house prices and household choices are determined endogenously, and we account for …

Systematic And Idiosyncratic Risks Of The U.S. Airline Industry, Rafiqul Bhuyan, André Varella Mollick, Md Ruhul Amin

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

Understanding the risky nature of the airline industry has received attention in the tourism literature from separate angles. Although the systematic risk of the airline industry has been examined before, idiosyncratic risk has largely been ignored. This study fills this gap in the tourism literature by investigating the effect of passengers’ air travel on systematic and idiosyncratic risks of the U.S. airline industry. Using historical air travel data and utilizing both OLS and fixed-effect models, this paper documents negative relationships between the occupancy of airline seats and idiosyncratic risks for 21 U.S. airline companies. This negative effect of occupancy is …

Residual State Ownership, Foreign Ownership And Firms' Financing Patterns, Yu Liu, Jian Xu

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

Would different types of ownerships affect each other's effect on firm behavior? We investigate the effect of residual state ownership, foreign ownership, and the interaction between the two on firms' financing patterns, employing the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) dataset, which covers over 130 thousand firms in 139 economies from 2006 to 2017. We find that neither firms with residual state ownership only nor firms with foreign ownership only are positively related with external finance. In comparison, firms with both state and foreign ownerships are associated with higher external finance. The coefficient of the state-foreign interaction is both statistically and …

Laissez-Faire, Social Networks, And Race In A Pandemic, Roland Pongou, Guy Tchuente, Jean-Baptiste Tondji

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We study the effects of race, network centrality, and policies that tolerate some level of virus spread (laissez-faire) on COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes in the United States. Our analysis uses unique data on nursing home networks and calibration-based estimates of states' preferences for health relative to short-term economic gains. Our findings suggest that laissez-faire policies increase deaths. Nursing homes with a larger share of Black residents experience more deaths, but they are less vulnerable to laissez-faire policies, especially when not central in social networks. Our findings highlight significant interactions between COVID-19 policies, race, and network structure among US seniors.

Overconfidence And Welfare In A Differentiated Duopoly, Jean-Baptiste Tondji

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We examine whether owners' decisions to delegate corporate responsibilities to overconfident managers improve welfare. We develop a dynamic model with product differentiation, where firms compete in cost-reducing research and development (R&D) and output. Before firms compete, each owner makes a strategic decision whether to hire an overconfident manager. The results reveal that when R&D technology is less productive, owners hire overconfident managers who overinvest in cost-reducing R&D. These strategic decisions improve welfare when spillovers are small and R&D productivity is low, or spillovers are large, or product differentiation is strong.

Stable Allocations Of Vaccines In A Political Economy, Zephirin Nganmeni, Roland Pongou, Bertrand Tchantcho, Jean-Baptiste Tondji

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We develop a theory that addresses the existence of stable vaccine allocations in a political economy where vaccination offers both private and social benefits. These are allocation policies that a political leader can enforce without losing their popularity. We show that a stable allocation may not exist if vaccine supply is sufficiently low relative to the number of individuals eligible to receive a dose. We then characterize the minimum number of vaccine doses guaranteeing the existence of a stable vaccine allocation. Moreover, when individuals have unequal voting rights in the political economy, stable allocations favor those with greater voting power. …

The Effect Of Foreign Institutional Ownership On Corporate Tax Avoidance: International Evidence, Iftekhar Hasan, Incheol Kim, Haimeng Teng, Qiang Wu

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We find that foreign institutional investors (FIIs) reduce their investee firms’ tax avoidance. We provide evidence that the effect is driven by the institutional distance between FIIs’ home countries/regions and host countries/regions. Specifically, we find that the effect is driven by the influence of FIIs from countries/regions with high-quality institutions (i.e., common law, high government effectiveness, and high regulatory quality) on investee firms located in countries/regions with low-quality institutions. Furthermore, we show that the effect is concentrated on FIIs with little experience in the investee countries/regions or FIIs with stronger monitoring incentives. Finally, we find that FIIs are more likely …

Unintended Consequences Of The Dodd–Frank Act On Credit Rating Risk And Corporate Finance, Bina Sharma, Binay K. Adhikari, Anup Agrawal, Bruno R. Arthur, Monika K. Rabarison

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

Prior research finds that Dodd–Frank Act’s regulations on credit rating agencies (CRAs) increase rated firms’ risk of rating downgrades, regardless of their credit quality. Our difference-in-difference estimates suggest that after Dodd–Frank, low-rated firms, which face steep costs from a further downgrade, significantly reduce their debt issuance and investments compared to similar unrated firms. Our results are not driven by credit supply or the financial crisis. They reveal an unintended consequence of Dodd–Frank: Greater regulatory pressure on CRAs leads to negative spillover effects on firms concerned about credit ratings, regardless of their credit quality.

Stock Returns, Oil Prices, And Leverage: Evidence From U.S. Firms, Md Ruhul Amin, André Varella Mollick

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper examines how the relationship between stock returns of U.S. firms and WTI oil prices is affected by leverage (debt to total assets) from 1990 to 2020. Results from our fixed-effect regression models suggest that leverage effects on stock returns are pervasive both in aggregate and cross-industry levels, while the mining industry is more sensitive. In addition to the positive oil price effects attenuated by leverage at the aggregate level, we observe stronger marginal effects of leverage only for the mining sector. Being more exposed to commodity prices, the positive effects of oil prices on stock returns in the …

The Behavioral Si* Model, With Applications To The Swine Flu And Covid-19 Pandemics, Jussi Keppo, Marianna Kudlyak, Elena Quercioli, Lones Smith, Andrea Wilson

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

The 1927 SIR contagion model is the dynamical system for an infection that passes at a constant rate in random pairwise meetings. Our Behavioral SI* Model assumes that everyone has access to a constant elasticity of avoidance technology. We then derive the passing rate in fully solvable Nash equilibrium of the game where everyone optimizes. The resulting dynamics are log-linear, and incidence is log-linear in prevalence, with slope less than one.

The SI* models yields extreme predictions for major contagions, not realized. At breakout, the SI* models capture exponential growth. In our BSI* model, increasing avoidance behavior bends the curve, …

Covid-19 And Women-Led Businesses Around The World, Yu Liu, Siqi Wei, Jian Xu

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

The impacts of crises are never gender-neutral, and the COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Using a brand-new dataset covering 24 countries, we document that women-led businesses are subject to a higher likelihood of closure and a longer closure duration than men-led businesses during the pandemic. Women business leaders are also more pessimistic about the future than men business leaders. The disadvantages suffered by women-led businesses widen in high gender inequality economies and developing economies. Our results further indicate that finance and labor factors are likely to be the major contributors to these disadvantages. We suggest that COVID-19′s policy response should …

Mixed-Signal Stock Splits, Ahmed M. Elnahas, Pankaj K. Jain, Thomas H. Mcinish

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We investigate CEOs who combine insider selling with stock splits, which is suspicious, because dumping stocks is inconsistent with the positive stock-split signal. Our empirical results indicate that, compared with other splits, these mixed-signal splits perform poorly and are followed by much lower buy-and-hold abnormal returns and much higher likelihoods of announcing an earnings restatement and CEO turnover in the post-split period. Our results are robust to entropy balancing and controlling for CEO characteristics, incentives, and corporate governance and highlight previously ignored agency issues around stock splits. Attention to insider trades is essential to properly interpret a stock-split signal.

Local Religiosity, Workplace Safety, And Firm Value, Md Ruhul Amin, Incheol Kim, Suin Lee

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper examines the effect of local religiosity on employee treatment, proxied by workplace safety incidents. Using the establishment-level data compiling on the incidents of work-related injuries, we find that employees of the establishments in more religious counties get less injured than those in less religious counties. We further find that a reduction in occupational accidents is more evident for establishments in counties dominated by one religious denomination, strengthening our argument on community solidarity and homophily stemming from religious networks. Firms whose establishments are located in high religiosity counties are less likely to violate workplace conduct and more likely to …

Corporate Cash Holding, Agency Problems And Economic Policy Uncertainty, Siamak Javadi, Mohsen Mollagholamali, Ali Nejadmalayeri, Saud Al-Thaqeb

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

Consistent with the agency view of cash holdings, we document a strong negative relationship between economic policy uncertainty and corporate cash holdings for non-U.S. firms from 19 countries. Our results are robust to different measures of cash holdings and model specifications and survive after addressing endogeneity. We provide evidence that the decrease in cash holdings is moderated by shareholders' ability to force managers to disgorge cash that fits consistently within the agency framework. Overall, results suggest that lowering cash holdings help alleviate agency problems in the presence of policy uncertainty and underscore the significance of country attributes in corporate finance.

A Political Reciprocity Mechanism, Roland Pongou, Jean-Baptiste Tondji

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We consider the problem of designing legislative mechanisms that guarantee equilibrium existence, Pareto-efficiency, and inclusiveness. To address this question, we propose a finite-horizon voting procedure that embeds clauses of reciprocity. These clauses grant voters the right to oppose actions that are not in their interest, retract actions that face opposition, and punish harmful actions. We study voters' strategic behavior under this voting procedure using two classical approaches. Following the blocking approach, we introduce two related solution concepts---the reciprocity set and the sophisticated reciprocity set---to predict equilibrium policies. We then show that these solution concepts (1) are always non-empty; (2) only …

The Impact Of Climate Change On The Cost Of Bank Loans, Siamak Javadi, Abdullah Al Masum

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We find that firms in location with higher exposure to climate risk pay significantly higher spreads on their bank loans. This result is robust to different measures of climate risk. Exploiting the economic link between a firm and its customers, we find that the exposure of a firm’s customers to climate risk adversely affects that firm’s cost of borrowing. In the cross-section, we find that the effect is mainly driven by long-term loans of poorly rated firms that are highly exposed to climate risk. Overall, our evidence suggests a slow increase in lenders’ attention to climate risk and that lenders …

Multinationality And The Value Of Green Innovation, Incheol Kim, Christos Pantzalis, Zhengyi Zhang

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

Highlights

• High exposure to foreign markets with more stringent environmental regulations stimulates MNCs' green patent applications.

• The pursuit of green innovation is positively associated with firm value in the long run.

• This long-run advantage is more significant when MNCs' home countries rely on more clean energy for power generation, have a more developed economy and have a more effective government.

• MNCs' environmental competitive advantage is coupled with exposure to MNCs' host countries with high long-term and femininity orientations.

Abstract

When do multinational corporations (MNCs) derive the most from internalizing the transfer of proprietary technological knowhow? We revisit this question, which …

Institutional Investors’ Ownership Stability And Their Investee Firms’ Equity Mispricing, Hamid Sakaki, Surendranath Jory, Dave Jackson

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study examines the impact of institutional investors' equity ownership stability and their investment horizon to determine the impact on their investee firms' equity mispricing. Mispricing represents the difference between a firm’s market and fundamental values. We treat institutional investors as a heterogenous group, i.e., dedicated, transient, or quasi-indexer as defined by Bushee, 1998, Bushee, 2001 since their categorization determines their trading strategy. Higher institutional ownership, higher stability in institutional investors' equity ownership, and institutional investors classified as long-term are all associated with lower equity mispricing at investee firms.

Business Strategy And Cost Of Bank Loans, Md Ruhul Amin, Abdullah Al Masum

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

Following Miles and Snow’s Business Strategy (BS) topology, we find that banks impose relatively higher loan spreads for the firms that follow an Innovation-Oriented Business Strategy (IOBS). We further document that IOBS is positively associated with corporate risk measures such as variances in equity returns and returns on assets. Overall, our findings suggest that banks charge a higher cost of debt in anticipation of borrowers’ payback riskiness from an IOBS.