Knowledge that Transforms

Recent research in accounting suggests female directors exert more stringent monitoring over the financial reporting process than their male counterparts. However, an emerging literature in finance and economics provides mixed findings and questions whether females in leadership roles significantly differ from their male counterparts. Building on this literature, we re-examine the link between the presence of female directors, gender biases, and financial statements quality. Using a large sample of UK firms we find that a larger percentage of women among independent directors is significantly associated with lower earnings management practices. However, we show that this relation disappears if we focus on firms that do not discriminate against women in the access to directorships. Finally, we provide evidence that gender biases are associated with lower earnings quality. We interpret our results as consistent with (1) prior evidence that males and females do not differ substantially when performing the same role in highly specialized positions, and with (2) discrimination being an important factor explaining the association between female directors and accounting quality.

During an IPO the issuing firm experiences a dramatic visibility shock caused by a large amount of information released to the public. In this context the media play a pivotal role in conveying information to investors who mostly rely on second-hand and simplified news. We argue that the way in which news is presented may shape retail investors' beliefs and in turn drive the demand for share and first-day returns. Based on over 2800 US IPOs and over 27,000 newspaper articles we show that (a) positive tones are positively associated with IPO underpricing; (b) this effect is stronger when news is reported close to the IPO date or (c) by more reputable newspapers.

This paper examines the impact of government versus private independent venture capital (VC) backing on the exit performance of entrepreneurial firms. Our analyses are based on the VICO dataset, which avoids the coding problems of VC type in the Thompson Financial SDC dataset. The data indicate that private independent VC-backed companies have better exit performance than government-backed companies. Mixed-syndicates of private-independent and governmental VC investors give rise to a higher (but not statistically different) likelihood of positive exits than that of IVC-backing. Our findings are not influenced by the composition of the syndicate in terms of size and institutional heterogeneity. Our results remain stable after controlling for endogeneity concerns, selection bias, omitted variable bias, legal and institutional differences across countries and over time through several econometric techniques. Moreover, our results are not driven by: i) the holding period of the different types of VC investors; ii) the potential signaling effect of GVC towards IVC investors; iii) the firm's financial structure and net cash-flow ratio; iv) the investment stage; and v) the distance between the VC investor and the target company.

This study analyzes foreign exchange (FX) cash flow and equity exposures of a sample of U.S. multinational firms. Focusing on asymmetry in FX cash flow exposures to direction and magnitude of FX shocks, the study finds that asymmetry is pervasive in several alternative measures of FX cash flow exposure. Also, after decomposing FX equity exposures into discount rate and cash flow components, the study documents significant asymmetries in FX discount rate exposures. The latter finding implies that market-related factors in addition to cash flow–based arguments need to be considered when further exploring FX equity exposure. This study also highlights the importance of model specification: models with asymmetric specifications detect more firms with significant FX exposures.

We examine the governance transfer effect of corporate blockholders in a sample of 892 block acquisitions across 42 countries from 1990 to 2008. Using earnings management as a proxy for corporate governance outcome, we find that target firms' earnings management is aligned with that of block acquirers after acquisitions, implying that blockholders transfer their own governance quality to investee firms. We further identify three economic mechanisms that underlie the governance transfer effect, namely, monitoring effectiveness, monitoring cost, and monitoring environment. Our findings provide new insights into the governance role of blockholders.

We investigate a particular aspect of creditor rights, judicial efficiency, and its influence on firms' corporate leverage in 69 countries. Increasing creditor rights makes credit more readily available due to greater loan supply, but firms use less leverage to avoid premature liquidation. We find that efficient judicial systems are associated with lower corporate leverage ratios. Managers perceive higher leverage in the presence of more efficient judicial systems as a serious threat to their jobs or private benefits continuing. Our results indicate that stronger creditor rights alone do not explain corporate leverage without taking into account efficient enforcement of these rights.

Performance share plans are an increasingly important component of executive compensation. They are equity-based, long-term incentive plans where the number of shares to be awarded is a quasi-linear function of a performance result over a fixed time period. We derive closed-form formulas for the value of a performance share plan when the performance measure is: (1) a non-traded measure following an Arithmetic Brownian Motion (e.g., earnings per share), (2) a non-traded measure following a Geometric Brownian Motion (e.g., revenue), or (3) a rank-order tournament of traded asset returns that are following Arithmetic Brownian Motions (e.g., percentile of ranked stock returns). Then we empirically test our valuation formulas. We find that our valuation formulas are more accurate for performance share plans based on earnings per share when forecasting using analyst consensus prior to the grant date. We also find that the efficiency of our valuation model greatly depends on the method used to forecast future firm performance. The policy implication is that FASB should consider requiring that grant date fair value be estimated using valuation formulas such as ours.

We summarize and synthesize the results from 73 studies that examine the consequences of shareholder activism for targeted firms, and draw two primary conclusions. First, activism that adopts some characteristics of corporate takeovers, especially significant stockholdings, is associated with improvements in share values and firm operations. Activism that is not associated with the formation of ownership blocks is associated with insignificant or very small changes in target firm value. Second, shareholder activism has become more value increasing over time. Research based on shareholder activism from the 1980s and 1990s generally finds few consequential effects, while activism in more recent years is more frequently associated with increased share values and operating performance. These results are consistent with Alchian and Demsetz' (1972) argument that managerial agency problems are controlled in part by dynamic changes in ownership, and with Alchian's (1950) observation that business practices adapt over time to mimic successful strategies.

This paper examines the dynamic allocation of control rights in private debt contracts of firms. We show that a covenant violation in the prior loan contract implies a stigma for borrowers which results in stricter loan contract terms in subsequent new loan contracts. Our analyses reject potentially other explanations such as firm characteristics or agency problems between the lender and firm management, shareholders or public debtholders. After covenant violations in the prior contract, new loans have on average 18bps higher spreads and include more of those covenant types which also have been violated in the prior contract, with tighter thresholds.

Using data for 939 publicly listed firms from 17 European countries over the period from 2004 to 2013, we investigate the effect of used credit lines on R&D investments, controlling for other determinants of R&D investments, i.e., cash flows, cash holdings, sales growth, equity financing, and Tobin's Q. Our estimation results, based on the system-GMM method, show that used credit lines have a positive and significant impact on R&D investments. In addition, we find that this impact is more pronounced for small and young firms than for large and mature firms. These results show that firms use credit lines as part of their liquidity management tools for supporting their R&D investments. Finally, we provide evidence that European firms in bank-based countries increased their use of credit lines for financing their R&D investments during the financial crisis of 2007–2009, while the link between R&D investments and used credit lines became weaker during the European sovereign debt crisis of 2010–2013.