Postcrisis regulations apply stricter liquidity rules to both money market funds (MMFs) and banks, requiring MMFs to do more overnight lending and banks to borrow longer-term. MMFs and banks resolve this dilemma by developing a “bundling” strategy across overnight and longer term markets. In particular, MMFs increase longer term funding and charge a lower rate to banks that have recently accommodated MMFs’ overnight depositing needs. Such cross-market reciprocity is stronger between MMFs and foreign banks, which depend on MMFs for dollar funding more than U.S. banks do. MMFs with lower liquidity buffers and higher flow volatility are more likely to engage in bundling.

We investigate the stock price reactions of industry competitors to IPOs in China. Contrary to findings in the U.S., we document a positive valuation effect of Chinese IPOs from 2002 to 2013. This finding is robust to alternative rival definitions, investor reaction measurement, and sample selection criteria. Based on the existing theories and institutional setup of the Chinese stock market, we propose three non-competing hypotheses: the signaling hypothesis (i.e., IPOs could convey positive industry-related information), the collusion hypothesis (i.e., rival firms can benefit from the increasing likelihood of collusion), and the substitution hypothesis (i.e., rival stocks can substitute for IPO stocks as an appealing investment). With a series of tests, we demonstrate that the substitution hypothesis can explain this phenomenon. Furthermore, we find that the spillover effects of IPOs decline with the increase in investment choices after 2014.

This study refines and extends Anglo-American research exploring excess executive compensation and its effects on firm value using data from Taiwan, a country in which the board members and executives of a firm often have friendly relations with one another. We find that excess executive compensation is negatively related to firm value but that voluntary disclosure practices moderate this relationship. Specifically, our results indicate that excess executive compensation has a positive effect on firm value when firms disclose comprehensive information voluntarily and that this effect is more pronounced in group-affiliated firms. Moreover, firms that provide comprehensive voluntary disclosure appear to alleviate agency problems more efficiently when their controlling shareholders have higher private benefit incentives or when these firms have higher quality corporate governance.

On January 1, 2010, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) in China launched an online interactive platform named “Hudongyi.” This platform enables individual investors to communicate directly with executives of firms listed on the SZSE, under the supervision of the SZSE, thereby providing a quasi-natural experiment to study the impact of individual investors on corporate governance. Employing a difference-in-differences design, we document that the investor-firm interactions on Hudongyi deter real earnings management by firms listed on the SZSE through reducing information asymmetry and raising reputational costs. This effect varies with posting specificity, interaction effectiveness, and firm features. These findings suggest that individual investors can effectively engage in corporate governance when their right to speak up is facilitated by proper technology and regulatory scrutiny.

Open-end corporate bond mutual funds invest in illiquid assets while providing liquid claims to shareholders. Does such liquidity transformation introduce fragility to the corporate bond market? To address this question, we create a novel bond-level latent fragility measure based on asset illiquidity of mutual funds holding the bond. We find that corporate bonds bearing higher fragility subsequently experience higher return volatility and more outflows-induced mutual fund selling over the period of 2006–2019. Using the COVID-19 crisis as a natural experiment, we find that bonds with higher precrisis fragility experienced more negative returns and larger reversals around March 2020.

We examine the extent to which institutional investors herd in the U.S. corporate bond market and the price impact of their herding behavior. We find that the level of institutional herding in corporate bonds is substantially higher than what is documented for equities, and that sell herding is much stronger and more persistent than buy herding. The price impact of herding is also highly asymmetric. While buy herding facilitates price discovery, sell herding causes transitory yet large price distortions. Such price destabilizing effect of sell herding is particularly pronounced for speculative-grade, small, and illiquid bonds, and during the financial crisis.

Liquidity restrictions on investors, like the redemption gates and liquidity fees introduced in the 2016 money market fund (MMF) reform, are meant to improve financial stability. However, we find evidence that such liquidity restrictions exacerbated the run on prime MMFs during the COVID-19 crisis. Our results indicate that gates and fees could generate strategic complementarities among investors in crisis times. Severe outflows from prime MMFs led the Federal Reserve to intervene with the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF). Using MMLF microdata, we show how the provision of “liquidity of last resort” stabilized prime funds.

In recent years, firms have increasingly come under scrutiny from environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rating agencies which systematically assess and publicize ESG-related information to diverse stakeholders. This study aims to investigate whether firms exhibit a heightened incentive to avoid ESG-related regulatory violations once they come under the coverage of ESG rating agencies. Analyzing data spanning from 2000 to 2018 and considering the coverage provided by four prominent ESG rating agencies to U.S. firms, we leverage the staggered initiation and intensity of this coverage. Our findings reveal a negative correlation between ESG violations and the commencement and extent of coverage by ESG rating agencies. This relationship is particularly pronounced for firms characterized by lower levels of corporate monitoring as indicated by fewer analysts providing coverage, limited media attention, weaker ESG commitments, and less disparate ESG ratings. Taken together, our study sheds light on the monitoring role of ESG rating agencies, illustrating their significance in incentivizing managers to mitigate ESG violations.

This paper investigates whether investors can earn higher profits by holding cryptocurrencies with higher downside risk. Both portfolio-level analyses and cryptocurrency-level cross-sectional regressions suggest a positive cross-sectional relation between downside risk and future returns in the cryptocurrency market. In addition to the risk-return tradeoff theory, the limits-to-arbitrage theory also has some explanatory power for these results. Moreover, we examine the source of downside risk premium, the existence of upside risk premium, as well as the intertemporal relation between downside risk and future returns. Collectively, our findings highlight the important role of downside risk in determining cryptocurrency prices.