A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.
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- Please kindly let me know [mingze.gao@mq.edu.au] in case of any errors.
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Results 123 resources
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Launched in Summer 2012, the European Central Bank’s (ECB) Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program indirectly recapitalized European banks through its positive impact on periphery sovereign bonds. However, the stability reestablished in the banking sector did not fully translate into economic growth. We document zombie lending by banks that remained weakly capitalized even post-OMT. In turn, firms receiving loans used these funds not to undertake real economic activity, such as employment and investment, but to build cash reserves. Creditworthy firms in industries with a high zombie firm prevalence significantly suffered from this credit misallocation, which further slowed the economic recovery.
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In the late nineteenth century Britain had almost no mandatory shareholder protections, but had very developed financial markets. We argue that private contracting between shareholders and corporations meant that the absence of statutory protections was immaterial. Using approximately 500 articles of association from before 1900, we code the protections offered to shareholders in these private contracts. We find that firms voluntarily offered shareholders many of the protections that were subsequently included in statutory corporate law. We also find that companies offering better protection to shareholders had less concentrated ownership.
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This paper investigates the role of ethnic matching between buyers and sellers in Singapore’s public housing market. We find that sellers sell homes in blocks with a high concentration of their own (other) ethnic group(s) at significant premiums (discounts). Chinese sellers earn 1.7% higher premiums when selling homes to Chinese buyers in high Chinese concentrations housing blocks, but Malay sellers accept 1.6% discounts from Malay buyers in the same blocks. We find that the high volume of within-ethnicity transactions with the price discounts is supported by the ethnic social networks, that is, through ethnicity-specialized real estate agents.
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The Investment Company Act of 1940 restricts interfund lending and borrowing within a mutual fund family, but families can apply for regulatory exemptions to participate in such transactions. We find that the monitoring mechanisms and investment restrictions influence the family’s decision to apply for the interfund lending programs. We document several benefits of such programs for equity funds. First, participating funds reduce cash holdings and increase investments in illiquid assets. Second, fund investors exhibit less run-like behavior. Third, it helps mitigate asset fire sales after extreme investor redemptions. Offsetting these benefits, money market funds in participating families experience investor outflows.
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We model asset encumbrance by banks subject to rollover risk and study the consequences for fragility, funding costs, and prudential regulation. A bank’s privately optimal encumbrance choice balances the benefit of expanding profitable, yet illiquid, investment funded by cheap long-term senior secured debt, against the cost of greater fragility from runs on unsecured debt. We derive testable implications about encumbrance ratios. The introduction of deposit insurance or wholesale funding guarantees induces excessive encumbrance and fragility. Limits on asset encumbrance or Pigovian taxes eliminate such risk-shifting incentives. Our results shed light on prudential policies currently being pursued in several jurisdictions.
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We test the hypothesis that foreign direct investment promotes corporate governance spillovers in the host country. Using firm-level data from 64 countries during the period 2005–2014, we find that cross-border M&A activity is associated with subsequent improvements in the governance of nontarget firms when the acquirer country has stronger investor protection than the target country. The effect is more pronounced when the target industry is more competitive. Cross-border M&As are also associated with increases in investment and valuation of nontarget firms. Alternative explanations, such as access to global financial markets and cultural similarities, do not appear to explain our findings.
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We show that, in the presence of correlated investment opportunities across firms, risk sharing between firm shareholders and firm managers leads to compensation contracts that include relative performance evaluation. These contracts bias investment choices toward correlated investment opportunities, and thus create systemic risk. Furthermore, we show that leverage amplifies all such effects. In the context of the banking industry, we analyze recent policy recommendations for firm managerial pay and show how shareholders optimally undo the policies’ intended effects.
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Persistence risk is an endogenous source of risk that arises when a rational agent learns about the length of business cycles. Persistence risk is positive during recessions and negative during expansions. This asymmetry, which solely results from learning about persistence, causes expected returns, return volatility, and the price of risk to rise during recessions. Persistence risk predicts future excess returns, particularly at 3- to 7-year horizons. Its predictability is strongest around business-cycle peaks and troughs. We confirm the model’s predictions in the data and provide evidence that persistence risk is priced in financial markets.
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This paper introduces a new approach to constructing optimal mean-variance portfolios. The approach relies on a novel unconstrained regression representation of the mean-variance optimization problem combined with high-dimensional sparse-regression methods. Our estimated portfolio, under a mild sparsity assumption, controls for risk and attains the maximum expected return as both the numbers of assets and observations grow. The superior properties of our approach are demonstrated through comprehensive simulation and empirical analysis. Notably, using our strategy, we find that investing in individual stocks, in addition to the Fama-French three-factor portfolios, leads to substantially improved performance.
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We analyze whether the growing importance of passive investors has influenced the campaigns, tactics, and successes of activists. We find activists are more likely to seek board representation when a larger share of the target company’s stock is held by passively managed mutual funds. Furthermore, higher passive ownership is associated with increased use of proxy fights, settlements, and a higher likelihood the activist achieves board representation or the sale of the targeted company. Our findings suggest that the recent growth of passive institutional investors mitigates free-rider problems and facilitates activists’ ability to engage in costly, value-enhancing forms of monitoring.
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- Bond (7)
- Mergers and Acquisitions (2)
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- Journal Article (123)