Knowledge that Transforms

We conduct a difference-in-differences (DID) analysis that uses the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2008 as an exogenous shock to examine the value effects of accounts payable. Analyses of 136,783 firm-year observations (21,765 companies) from 40 countries show that accounts payable significantly absorbed the reduction of Tobin's Q during the GFC. The value effect is pronounced for civil law, long-term-oriented, and high-uncertainty-avoidance countries, in which long-term relations are likely beneficial. These results are obtained after controlling for other country- and firm-level characteristics as well as with alternative definitions of the global financial crisis and accounts payable. We also find that trade credit in those countries prevents a significant reduction in inventory investments during the GFC.

Prior literature shows that high leverage is associated with losses in market share due to unfavorable actions by customers and competitors. Building on this literature, we investigate the effect of collectivism on the product market performance of highly leveraged firms. Using a sample of 46 countries over the 1989–2016 period, we find significantly lower costs of high leverage for countries with higher collectivism scores. Moreover, we find that the impact of collectivism on high leverage costs is more pronounced for firms with high product specialization and with financially healthy rivals. In additional analysis, we find that collectivism helps highly leveraged firms retain employees and obtain trade credit from suppliers. Our findings thus suggest that a country's culture affects corporate financial outcomes by influencing the actions of firm stakeholders.

This paper investigates the relationship between upside potential and future hedge fund returns. We measure upside potential based on the maximum monthly returns of hedge funds (MAX) over a fixed time interval, and show that MAX successfully predicts cross-sectional differences in future fund returns. Hedge funds with strong upside potential generate 0.70% per month higher average returns than funds with weak upside potential. After controlling for alternative risk and performance measures, funds’ market-timing ability, and a large set of fund characteristics, the positive link between MAX and future returns remains highly significant. We conclude that MAX, as a simple proxy for realized noln-normalities in hedge funds, offers incremental information on future hedge fund returns above and beyond provided by standard risk, performance, and market-timing measures.

This paper examines how the investment horizons of a firm's institutional investors affect its corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Using data on U.S. firms’ CSR ratings over the 1995–2012 period, we find that longer investment horizons are positively related to CSR. Further, active long-term institutions increase CSR whereas passive long-term institutions have no significant effect. Our results suggest that investors with long-term horizons have more incentives to monitor their firms which leads managers to engage in more vigorous CSR activities.

This paper explores why the size effect vanished after the early 1980s. We show that the size effects are significantly positive primarily at the bottom of the business cycles. More importantly, this dependency of the size effect on the business cycles is preserved even after the 1980s. Therefore, our findings suggest that while unconditional size effect has perished, the size effect conditional on the business cycles is alive and well. The less frequent occurrences of troughs, due to prolonged business cycle length, are shown to be responsible for the dissolution of the size effect.

Operational risk announcements are unexpected adverse media news that potentially harm the reputation of financial institutions. This paper examines the equity-based and debt-based reputational effects of financial sentiment tones in operational risk announcements and shows how such reputational effects are moderated by alternative sources of public information. Our analysis reveals that the net negative tone and litigious tone have adverse reputational effects, and the uncertainty tone mitigates the adverse reputational impact. Additionally, alternative, simultaneous sources of information neutralize the reputational effects of textual tones. First, third-party information about the event (i.e. regulatory announcements and final settlements) dissolves the favorable (adverse) reputational impact of the uncertainty tone (litigious tone). Second, loss amount disclosure and firm recognition substitute the reputational effects of the net negative tone and uncertainty tone only in Anglo-Saxon countries and market-based economies. Overall, our findings indicate that the reputational effects of the media materialize most when there is lack of certain, quantifiable and regulated public information about the operational risk event.

This paper investigates the impact of family ownership on credit rationing using a rich sample of Italian firms. Estimation results indicate that family owned firms are more likely to experience credit restrictions. The adverse impact of family ownership on credit rationing is particularly relevant for small-sized firms, whereas it is mitigated in firms with closer lending relationships. Finally, we find some evidence that family firms with high ownership concentration are more likely to be rationed by banks.

We study the response of stock prices to monetary policy, distinguishing effects of exogenous shocks from “Delphic” shocks that reveal the Federal Reserve’s macroeconomic forecasts. To decompose monetary policy surprises into these separate components we construct a measure of Federal Reserve private information that exploits differences in central bank and market forecasts. Contractionary policy shocks of either type lower stock prices with exogenous shocks having a larger negative effect. There is some suggestive evidence of an asymmetry; when FOMC meetings are unscheduled or when the fed funds rate reverses direction, stock prices rise in response to a contractionary Delphic shock.

We study the impact of government expropriation risk on the terms of cross-border syndicated loans. By comparing loans by foreign lenders from countries covered by Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) to loans from non-covered countries, we isolate and quantify the impact of strengthening property rights against government expropriation on loans. We find that stronger property rights lead to a lower cost of debt, larger loans, larger syndicates, less collateral, and fewer covenants. Results are stronger in countries with a history of government expropriations and robust to methodologies accounting for the endogenous nature of BITs and for the simultaneous determination of loan terms. Our findings persist after the inclusion of other metrics of institutional quality, such as legal origin identifiers and an index of creditor rights.

The development of a country's financial sector plays an important role in shaping its industrial structure; however, evidence on the micro level channels through which this relationship appears remains relatively sparse, particularly for developing countries. We examine the banking sector's role in the industrial structure in China by exploiting a quasi-experimental shock from a banking sector reform in 2002 that entailed stricter capital and asset requirements. Based on longitudinal data on manufacturing firms and registered banks from 1998 to 2008, we find that banking reform reduced concentrations in the product market by encouraging the growth of smaller and younger firms. These effects were most pronounced in regions with lower levels of financial development prior to the reform. Our results are robust after considering alternative model specifications and measures of dependence on external financing.