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

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Results 5,189 resources

  • This article explores the link between the composition of firms' capital and stock returns. I develop a general equilibrium production economy where firms use two factors: real estate and other capital. Investment is subject to asymmetric adjustment costs. Because real estate depreciates slowly, firms with high real estate holdings are more vulnerable to bad productivity shocks and hence are riskier and have higher expected returns. This prediction is supported empirically. I find that the returns of firms with a high share of real estate capital exceed that of low real estate firms by 3–6% annually, adjusted for exposures to the market return, size, value, and momentum factors. Moreover, conditional beta estimates reveal that these firms indeed have higher market betas, and the spread between the betas of high and low real estate firms is countercyclical.

  • The signing bonus is one of the most common elements of compensation packages for white-collar employees but has received little theoretical and empirical attention. This article investigates the use of a signing bonus as a tool for firms to signal to prospective employees: when they are uncertain regarding their fit with the firm, the signing bonus can serve as a credible signal of the firm's belief of said fit. The theory suggests that we should expect signing bonuses to be more common and larger when the economy is stronger, when employees are less certain of how well they will fit at the firm, when the quality of fit (known to the firm) is higher, and when performance pay is present. Employees receiving a signing bonus work harder, so the signing bonus also serves as an incentive device. This article also presents the first broad empirical look at the use of the signing bonus across industries and time. Evidence is consistent with the theory.

  • This paper presents a model that reproduces the uncovered interest rate parity puzzle. Investors have preferences with external habits. Countercyclical risk premia and procyclical real interest rates arise endogenously. During bad times at home, when domestic consumption is close to the habit level, the representative investor is very risk averse. When the domestic investor is more risk averse than her foreign counterpart, the exchange rate is closely tied to domestic consumption growth shocks. The domestic investor therefore expects a positive currency excess return. Because interest rates are low in bad times, expected currency excess returns increase with interest rate differentials.

  • We calculate the costs and benefits of the largest ever US government intervention in the financial sector announced during the 2008 Columbus-day weekend. We estimate that this intervention increased the value of banks' financial claims by 130 billion (bn) at a taxpayers' cost of 21-44 billion with a net benefit between 86 and $109Â bn. By looking at the limited cross section, we infer that this net benefit arises from a reduction in the probability of bankruptcy, which we estimate would destroy 22% of the enterprise value. The big winners of the plan were the bondholders of the three former investment banks and Citigroup, while the losers were JP Morgan shareholders and the US taxpayers.

  • We develop a life-cycle consumption and portfolio choice model in which households have nonhomothetic utility over two types of goods, basic and luxury. We calibrate the model to match the cross-sectional and life-cycle variation in the basic expenditure share in the Consumer Expenditure Survey. The model explains the degree to which the portfolio share in risky assets rises in wealth in the cross-section of households in the Survey of Consumer Finances. For a given household, the portfolio share can fall in response to an increase in wealth, even though the model implies decreasing relative risk aversion.

  • We examine how a firm's incentive to commit fraud when going public varies with investor beliefs about industry business conditions. Fraud propensity increases with the level of investor beliefs about industry prospects but decreases when beliefs are extremely high. We find that two mechanisms are at work: monitoring by investors and short‐term executive compensation, both of which vary with investor beliefs about industry prospects. We also find that monitoring incentives of investors and underwriters differ. Our results are consistent with models of investor beliefs and corporate fraud, and suggest that regulators and auditors should be vigilant for fraud during booms.

  • This paper presents a dynamic equilibrium model of bond markets in which two groups of agents hold heterogeneous expectations about future economic conditions. The heterogeneous expectations cause agents to take on speculative positions against each other and therefore generate endogenous relative wealth fluctuation. The relative wealth fluctuation amplifies asset price volatility and contributes to the time variation in bond premia. Our model shows that a modest amount of heterogeneous expectations can help explain several puzzling phenomena, including the "excessive volatility" of bond yields, the failure of the expectations hypothesis, and the ability of a tent-shaped linear combination of forward rates to predict bond returns.

  • In this article, we derive an analytic expression for the representative agent of a large class of economies populated by agents with "catching up with the Joneses" preferences, but who exhibit heterogeneous risk aversion. As Chan and Kogan (2002) show numerically, the representative agent has stochastic risk that moves countercyclically to the state variable. However, we show that heterogeneity of risk aversion alone is insufficient for explaining empirical regularities–namely the variability of the Sharpe ratio–that Campbell and Cochrane (1999) obtain in a model of a representative agent with stochastic risk aversion.

  • This study examines the association between chief financial officer (CFO) equity incentives and earnings management. Chief executive officer (CEO) equity incentives have been shown to be associated with accruals management and the likelihood of beating analyst forecasts (Bergstresser and Philippon, 2006; Cheng and Warfield, 2005). Because CFOs' primary responsibility is financial reporting, CFO equity incentives should play a stronger role than those of the CEO in earnings management. We find that the magnitude of accruals and the likelihood of beating analyst forecasts are more sensitive to CFO equity incentives than to those of the CEO. Our evidence supports the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) new disclosure requirement on CFO compensation.

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