Knowledge that Transforms

This paper presents evidence that information asymmetry increases equity misvaluation by showing the impact of analyst coverage on misvaluation. To establish the causality, I use two exogenous events (broker closures and mergers), as well as an instrumental variable approach. The identification strategies indicate that there is a negative causal effect of analyst coverage on equity misvalutaion. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that information environment can cause investors to use their perceived value in cash flow and discount rate to estimate their perceived equity prices, which deviate from intrinsic value.

This study examines whether corporate relationship spending through business entertainment expenses (BEEs) affects future stock price crash risk. Stakeholder theory suggests that expenditure on relationship building with external stakeholders enhances trust, firm reputation, and transparency, potentially lowering future crash risk. However, agency theory suggests that excessive relationship spending is associated with greater information opacity and managerial opportunism, contributing to greater future crash risk. Our results are more aligned with the agency perspective, showing that BEEs relate positively to future crash risk. China's 2012 anti-corruption campaign significantly moderated the effect of BEEs on stock price crash risk, particularly for firms having weak political connections, weak information transparency, and weak external monitoring mechanisms. The positive BEE-crash relation persists after the anti-corruption campaign for high financial risk firms.

We analyze the links between banking integration and economic development for a sample of OECD countries. We measure banking integration considering indicators that merge not only openness but also connectedness with other banking systems. We plug these indicators into income regressions, also controlling for other relevant variables considered by the literature. In contrast to previous initiatives, this second stage explicitly takes into account the differing levels of economic development of the countries in our sample, since the benefits of enhanced banking integration might not be generalizable. To this end, we implement quantile regression, also considering the presence of endogenous regressors. Results show that bank connectedness is more important for economic development than bank openness, but the combined effect (i.e., banking integration) overall is positive and significant. The quantile regression models used in the second stage show that the effects are stronger for the poorest economies.

Hedge fund managers with the first-loss scheme charge a management fee, a performance fee and guarantee to cover a certain amount of investors’ potential losses. We study how parties can choose a mutually preferred first-loss scheme in a hedge fund with the manager’s first-loss deposit and investors’ assets segregated. For that, we solve the manager’s non-concave utility maximization problem, calculate Pareto optimal first-loss schemes and maximize a decision criterion on this set. The traditional 2% management and 20% performance fees are found to be not Pareto optimal, neither are common first-loss fee arrangements. The preferred first-loss coverage guarantee is increasing as the investor’s risk-aversion or the interest rate increases. It decreases as the manager’s risk-aversion or the market price of risk increases. The more risk averse the investor or the higher the interest rate, the larger is the preferred performance fee. The preferred fee schemes significantly decrease the fund’s volatility.

This paper extends the Diamond–Dybvig model of bank runs by incorporating hyperbolic discounting. The main question is how consumers’ myopic decisions affect the possibility of a bank run and the bank’s optimal contract. Under hyperbolic discounting, consumers’ deposit preferences differ from their withdrawal preferences. Therefore, the bank needs to consider two separate preferences when designing the optimal banking contract, making it more difficult to design a run-safe banking contract. This difference in preferences could increase the possibility of a bank run in equilibrium. Although the bank can design a run-proof contract, the ex-ante welfare through banking services will be lower under hyperbolic discounting due to its tighter incentive compatibility constraint.

We show that emergency liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve transmitted to non-U.S. banking markets. Based on manually collected holding company structures, we identify banks in Germany with access to U.S. facilities. Using detailed interest rate data reported to the German central bank, we compare lending and borrowing rates of banks with and without such access. U.S. liquidity shocks cause a significant decrease in the short-term funding costs of the average German bank with access. This reduction is mitigated for banks with more vulnerable balance sheets prior to the inception of emergency liquidity. We also find a significant pass-through in terms of lower corporate credit rates charged for banks with the lowest pre-crisis leverage, US-dollar funding needs, and liquidity buffers. Spillover effects from U.S. emergency liquidity provision are generally confined to short-term rates.

We apply the Atkinson (1970) inequality index to time series of asset returns to offer a novel measure of financial risk consistent with expected-utility theory. This measure is converted to a certainty-equivalent return serving as a performance measure. We extend the Atkinson index to HARA utility and derive closed-form solutions to our measures for a number of preference-return combinations. Further, we establish relationships between risk aversion and the weights assigned to the cumulants of the return distribution for our performance measure. Using data from hedge funds and asset-pricing anomalies, we find that our performance measure contains additional, economically meaningful information.

We establish the existence of liquidity risk premium in option returns via sorting analyses and Fama-MacBeth regressions. In leverage-adjusted, hedged returns, the alpha due to liquidity risk ranges from 8.5 to 14.6 basis points per month. In hedged returns unadjusted for leverage, the alpha ranges from 165.9 to 185.1 basis points per month. Compared with the option bid-ask spread, the premium is small in magnitude. In contrast to the findings for stocks and bonds, the liquidity risk premium uncovered in option returns is negative. We explain the negative premium by noting that option end-users write options in net and they might care more about liquidity risk than market makers.

We contend that high borrowing costs can overwhelm precautionary motives and induce low cash holdings in private firms. Supportive of our hypothesis, we find European private firms hold less cash than public firms and this differential relates to borrowing costs. Results are robust to endogeneity concerns and reveal private firms use cash flow to pay-down existing debt instead of building cash reserves. Further, stronger creditor rights and debt market development lead to convergence in cash policies of private and public firms.

This study examines how competition affects the profitability of mutual funds’ trading on the post earnings announcement drift (PEAD). Our results show that among funds actively pursuing this strategy, only those that manage to avoid competition deliver superior performance. Further, we find that funds avoid competition by investing in illiquid stocks. Our analysis shows that the outperformance of these low-competition funds is mainly attributable to their information advantage in identifying mispricing among illiquid stocks.