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Articles 61 - 90 of 196
Full-Text Articles in Business
Analyst Effort Allocation And Firms' Information Environment, Rong Wang, Jarrad Harford, Feng Jiang, Fei Xie
Analyst Effort Allocation And Firms' Information Environment, Rong Wang, Jarrad Harford, Feng Jiang, Fei Xie
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We show that a firm’s information environment is significantly impacted by the characteristics of the other firms its analysts cover. Analysts strategically allocate effort among portfolio firms by devoting more effort to firms that are relatively more important for their career concerns. Specifically, controlling for analyst and firm characteristics, we find that within each analyst’s portfolio, firms ranked relatively higher based on market capitalization, trading volume, or institutional ownership receive more accurate, frequent, and informative earnings forecast revisions and stock recommendation changes that contain greater information content from that analyst. Firms’ relative rank across analysts varies widely, so this is …
Powerful Blockholders And Ceo Turnover, Chi Shen Wei, Lei Zhang
Powerful Blockholders And Ceo Turnover, Chi Shen Wei, Lei Zhang
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We identify the power of institutional blockholders to influence management using previous occurrences of forced CEO turnover at other firms in the blockholders’ overall portfolio. We create a “powerful blockholder linkage” measure that strongly predicts future forced CEO turnover. These effects are larger when “powerful” blockholders are more motivated to monitor and when they have had valuable monitoring experience. Moreover, firms with powerful blockholders display higher CEO turnover-performance sensitivity, pursue more value-increasing mergers, and have higher firm value. Overall, our results suggest that an identifiable group of powerful blockholders play an important role in corporate governance.
Public Hedge Funds, Lin Sun, Song Wee Melvyn Teo
Public Hedge Funds, Lin Sun, Song Wee Melvyn Teo
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Hedge funds managed by listed firms significantly underperform funds managed by unlisted firms. The underperformance is more severe for funds with low manager deltas, poor governance, and no manager co-investment, or managed by firms whose prices are sensitive to earnings news. Notwithstanding the underperformance, listed asset management firms raise more capital, by growing existing funds and launching new funds post listing, and harvest greater fee revenues than do comparable unlisted firms. The results are consistent with the view that, for asset management firms, going public weakens the alignment between ownership, control, and investment capital, thereby engendering conflicts of interest.
Are Capital Market Anomalies Common To Equity And Corporate Bond Markets?, Tarun Chordia, Amit Goyal, Yoshio Nozowa, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Qing Tong
Are Capital Market Anomalies Common To Equity And Corporate Bond Markets?, Tarun Chordia, Amit Goyal, Yoshio Nozowa, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Qing Tong
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
This paper studies whether the commonly analyzed equity return predictors also predict corporate bond returns. Bond markets do price risk, but are also susceptible to delayed information transmission relative to equities. Firm size and profitability are negatively priced while idiosyncratic volatility is positively priced, suggesting that large firms, more profitable firms and relatively less volatile firms are more attractive to bond investors, thus requiring lower returns. Consistent with a relatively sophisticated institutional clientele, bonds are efficiently priced in that none of the behaviorally-motivated variables provide profitable trading strategies after accounting for transactions costs, though some risk-based variables continue to do …
Public Hedge Funds, Lin Sun, Song Wee Melvyn Teo
Public Hedge Funds, Lin Sun, Song Wee Melvyn Teo
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Hedge funds managed by listed firms significantly underperform funds managed by unlisted firms. The underperformance is more severe for funds with low manager deltas, poor governance, and no manager co-investment, or managed by firms whose prices are sensitive to earnings news. Notwithstanding the underperformance, listed asset management firms raise more capital, by growing existing funds and launching new funds post listing, and harvest greater fee revenues than do comparable unlisted firms. The results are consistent with the view that, for asset management firms, going public weakens the alignment between ownership, control, and investment capital, thereby engendering conflicts of interest.
Short Interest, Returns, And Unfavorable Fundamental Information, Ferhat Akbas, Ekkehart Boehmer, Bilal Erturk, Sorin Sorescu
Short Interest, Returns, And Unfavorable Fundamental Information, Ferhat Akbas, Ekkehart Boehmer, Bilal Erturk, Sorin Sorescu
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Several months before information becomes public, the level of short interest contains value-relevant information about publicly traded corporations. Short interest predicts future bad news, negative earnings surprises, and downward revisions in analyst earnings forecasts. This informational content is stronger for stocks that are harder to short. We also find that nearly half of the well-known cross-sectional relation between short interest and future stock returns is related to future changes in firms’ value-relevant information. Our results suggest that short interest predicts future returns, in part, due to short sellers’ ability to uncover unfavorable information about firms.
On The Foundations Of Corporate Social Responsibility, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog
On The Foundations Of Corporate Social Responsibility, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
A firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice and its country’s legal origin are strongly correlated. This relation is valid for various CSR ratings coming from several large datasets that comprise more than 23,000 large companies from 114 countries. We find that CSR is more strongly and consistently related to legal origins than to “doing good by doing well”-factors, and most firm and country characteristics such as ownership concentration, political institutions, and degree of globalization. In particular, companies from common law countries have lower level of CSR than companies from civil law countries, and Scandinavian civil law firms assume highest level …
What Doesn't Kill You Will Only Make You More Risk-Loving: Early-Life Disasters And Ceo Behavior, Gennaro Bernile, Vineet Bhagwat, P. Raghavendra Rau
What Doesn't Kill You Will Only Make You More Risk-Loving: Early-Life Disasters And Ceo Behavior, Gennaro Bernile, Vineet Bhagwat, P. Raghavendra Rau
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
The literature on managerial style posits a linear relation between a chief executive officer's (CEOs) past experiences and firm risk. We show that there is a nonmonotonic relation between the intensity of CEOs’ early-life exposure to fatal disasters and corporate risk-taking. CEOs who experience fatal disasters without extremely negative consequences lead firms that behave more aggressively, whereas CEOs who witness the extreme downside of disasters behave more conservatively. These patterns manifest across various corporate policies including leverage, cash holdings, and acquisition activity. Ultimately, the link between CEOs’ disaster experience and corporate policies has real economic consequences on firm riskiness and …
Multinational Firms And Cash Holdings: Evidence From China, Weijun Wu, Yang Yang, Sili Zhou
Multinational Firms And Cash Holdings: Evidence From China, Weijun Wu, Yang Yang, Sili Zhou
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
To adapt to globalization, Chinese multinational firms have more exploitation of cash. This paper shows that Chinese multinational corporations (MNCs) do not hold significantly more cash relative to domestic firms unless these multinationals heavily relay on the foreign sales. In addition, the multinationals of non-State-Owned Enterprises (Non-SOEs) exhibit the insignificant difference in cash holdings for non-multinationals. We also find that Chinese MNCs invest more but are less profitable, especially in non-SOE subsample. Overall, we conclude that the need of cash liquidity of multinational corporations in China is different from those in U.S.
Socially Responsible Firms, Allen Ferrell, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog
Socially Responsible Firms, Allen Ferrell, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
In the corporate finance tradition, starting with Berle and Means (1932), corporations should generally be run to maximize shareholder value. The agency view of corporate social responsibility (CSR) considers CSR an agency problem and a waste of corporate resources. Given our identification strategy by means of an instrumental variable approach, we find that well-governed firms that suffer less from agency concerns (less cash abundance, positive pay-for-performance, small control wedge, strong minority protection) engage more in CSR. We also find that a positive relation exists between CSR and value and that CSR attenuates the negative relation between managerial entrenchment and value.
Valuation Uncertainty, Market Sentiment And The Informativeness Of Institutional Trades, Lisa Yang, Jeremy Goh, Chiraphol N. Chiyachantana
Valuation Uncertainty, Market Sentiment And The Informativeness Of Institutional Trades, Lisa Yang, Jeremy Goh, Chiraphol N. Chiyachantana
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Prior studies indicate that institutional investors are informed, in the sense that their trades predict price changes. In this study we show that return predictive ability of institutions arises (after controlling for size, book-to-market, and momentum) mainly from institutional sales of hard-to-value stocks during periods of positive market sentiment. These results support the notion that these stocks tend to be overvalued during periods of bullish market sentiment, and institutions contribute to market efficiency by identifying and trading on these overpriced stocks.
Decimalization, Ipo Aftermath, And Liquidity, Charlie Charoenwong, David K. Ding, Tiong Yang Thong
Decimalization, Ipo Aftermath, And Liquidity, Charlie Charoenwong, David K. Ding, Tiong Yang Thong
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We investigate the effect of decimalization on the aftermarket trading of NYSE-listed IPOs. We find that the relation between bid–ask spread and underpricing becomes negative post-decimalization, suggesting that benefits from the increased price competition accrue more to hot IPOs. The quoted depth is generally smaller post-decimalization due to a higher probability of front running, which aggravates the cost of adverse selection and limit order submission. We show that underwriters continue to provide price support but are only willing to cover the initial short position, if profitable to do so. Decimal pricing does not affect the flipping strategy of institutions for …
Did The Sarbanes-Oxley Act Impede Corporate Innovation? An Analysis Of The Unintended Consequences Of Regulation, Cao, Jerry X., Aurobindo Ghosh, Choo Yong, Jeremy Goh, Feichin Ted Tschang (Or F. Ted Tschang)
Did The Sarbanes-Oxley Act Impede Corporate Innovation? An Analysis Of The Unintended Consequences Of Regulation, Cao, Jerry X., Aurobindo Ghosh, Choo Yong, Jeremy Goh, Feichin Ted Tschang (Or F. Ted Tschang)
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We investigate whether innovation by publicly listed U.S. companies deteriorated significantly after the adoption of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Using data on patent filings as proxies for firms‟ innovative activities, we find firms‟ innovation as measured by patents and innovation efficiency dampened significantly after the enactment of the Act. The degree of impact is related to firm-specific characteristics such as the firm‟s value (Tobin‟s Q) and its measure of corporate governance (G-Index), as well as the firm‟s operating conditions (i.e., the firm being in an high-tech industry, and being delisted or not). We find evidence that the SOX‟s impact …
Sociability, Golf Courses, And The Performance Of Institutional Investors, Chi Shen Wei, Lei Zhang
Sociability, Golf Courses, And The Performance Of Institutional Investors, Chi Shen Wei, Lei Zhang
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We hypothesize that prestigious golf courses attract golfers and visitors from across the country, providing greater opportunities for nearby investors to build social connections. Our evidence suggests that institutional investors located near prestigious golf courses earn significantly better benchmark- and risk-adjusted returns. This reflects the benefits of sociability as our findings are stronger for golf courses with reciprocal guest policies that allow wider participation and increase when major golf championships rotate to the state. Their portfolios reveal hallmarks of active trading – higher concentration, greater selectivity, more frequent turnover – and include more distant stocks. To establish a causal link, …
Political Turnovers, Ownership, And Corporate Investment In China, Jerry X. Cao, Julio Brandon, Tiecheng Leng, Sili Zhou
Political Turnovers, Ownership, And Corporate Investment In China, Jerry X. Cao, Julio Brandon, Tiecheng Leng, Sili Zhou
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We examine the impact of political influence and ownership on corporate investment by exploiting the unique way provincial leaders are promoted in China. The tournament-style promotion system creates incentives for new governors to exert influence over investment in the early years of their term. We find a divergence in investment rates between state owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms following political turnover. SOEs increase investment by 6.0% following the turnover while investment rates for private firms decline, suggesting that the political influence exerted over SOEs may crowd out private investment.
Does It Pay To Be Different? Relative Csr And Its Impact On Firm Value, David K. Ding, Christo Ferreira, Udomsak Wongchoti
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 …
Can Information Be Locked Up? Informed Trading Ahead Of Macro-News Announcements, Gennaro Bernile, Jianfeng Hu, Yuehua Tang
Can Information Be Locked Up? Informed Trading Ahead Of Macro-News Announcements, Gennaro Bernile, Jianfeng Hu, Yuehua Tang
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Government agencies routinely allow pre-release access to information to accredited news agencies under embargo agreements. Using high-frequency data, we find evidence consistent with informed trading during embargoes of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) scheduled announcements. The E-mini Standard & Poor’s 500 futures’ abnormal order imbalances are in the direction of subsequent policy surprises and contain information that predicts the market reaction to the policy announcements. The estimated informed trades’ profits are arguably large. Notably, we find no evidence of informed trading prior to the start of FOMC news embargoes or during lockups ahead of nonfarm payroll, US Producer Price Index, …
Governance And Post-Repurchase Performance, Gary Caton, Jeremy Goh, Yen Teik Lee, Scott Linn
Governance And Post-Repurchase Performance, Gary Caton, Jeremy Goh, Yen Teik Lee, Scott Linn
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Payout policies based on share repurchase programs provide greater flexibility than do those based on cash dividends. We develop and test an empirical model in which strongly governed companies outperform weakly governed companies after announcing share repurchase programs. Our findings include positive associations between strong governance and both post-announcement adjusted operating performance and abnormal stock returns. The results are robust to sample selection bias, different sample criteria, governance measurement, and various control variables. In addition, governance strength is associated with larger post-announcement changes in CEO incentive compensation and merger and acquisition activity, both of which we argue are consistent with …
Socially Responsible Firms, Allen Ferrell, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog
Socially Responsible Firms, Allen Ferrell, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
In the corporate finance tradition starting with Berle & Means (1923), corporations should generally be run so as to maximize shareholder value. The agency view of corporate social responsibility (CSR) considers CSR as an agency problem and a waste of corporate resources. Given our identification strategy by means of an IV approach, we find that well-governed firms who suffer less from agency concerns (less cash abundance, positive pay-for-performance, small control wedge, strong minority protection) engage more in CSR. We also find a positive relation between CSR and value and that CSR attenuates the negative relation between managerial entrenchment and value.
Have We Solved The Idiosyncratic Volatility Puzzle?, Kewei Hou, Roger Loh
Have We Solved The Idiosyncratic Volatility Puzzle?, Kewei Hou, Roger Loh
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We propose a simple methodology to evaluate a large number of potential explanations for the negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility and subsequent stock returns (the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle). We find that surprisingly many existing explanations explain less than 10% of the puzzle. On the other hand, explanations based on investors’ lottery preferences, short-term return reversal, and earnings shocks show greater promise in explaining the puzzle. Together they account for 60-80% of the negative idiosyncratic volatility-return relation. Our methodology can be applied to evaluate competing explanations for a broad range of topics in asset pricing and corporate finance.
Governance Matter: Morningstar Stewardship Grades And Mutual Fund Performance, Jerry X. Cao, Aurobindo Ghosh, Jeremy Goh, Wee Seng Ng
Governance Matter: Morningstar Stewardship Grades And Mutual Fund Performance, Jerry X. Cao, Aurobindo Ghosh, Jeremy Goh, Wee Seng Ng
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Mutual fund investors have the arduous task of disentangling luck from ability of mutual fund managers’ performance. In this paper we investigate the role of mutual fund corporate governance (measured by Morningstar Stewardship grade) in mutual fund performance. We propose an objective data-driven corporate governance score based on principal components of Morningstar Stewardship Grades. Furthermore, we establish corporate governance scores have Granger Causality on long-term risk-adjusted returns. The findings suggest that corporate governance grades of mutual funds carry information content beyond the usual star rating measures for predicting long-term mutual fund performance and provide an effective tool for selecting funds.
Leveraging Foreign Institutional Logic In The Adoption Of Stock Option Pay Among Japanese Firms, Xuesong Geng, Toru Yoshikawa, Asli M. Colpan
Leveraging Foreign Institutional Logic In The Adoption Of Stock Option Pay Among Japanese Firms, Xuesong Geng, Toru Yoshikawa, Asli M. Colpan
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We investigate why Japanese firms have adopted executive stock option pay, which was developed with shareholder-oriented institutional logic that was inconsistent with Japanese stakeholder-oriented institutional logic. We argue that Japanese managers have self-serving incentives to leverage stock ownership of foreign investors and their associated institutional logic to legitimize the adoption of stock option pay. Our empirical analyses with a large sample of Japanese firms between 1997 and 2007 show that when managers have elite education, high pay inequality with ordinary employees, and when firms experience poor sales growth, foreign ownership is more likely associated with the adoption of stock option …
Macro Disagreement And The Cross-Section Of Stock Returns, Frank Weikai Li
Macro Disagreement And The Cross-Section Of Stock Returns, Frank Weikai Li
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
This paper examines the effects of macro-level disagreement on the cross-section of stock returns. Using forecast dispersion measure from Survey of Professional Forecasters database, I find that when forecast dispersion on macroeconomic factor is high, stocks that have high loadings on that factor earn lower future returns relative to stocks with low loadings and vice versa. This negative relationship between risk premium of macro-factors and macro-level disagreement is robust and exists for a large set of macroeconomic risk factors. These findings are consistent with the model of Hong and Sraer (2015), where high beta stocks are more prone to speculative …
Spillover Effects In Mutual Fund Companies, Clemens Sialm, T. Mandy Tham
Spillover Effects In Mutual Fund Companies, Clemens Sialm, T. Mandy Tham
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Our paper investigates spillover effects across different business segments of publicly traded financial conglomerates. We find that the investment decisions of mutual fund shareholders do not depend only on the prior performance of the mutual funds; they also depend on the prior performance of the funds’ management companies. Flows into equity and bond mutual funds increase with the prior stock price performance of the funds’ management companies after controlling for fund performance and other fund characteristics. The sensitivity of flows to the management company’s performance is not justified by the subsequent performance of the affiliated funds. The results indicate that …
Social Capital, Informal Governance, And Post-Ipo Firm Performance: A Study Of Chinese Entrepreneurial Firms, Jerry X. Cao, Yuan Ding, Hua Zhang
Social Capital, Informal Governance, And Post-Ipo Firm Performance: A Study Of Chinese Entrepreneurial Firms, Jerry X. Cao, Yuan Ding, Hua Zhang
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Social capital can serve as informal governance in weak investor-protection regimes. Using hand-collected data on entrepreneurs' political connections and firm ownership, we construct several original measures of social capital and examine their effect on the performance of entrepreneurial firms in China after their initial public offerings. Political connections or a high percentage of external investors tend to enhance firm performance, but intragroup related-party transactions commonly lead to performance decline. These forms of social capital have a strong influence on the performance of Chinese firms, whereas formal governance variables such as board size or board independence have little effect. Although social …
Slack Resources And The Rent-Generating Potential Of Firm-Specific Knowledge, Heli Wang, Jaepil Choi, Guoguang Wan, John Qi Dong
Slack Resources And The Rent-Generating Potential Of Firm-Specific Knowledge, Heli Wang, Jaepil Choi, Guoguang Wan, John Qi Dong
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We examine how two types of slack resources relevant to knowledge employees—human resource slack and financial slack at the R&D functional level—influence the rent-generating potential of firm-specific knowledge resources. According to the resource- and knowledge-based views of the firm, firm-specific knowledge resources are critical for generating economic rents for a firm. However, without motivated knowledge employees investing in the corresponding specialized human capital in the process of absorbing and deploying firm-specific knowledge resources, the resource potential for rent generation would be greatly discounted. We argue that human resource slack among knowledge employees and financial slack available for R&D activities affect …
Option Return Predictability, Jie Cao, Han Bing, Qing Tong, Xintong Zhan
Option Return Predictability, Jie Cao, Han Bing, Qing Tong, Xintong Zhan
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We show the cross-section of equity option returns can be predicted by a variety of underlying stock characteristics and firm fundamentals, including idiosyncratic volatility, past stock returns, profitability, cash holding, new share issuance, and dispersion of analyst forecasts. Such predictability is not mechanically inherited from the stock market because these variables do not significantly predict stock returns in our sample, and our results hold for delta-hedged calls and puts in the same directions. We document new option trading strategies that are profitable even after transaction costs. These profits are robust across different market conditions and subsamples. They cannot be explained …
Board Diversity, Firm Risk, And Corporate Policies, Gennaro Bernile, Vineet Bhagwat, Scott Yonker
Board Diversity, Firm Risk, And Corporate Policies, Gennaro Bernile, Vineet Bhagwat, Scott Yonker
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We examine the effects of diversity in the board of directors on corporate policies and risk. Using a multi-dimensional measure, we find that greater board diversity leads to lower volatility and better performance. The lower risk levels are largely due to diverse boards adopting more persistent and less risky financial policies. However, consistent with diversity fostering more efficient (real) risk-taking, firms with greater board diversity also invest persistently more in R&D and have more efficient innovation processes. Instrumental variable tests that exploit exogenous variation in firm access to the supply of diverse nonlocal directors indicate that these relations are causal.
A State-Stewardship View On Executive Compensation, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog, Sunny Li Sun
A State-Stewardship View On Executive Compensation, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog, Sunny Li Sun
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We take a state-stewardship view on corporate governance and executive compensation in economies with strong political involvement, where state-appointed managers act as responsible ‘stewards’ rather than ‘agents’ of the state. We test this view on China and find that Chinese managers are remunerated not for maximizing equity value but for increasing the value of state-owned assets. Managerial compensation depends on political connections and prestige, and on the firms’ contribution to political goals. These effects were attenuated since the market-oriented governance reform. In a social welfare perspective, such compensation stimulates not the maximization of shareholder value but the preservation of the …
Open Market Share Repurchase Programs And Corporate Governance: Company Performance, Gary Caton, Jeremy Goh, Yen Teik Lee, Scott C. Linn
Open Market Share Repurchase Programs And Corporate Governance: Company Performance, Gary Caton, Jeremy Goh, Yen Teik Lee, Scott C. Linn
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Payout policies based on share repurchase programs provide greater flexibility than do those based on cash dividends. We develop and test an empirical model in which strongly-governed companies outperform weakly-governed companies after announcing share repurchase programs. Our findings include positive associations between strong governance and both post-announcement adjusted operating performance and abnormal stock returns. The results are robust to sample selection bias, different sample criteria, governance measurement, and various control variables. In addition, governance strength is associated with larger post-announcement changes in CEO incentive compensation and merger and acquisition activity, both of which we argue are consistent with strongly-governed companies …