A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.

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Results 75 resources

  • We examine the relation between insiders’ investment horizon and the information content of their trades with respect to future stock returns. We conjecture that an insider's investment horizon establishes a benchmark for expected patterns of continued trading behavior and thus helps identify unexpected insider trades, which should be more informative in efficient markets. Consistent with this conjecture, the trades of short‐horizon insiders are both more unexpected and more informed, on average, than those of long‐horizon insiders. Short‐horizon insiders and their firms also tend to display characteristics that are associated with a greater focus on short‐termism.

  • Change of management restrictions (CMRs) in loan contracts give lenders explicit ex ante control rights over managerial retention and selection. This paper shows that lenders use CMRs to mitigate risks arising from CEO turnover, especially those related to the loss of human capital and replacement uncertainty, thereby providing evidence that human capital risk affects debt contracting. With a CMR in place, the likelihood of CEO turnover decreases by more than half, and future firm performance improves when retention frictions are important, suggesting that lenders can influence managerial turnover, even outside of default states, and help the borrower retain talent.

  • We study corporate control tracing controlling shareholders for thousands of listed firms from 127 countries over 2004 to 2012. Government and family control is pervasive in civil‐law countries. Blocks are commonplace, but less so in common‐law countries. These patterns apply to large, medium, and small firms. In contrast, the development‐control nexus is heterogeneous; strong for large but absent for small firms. Control correlates strongly with shareholder protection, the stringency of employment contracts and unions power. Conversely, the correlations with creditor rights, legal formalism, and entry regulation appear weak. These patterns support both legal origin and political theories of financial development.

  • France's Ordonnance 2006‐346 repudiated the notion of possessory ownership in the Napoleonic Code, easing the pledge of physical assets in a country where credit was highly concentrated. A differences‐test strategy shows that firms operating newly pledgeable assets significantly increased their borrowing following the reform. Small, young, and financially constrained businesses benefitted the most, observing improved credit access and real‐side outcomes. Start‐ups emerged with higher “at‐inception” leverage, located farther from large cities, with more assets‐in‐place than before. Their exit and bankruptcy rates declined. Spatial analyses show that the reform reached firms in rural areas, reducing credit access inequality across France's countryside.

  • This paper introduces a novel consumption‐based variable, cyclical consumption, and examines its predictive properties for stock returns. Future expected stock returns are high (low) when aggregate consumption falls (rises) relative to its trend and marginal utility from current consumption is high (low). We show that the empirical evidence ties consumption decisions of agents to time variation in returns in a manner consistent with asset pricing models based on external habit formation. The predictive power of cyclical consumption is not confined to bad times and subsumes the predictability of many popular forecasting variables.

  • Government guarantees generate an implicit subsidy for banks. A capital requirement reduces this subsidy, through a simple liability composition effect. However, the guarantees also make a bank undervalue loans that generates surplus in states of the world in which it defaults. Raising the capital requirement makes the bank safer, which alleviates this problem. We refer to this mechanism, which we argue is empirically relevant, as the forced safety effect.

  • We study the consequences of, and potential policy responses to, high‐frequency trading (HFT) via the tradeoff between liquidity and information production. Faster speeds facilitate HFT, with consequences for this tradeoff: Information production decreases because informed traders have less time to trade before HFTs react, but liquidity (measured by the bid‐ask spread) improves because informational asymmetries decline. HFT also pushes outcomes inside the frontier of this tradeoff. However, outcomes can be restored to the frontier by replacing the limit order book with one of two alternative mechanisms: delaying all orders except cancellations or implementing frequent batch auctions.

  • This paper presents direct measures of capital costs, equal to the product of the required rate of return on capital and the value of the capital stock. The capital share, equal to the ratio of capital costs and gross value added, does not offset the decline in the labor share. Instead, a large increase in the share of pure profits offsets declines in the shares of both labor and capital. Industry data show that increases in concentration are associated with declines in the labor share.

  • We study the impact of Quickpay, a reform that permanently accelerated payments to small business contractors of the U.S. government. We find a strong direct effect of the reform on employment growth at the firm level. However, we document substantial crowding out of nontreated firms' employment within local labor markets. While the overall net employment effect is positive, it is close to zero in tight labor markets. Our results highlight an important channel for alleviating financing constraints in small firms, but emphasize the general‐equilibrium effects of large‐scale interventions, which can lead to lower aggregate outcomes depending on labor market conditions.

  • Using variation in firms’ exposure to their CEOs resulting from hospitalization, we estimate the effect of chief executive officers (CEOs) on firm policies, holding firm‐CEO matches constant. We document three main findings. First, CEOs have a significant effect on profitability and investment. Second, CEO effects are larger for younger CEOs, in growing and family‐controlled firms, and in human‐capital‐intensive industries. Third, CEOs are unique: the hospitalization of other senior executives does not have similar effects on the performance. Overall, our findings demonstrate that CEOs are a key driver of firm performance, which suggests that CEO contingency plans are valuable.

Last update from database: 5/16/24, 11:00 PM (AEST)