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

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Results 536 resources

  • We study the determinants of vertical integration in a new data set of over 750,000 firms from 93 countries. We present a number of theoretical predictions on the interactions between financial development, contracting costs, and the extent of vertical integration. Consistent with these predictions, contracting costs and financial development by themselves appear to have no effect on vertical integration. However, we find greater vertical integration in countries that have both greater contracting costs and greater financial development. We also show that countries with greater contracting costs are more vertically integrated in more capital‐intensive industries.

  • We argue that when bankruptcy code is creditor friendly, excessive liquidations cause levered firms to shun innovation, whereas by promoting continuation upon failure, a debtor-friendly code induces greater innovation. We provide empirical support for this claim by employing patents as a proxy for innovation. Using time-series changes within a country and cross-country variation in creditor rights, we confirm that a creditor-friendly code leads to a lower absolute level of innovation by firms, as well as relatively lower innovation by firms in technologically innovative industries. When creditor rights are stronger, technologically innovative industries employ relatively less leverage and grow disproportionately slower.

  • This paper analyzes why gold mining firms use options instead of linear strategies to hedge their gold price risk. Consistent with financial constraints based theories, the largest and least financially constrained firms are the most likely to hedge with insurance strategies (put options), while more constrained firms finance the purchase of puts by selling calls (collars). The most financially constrained firms use strategies that involve selling calls. Firms with large investment programs are also more likely to use insurance rather than linear strategies. Firms' hedging instrument choices are also correlated with current market conditions, suggesting that managers' market views partially drive hedging instrument choices.

  • We show that female directors have a significant impact on board inputs and firm outcomes. In a sample of US firms, we find that female directors have better attendance records than male directors, male directors have fewer attendance problems the more gender-diverse the board is, and women are more likely to join monitoring committees. These results suggest that gender-diverse boards allocate more effort to monitoring. Accordingly, we find that chief executive officer turnover is more sensitive to stock performance and directors receive more equity-based compensation in firms with more gender-diverse boards. However, the average effect of gender diversity on firm performance is negative. This negative effect is driven by companies with fewer takeover defenses. Our results suggest that mandating gender quotas for directors can reduce firm value for well-governed firms.

  • We examine whether a large shareholder can alleviate conflicts of interest between managers and shareholders through the credible threat of exit on the basis of private information. In our model, the threat of exit often reduces agency costs, but additional private information need not enhance the effectiveness of the mechanism. Moreover, the threat of exit can produce quite different effects depending on whether the agency problem involves desirable or undesirable actions from shareholders' perspective. Our results are consistent with empirical findings on the interaction between managers and minority large shareholders and have further empirical implications.

  • We present a dynamic contracting model in which the principal and agent disagree about the resolution of uncertainty, and we illustrate the contract design in an application with Bayesian learning. The disagreement creates gains from trade that the principal realizes by transferring payment to states that the agent considers relatively more likely, changing incentives. The interaction between incentive provision and learning creates an intertemporal source of "disagreement risk" that alters optimal risk sharing. There is an endogenous regime shift between economies with small and large belief differences, and an early shock to beliefs can lead to large persistent differences in variable pay even after beliefs have converged. Under risk-neutrality, "selling the firm" to the agent does not implement the first-best because it precludes state-contingent trades.

  • Using a comprehensive hedge fund database, we examine the role of managerial incentives and discretion in hedge fund performance. Hedge funds with greater managerial incentives, proxied by the delta of the option‐like incentive fee contracts, higher levels of managerial ownership, and the inclusion of high‐water mark provisions in the incentive contracts, are associated with superior performance. The incentive fee percentage rate by itself does not explain performance. We also find that funds with a higher degree of managerial discretion, proxied by longer lockup, notice, and redemption periods, deliver superior performance. These results are robust to using alternative performance measures and controlling for different data‐related biases.

  • We construct a firm-level governance index that increases with minority shareholder protection. Compared with U.S. matching firms, only 12.68% of foreign firms have a higher index. The value of foreign firms falls as their index decreases relative to the index of matching U.S. firms. Our results suggest that lower country-level investor protection and other country characteristics make it suboptimal for foreign firms to invest as much in governance as U.S. firms do. Overall, we find that minority shareholders benefit from governance improvements and do so partly at the expense of controlling shareholders.

  • We study how competition in the product market affects the link between firms' real investment decisions and their asset return dynamics. In our model, assets in place and growth options have different sensitivities to market wide uncertainty. The strategic behavior of market participants influences the relative importance of these components of firm value. We show that the relationship between the degree of competition and assets' expected rates of return varies with product market demand. When demand is low, firms in more competitive industries earn higher returns, whereas when demand is high firms in more concentrated industries earn higher returns.

  • This paper proposes a new method of forming basis assets. We use return correlations to sort securities into portfolios and compare the inferences drawn from this set of basis assets with those drawn from other benchmark portfolios. The proposed set of portfolios appears capable of generating measures of risk–return trade-off that are estimated with a lower error. In tests of asset pricing models, we find that the returns of these portfolios are significantly and positively related to both CAPM and Consumption CAPM risk measures, and there are significant components of these returns that are not captured by the three-factor model.

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