The relationship between private investors and small firms: an agency theory approach

Many small firms in Sweden are characterized by a lack of equity capital. For several years measures to increase the equity capital have been discussed. In this discussion the private investors' market has received virtually no attention. This study presents some preliminary results of the private investors in Sweden.

The research in small firms financing is characterized by a lack of theoretical framework. One basic assumption in the study is that agency theory can provide an essential framework to explain the interaction between the private investor and entrepreneur. Twenty-five hypotheses generated from agency theory are formulated and tested on 62 small unlisted firms in Sweden. Multiple regression analysis is used for the causal analyses.

The empirical results in the study show inter alia that the geographic distance and the private investor's knowledge about the portfolio firm's transformation process seem to be the most influential factors for determining the private investor's involvement in the portfolio firms. It is also interesting to notice that none of the variables, frequency of contacts and the private investor's operational work in the portfolio firm affect the performance of the firm. Contrary to conventional wisdom, private investors do not add value to their portfolio firms through their interaction with the entrepreneurs.

The theoretical conclusion is that agency theory does not provide any satisfactory framework to explain the private investor - entrepreneur relationship. Some of the basic assumptions in agency theory seem to be invalid. A model for the relationship between private investors and entrepreneurs is developed in which four interaction strategies are identified. The model gives implications on two levels: the portfolio level and the individual case level.     

Financial accumulation implies ever-increasing wealth inequality

Wealth inequality is an important matter for economic theory and policy. The recent rise in wealth inequality has been discussed in connection with the recent development of active global financial markets. The existing literature on wealth distribution links wealth inequality to a variety of drivers. Our approach develops a minimalist modelling strategy that combines three featuring mechanisms: active financial markets, individual wealth accumulation and compound interest structure. We provide mathematical proof that accumulated financial investment returns involve ever-increasing wealth concentration and inequality across individual investors most of the time. This cumulative effect over space and time depends on financial accumulation processes, including under efficient financial markets, which generate a fair investment game that individual investors repeatedly play through time.

     

Arbitrage,speculation and futures price fluctuations with boundedly rational and heterogeneous agents

This paper proposes a dynamic model for the futures market with three types of investors. The bounded rationality and heterogeneity of investors are taken into consideration. The equilibrium of the system and its stability conditions are derived with mathematical analysis. In the equilibrium, the futures price and the spot price converge to the equilibrium simultaneously. The equilibrium is determined by many factors, including the risk appetite and the rationality of investors, the trading costs, the arbitrage basis price and the fundamental price. When the stability conditions are violated, complex dynamics will emerge in the market. As shown by the simulations, the arbitrage is likely to destabilize the market. Moreover, when investors have the high degree of rationality, the equilibrium will become unstable and the futures market is inefficient. Statistical analysis indicates that the model can reproduce the stylized facts observed in the futures market, such as long memory, volatility clustering and fat tail of returns.

     

内部控制评价主体、信息错报风险与个人投资的信息可靠性感知

采用实验研究方法,检验了不同主体关于内部控制的有效评价意见、信息错报风险对个体投资者感知财务信息可靠性的影响.研究发现:在信息错报风险高的情况下,有注册会计师审计意见时,个体投资者感知财务信息的可靠性最高,有独立董事意见时次之,只有企业自我评价意见时最低;在信息错报风险低时,个体投资者的感知在以上三种主体意见之间没有差异;个体投资者对财务信息可靠性的感知“中介”了不同评价主体的内部控制评价意见与投资可能性之间的关系.     

How do crowd logistics platforms create value? An exploratory case study from China

ABSTRACT

Crowd logistics platforms play an important role in value creation, but the extant literature has not clarified how platforms create value. Consequently, this multiple case study identifies three main types of value creation capabilities for crowd logistics platforms: resource matching, operations management, and risk control. Additionally, the study demonstrates that these crowd logistics platform capabilities create value by providing the most accurate matches between resources and requests while also enhancing driver agility and compliance. Based on these findings, we present four propositions that extend our understanding of crowd logistics platforms’ value creation capabilities and the process through which these capabilities lead to value creation. The study also provides valuable insights for crowd logistics companies to improve their value creation capabilities.     

Momentum strategies with stock index exchange-traded funds

Previously reported momentum profits may not be available to individual investors who have more trading constraints. Therefore, I examine the profitability of momentum strategies with international iShares and US sector exchange-traded funds (ETFs) traded on the NYSE. The index ETFs provide individual investors easy access to international stock markets and US sectors for asset allocations. Using cross-sectional momentum strategies, in contrast to prior research, I find that momentum profits are insignificant for the late 1990s–2014 period. Few country and industry ETFs yield positive results using time series momentum, and the overall performance is worse than the buy-and-hold strategy. Time series momentum offers significant profits during the 2008 global financial crisis, but the profits decline sharply for the post-crisis period.     

Individual and Institutional Investors’ Response to Earnings Reported by Conservative and Non‐Conservative Firms: Evidence from Chinese Financial Markets

In this study, we document that there are significant differences in individual and institutional investors’ perception and interpretation of information based on accounting conservatism, as reflected by their trading behavior in the Chinese financial market. Our findings show that institutional investors, who are more sophisticated and have better skills, engage in higher purchases of equities of firms that use high accounting conservatism compared to the firms that use low/no accounting conservatism. Institutional investors’ equity purchases are even higher if these firms are associated with higher growth opportunities. On the other hand, individual investors are attracted more by the attention‐grabbing events and are motivated to purchase equities of firms that either do not use accounting conservatism or use low accounting conservatism, and their purchases are even higher when the firms report positive earnings surprises. Additionally, we find that abnormal returns are higher for the firms using high accounting conservatism and have experienced higher purchases by institutional investors.     

The impact of investor structure on stock price crash sensitivity: Evidence from China's stock market

Stock price crash sensitivity refers to the conditional probability of a stock crash when the market collapses. It focuses on individual stocks' sensitivity to the market crash and can affect stock pricing significantly. Although the crash sensitivity of China's stock market is very high as a whole (Weigert, 2016), different individual stocks show varying degrees of crash sensitivity. This paper, adopting the perspective of institutional investors, explores the reasons for the difference in crash sensitivity in China's stock market, and finds that: First, institutional investors' shareholdings is positively related to firms' stock price crash sensitivity. However, after dividing institutional investors into professional (represented by financial institutions) and non-professional institutional investors (represented by general legal persons), we find that only professional institutional investors' shareholdings is negatively related to firms' stock price crash sensitivity. Second, the impact of professional institutional investors on the crash sensitivity is influenced by stock liquidity and media sentiment: when the stock liquidity of listed companies is good or the media sentiment is strong, the negative impact of professional institutional investors on the crash sensitivity is accordingly high. This paper, by highlighting the investor structure, attempts a pioneering exploration of the influencing factors of the difference in stock price crash sensitivity in China. Our empirical results enrich research on stock price crash sensitivity and the heterogeneity of institutional investors. They can also serve to guide regulatory authorities' development of institutional investors and efforts to maintain market stability.     

How much should an investor trust the startup entrepreneur? A network model

Trust is an important determinant of start-up financing. In a simple agent-based model it is determined what the best trusting strategy is for a collective of investors and whether it is rational for an individual investor to deviate from this collective optimum. Trust depends on a measure of social distance and is the precondition for investment. Trust increases and decreases based on whether an investor is satisfied with the interest payments received from an entrepreneur. If an investor is dissatisfied, he terminates the relation with the entrepreneur. For assessing the quality of their own investments, investors communicate with other investors in a network-like structure. I find that, as a collective, it is best for investors to compare their returns critically in order to identify unproductive entrepreneurs, but to be tolerant regarding existing links to entrepreneurs in order not to terminate profitable relations because of minor productivity drops. However, it is optimal for an individual investor to deviate from this strategy and to be less easily disappointed, but to decrease trust in larger steps. In a sense, an individual investor can free ride on the others’ critical assessment. If all investors behave according to this latter strategy, too many unproductive firms remain in the market and the average investor’s return is lower than in the collective optimum.     

Do institutional investors monitor management? Evidence from the relationship between institutional ownership and capital structure

We examine the dynamic relations between institutional ownership and a firm's capital structure. We find that a firm's leverage decreases when institutional ownership increases. This result implies that a firm reduces its debt level as institutional investors substitute for the monitoring role of debt. More importantly, we find that a firm's suboptimal leverage decreases when the institutional ownership increases, and institutional ownership decreases when a firm's suboptimal leverage increases. This finding shows that institutions not only effectively monitor a firm's capital structure but they also passively sell their shares when dissatisfied with it. In addition, we find that the monitoring evidence on a firm's leverage and suboptimal leverage are more pronounced when the institutional investors are less likely to have business relationships with a firm or the information asymmetry is high in the market.     

Optimal portfolio choice with wash sale constraints

We analytically solve the portfolio choice problem in the presence of wash sale constraints in a two-period model with one risky asset. Our results show that wash sale constraints can heavily affect portfolio choice of investors with unrealized losses. The trading behavior of such investors is to a large extent driven by the desire to realize those losses, either immediately by sharply decreasing the holding of assets carrying unrealized losses, or indirectly by increasing such holdings in order to prepare for a decrease in a future period to earn the tax rebate payment. Our findings are robust to increasing the number of trading dates and introducing a second risky asset and a correlation structure.     

An empirical test of individual and institutional trading patterns in Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan

We examine the pattern of daily stock returns in Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Our results support the information-processing hypothesis: Average returns on Monday are lower than on other days of the week, particularly when the previous trading day’s return is negative. Our results also support the positive-feedback-trading hypothesis: Daily returns exhibit positive autocorrelation, particularly when the previous trading day’s return is positive. Further analysis reveals that institutional investors (Japan), individual investors (Taiwan), or both (Hong Kong) can cause these patterns. Our findings are consistent with the relative importance of institutional and individual investors in each of these markets. We thank three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Interbank credit and the money manufacturing process: a systemic perspective on financial stability

Interbank lending and borrowing occur when financial institutions seek to settle and refinance their mutual positions over time and circumstances. This interactive process involves money creation at the aggregate level. Coordination mismatch on interbank credit may trigger systemic crises. This happened when, since summer 2007, interbank credit coordination did not longer work smoothly across financial institutions, eventually requiring exceptional monetary policies by central banks, and guarantee and bailout interventions by governments. Our article develops an interacting heterogeneous agent-based model of interbank credit coordination under minimal institutions. First, we explore the link between interbank credit coordination and the money generation process. Contrary to received wisdom, interbank credit has the capacity to remove the inner limits of monetary system capacitance. Second, we develop simulation analysis on imperfect interbank credit coordination, studying impact of interbank dynamics on financial stability and resilience at individual and aggregate levels. Systemically destabilizing forces prove to be related to the working of the banking system over time, especially interbank coordination conditions and circumstances.

     

Financial return crowdfunding: literature review and bibliometric analysis

In the FinTech era, other technological enterprises different from traditional banking are offering financial services (Zalan and Toufaily Zalan et al. Contemporary Economics, 11(4), 2017). Crowdfunding is a materialization of the evolution of entrepreneurial finance, permitting the raising of funds from a crowd of investors through online platforms. Crowdfunding is a rather new phenomenon, so literature is still incipient. This research aims to study crowdfunding as a financial instrument. For this reason, we will focus specifically on crowdfunding that generates a financial return- i.e., peer-to-peer lending (P2P) and equity crowdfunding (EC). This article looks into the documents published in the Tomson Reuters Web of Science on the field of financial return crowdfunding. Conclusions are drawn in terms of relevance of this burgeoning topic and suggestions for future research are put forward.     

Testing the Wisdom of Crowds in the field: Transfermarkt valuations and international soccer results

This paper investigates the value of collective judgments which stem from settings that have not been designed explicitly to elicit the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’. In particular, I investigate information obtained from transfermarkt.de, an online platform where a crowd of registered users assess the value of professional soccer players. I show that forecasts of international soccer results based on the crowd’s valuations are more accurate than those based on standard predictors, such as the FIFA ranking and the ELO rating. When this improvement in forecasting performance is applied to betting strategies, it leads to sizable monetary gains. I further exploit information on the preferences of individual crowd members in order to investigate whether wishful thinking hampers the accuracy of crowd valuations, but fail to find evidence that such is the case.     

The formation and interplay of social capital in crowdfunded social ventures

The multi-levelled processes taking place in Crowdfunding (CF), when tapping a large heterogeneous crowd for resources, and the often fundamentally different intentions of individual crowd members in the case of highly desirable social ventures with little prospect for economic gains, may lead to a different logic and approach to how entrepreneurship develops. Using this under-institutionalized sphere as both, context and subject, the author seeks evidence and a new understanding of entrepreneurial routes by using the sociological perspectives of Bourdieus' four forms of capital as a lens on 36 cases of social ventures. In the cases, opportunity recognition, formation and exploitation could not be distinguished as separate processes. CF and sourcing help form the actual opportunity and disperse information at the same time. In addition, the ‘nexus’ of opportunity and entrepreneur is breached in CF of social causes through the constant exchange of ideas with the crowd, leading to norm-value pairs between the funders and the entrepreneurs. Issues of identification and control are thus not based upon any formal relationship but based on perceived legitimization and offered democratic participation leading to the transformation of social capital (SC) into economic capital (EC). Success is based upon the SC of the entrepreneurial teams, yet the actual resource exchange and transformation into EC is highly moderated by cultural and symbolic capital that is being built up through the process.     

Collusionby Asymmetrically Informed Firms

We analyze the implementation problem faced by firms when trying to collude in the face of asymmetric information about costs. Assuming that transfer payments are possible, we examine the incentive compatibility and individual rationality constraints that must be satisfied by any cartel agreement. Two scenarios are considered. Firms may or may not withdraw from the agreement after each firm's costs become known. If no withdrawal is possible, we find that the monopoly rule is implementable when weak types of individual rationality constraints are required. This contrasts with some results in the literature. If withdrawal is possible, we find a potential conflict between different forms of individual rationality constraints, in particular, between interim and ex post constraints. This conflict disappears in industries with a large number of firms.     

Liquidity provisions by individual investor trading prior to dividend announcements: Evidence from Taiwan

This paper investigates the role of liquidity provisions played by individual investors prior to dividend announcements in Taiwan. We first document a positive relationship between aggregate individual trading before dividend announcements and abnormal stock returns in the one month after the events. We find that this positive relationship varies with liquidity. We then decompose the abnormal returns following the event into information and liquidity provision components. The information component is not significant at all, but the liquidity component is positively significant, which shows that it is individual investors’ provisions of liquidity to institutional investors prior to dividend announcements that drives the positive relationship between pre-event individual trading and post-event returns.     

The bail-in problem: systematic goals,ad hoc means

In this paper we analyze recent efforts of the international financial institutions to limit the moral hazard created by their assistance to crisis countries. We question the wisdom of the case-by-case approach taken in Pakistan, Ecuador, Romania and Ukraine. We show that because default and restructuring are painful and costly, it is simply not time consistent for the IFIs to plan to stand aside if the markets refuse to roll over maturing claims, restructure problem debts, or provide new money. Because these realities create an incentive to disburse even if investors fail to comply, the IFIs are then placed in the position of having to back down on their previous conditionality, which undermines their credibility. And since investors are aware of these facts, their behavior is unlikely to be modified by the IFIs’ less-than-credible statements of intent. Hence, this approach to “bailing in the private sector” will not work. Fortunately, there is an alternative: introducing collective-action clauses into loan agreements. This, and not ad hoc efforts to bail in the private sector, is the forward-looking solution to the moral hazard problem.     

投资者监督、政府干预与企业价值——基于机构投资者的经验证据

文章通过模型证明大投资者(Blockholders)与个人投资者相比对上市公司实施更多的监督,并且大投资者的监督行为能够增加企业价值;但模型也表明机构投资者是否实施监督及其为企业带来的价值增量取决于监督的成本和收益。文章利用中国资本市场的机构投资者数据,检验了理论模型的四个基本结论。结果表明:机构投资者比个人投资者更积极地监督上市公司,并有助于提高企业价值;政府干预(用上市公司最终控制人为政府代表)减少了机构投资者监督的收益,降低了机构投资者对企业价值所起到的正面作用,削弱了机构投资者监督的积极性。研究结论表明,发展机构投资者有助于改善上市公司的治理水平,提升企业价值;但是政府干预限制了机构投资者的积极公司治理作用。