This study investigates the impact of excess cash on the liquidity risk faced by investors and their required liquidity premium. It shows that excess cash improves trading continuity and reduces both liquidity risk and the cost of equity capital. These findings are consistent with the view that firms with excess cash attract more traders even when market liquidity dries up. The increase in investors' trading propensity reduces stock price exposure to shocks to market liquidity and the liquidity premium required by investors. We also examine the impact of excess cash on firm value. We show that while the direct effect of excess cash on firm value is negative, its indirect effect through liquidity is significantly positive, indicating that investors are less likely to sanction (or even reward) illiquid firms for holding excess cash. Further analysis suggests that the liquidity benefits of excess cash are greater for financially constrained firms and firms with high growth opportunities. Our results are robust over time, after addressing endogeneity concerns, and to alternative estimation methods and alternative measures of liquidity.

It is a commonly held view that gold protects investors’ wealth in the event of negative economic conditions. In this study, we test whether other metals offer similar or better investment opportunities in periods of market turmoil. Using a sample of 13 sovereign bonds, we show that other precious metals, palladium in particular, offer investors greater compensation for their bond market losses than gold. We also find that industrial metals, especially copper, tend to outperform gold and other precious metals as hedging vehicles and safe haven assets against losses in sovereign bonds. However, the outcome of the hedge and safe haven properties is not always consistent across the different bonds. Finally, our analysis suggests that copper is the best performing metal in the period immediately after negative bond price shocks.

This study explores the effect of directors' political contributions on IPOs' valuation and firm survival. We find that individual contributions by directors bring significant benefits to the IPO firms. Specifically, we show that political contributions of board members, particularly those of CEOs and founders, increase the IPO premium and the survivability of IPO firms. We find that the relationship between directors' political contributions and IPO premium is particularly strong among non-venture-backed firms, while the link between directors' political contributions and firm survival is more pronounced for venture-backed firms with strong corporate governance. Our findings are robust to endogeneity concerns and to alternative measures of political donations and IPO performance. Our results confirm the relevance of signaling and resource dependence theories.

This study uses the quality of coverage decisions as a new metric to evaluate the performance of star and non-star analysts. We find that the coverage decisions of star analysts are better predictors of returns than those of non-star analysts. The return predictability of star analysts’ coverage decisions is stronger for informationally opaque stocks. We further exploit the staggered short selling deregulations, Google’s withdrawal, and the anti-corruption campaign as three quasi-natural experiments that create plausibly exogenous variations in the quality of information environment. These experiments show that the predictive power of star analysts’ coverage decisions strengthens (weakens) following a sharp deterioration (improvement) in firms’ information environment, consistent with the notion that star analysts possess superior ability to identify mispriced stocks. Overall, star analysts make better coverage decisions and play a superior role as information intermediaries, especially in poor information environment.

We offer new evidence on the risk versus mispricing explanations for the R&D anomaly. Return covariance with a characteristic-based factor captures the cross-sectional return variation on R&D portfolios not explained by asset pricing models. This is consistent with both covariance risk and mispricing. Under the framework of the ICAPM, we find little economic justification that an R&D factor is a proxy for innovations to a state variable. The characteristic subsumes the factor loading in direct tests, providing support to the mispricing hypothesis. Investigating the mispricing explanation further, we reject the assertion that the R&D anomaly arises from the correction of stocks mispriced by investor sentiment. A natural experiment exploiting the pilot program under Regulation SHO shows no evidence that the anomaly persists due to limits to arbitrage in the form of short sale constraints.

This article investigates the impact of exchange-traded fund (ETF) ownership on seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). We find that increases to firms’ ETF ownership is positively related to their propensity to conduct an SEO. ETF ownership is also associated with less negative SEO announcement returns, smaller discounts, and better long-run stock returns. Our evidence is consistent with equity issuance following investor demand for stocks driven by greater participation in ETFs, suggesting a possible alternative source of market timing opportunity.

Using data from 20 OECD countries, we find that firms with greater organization capital have significantly higher stock returns and that this represents an international phenomenon. We also find new evidence that the positive association between organization capital and stock returns increases with labor market flexibility. This finding is consistent with greater labor mobility and competition in flexible labor markets rendering organization capital investment riskier from the shareholders’ perspective.