[Closed-end country funds can trade at large premiums and discounts from their foreign asset values (NAVs). Investigating this anomaly, we find that individual fund premiums move together, primarily because of the comovement of their stock prices with the U.S. market. Moreover, an index of country fund premiums differentiates size-ranked U.S. portfolio returns and forecasts country fund stock returns. These findings suggest that international equity prices are affected by local risk. In particular, we show that country fund premium movements reflect a U.S.-specific risk, which may be interpreted as U.S. market sentiment.]

This research investigates the impact of interest rate volatility upon corporate bond yield spreads. We first consider the impact of interest rate volatility upon noncallable bond spreads. Because greater interest rate volatility likely increases the volatility of the firm's debt, we hypothesize that the relation will be positive. Given that we do find a positive relation, we thus investigate whether the positive effect of interest rate volatility on yield spreads is stronger or weaker for callable bonds. We find that the effect is weaker for callable bonds. This result indicates that there is a negative relation between default spreads and call spreads, which is consistent with the theory of Acharya and Carpenter (2002), but in contrast to the theory of King (2002). Furthermore, our results for the relationship between equity volatility and yield spread tend to support Acharya and Carpenter (2002) more than King (2002).

Closed-end country funds can trade at large premiums and discounts from their foreign asset values (NAVs). Investigating this anomaly, we find that individual fund premiums move together, primarily because of the comovement of their stock prices with the U.S. market. Moreover, an index of country fund premiums differentiates size-ranked U.S. portfolio returns and forecasts country fund stock returns. These findings suggest that international equity prices are affected by local risk. In particular, we show that country fund premium movements reflect a U.S.-specific risk, which may be interpreted as U.S. market sentiment.

This paper examines the role of customer-affiliated outside directors on suppliers in reducing risk arising from having a major customer. Using a sample of US supplier firms, we find that a positive relationship between having a major customer and supplier risk is weakened with the presence of the major customer's representatives at suppliers' board. We further show that suppliers with customer-affiliated outside directors are more likely to have less conservative financial policies. Our results suggest that customers' board membership at suppliers helps mitigate the business risk due to the tightened supplier–customer relationship and reduced information asymmetry.

This paper explores the informed trading by mutual funds of local investments. Using hand-collected securities class actions (SCAs), we examine whether local mutual funds can avoid potential economic damage from SCAs against their portfolio firms by selling them in advance – local information advantage hypothesis. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis. The informed selling by local funds of the SCA firms is driven by the firms with low analyst coverage and high forecasting errors, which suggests that local funds benefit the most when an SCA firm's information environment is poor. Furthermore, we find that informed trading of local funds can predict a possible outcome of the lawsuit. Finally, the magnitude of informed selling is greater when firms are closer to local funds and the class period is shorter.

This paper examines how the investment horizons of a firm's institutional investors affect its corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Using data on U.S. firms’ CSR ratings over the 1995–2012 period, we find that longer investment horizons are positively related to CSR. Further, active long-term institutions increase CSR whereas passive long-term institutions have no significant effect. Our results suggest that investors with long-term horizons have more incentives to monitor their firms which leads managers to engage in more vigorous CSR activities.