Knowledge that Transforms

We examine the relations between recent board declassifications, takeover activity and takeover gains over the period 2003–2014. We report that firms that declassified their boards in the previous five years are more likely to be a takeover target compared to firms whose boards remain classified. We also report that, once targeted, these firms receive lower takeover premiums and realize lower abnormal returns around the announcement of the transaction. Finally, we find that these firms obtain a smaller share of abnormal dollar merger gains. These results are consistent with the interpretation that firms that declassified their boards have lost some bargaining power in negotiating M&A transactions.

This paper studies the impact of the loan-to-deposit (LTD) ratio regulation – a specific macroprudential policy instrument introduced in Korea – on bank-level lending supply and the subsequent firm-level real consequences. The bank-firm-level matched loan data reveals that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) were particularly hit by adverse lending supply shocks from banks with higher pre-regulation LTD ratios. However, they were compensated by new loans extended by banks with lower pre-regulation LTD ratios as well as unregulated non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs). After all, the regulation did not result in adverse consequences on firm-level net credit or real performance, possibly at the cost of rising corporate loans extended by the shadow banking system.

We examine the implications of special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) in South Korea, where sponsor contracts are better aligned than in the U.S. Unlike in U.S. where SPAC targets (de-SPACs)' post-merger prices generally fall below the SPAC IPO offer price due to distorted incentives of the SPAC sponsors, Korean de-SPACs' prices tend to remain above the initial SPAC price. The better alignment of incentives results in positive or at least non-negative average buy-and-hold returns and excess portfolio returns in Korean de-SPACs, which contrast with the negative long-run performance observed in the U.S. Korean de-SPACs also increase investment more than matched private firms following the listing. Overall, our results suggest that better aligned sponsor contracts may incentivize sponsors to target high-quality firms, enhancing post-merger performance.

We examine how firms estimate CEO-employee pay ratios in response to the CEO pay ratio rule, the first mandated pay inequality disclosure for U.S. firms. Our findings reveal that firms disclose lower pay ratios when they use more complex methods to identify the median employee. The relation between the estimation method and the disclosed pay ratio is stronger for firms headquartered in states with a greater societal aversion to income inequality and is weaker when CEO pay in the prior year is lower. Firms’ estimation choices do not merely represent selection bias or potentially omitted variables such as firm size, industry, compensation design complexity, or workforce composition – including the presence of foreign, temporary, seasonal, or highly paid employees. Although firms that use more complex methods to identify the median employee disclose lower pay ratios, we find no evidence of real changes in pay inequality among these firms. Our results suggest that some firms use estimation discretion to appear to conform to stakeholders’ preferences instead of taking real actions. These practices call into question the informativeness of CEO pay ratio disclosures, highlighting a potential cost of granting discretion in mandatory ESG disclosures.

This paper introduces the “financing purposes (FP) channel”, a new channel through which uncertainty affects the effectiveness of monetary policy. Using U.S. bank-firm-loan-level data from 1990 to 2019, we examine how firms adjust FP in response to monetary policy shocks and how this response varies with the level of macroeconomic uncertainty. We find that firms demand more bank loans for investment-related purposes during monetary expansion, but this tendency diminishes notably when uncertainty spikes. A counterfactual analysis suggests that heightened uncertainty explains almost half of the decline in the share of productive loans during the Great Recession. Our results are not driven by banks’ credit supply and are more pronounced for more financially constrained firms and those with a higher degree of investment irreversibility, aligning with the real options theory and financial frictions channel. We also show that FP positively predicts real activities such as investment and employment growth, indicating that high uncertainty weakens the monetary policy transmission via the financing purposes channel.

This paper investigates how the regulation of bank wealth management products (WMPs) affects corporate innovation. We build a concise model linking firms’ assets allocation decisions to regulatory variables affecting banks. The model suggests that current WMP regulation can enhance formal lending and stimulate innovation among state-owned enterprises (SOEs), while having no impact on innovation in private enterprises (PEs). Empirically, we identify firms’ exposure to bank regulation by examining the number of WMPs issued by banks in 2017 and the distance between banks and firms. Our results indicate that innovation output significantly increased for highly exposed SOEs, while there was no significant change for PEs. Using city-level data, we further observe that regulation fosters innovation in regions with higher exposure. Our findings suggest that regulation exerts heterogeneous effects on the real economy by banks’ credit allocation and firms’ investment strategies.

This study explores the intertemporal relationship between the gold-to-platinum price ratio (logGP) across economic conditions and international equity risk premiums. We find that logGP provides distinct predictive signals based on economic states, with logGP during U.S. contractions works as a strong and robust predictor of global stock market returns both in-sample and out-of-sample. This predictability stems not from U.S. market spillovers but rather reflects investors’ tail risk concerns and forecasts of economic activity. Our results indicate that U.S. recessions act as wake-up calls for international investors. Concerns about a U.S. recession propagating to other economies prompts investors to reassess local risks, thereby influencing local stock market dynamics.

This study examines the impact of European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy surprises on economic uncertainty and investor risk aversion. We identify four factors using a high-frequency event-study approach. These factors measure surprises regarding the current setting of policy rates (Target), the bank’s future policy path (Forward Guidance), and quantitative easing (QE). The fourth factor reflects unexpected news about future macroeconomic conditions. Our main finding is that quantitative tightening surprises, proxied by positive QE surprises, increase economic uncertainty and investor risk aversion. Additionally, we document the significant response of key macroeconomic variables to these surprises.

This research proposes a novel firm-based model for pricing cyber insurance. Our model considers two types of cyber risk: virus attacks and data breaches. Virus attacks deliver adverse shocks to the firm’s productivity, while data breaches cause premium customer departures that worsen the prospect of the firm’s product demand. We derive the endogenous structural form of cyber losses in firms and utilize it to solve the formula for cyber insurance premiums. Our quantitative results show that the consensus prediction about a strictly positive premium-risk nexus is no longer valid. Asymmetries in the sub-premium’s sensitivity to cyber risks from different sources and the premium customer loss rates jointly shape the complexity of the relation between cyber insurance premiums and cyber risks. Improvements in the product demand conditions enhance firms’ incentives to hedge cyber losses and push premiums higher. Lastly, we discuss the influence of product price competition on premiums.

We reassess the predictive power of risk-neutral excess-of-market stock variance (Martin and Wagner, 2019) for stock returns. After correcting two look-ahead biases that influence evidence supporting an average predictive coefficient of 0.5 reported in prior works, we find the data are too noisy to reject the null hypothesis of an average coefficient of zero. However, this insignificant average predictive coefficient conceals the predictability’s strong covariance with market volatility, as well as its large variation across characteristics-sorted subsamples. Out-of-sample analysis confirms that while the MW model does not significantly outperform benchmark models on average, it significantly outperforms during high-volatility periods.