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 Investor flows into and out of CLNs are passed to and withdrawn from the futures markets via issuers' trades to hedge their CLN liabilities.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movements but nonetheless cause increases and decreases in commodity futures prices when they are passed through to and withdrawn from the futures markets.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.

We examine whether international equity mutual fund managers shift their portfolios toward stocks with higher financial reporting quality (FRQ) during periods of high political uncertainty. Our study is motivated by two primary factors. First, prior research shows evidence of fund managers’ “flight to quality” (e.g., to less risky securities) during periods of uncertainty. Second, recent theoretical research concludes that stocks with higher FRQ are assessed as less sensitive to systematic risk (such as political uncertainty). We employ national elections as exogenous increases in systematic risk in the local markets and accordingly use an international sample of mutual funds that focus on local markets. We find that mutual fund managers shift their equity holdings to stocks with higher FRQ during election periods when political uncertainty is higher. Such a flight‐to‐quality effect is less pronounced for elections with larger expected electoral margins in the pre‐election period (i.e., when the incumbent is more likely to win the election) and for countries with higher transactions costs. In contrast, the effect is more pronounced when governments have greater involvement in the local economy. Our inferences are robust to alternative proxies for political uncertainty and FRQ and to numerous other sensitivity analyses.

We examine whether investors are able to fully anticipate the pricing implications of cash flow hedges in the banking industry. We show that mark-to-market adjustments on cash flow hedges are inversely related to future cash flows and that investors underestimate the extent of this inverse relation. Our evidence supports the notion that incomplete information on value relevant parameters makes it difficult for investors to accurately predict the effects of current cash flow hedge adjustments on future cash flows. Our results are also consistent with the evidence that investors have limited attention such that information, particularly information that is difficult to discern, is not fully reflected in stock prices. Thus, the additional disclosures mandated by regulatory agencies in the banking industry are not sufficient to overcome the challenges associated with incomplete information and investors’ limited attention.

Time series momentum (TSM) refers to the predictability of the past 12-month return on the next one-month return and is the focus of several recent influential studies. This paper shows that asset-by-asset time series regressions reveal little evidence of TSM, both in- and out-of-sample. While the t-statistic in a pooled regression appears large, it is not statistically reliable as it is less than the critical values of parametric and nonparametric bootstraps. From an investment perspective, the TSM strategy is profitable, but its performance is virtually the same as that of a similar strategy that is based on historical sample mean and does not require predictability. Overall, the evidence on TSM is weak, particularly for the large cross section of assets.

We study the share privatization process in China to investigate whether and how the removal of market frictions is associated with efficiency gains. Prior to the reform, domestic A-shares were divided into tradable and non-tradable shares. As a result of the reform, holders of non-tradable shares compensated holders of tradable shares in order to make their shares tradable. We show that size is positively associated with both the gain in risk sharing and the price impact of more shares coming on the market as a result of the reform. Our study highlights the role of risk sharing in China's share issue privatization process. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

This paper studies the presence of hedge funds in the Chapter 11 process and their effects on bankruptcy outcomes. Hedge funds strategically choose positions in the capital structure where their actions could have a bigger impact on value. Their presence, especially as unsecured creditors, helps balance power between the debtor and secured creditors. Their effect on the debtor manifests in higher probabilities of the latter's loss of exclusive rights to file reorganization plans, CEO turnover, and adoptions of key employee retention plan, while their effect on secured creditors manifests in higher probabilities of emergence and payoffs to junior claims.

This paper shows that politicians’ pressure to climb the career ladder increases bank risk exposure in their region. Chinese local politicians are set growth targets in their region that are relative to each other. Growth is stimulated by debt-financed programs which are mainly financed via bank loans. The stronger the performance pressure the riskier the respective local bank exposure becomes. This effect holds for local banks which are under some control of local politicians, it has increased with the release of stimulus packages requiring local co-financing and it is stronger if politicians hold chairmen positions in bank boards.

We propose a theory of banking in which banks cannot perfectly control deposit flows. Facing uninsurable loan and deposit shocks, banks dynamically manage lending, wholesale funding, deposits, and equity. Deposits create value by lowering funding costs. However, when the bank is undercapitalized and at risk of breaching leverage requirements, the marginal value of deposits can turn negative as deposit inflows, by raising leverage, increase the likelihood of costly equity issuance. Banks' inability to fully control leverage distinguishes them from nondepository intermediaries. Our model suggests a reevaluation of leverage regulations and offers new perspectives on banking in a low‐interest‐rate environment.

We use retail structured equity product (SEP) issuances to construct a new sentiment measure for large capitalization stocks. The SEP sentiment measure predicts negative abnormal returns on the SEP reference stocks based on a variety of factor models, and also predicts returns in Fama‐MacBeth regressions that include a wide range of covariates. Consistent with our interpretation that SEP issuances reflect investor sentiment, aggregate SEP issuances are highly correlated with the Baker‐Wurgler sentiment index. Tobit regressions reveal that proxies for attention and sentiment predict SEP issuance volumes, providing additional evidence consistent with the hypothesis that SEP issuances reflect sentiment.

Prior research shows that financial reporting quality (FRQ) is positively related to investment efficiency for large U.S. publicly traded companies. We examine the role of FRQ in private firms from emerging markets, a setting in which extant research suggests that FRQ would be less conducive to the mitigation of investment inefficiencies. Earlier studies show that private firms have lower FRQ, presumably because of lower market demand for public information. Prior research also shows that FRQ is lower in countries with low investor protection, bank-oriented financial systems, and stronger conformity between tax and financial reporting rules. Using firm-level data from the World Bank, our empirical evidence suggests that FRQ positively affects investment efficiency. We further find that the relation between FRQ and investment efficiency is increasing in bank financing and decreasing in incentives to minimize earnings for tax purposes. Such a connection between tax-minimization incentives and the informational role of earnings has often been asserted in the literature. We provide explicit evidence in this regard.