Corporate Finance Commons^™

Blockchain Games: What On And Off-Chain Factors Affect The Volatility, Returns, And Liquidity Of Gaming Crypto Tokens, Sumer Sareen

CMC Senior Theses

Blockchain games took the internet by storm as they offered a new way for users to play video games, own the assets in those games, and benefit monetarily from their efforts. Through Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies, new, Web3 games ushered in a unique asset class for retail and institutional investors to diversify into and benefit from. This paper uses cross-sectional data from 30 blockchain gaming companies to identify on and off-chain factors that affect the company’s token volatility, returns, and liquidity. A multiple linear regression found the percentage of tokens dedicated to a company’s private sale and rewarding users, …

Endogenous Market Choice, Listing Regulations, And Ipo Spread: Evidence From The London Stock Exchange, Hafiz Hoque, John Doukas

Finance Faculty Publications

This study examines the endogenous market choice and its impact on underwriter spread if Alternative Investment Market (AIM) IPOs that meet Main Market (MM) listing requirements had issued equity in the MM during the 1995–2021 period. We find that the spread is 1.33% higher in the AIM than the MM for IPO listings that meet the MM listing requirements. This finding suggests that AIM companies, meeting the MM listing requirements, could have saved more than £100 million by going public through the MM than the AIM market. We also find that this spread differential is attributed to the issuing firms' …

Information Sharing Between Mutual Funds And Auditors, Ole‐Kristian Hope, Pingui Rao, Yanping Xu, Heng Yue

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper examines whether there is information sharing between mutual funds and their auditors about the auditors’ other listed firm clients. Using data from the Chinese market, we find that mutual funds earn higher profits from trading in firms that share the same auditors. The effects are more pronounced when firms have a more opaque information environment and when the audit partners for the fund and the partners for the listed firm share school ties. The evidence is consistent with information flowing from auditors to mutual funds, providing mutual funds with an information advantage in firms that share the same …

Trust And Contracting: Evidence From Church Sex Scandals, Gilles Hilary, Sterling Huang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Firms located in communities in which people are, on average, more trusting enjoy some benefits in terms of the power of CEO contracts. We present two pieces of empirical evidence to support this claim: (1) higher average trust in a county is associated with “flatter” executive contracts and (2) when an exogenous shock occurs (such as a scandal involving an important social institution), both trust and contracting move in similar directions. We obtain the first result in a panel specification and the second in a “difference-in-difference” specification that uses the revelation of sex scandals involving the Catholic Church across different …

How Much Do Investors Care About Social Responsibility?, Scott Hirst, Kobi Kastiel, Tamar Kricheli-Katz

Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps the most important corporate law debate over the last several years concerns whether directors and executives should manage the corporation to maximize value for investors or also take into account the interests of other stakeholders and society. But, do investors themselves wish to maximize returns, or are they willing to forgo returns for social purposes? And more broadly, do market participants, such as investors and consumers, differ from donors in the ways in which they prioritize monetary gains and the promotion of social goals?

This project attempts to answer these questions with evidence from an experiment conducted with 279 …

The Lost Promise Of Private Ordering, Cathy Hwang, Yaron Nili, Jeremy Mcclane

Faculty Scholarship

The agency problem is corporate law’s most enduring challenge: when corporate managers spend investors’ money, how does the law protect investors from reckless management? Scholars of law, finance, and accounting have suggested that in one corner of corporate law—corporate debt—a powerful tool exists to mitigate the agency problem. Specifically, through loan covenants, lenders can force borrowers to comply with lenders’ preferences, thereby mitigating the agency problem in lending.

But loan covenants are disappearing. Over the last decade, loan covenants have become fewer and skinnier, and so called “covenant-lite” or “cov-lite” loans have become dominant. If loan covenants do such a …

Side Letter Governance, Elisabeth De Fontenay, Yaron Nili

Faculty Scholarship

A standard feature of the private equity industry, “side letters” are confidential agreements between the sponsor and individual investors that give the latter special rights, beyond those that apply to other investors in the private equity fund. Yet side letters have become a flashpoint for prominent critics of the industry, who argue that they allow private equity sponsors to benefit their favored investors at the expense of smaller, less sophisticated ones. Others have argued that, to the contrary, side letters are merely an efficient means of price discrimination—charging different prices to different investors, according to their willingness to pay—a practice …

Brief Of Law And Business Professors As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondents, James D. Cox, Sarah C. Haan, Faith Stevelman, J. Robert Brown Jr., Joan Macleod Heminway

Faculty Scholarship

Omissions of disclosure required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC or Commission) in Item 303 of Regulation S-K can be a basis for an action under Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (Exchange Act). Disclosures mandated by the SEC in periodic reports are not optional. That these obligations can create a “duty” to disclose under Rule 10b-5(b) is consistent with congressional intent, state court opinions, the common law, and with the longstanding understanding of the federal securities laws (including those of legal scholars and the SEC). This case does not, therefore, seek to “impermissibly expand” the …

Corporate Governance And Risk-Taking: A Statistical Approach, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

Because prudent corporate governance often requires managers to take risks based on statistically expected outcomes, corporate failures that have a small but finite chance of occurring cannot always be prevented. This Article makes three related claims about risk-taking in corporate governance.

This Article’s first claim is that managers should not automatically be presumed to be at fault for corporate failures that result from risk-taking decisions based on statistical methodologies that reasonably justify the decisions ex ante. Conceptually, the business judgment rule should protect corporate managers for engaging in a reasonable decision-making process, including one that is statistically based. Jurisdictionally, however, …

Essays On Ceo Background And Corporate Performance, Busra Agcayazi

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation is composed of three distinct chapters, all of which revolve around the core subject of how CEO background attributes impact a company’s investment decisions and the resulting corporate outcomes. The first chapter entitled, “CEO International Background and Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions” investigates whether having a CEO with an international background affects U.S. firms’ cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) activities. By defining international background as having either non-U.S. nationality, overseas education, or foreign work experience, this chapter provides robust evidence that when a CEO possesses these characteristics, the firm is more likely to acquire international targets, and these deals …

Twitter Sentiment Analysis: Applications In Healthcare And Finance, Jiali Wang

Dissertations

This research explores the influence of Twitter sentiment on healthcare and finance industries. It assesses how Twitter sentiment and culture measure influence COVID-19 statistics, and it investigates the impact of Twitter sentiment on S&P 1500 stock mispricing. Furthermore, it examines how tweet sentiment predicts major industry returns.

The first part examines how Hofstede’s Culture Dimensions (HCD) and Twitter economic uncertainty index (TEU) relate to COVID-19 infection rate and death rate. The results show certain aspects in HCD, such as power distance index (PDI) and masculinity (MAS) both are negatively and significantly associated with the infection rate, while indulgence (IVR) and …

Esg And Intellectual Capital Efficiency: Evidence From Asean Emerging Markets, Etikah Karyani, Muhamad Resa Perdiansyah

Jurnal Akuntansi dan Keuangan Indonesia

This study aims to investigate the impacts of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) in total and individual performance (“E”, “S”, and “G”) on firms’ intellectual capital (IC) efficiency. The Value-Added Intellectual Coefficient (VAIC) and Modified Value-Added Intellectual Coefficient (MVAIC) were used to measure IC efficiency. Meanwhile, the annual ESG index data from the ASEAN-4 were used to measure ESG from 2015 to 2020. The results show “E”, “S”, and “G” and total ESG positively affect firms’ efficiency in managing IC. In addition, the industry type moderates these relationships in terms of that banks have a greater influence than non-banks. Our …

Ethical Compatibility Of Socially Responsible Banking: Comparing The Japanese Main Bank System With The Usa, Kanji Kitamura

School of Business: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although the broad idea of socially responsible banking is widely accepted, no precise definition of ethical banking is available because of various ethical preferences. This paper develops the concept of ethical compatibility as a theoretical description of ethical banking. It offers a multi-level framework to illustrate the compatibility between the regional ethics and preferred forms of ethical banking prevalent in Japan and the USA. This paper first revisits the two paradigms of financial systems and examines the two types of business purposes as ethics. Drawing on the literature concepts, this study posits a conceptual framework demonstrating the compatibility between the …

Financial Institutions Continue To Adopt Crypto Despite Industry Turmoil, Andre Beganski

Capstones

Even though this calamitous year has raised doubts about crypto's future, not a single large financial institution has backed away from their forays into digital assets. And despite a period of turmoil that’s seen the market value of all cryptocurrencies crater to under $880 billion from over $3 trillion, many sizable firms continue to view crypto as an emerging sector of finance and technology that’s rife with opportunity.

While financial firms have the potential to foster a widespread perception of cryptocurrencies as a legitimate asset class, their involvement runs counter to the intent of those who pioneered blockchain technology for …

The Effect Of Climate Change On Firm Level Costs With Focus On Mena Region, Farah Osama Saieed

Theses and Dissertations

This paper has a main objective of identifying the relationship between environmental factors and climate change on operating costs incurred by firms. This paper also attempts to compare the direction and intensity of the effect on different sectors in order to analyze whether climate change effect differs based on the nature of the business operations. Several papers have previously addressed the relationship between climate change factors ad profits. This literature will add to previous studies by observing the effect on the cost rather than the profits. In addition to providing results that minimize endogeneity, which is found in a large …

A Comparison Of M&T Bank And Citizens Bank Net Income Changes During The Coronavirus Pandemic, Alex R. Glasier

Applied Economics Theses

The COVID-19 pandemic had a tremendous impact on every aspect of life, particularly within the world of banking & finance. All banks saw sharp drops in their stock prices and net income, but my hypothesis is that larger, more established banks maintained more stability during 2020 than smaller banks. This paper analyzes the income statements and balance sheets of M&T Bank (an older, more well-established bank) and Citizens Bank (a less-established bank) during this difficult time.

The first part of my thesis describes similarities and differences between M&T Bank and Citizens Bank. I explain how these similarities and differences may …

Forecasting Variance Swap Payoffs, Jonathan Dark, Xin Gao, Thijs Van Der Heijden, Federico Nardari

WCBT Faculty Publications

We investigate the predictability of payoffs from selling variance swaps on the S&P500, US 10-year treasuries, gold, and crude oil. In-sample analysis shows that structural breaks are an important feature when modeling payoffs, and hence the ex post variance risk premium. Out-of-sample tests, on the other hand, reveal that structural break models do not improve forecast performance relative to simpler linear (or state invariant) models. We show that a host of variables that had previously been shown to forecast excess returns for the four asset classes, contain predictive power for ex post realizations of the respective variance risk premia as …

The Effect Of The Syrian Crisis On The Profitability Of The Country's Private Banking Sector, Osama Alyousef

BAU Journal - Creative Sustainable Development

This research analyses the effect of the Syrian crisis on the profitability of local private banks during the period from 2011 to 2018 using fixed effects estimator on panel data. The research studies all of the 14 Syrian private banks and includes bank-specific variables calculated from the published quarterly and annual reports of all the banks, as well as a variable for the Syrian crisis measured by the following macro-economic factors: the number of crisis-related casualties, the number of Syrians who fled the country as refugees or asylum seekers, and the Syrian Pound exchange rate against U.S. Dollar during the …

Coeur Mining Inc. A Financial Statement Analyis, Justin Czech

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

This Financial Statement Analysis of Coeur Mining Inc. looks at the firms, past, present, and future projects, trends, and financial statements in order to come to a conclusion about the firm as a whole, and the stock of the firm. In this analysis, I will discuss the firm as compared to a competitor firm; Compass Minerals Inc. Through this comparison, I will decide the strength and legitimacy of the financial statements of Coeur Mining Inc.

The Effect Of Accounting Conservatism On Measures Of Financial Constraints, Taewoo Kim, Brandon Byunghwan Lee, Bo Meng, Daniel Paik

Accounting Faculty Publications

This study examines the relationship between accounting conservatism and measures of financial status. We find that, in general, a higher level of accounting conservatism is associated with a lower level of financial constraints – thereby making external funds less costly. The results also show that for a firm with a higher bid-ask spread or a higher likelihood of bankruptcy, this negative relationship between conservative financial reporting and financial constraints is intensified. In other words, a higher level of accounting conservatism is likely to make external funds less costly especially for those firms with a higher level of bid-ask spread or …

A Hybrid Delayed Differentiation Multiproduct Epq Model With Scrap And End-Products Multi-Shipment Policy, Yuan-Shyi Peter Chiu, Ya-Lei Lo, Tsu-Ming Yeh, Yunsen Wang, Hung-Yi Chen

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The present work intends to optimize a hybrid delayed differentiation multiproduct economic production quantity-EPQ model with the scrap and end-products multi-shipment policy. Since the requirements of multi-goods have a standard part in common, our fabrication planning adopts a two-phase delayed differentiation strategy to make the standard components first and produce the finished multi-goods in the second phase. Implementing a partial subcontracting option (with the additional expense) for the standard parts helps us to expedite the required uptime in the first phase. A screening process identifies the faulty items that need to be removed to ensure the in-house production quality. A …

The Effects Of Prior Trading Performance Have On Risk-Taking Of Subsequent Trading – The House Money Effect, Lenz Tan Koon Bin

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This study tests for house money effect on 2,030 non-professional FX investors trading through an Australian Financial Service provider. The results indicate that, in general, investors display a positive relationship between prior gains and the change in subsequent weekly risk-taking - the house money effect. The results also suggest that astute investors display a stronger house money effect than mediocre investors following prior gains. In comparison, mediocre investors display a stronger disposition effect following prior losses than astute investors. The study further reveals that investors who initially demonstrated the house money effect became more prone to the disposition effect during …

Replenishment-Shipment Decision For A Multiproduct Producer-Client Coordinated Fpr Model With Postponement, Rework And Subcontracting, Yuan-Shyi Peter Chiu, Ting-Fang Yan, Yunsen Wang, Hui-Chi Wang

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This research constructs a mathematical scheme to explore replenishment-shipment decisions for a multiproduct producer-client coordinated finite production rate (FPR) model with the postponement, rework, and subcontracting plan. The considered multiple goods have a common component, and a batch FPR fabrication with postponement is planned to meet the annual multiproduct requirements. The first fabricating phase makes only the standard components needed for a batch and subcontracts a proportion of them (with additional cost) to expedite the process. In contrast, the second fabricating phase produces the finished multiple merchandise in sequence. The in-house rework processes with extra expense help retain the desirable …

Doing Well By Doing Good: Analyzing The Dynamics And Effectiveness Of Corporate Engagement, Gillian Meyers

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Sustainable investing and corporate climate action have grown exponentially in the last decade, generating a simultaneous need for customers, investors, and policymakers to determine when companies are genuinely achieving positive impact related to environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) factors. As a result, investors are increasingly employing ESG engagement, which typically takes the form of direct communication with holdings to determine and positively shape their impacts on their stakeholders. In this paper, I explore the reasoning for conducting ESG engagement and refute arguments against it. I fill an existing research gap by analyzing the benefits of ESG engagement to both …

10 Good Reasons Why Llcs Should Not Elect To Be S Corporations, Paul N. Iannone, Danny A. Pannese

WCBT Faculty Publications

Since 2004, the IRS has administratively made S elections for limited liability companies (LLCs) very easy. An LLC that is otherwise eligible to be an S corporation that is classified as a partnership or a disregarded entity can simultaneously elect to be classified as both a corporation and an S corporation by timely filing Form 2553, Election by a Small Business Corporation, without the need to also file Form 8832, Entity Classification Election. The Treasury regulations treat the "one-stop-shop" rule as a "deemed election" under the entity classification regulations.

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

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This study analyzes the effect of geographical diversification on global private equity (PE) fund returns. I 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, I employ an instrument variable analysis where the instrument used is the stock market capitalization value of the host country where the PE fund is based. My results apply to Net IRR, multiple 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 …

Empirical Studies Of Esg Scores With Corporate Credit Spreads (Insights From Popularity-Based Pricing), Eugene Okyere-Yeboah

Doctoral Dissertations (DBA)

This study examines various factors or characteristics (risk and non-risk) that determine a firm’s credit risk premium, as measured by its credit default swap (CDS) spread, with a particular focus on the impact of environment, social, and governance (ESG) scores. The framework employed is a general equilibrium asset pricing model which integrates classical and behavioral finance elements, known as popularity-based asset pricing. It treats all attributes or characteristics of an asset as ”factors” to which investors assign a degree of popularity, which changes over time. Non-risk characteristics are classified as ”tastes” or ”disagreements”, Fama French (2007). Firms’ degree of adherence …

Cfo Gaps: Determinants And Impact On The Corporate Information Environment, Xia Chen, Na Li, An-Ping Lin

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

A CFO gap arises when the CFO position is left vacant for a period between the departure of the old CFO and the appointment of a new CFO. We find that CFO gaps are fairly common; over the sample period 2004–2016, approximately one-third of CFO turnovers are associated with a CFO gap, lasting on average two quarters and two months. CFO gaps are more likely for firms that face more labor market search frictions and with financial reporting and performance issues, and are less likely for firms with succession plans and with greater growth opportunities. While CFO gaps are not …

Giving Shareholders Real Rights, Reducing Excessive Executive Pay, And Reducing One‐Size‐Fits‐All Regulation, Dan Palmon, Gary Kleinman, Ann F. Medinets

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper questions the effectiveness of shareholders’ protection from managers who may make choices contrary to the shareholders’ interests. We focus on “silent shareholders” who rarely vote because their goal is purely financial return with no intention or ability to participate in corporate strategies. Since they have virtually no influence on company policies, we argue that they should not be viewed as firm owners, but as consumers of managerial services. Therefore, we suggest the creation of a new class of “capital contract” stock that would grant silent shareholders an explicit legal contract that clearly specifies their rights and compensations in …

Trusting The Stock Market: Further Evidence From Ipos Around The World, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam, Kiat Bee Jimmy Lee, Chee Yeow Lim, Gerald J. Lobo

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using an international sample of IPO firms from 36 countries and a country-level index for societal trust, we find strong evidence that societal trust is negatively associated with the degree of IPO underpricing. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the effect of societal trust in reducing IPO underpricing is more pronounced when the information environment is less transparent, when the stock market environment is less robust, and when legal institutions are weaker, settings where the effect of trust is likely to be more salient. Our study contributes to and extends the literature by providing strong evidence that an informal institution …