Knowledge that Transforms

We hypothesize that short selling has a disciplining role vis-à-vis firm managers that forces them to reduce earnings management. Using firm-level short-selling data for thirty-three countries collected over a sample period from 2002 to 2009, we document a significantly negative relationship between the threat of short selling and earnings management. Tests based on instrumental variable and exogenous regulatory experiments offer evidence of a causal link between short selling and earnings management. Our findings suggest that short selling functions as an external governance mechanism to discipline managers.

This paper uses a novel dataset of commodity-linked notes (CLNs) to examine the impact of the flows of financial investors on commodity futures prices. Investor flows into and out of CLNs are passed to and withdrawn from the futures markets via issuers' trades to hedge their CLN liabilities. The flows are not based on information about futures price movements but nonetheless cause increases and decreases in commodity futures prices when they are passed through to and withdrawn from the futures markets. These finding are consistent with the hypothesis that non-information-based financial investments have important impacts on commodity prices.

This paper studies the long-term effect of hedge fund activism on firm productivity using plant-level information from the U.S. Census Bureau. A typical target firm improves production efficiency in the 3 years after intervention, with stronger improvements in business strategy-oriented interventions. Plants sold after intervention improve productivity significantly under new ownership, suggesting that capital redeployment is an important channel for value creation. Employees of target firms experience stagnation in work hours and wages despite an increase in labor productivity. Additional tests refute alternative explanations attributing the improvement to mean reversion, management's voluntary reforms, industry consolidation shocks, or activists' stock-picking abilities.

We analyze an extensive proprietary database of corporate social responsibility engagements with U.S. public companies from 1999–2009. Engagements address environmental, social, and governance concerns. Successful (unsuccessful) engagements are followed by positive (zero) abnormal returns. Companies with inferior governance and socially conscious institutional investors are more likely to be engaged. Success in engagements is more probable if the engaged firm has reputational concerns and higher capacity to implement changes. Collaboration among activists is instrumental in increasing the success rate of environmental/social engagements. After successful engagements, particularly on environmental/social issues, companies experience improved accounting performance and governance and increased institutional ownership.

Using a news-based index of policy uncertainty, we document a strong negative relationship between firm-level capital investment and the aggregate level of uncertainty associated with future policy and regulatory outcomes. More importantly, we find evidence that the relation between policy uncertainty and capital investment is not uniform in the cross-section, being significantly stronger for firms with a higher degree of investment irreversibility and for firms that are more dependent on government spending. Our results lend empirical support to the notion that policy uncertainty can depress corporate investment by inducing precautionary delays due to investment irreversibility.

This paper explores the impact of target CEOs’ retirement preferences on takeovers. Using retirement age as a proxy for CEOs’ private merger costs, we find strong evidence that target CEOs’ preferences affect merger activity. The likelihood of receiving a successful takeover bid is sharply higher when target CEOs are close to age 65. Takeover premiums and target announcement returns are similar for retirement‐age and younger CEOs, implying that retirement‐age CEOs increase firm sales without sacrificing premiums. Better corporate governance is associated with more acquisitions of firms led by young CEOs, and with a smaller increase in deals at retirement age.

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An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.