Directors’ and officers’ liability insurance (D&O insurance) is one of the most controversial and least understood governance tools. Using manually collected voting data for all director types at Chinese listed firms, we provide the first evidence for the impact of D&O insurance on directors’ voting decisions and the subsequent effects on corporate governance and financial performance. We find that independent directors at firms carrying D&O insurance are more likely to dissent when benchmarked against their peers in the same firm on the same proposal. Our results are robust to endogeneity checks. We identify channels through which the incentive effects of D&O insurance operate. We also find that the positive effect of D&O insurance on independent director dissension is associated with better firm performance and monitoring outcomes, including less litigation and lower claim values, less underinvestment, better internal control quality, and improved CEO pay- and turnover-performance sensitivities.

While momentum benefits from persistent trends of the market, such strategies are unable to distinguish between upside and downside risk and suffer consequently. We propose a Partial Moment Momentum (PMM) trading strategy that is sensitive to the sign of risk and show risk-adjusted outperformance compared to plain momentum and volatility-adjusted momentum strategies. The outperformance is robust across multiple time periods and in particular during market downturns. Further analysis based on conventional linear factor models shows negligible exposure to factor risk for our PMM portfolio. Finally, the performance of our proposed strategy appears to be enhanced when time series momentum is present and allows for improved risk management by distinguishing between upside and downside risks.

This study examines the value of language, as an important dimension of culture, to banks. Based on a unique hand-collected dataset of Chinese commercial banks and a county-level dialect dataset, we find that a higher degree of dialect similarity between the chairman and the CEO is associated with a higher return on assets, a higher return on equity, and a lower cost-to-income ratio, suggesting that dialect similarity plays a positive role in improving bank performance. Further analyses show that dialect similarity has no significant association with bank risk and bank expansion. In addition, it does not cause higher CEO pay or lower pay-performance sensitivity. These results indicate that dialect similarity does not lower the monitoring effectiveness. We also investigate the relation between dialect similarity and banks’ agency costs and the results show that dialect similarity reduces agency costs significantly. Our findings are robust to alternative measures of dialect similarity, the separation of the “dialect level effect”, and the potential endogeneity of dialect similarity.

This study resolves a puzzle in the banking literature: why do an increasing number of countries adopt a deposit insurance scheme (DIS) while prior studies have shown that it increases the likelihood of banking crises? Using a dataset of 64 countries over the period 1970–2009, our study shows that the adoption of a DIS is associated with a 2.0–4.7 percentage points higher likelihood of banking crises (the “direct effect”), while it is associated with a 10.1–11.1 percentage points lower likelihood of non-banking financial crises (the “spillover effect”). Since the “spillover effect” is larger than the “direct effect”, a DIS actually increases overall financial stability. Additionally, we analyze the mechanisms through which a DIS affects financial crises. First, we highlight the existence of the implicit guarantee and examine its interaction with an explicit DIS. Second, we investigate the substitution effect between banking crises and non-banking crises.

We provide evidence that a simple moving average timing strategy, when applied to portfolios of commodity futures, can generate superior performance to the buy-and-hold strategy. The outperformance is very robust. It can survive the transaction costs in the futures markets, it is not concentrated in a particular subperiod, and is robust to short-sale constraints, alternative specifications of the moving average lag length, alternative construction of the continuous time-series of futures prices, and impact from data mining. The outperformance of the timing strategy is not driven by the backwardation and contango. It is stronger during recession and can not be explained by macroeconomic variables. Finally, we confirm that the outperformance of the moving average timing strategy in the commodity futures comes from the successful market timing.

Sousa (2010a) shows that the residuals from the common trend among consumption, financial wealth, housing wealth and human capital, cday, can predict quarterly stock market returns better than cay from Lettau and Ludvigson (2001), which considers aggregate wealth instead. In this paper, we use a more appropriate proxy of human capital, which alleviates the potential correlation between the residuals and the regressors and makes the estimation more precise. In addition, we extend housing wealth to household capital by taking durable goods into consideration. The new predictor is proposed accordingly. Empirically, we find that our predictor is superior to the other alternatives.

Portfolios selected based on the sample covariance estimates may not be stable or robust, particularly so in situations with a large number of assets. The l1 or l2 norm constrained portfolio optimization method has been used as a robust method to control the sparsity or to shrink the estimated weights of assets. In this paper, we propose to add an additional l∞ norm constraint or to add a pairwise l∞ norm constraint in the l1 norm constrained minimum-variance portfolio (MVP) problem. The l∞ constraint controls the largest absolute component of the weight vector and the pairwise l∞ constraint encourages retaining the cluster structure of highly correlated assets in MVP optimization. By simulation study and analysis of empirical data, we find that the proposed portfolios often have better out-of-sample performance in terms of Sharpe ratios, variances and turn-overs than existing popular portfolio strategies including the l1 norm constrained MVP, l2 norm constrained MVP and the 1/N portfolio. In addition, we provide moment shrinkage interpretations of the new strategies and an upper bound of errors in the approximation of the empirical optimal portfolio risk based on the theoretical optimal portfolio risk.

Using monthly stock and bond return data in the past 150 years (1855–2001) for both the US and the UK, this study documents time-varying stock–bond correlation over macroeconomic conditions (the business cycle, the inflation environment and monetary policy stance). There are different patterns of time variation in stock–bond correlations over the business cycle between US and UK, which implies that bonds may be a better hedge against stock market risk and offer more diversification benefits to stock investors in the US than in the UK. Further, there is a general pattern across both the US and the UK during the post-1923 subperiod and during the whole sample period: higher stock–bond correlations tend to follow higher short rates and (to a lesser extent) higher inflation rates.

We investigate the international transmission of inflation among G-7 countries using data-determined vector autoregression analysis, as advocated by Swanson and Granger [Swanson, N., Granger, C., 1997. Impulse response functions based on a causal approach to residual orthogonalization in vector autoregressions. Journal of the American Statistical Association 92, 357–367]. Over the period 1973–2003, we find that unexpected changes in US inflation have large effects on inflation in other countries, although they are not always the dominant international factor. Similarly, shocks to some other countries also have a statistically and economically significant influence on US inflation. Moreover, our evidence indicates that US inflation has become less vulnerable to foreign shocks since the early 1990s, mainly because of the diminished influence from Germany and France.

We use a novel identification strategy to investigate whether regional universities make their local economies more resilient. Our strategy is based on state governments using similar site-selection criteria to assign normal schools (to train teachers) and insane asylums between 1830 and 1930. Normal schools became larger regional universities while asylum properties mostly continue as small state-owned psychiatric health facilities. We find that a regional university roughly offsets the negative effects of manufacturing exposure. We show the resilience of regional public university spending is an important mechanism, and we show correlations consistent with bachelor’s degree share also playing a mediating role.