Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Business Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 30 of 113

Full-Text Articles in Business

Impact Of Geographical Diversification And Limited Attention On Private Equity Fund Returns, Victor Ong Feb 2023

Impact Of Geographical Diversification And Limited Attention On Private Equity Fund Returns, Victor Ong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article analyzes the effect of geographical diversification on global private equity (PE) fund returns. We find that there is a negative correlation between geographical diversification and PE fund returns. To establish the causality between geographical diversification and PE fund returns, we employ an instrumental variable analysis where the instrument used is the stock market capitalization of the host country where the PE fund is based. Our results apply to Net IRR, TVPI and DPI as dependent variables used to proxy for PE fund returns in the main regression model. A one standard deviation increase in geographical diversification results in …


Does Abstract Thinking Facilitate Information Processing? Evidence From Financial Analysts, Frank Weikai Li, Rong Wang, Yang Yu, Gloria Yang Yu Dec 2022

Does Abstract Thinking Facilitate Information Processing? Evidence From Financial Analysts, Frank Weikai Li, Rong Wang, Yang Yu, Gloria Yang Yu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study whether abstract thinking – an essential cognitive trait established by psychological and neuroscientific studies – facilitates analysts’ information processing. Exploiting analysts’ questions during earnings calls, we construct an Abstract Thinking Index (ATI) that measures their tendency to involve abstract words, logical reasoning, broader topics, and future outlooks. We find that abstract thinking improves analysts’ forecast accuracy and recommendation informativeness. Consistent with abstract thinking featuring identifying central characteristics and comprehending intangible things, ATI has stronger effects for firms with fundamentals co-moving more with peers and less tangible information. Additional analyses suggest that ATI captures analysts’ cognitive traits rather than …


Learning From Manipulable Signals, Mehmet Ekmekci, Leandrro Gorno, Lucas Maestri, Jian Sun, Dong Wei Dec 2022

Learning From Manipulable Signals, Mehmet Ekmekci, Leandrro Gorno, Lucas Maestri, Jian Sun, Dong Wei

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study a dynamic stopping game between a principal and an agent. The agent is privately informed about his type. The principal learns about the agent’s type from a noisy performance measure, which can be manipulated by the agent via a costly and hidden action. We fully characterize the unique Markov equilibrium of this game. We find that terminations/ market crashes are often preceded by a spike in (expected) performance. Our model also predicts that, due to endogenous signal manipulation, too much transparency can inhibit learning. As the players get arbitrarily patient, the principal elicits no useful information from the …


The Alphabet Soup In Reporting And Measuring Esg, Hao Liang, Kam Chee Chan Oct 2022

The Alphabet Soup In Reporting And Measuring Esg, Hao Liang, Kam Chee Chan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Harmonising frameworks with the Impact-Weighted Accounts Framework.


International Asset Pricing With Strategic Business Groups, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang, Hong Zhang Aug 2022

International Asset Pricing With Strategic Business Groups, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Firms in global markets often belong to business groups. We argue that this feature can have a profound influence on international asset pricing. In bad times, business groups may strategically reallocate risk across affiliated firms to protect core “central firms.” This strategic behavior induces co-movement among central firms, creating a new intertemporal risk factor. Based on a novel data set of worldwide ownership for 2002–2012, we find that central firms are better protected in bad times and that they earn relatively lower expected returns. Moreover, a centrality factor augments traditional models in explaining the cross section of international stock returns.


Customer Concentration And Corporate Carbon Emissions, Saiying Deng, Tinghua Duan, Frank Weikai Li, Xiaoling Pu Aug 2022

Customer Concentration And Corporate Carbon Emissions, Saiying Deng, Tinghua Duan, Frank Weikai Li, Xiaoling Pu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines whether economic links with major corporate customers curb corporate carbon emissions. We show that supplier firms with a concentrated customer base have significantly lower carbon emissions. The baseline results are robust to alternative measures of carbon emissions and customer concentration, and various approaches that mitigate endogeneity concerns due to omitted variables and reverse causality. Moreover, the curbing effect of customer concentration on supplier carbon emissions is more pronounced in firms facing lower customer switching costs, with less (more) supplier (customer) bargaining power, fewer redeployable assets, operating in more carbon-intensive industries, and after the Paris Agreement of 2015. …


The Cryptocurrency Participation Puzzle, Ran Duchin, David H. Solomon, Jun Tu, Xi Wang Aug 2022

The Cryptocurrency Participation Puzzle, Ran Duchin, David H. Solomon, Jun Tu, Xi Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that ongoing zero portfolio weights in cryptocurrency are surprisingly difficult to generate in a standard Bayesian portfolio theory framework. With ten years of prior data, equity market investors would need very pessimistic priors on mean returns to justify never having bought cryptocurrency: -10.6% per month for Bitcoin, and -19.6% per month for a diversified portfolio of cryptocurrencies. Moreover, most priors that involve never purchasing cryptocurrency imply that investors should short cryptocurrency. Optimal absolute weights are generally small but non-trivial (1-5%), frequently positive, and fairly smooth despite returns being volatile. Under a wide range of priors, the certainty equivalent …


Why Do U.S. Firms Invest Less Over Time?, Fangjian Fu, Sheng Huang, Rong Wang Jul 2022

Why Do U.S. Firms Invest Less Over Time?, Fangjian Fu, Sheng Huang, Rong Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Capital expenditures of U.S. public firms, relative to total assets, decrease by more than half from 1980 to 2020. The decline is pervasive across industries and firms of different characteristics and cannot be explained by the usual determinants of investment and many other seemingly plausible reasons. The decline is consistent with the transformation in production technology — firms rely more on intangible capital and less on fixed assets in production. Industry-level analyses yield supporting evidence. We observe similar declining trend in capital expenditure in other developed countries but not in most emerging markets.


Exchange-Traded Funds And Real Investment, Constantinos Antoniou, Frank Weikai Li, Xuewen Liu, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Chengzhu Sun Jul 2022

Exchange-Traded Funds And Real Investment, Constantinos Antoniou, Frank Weikai Li, Xuewen Liu, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Chengzhu Sun

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate the link between exchange-traded funds and real investment. Cross-sectionally, higher ETF ownership is associated with an increased sensitivity of real investment to Tobin's q and a heightened ability of stock returns to forecast future earnings. Inclusion of stocks in industry ETFs enhances investment-q sensitivity and implies greater incorporation of earnings information into prices prior to public releases. Greater nonmarket ETF ownership leads to increased (reduced) reliance of real investment on own (peers') stock prices. Overall, the evidence is consistent with ETFs positively affecting real investment efficiency via greater flows of information.


Eradicating Malaria: Innovation Diffusion In The Face Of Grand Challenges, Han Jiang, Hao Liang, Dongning Yang Jul 2022

Eradicating Malaria: Innovation Diffusion In The Face Of Grand Challenges, Han Jiang, Hao Liang, Dongning Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

What is the role of organizational innovation—beyond technological innovation—in an era of grand challenges concerning health, poverty, and economic development around the world? How is organizational innovation developed and diffused to influence resource allocation in the field? We conduct a qualitative case study by analyzing a Chinese pharmaceutical firm’s efforts to combat malaria in Africa over 10 years. Through documentation and extensive interviews, we study the role of innovation diffusion and resource allocation to address grand challenges in emerging markets with significant institutional voids. Our conceptual model delineates the different stages of innovation diffusion to show how organizations can draw …


Internal Capital Markets And Predictability In Complex Ownership Firms, Ran Chang, Angelica Gonzalez, Sergei Sarkissian, Jun Tu Jun 2022

Internal Capital Markets And Predictability In Complex Ownership Firms, Ran Chang, Angelica Gonzalez, Sergei Sarkissian, Jun Tu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Using global cross-firm ownership data, we find that both stock returns and cash-flow news of ownership-linked firms predict focal firm's returns for all types of ownership structures: subsidiary-parent, parent-subsidiary, subsidiary-subsidiary, and parent-parent. This effect, observed only after the establishment of cross-firm ownership, is not subsumed by focal firm or industry momentum, or alternative inter-firm relations, including customer-supplier links and shared analyst coverage. Our findings are explained by mispricing due to internal capital markets - a mechanism unique to complex ownership firms. Higher internal capital market activity among ownership-linked firms also induces larger investments and lower external financing of the focal …


A Black-Scholes User's Guide To The Bachelier Model, Jaehyuk Choi, Minsuk Kwak, Chyng Wen Tee, Yumeng Wang May 2022

A Black-Scholes User's Guide To The Bachelier Model, Jaehyuk Choi, Minsuk Kwak, Chyng Wen Tee, Yumeng Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

To cope with the negative oil futures price caused by the COVID-19 recession, global commodity futures exchanges switched the option model from Black-Scholes to Bachelier in April 2020. This study reviews the literature on Bachelier's pioneering option pricing model and summarizes the practical results on volatility conversion, risk management, stochastic volatility, and barrier options pricing to facilitate the model transition. In particular, using the displaced Black-Scholes model as a model family with the Black-Scholes and Bachelier models as special cases, we not only connect the two models but also present a continuous spectrum of model choices.


Investor Sentiment And Paradigm Shifts In Equity Premium Forecasting, Liya Chu, Kai Li, Tony Xue-Zhong He, Jun Tu Apr 2022

Investor Sentiment And Paradigm Shifts In Equity Premium Forecasting, Liya Chu, Kai Li, Tony Xue-Zhong He, Jun Tu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study investigates the impact of investor sentiment on excess equity return forecasting. A high (low) investor sentiment may weaken the connection between fundamental economic (behavioral-based non-fundamental) predictors and market returns. We find that although fundamental variables can be strong predictors when sentiment is low, they tend to lose their predictive power when investor sentiment is high. Non-fundamental predictors perform well during high-sentiment periods while their predictive ability deteriorates when investor sentiment is low. These paradigm shifts in equity return forecasting provide a key to understanding and resolving the lack of predictive power for both fundamental and non-fundamental variables debated …


Do Underwriters Short-Change Corporations Issuing Bonds?, Choo Yong, Jeremy Goh, Lisa Yang Apr 2022

Do Underwriters Short-Change Corporations Issuing Bonds?, Choo Yong, Jeremy Goh, Lisa Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We confirm prior evidence that bonds on average are offered at prices below their immediate post-offer secondary market prices. However, in cases where banks lead-manage their own bond offerings the underpricing is significantly less as compared to other non-self-marketed offerings. These findings are robust across various matched samples and selection models. Our results suggest that the bond offering process is characterized by substantive agency conflicts between shareholders of corporations (issuers) and underwriters.


Why Commonality Persists?, Chyng Wen Tee, Raja Velu, Zhaoque Zhou Apr 2022

Why Commonality Persists?, Chyng Wen Tee, Raja Velu, Zhaoque Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that order flows do not exhibit predictive power on asset returns, and their relationships have been static over time. We use a reduced-rank regression formulation to model both returns and the order flows as endogenous variables, and use investors' sentiment and attention as exogenous factors. We provide empiricalevidence to demonstrate that cross-sectional commonality in attention (sentiment) is linearly (nonlinearly) associated with both returns and order flows at the intraday level, while the sentiment and attentionmeasures themselves exhibit a nonlinear mutual relationship, thus revealing the multi-dimensional aspect of the commonality relationship.


Financial Intermediaries And Contagion In Market Efficiency: The Case Of Etfs, Claire Yurong Hong, Frank Weikai Li, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam Mar 2022

Financial Intermediaries And Contagion In Market Efficiency: The Case Of Etfs, Claire Yurong Hong, Frank Weikai Li, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Capital constraints of financial intermediaries can affect liquidity provision. We investigate whether these constraints spillover and consequently cause contagion in the degree of market efficiency across assets managed by a common intermediary. Specifically, we provide evidence of strong comovement in pricing gaps between ETFs and their constituents for ETFs served by the same lead market maker (LMM). The effects are stronger for ETFs that are more illiquid and volatile, when the underlying constituents of the ETFs are more costly to arbitrage, and for LMMs with more constrained capital. Using extreme disruptions in debt markets during COVID-19 as an experiment, we …


How Do Firms Respond To Reduced Private Equity Buyout Activity?, Yi-Hsin Lo Mar 2022

How Do Firms Respond To Reduced Private Equity Buyout Activity?, Yi-Hsin Lo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper presents new evidence on the economic role of private equity buyouts by exploiting the staggered adoption of the constructive fraud provision by U.S. state courts. The law unintentionally shifts the credit default risk borne by existing unsecured creditors of the buyout target to the selling shareholders and lenders in the form of ex-post litigation risk, thereby discouraging buyout activity. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find that firms raise less capital, reduce payouts and investments, and form alliances with employees. Firms also avoid positive NPV projects that carry too much risk. These findings are consistent with managers enjoying a …


Short Selling Etfs, Frank Weikai Li, Qifei Zhu Feb 2022

Short Selling Etfs, Frank Weikai Li, Qifei Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We provide novel evidence that arbitrageurs use exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as an avenue to circumvent short-sale constraints at the stock level. Using a large sample of U.S. equity ETF holdings, we document that shorting activity on ETFs rises with the difficulty of shorting underlying stocks. Stocks heavily shorted via their holding ETFs underperform those that are lightly shorted. The return predictability of ETF shorting is distinct from stock-level shorting measures and is concentrated among stocks that face severe arbitrage constraints. These findings suggest that ETFs allow arbitrageurs to target overpriced stocks that are otherwise difficult to short.


Investing In Low-Trust Countries: On The Role Of Social Trust In The Global Mutual Fund Industry, Massimo Massa, Chengwei Wang, Hong Zhang, Jian Zhang Feb 2022

Investing In Low-Trust Countries: On The Role Of Social Trust In The Global Mutual Fund Industry, Massimo Massa, Chengwei Wang, Hong Zhang, Jian Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We hypothesize that social trust, in mitigating contracting incompleteness, may have an important effect on the activeness and effectiveness of delegated portfolio management. Using a complete sample of worldwide open-end mutual funds, we find that trust is positively associated with the activeness of funds and that trust-related active share delivers superior performance (e.g., approximately 2% per year for cross-border investments). Moreover, "trust in the market" and "trust in managers" play important yet different roles for different types of cross-border delegated portfolio management. Our results suggest that trust acts as a fundamental building block for delegated portfolio management.


Climate Change And Sustainability In Asean Countries, David K. Ding, Sarah E. Beh Jan 2022

Climate Change And Sustainability In Asean Countries, David K. Ding, Sarah E. Beh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The ASEAN region is one of the most susceptible regions to climate change, with three of its countries—Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand—among those that have suffered the greatest fatalities and economic losses because of climate-related disasters. This paper reveals that the ASEAN’s environmental performance is sorely lagging other regions despite evidence of its cohesive and comprehensive efforts to mitigate emissions and build up adaptive capacity to climate-related disasters. Within the ASEAN, there exist gaps in environmental performance between each country. This suggests that increased cooperation between individual ASEAN countries is pertinent for the region to collectively combat climate change. In …


Harnessing Digitalization For Sustainable Economic Development: Insights For Asia, John Beirne, David Fernandez Dec 2021

Harnessing Digitalization For Sustainable Economic Development: Insights For Asia, John Beirne, David Fernandez

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Digitalization has helped to transform economies by enhancing competitiveness and productivity across a wide range of sectors. The use of big data and the rise of online platforms have accelerated this process over the past decade. In addition, the adoption of digital solutions in the face of social distancing and lockdown measures introduced due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been integral to the economic recovery process. The shift to a digitalized economy has also reduced barriers to market entry for firms, lowered inequality, and led to a promotion of social and economic inclusion. Advances in digital technology …


Socially Responsible Corporate Customers, Rui Dai, Hao Liang, Lilian Ng Nov 2021

Socially Responsible Corporate Customers, Rui Dai, Hao Liang, Lilian Ng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Corporate customers are an important stakeholder in global supply chains. We employ several unique international databases to test whether socially responsible corporate customers can infuse similar socially responsible business behavior in suppliers. Our findings suggest a unilateral effect on corporate social responsibility (CSR) only from customers to suppliers, an evidence further supported by exogenous variation in customers’ close-call CSR proposals and by product scandals. Customers exert influence on suppliers’ CSR through positive assortative matching and their decision-making process. Enhanced collaborative CSR efforts help improve operational efficiency and firm valuation of both customers and suppliers but increase only the customers’ future …


Volatility Timing Under Low-Volatility Strategy, Poh Ling Neo, Chyng Wen Tee Nov 2021

Volatility Timing Under Low-Volatility Strategy, Poh Ling Neo, Chyng Wen Tee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The authors show that the slope of the volatility decile portfolio’s return profile contains valuable information that can be used to time volatility under different market conditions in the United States. During good (bad) market conditions, the high- (low-) volatility portfolio produces the highest return. The authors proceed to devise a volatility timing strategy based on statistical tests on the slope of the volatility decile portfolio’s return profile. Volatility timing is achieved by being aggressive during strong growth periods and conservative during market downturns. Superior performance is obtained, with an additional return of 4.1% observed in the volatility timing strategy, …


Stock Return Prediction Using Financial News: A Unified Sequence Model Based On Hierarchical Attention And Long-Short Term Memory Networks, Haoling Chen, Peng Liu Nov 2021

Stock Return Prediction Using Financial News: A Unified Sequence Model Based On Hierarchical Attention And Long-Short Term Memory Networks, Haoling Chen, Peng Liu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Stock return prediction has been a hot topic in both research and industry given its potential for large financial gain. The return signal, apart from its inherent volatility and complexity, is often accompanied by a multitude of noises, such as other stocks’ performance, macroeconomic factors and financial news, etc. To better characterize these factors, we propose a new model that consists of two levels of sequence: an NLP-based module to capture the sequential nature of words and sentences in the financial news, and a time-series-based module to exploit the sequential nature of adjacent observations in the stock price. In this …


Algorithmic Transparency, Jian Sun Nov 2021

Algorithmic Transparency, Jian Sun

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

I study the optimal algorithmic disclosure in a lending market where lenders use a predictive algorithm to mitigate adverse selection. The predictive algorithm is unobservable to borrowers and uses a manipulable borrower feature as input. A regulator maximizes market efficiency by disclosing information about the statistical properties of variables embedded in the predictive algorithm to borrowers. Under the optimal disclosure policy, the posterior belief consists of two disjoint regions in which the borrower feature is more relevant and less relevant in predicting borrower quality, respectively. The optimal disclosure policy differentiates posterior lending market equilibria by the equilibrium data manipulation levels. …


Air Pollution, Behavioral Bias, And The Disposition Effect In China, Jennifer (Jie) Li, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang, Jian Zhang Oct 2021

Air Pollution, Behavioral Bias, And The Disposition Effect In China, Jennifer (Jie) Li, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang, Jian Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Inspired by the recent health science findings that air pollution affects mental health and cognition, we examine whether air pollution can intensify the cognitive bias observed in the financial markets. Based on a proprietary data set obtained from a large Chinese mutual fund family consisting of complete trading information for more than 773,198 ac-counts in 247 cities, we find that air pollution significantly increases investors' disposition effects. Analysis based on two plausible exogenous variations in air quality (the vast dissi-pation of air pollution caused by strong winds and the Huai River policy) supports a causal interpretation. Mood regulation provides a …


Media Connection And Return Comovement, Zilin Chen, Li Guo, Jun Tu, Jun Tu Sep 2021

Media Connection And Return Comovement, Zilin Chen, Li Guo, Jun Tu, Jun Tu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Media news may cover multiple firms in one article, which establishes a media connection across firms. We propose a media connection strength (MCS) measure between two given firms, which is defined as the number of news articles co-mentioning these two firms. We show that the MCS measure can significantly explain and forecast return comovement of media-connected firm-pairs. Further analyses show that our results are robust to various alternative explanations. We argue that the MCS measure can capture comprehensive and complex correlated fundamental information among media-connected firms and hence may provide a new mechanism for return comovement beyond the existing rational- …


Towards Better Data Augmentation Using Wasserstein Distance In Variational Auto-Encoder, Zichuan Chen, Peng Liu Sep 2021

Towards Better Data Augmentation Using Wasserstein Distance In Variational Auto-Encoder, Zichuan Chen, Peng Liu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

VAE, or variational auto-encoder, compresses data into latent attributes, and generates new data of different varieties. VAE based on KL divergence has been considered as an effective technique for data augmentation. In this paper, we propose the use of Wasserstein distance as a measure of distributional similarity for the latent attributes, and show its superior theoretical lower bound (ELBO) compared with that of KL divergence under mild conditions. Using multiple experiments, we demonstrate that the new loss function exhibits better convergence property and generates artificial images that could better aid the image classification tasks.


Oil Price Shocks And Stock Market Anomalies, Zhaobo Zhu, Licheng Sun, Jun Tu, Qiang Ji Sep 2021

Oil Price Shocks And Stock Market Anomalies, Zhaobo Zhu, Licheng Sun, Jun Tu, Qiang Ji

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper provides a novel perspective to the nexus of oil prices and stock markets by examining the impact of oil price shocks on stock market anomalies. After decomposing oil price shocks into three types , we find that aggregate demand shocks have the strongest influence on stock market anomalies. In contrast, oil supply shocks and oil-specific demand shocks have little impact. Similar results are also found in the industry analysis. Interestingly, the link between aggregate demand shocks and anomalies is the strongest among firms with either small size or high idiosyncratic risks. The documented effects are robust after controlling …


Monetary Policy Surprises, Stock Returns, And Financial And Liquidity Constraints, In An Exchange Rate Monetary Policy System, John M. Sequeira Aug 2021

Monetary Policy Surprises, Stock Returns, And Financial And Liquidity Constraints, In An Exchange Rate Monetary Policy System, John M. Sequeira

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study examines the impact of monetary policy surprises on the stock price behaviour of a small developed economy, whose monetary policy is based on the exchange rate. We find that monetary policy surprises associated with all contractionary policy levers and a neutral policy lever, have a consistently significant and negative impact on stock returns. In comparison, only monetary policy surprises associated with a downward re-centering policy lever, has a significantly positive effect on stock returns. Using a recalibrated classification system, we also find that monetary policy surprises differ across sectors of the economy. Our results show how monetary policy …