Knowledge that Transforms

We exploit a quasi-natural experiment (the adoption of state anti-recharacterization laws) to study the effect of strengthened creditor rights on corporate mergers and acquisitions. We find that, following the passage of anti-recharacterization laws, firms decrease overall acquisition activities. This effect is stronger for firms with worse agency problems. Announcement returns to shareholders are larger and post-merger operating cash flows are better for acquirers with weaker governance. Furthermore, returns to bondholders of these firms are also higher, indicating no wealth transfers. Taken together, our evidence suggests that ex-ante strengthened creditor rights can discipline firm managers to reduce value-destroying acquisitions and conduct higher quality deals.

This study examines intra-industry information transfer in the emerging market of China, where financial and market institutions are underdeveloped and the majority of investors are inexperienced individual investors. In an analysis of the management earnings forecasts of publicly listed firms, we find that investors in China transfer information between peer firms, with a stronger transfer when earnings forecasts are more accurate and credible, and when the investors of non-announcing firms are more sophisticated. We also find that the non–market-based resource allocation and entry restrictions in China discourage intra-industry information transfer between firms. Overall, our results suggest that intra-industry information transfer in China is constrained by institutional barriers. Reforms aimed at removing these barriers can help enhance these markets’ stock price efficiency. Our results provide policy implications to other emerging markets with institutional environments similar to China.

This study seeks to determine whether mutual fund decarbonization affects the stock prices of divested firms and contributes to the reduction of these firms’ carbon emissions. Using a new methodology to identify equity mutual funds’ decarbonization trades, we calculate a metric of decarbonization selling pressure (DSP) on stocks. Controlling for endogeneity and selection bias, we find that high DSP sustainably pressures stock prices downwards. Furthermore, we find that divested firms experiencing a stock price decline subsequently reduce their carbon emissions compared to non-divested firms. This finding is consistent with theoretical predictions. Various tested alternative explanations, such as shareholder intervention and financial selling pressure, cannot diminish these results. Overall, our findings support the divestment movement's hope that a critical mass of investors is able to reduce carbon emissions. Short presentation English version: https://youtu.be/dorMMn2BBn4, German version: https://youtu.be/i3r30iRbtI8.

Individuals’ stock market participation depends on the risk-return trade-off they expect to achieve. We find that the expected economic benefits of investing are highly heterogeneous. We define the personal equity risk premium (PERP) as the difference between an individual's expectation of returns and personal opportunity cost of capital. Higher PERP is associated with greater stock market participation. Our results hold after we control for known factors, such as financial literacy, trust, and loss aversion, and are stronger for the level of stock investment. Disentangling PERP shows that both components help explain both stock market participation and the level of participation.

I examine an action hedge fund managers take to increase their assets under management: selling ownership stakes in their firms to outside owners. Fund companies that sell stakes to outside owners open more new funds and attract higher fund flows. The flow impact is greater for funds who sell stakes to more reputable outside owners and outsiders with asset management divisions. Funds with outside owners do not subsequently outperform their peers. Despite the lack of subsequent outperformance, fund investors do benefit from a reduction in returns management and lower incidence of fraud. Taken together, my results indicate that these transactions result in synergies for all parties involved.

We extend the existing literature on bank capital structure by applying a time-varying parameter model to the partial adjustment framework. This model allows one to obtain a more timely and on-going assessment of bank behavior in adjusting the capital ratio to its optimal or target level. The estimated time-varying rate of capital adjustment indicates that banks slowly adjusted their capital ratios to their optima or targets before the 2007–2009 global financial crisis, while they more rapidly adjusted their capital ratios upwards after the crisis. This finding suggests that banks make faster capital structure adjustments under more stringent post-crisis regulatory reforms of capital requirements. Moreover, we find convincing evidence on a structural change in bank behavior in adjusting its capital ratio around the global financial crisis.

We examine, for the first time in the literature, the impact of social capital on the cost of bank equity worldwide. We reach two interesting conclusions. First, consistent with the view that the social capital of a region can constrain managerial opportunistic behavior, enhance the flow of information, and mitigate moral hazard and agency concerns, we find that banks from countries with higher social capital operate with lower cost of equity. Second, consistent with the view of a substitutional relationship between formal and informal institutions we find that the association of social capital with the cost of bank equity becomes weaker in countries with strong formal institutions. The results hold while controlling for numerous bank-level and country-level characteristics, as well as when we account for endogeneity with the use of an instrumental variables approach.

We develop a new rationale for capital allocation in business groups’ internal capital markets. We show that productivity and pledgeable income jointly drive capital allocation within an internal capital market. In financially constrained business groups, an efficient internal capital market can allocate marginal funds to firms that have high pledgeability of income because of a multiplier effect: a dollar of internal funds generates a bigger increase in investment. This result has important implications for the business group affiliation strategy. Whether or not a financially constrained but highly productive firm will benefit from group affiliation depends on its borrowing capacity vis-à-vis other affiliates.

Target2 (T2) balances in the Eurozone are again in a divergent trend after the pandemic shock. The recent financial literature seems to have reached a consensus about the need to characterize such phenomena under specific monetary policy configurations variable in time. T2 balances can be decomposed by using the balance of payments (BoP) identities. Indeed, proving a strong causality link from data that have to fulfill an accounting identity can be challenging, since the closer the data are to an accounting identity, the less information on causal relation can be inferred from econometric techniques. Nevertheless we believe that useful information can be extracted from accounting correspondences. In this perspective, both long-term and short-term BoP decompositions are performed for Italy, Germany and France under different regimes of monetary policies in the Euro Area, showing the uttermost importance of current account imbalances and interbank credit flows in determining the behavior of T2 net balances.

We create and test two novel network-based measures of interconnectedness in the financial industry during 1996 to 2013. A network based on informed trading in financial firms predicts firm-specific risk and performance, while one formed on financial firm returns predicts future macroeconomic risk. The measure of informed trading is robust to variable order arrival rates more common in modern algorithmic trading. A trading strategy based on informed trading network centrality in the financial sector delivers an annualized risk-adjusted return of 7.73%. This risk-adjusted return shows that the network centrality has an economic impact that is relevant beyond the statistical results of the paper.