Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines the role of intellectual property (IP) law as a determinant for external debt financing of innovative firms. For identification, we exploit exogenous variation in patent right enforcement arising from the 2004 EU Enforcement Directive. This major policy reform strengthened IP rights and, thus, raised patent owners' asset position. We find that patenting firms significantly increase their use of debt and benefit from lower interest rates in response to the amendment, especially if they own valuable patent portfolios. These effects are most pronounced for relatively small and financially constrained firms, emphasizing the importance of the legal framework in fostering debt financing activities of innovation-oriented firms.

We investigate housing market distortions with the collusion of agents. The agency problem where agents sell clients' houses with price discounts while selling their own homes with price premiums is quite straightforward. However, the issue that agents collude with each other to further maximize their own interests is elusive. When agents collude, the resulting market distortions may even be worse than previous studies suggested. Indeed, this paper finds that the agency problem and market distortions are much more severe with agent collusion, as both the discounts associated with clients' houses and the premiums with agents' own homes become much larger when the two agents collude.

We investigate the impact of dividend policy on earnings quality and opportunistic earnings management for individual banks across 45 developed and developing countries between 1996 and 2019. Our estimates show that high dividend payments reduce earnings management, hence mitigate agency problems. This mitigation is especially prevalent among well-capitalised and non-listed banks. Greater investor protection and government regulation appear to strengthen the negative association between dividend policy and earnings management. Our results hold robustly across many different specifications.

We provide international empirical evidence that periods of rapid expansion in credit—credit booms—lead to both a relaxation of financial constraints and a worsening of capital allocation. These two effects are related, suggesting a more prominent role for the investor sentiment views of the credit cycle. Firms more likely to be financially constrained because of their size, industry, or country experience stronger misallocation in booms. At the macro level, credit booms with higher capital misallocation result in a higher probability of experiencing a banking crisis and poor economic and financial performance after the boom ends.

This study develops a theoretical model to analyze the asset substitution problem over insurance decisions. We find that agency conflict is related to a firm’s risk level and capital structure. In particular, at the optimal leverage, agency conflict occurs only when the risk level is relatively high, which explains why insurance covenants are typically for significant pure risks. Moreover, when the risk level is specified, agency conflict over insurance decisions occurs within a specific leverage range. This is consistent with the findings of some research on the asset substitution problem over speculative risk choices. In addition, we consider premium loadings and conclude that full hedging is not a firm’s optimal risk management strategy, contributing to the literature on optimal hedging decisions with transaction frictions. Our framework with premium loadings can also explain many insurance phenomena, such as risk retention for small losses and subsidies for catastrophe insurance.

Fabo et al. (2021) show that papers written by central bank researchers find quantitative easing (QE) to be more effective than papers written by academics. Weale and Wieladek (2022) show that a subset of these results lose statistical significance when OLS regressions are replaced by regressions that downweight outliers. We examine those outliers and find no reason to downweight them. Most of them represent estimates from influential central bank papers published in respectable academic journals. For example, among the five papers finding the largest peak effect of QE on output, all five are published in high-quality journals (Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and Applied Economics Letters), and their average number of citations is well over 200. Moreover, we show that these papers have supported policy communication by the world's leading central banks and shaped the public perception of the effectiveness of QE. New evidence based on quantile regressions further supports the results in Fabo et al. (2021).

This paper examines how cultural distance affects fund transfers in the internal capital market of multinational firms. The results show that a larger cultural distance significantly reduces internal fund transfers to foreign subsidiaries. These results are robust to alternative measures of cultural distance and different econometric specifications. External shocks do not affect the results. Further analysis shows that the negative cultural impact is driven mainly by the dimensions of power distance, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance. Furthermore, the effect of cultural distance on internal fund transfers is independent of subsidiary productivity, and a larger cultural distance exacerbates the negative impact of corporate diversification on firm value. Overall, our findings highlight the important role that culture plays in multinationals’ global operations.

There is mixed empirical evidence on whether close banking relationships are associated with lower or higher earnings quality of borrowing firms. This paper analyzes how this evidence can be explained by the role of the bank, whether the bank is a creditor or equity-holder of the firm. We use a sample of Japanese public firms. In Japan, (1) banks historically have both close financial and personal ties to borrowing firms, (2) banks are not only lenders, but are also permitted to have an equity stake in the firm, and (3) detailed data on bank relationship characteristics are publicly available. One key result is that relationship banking is associated with lower earnings quality if the bank only provides debt. This effect is more pronounced in years of economic expansion. The results are in line with the theoretical literature, which argues that borrowing firms that want to conceal good performance from competitors benefit from relationship banking because banks’ access to private information lowers the demand for high earnings quality. However, if banks have an equity stake, they are more concerned about complying with insider-trading rules and governing agency problems of equity by efficient executive compensation contracts. Consistently, the second main finding is that the firm's earnings quality improves significantly with a bank's equity stake, regardless of the state of the economy. These results are robust according to various specifications of relationship banking or earnings quality.

Recent reform in China has made a subset of Chinese stocks available to foreign investors, partially opening up China's stock market. Our difference-in-differences analysis shows that this liberalization reform boosts investments in investable firms relative to noninvestable ones, with results robust to various sensitivity analyses. Besides capital inflows and risk sharing, a potential but underexplored channel is improved corporate governance due to direct and indirect pressures from foreign investors, which lowers the cost of capital and improves capital allocation efficiency. Consistent with this corporate governance channel, we find that the liberalization reform reduces investable firms’ agency costs, increases their investment efficiency and total factor productivity, and improves their operating performance. Further analysis finds that the positive investment effect from the liberalization reform is stronger among firms that were poorly governed before the reform.

Sustainable investing is characterized by considerations of both financial returns and ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) impacts. We investigate how information about these two aspects, individually and in combination, affects investors’ decision to invest sustainably and their satisfaction with the information they received. We also test whether different ESG preference elicitation modes affect these investment decisions and investors’ satisfaction. We conduct an incentivized online experiment with two samples, experienced retail investors and a representative sample of the Austrian population in terms of age and gender (N = 2,254 in total). We find that both financial return information and ESG impact information stimulate ESG investment. Providing both types of information does not have a greater effect than presenting either one alone. Finally, we find no effect on satisfaction and the ESG preference elicitation mode significantly affects neither investment decisions nor satisfaction.