The value of ongoing venture capital investment to newly listed firms

We examine whether the market values continuing venture capital (VC) investor involvement in firms post-IPO. Compared to the US, Australian VC investors exit their investments post-IPO by on-market sales rather than distribution of holdings to their investors. Lockup periods tend to be longer and ownership thresholds for reporting trades lower. We find that the market responds positively to buy transactions, negatively to sell transactions of VC investors and negatively to the resignation of VC directors. These results are consistent with VC investors in the firm having a positive influence and creating value from which the VCs and other shareholders benefit.     

公司治理与IPO抑价——来自中国股票市场的经验证据

Jensen与Meckling(1976)认为,代理成本是投资者愿意支付的价格与公司内在价值之间的差异。投资者对公司代理成本的预期也会体现在IPO定价过程中,良好的公司治理结构有助于降低公司IPO抑价。本文以我国2002—2003年的133家IPO公司为研究样本,研究样本公司治理结构特征对IPO抑价的影响。结果发现,控制权结构特征以及关联交易性质对IPO抑价有显著的影响,而董事会独立性对IPO的抑价影响则不显著。本文的结果表明,良好的公司治理结构可以显著地降低IPO抑价,降低公司股权融资成本。     

Monitoring via staging: Evidence from Private investments in public equity

I study the causes and consequences of staging in the setting of private investments in public equities (PIPEs). I find that, in PIPE investments, as in venture capital staging, the staging strategy is used by investors as a monitoring mechanism to mitigate information asymmetry and agency problems. Moreover, strategic investors and investors investing alone are more likely to utilize staging. I show also that staging reduces the cost of financing and has positive implications for PIPE issuers’ long-run stock performance.     

Do Individual Investors Have Asymmetric Information Based on Work Experience?

Using a novel data set covering all individual investors' stock market transactions in Norway over 10 years, we analyze whether individual investors have a preference for professionally close stocks, and whether they make excess returns on such investments. After excluding own‐company stock holdings, investors hold 11% of their portfolio in stocks within their two‐digit industry of employment. Given the poor hedging properties of such investments, one would expect abnormally high returns. In contrast, all estimates of abnormal returns are negative, in many cases statistically significant. Overconfidence seems the most likely explanation for the excessive trading in professionally close stocks.     

Value of Multinationality: Internalization, Managerial Self-interest, and Managerial Compensation

In this paper, we examine the impact of managerial self-interest on the value of multinationality. Since agency theory also suggests that a divergence between the interests of managers and shareholders can be aligned by effective managerial incentive, we also examine the effect of managerial compensation on the value of multinationality. Our results show that for high- Q (Tobin's Q > 1 ) firms, investors do not associate the spending of free cash flow on multinationality with the problem of overinvestments. For high- Q firms, it is also found that the value of multinationality can be enhanced by effective managerial incentives. For low- Q firms (Tobin's Q < 1 ), it is found that the concern of managerial self-interest overwhelms the benefits of internalization, making multinationality a value-decreasing event. For low- Q firms, managerial compensation is also ineffective in promoting value-enhancing foreign direct investments.     

Mimicking insider trades

We examine whether outside investors mimic insider trades by analyzing the daily transactions of foreign institutional investors (FII) in the Indian emerging market. We find that the value relevance of insiders' opportunistic buy trades is much higher in our context relative to that reported for developed markets. More importantly, we find that FII mimic opportunistic buy trades, which is more pronounced for firms that are informationally more opaque or have lower corporate governance quality. A long-short strategy based on FII's transactions after opportunistic trades generates an additional abnormal return of approximately 29% annually, compared to transactions based on routines trades.     

Foreign institutional investment horizon and earnings management: Evidence from around the world

This paper investigates whether and how the investment horizon relates to foreign institutional monitoring in constraining the self-interested managerial use of earnings management for a sample of firms from 29 countries. We find that equity ownership by long-term foreign institutional investors, irrespective of the strength of institutional controls in their home countries, is associated with lesser earnings management. Accounting for the significance of information asymmetry in earnings management and the ability of long-term foreign institutional investors to mitigate the information disadvantage associated with cross-border equity investments, we find that the constraining effect is stronger in firms with weaker information environments. Finally, using multiple proxies for the country- and firm-level agency, we find that monitoring by long-term, rather than short-term, foreign institutional investors is significantly effective in limiting earnings management in environments of severe agency conflicts. Overall, our findings draw attention to the heterogeneity in the monitoring role played by foreign institutional investors in influencing the financial reporting quality.     

Connected transactions and firm value: Evidence from China-affiliated companies

This paper investigates tunneling through related-party transactions (RPT) using a unique dataset of listed Chinese companies in Hong Kong. While prior findings suggest that investors do not seem to systematically discount tunneling firms, we find that firm value (Tobin's q and market-to-book value) is significantly lower for firms undertaking potentially expropriating transactions. In addition, cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) are lower for RPTs with disclosure exemptions and are negatively related to some RPT types. Our results suggest that firms tunnel using RPTs with disclosure exemptions and that disclosure requirements matter for RPTs. These RPTs could signal firms' corporate-governance quality, as investors substantially discount firms that undertake potentially expropriating transactions.     

Is the Aggregate Investor Reluctant to Realise Losses? Evidence from Taiwan

We ask whether the typical investor and the aggregate investor exhibit a bias known as the disposition effect, the tendency to sell investments that are held for a profit at a faster rate than investments held for a loss. We analyse all trading activity on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE) for the five years ending in 1999. Using a dataset that contains all trades (over one billion) and the identity of every trader (nearly four million), we find that in aggregate, investors in Taiwan are about twice as likely to sell a stock if they are holding that stock for a gain rather than a loss. Eighty‐four percent of all Taiwanese investors sell winners at a faster rate than losers. Individuals, corporations, and dealers are reluctant to realise losses, while mutual funds and foreigners, who together account for less than 5% of all trades (by value), are not.     

股权质押与公司估值:理论与实证

本文基于2000—2020年我国A股上市公司数据,探讨了控股股东股权质押对上市公司代理问题及其估值的非线性影响。研究发现,控股股东股权质押比例较低(高)时将会缓解(加剧)上市公司的代理问题,从而使其估值上升(下降)。进一步分析显示,随着控股股东股权质押比例的提高,上市公司的财务约束和财务困境水平先降后升,呈U形变化;与此同时,控股股东高股权质押比例降低了上市公司增量现金的边际价值,增加了其审计费用和违规频次。从企业异质性来看,国企子样本中上述关系大多不显著。本文研究对进一步理解股权质押的内在运行机制和经济后果有一定参考意义。     

Why Are Buyouts Levered? The Financial Structure of Private Equity Funds

Private equity funds are important to the economy, yet there is little analysis explaining their financial structure. In our model the financial structure minimizes agency conflicts between fund managers and investors. Relative to financing each deal separately, raising a fund where the manager receives a fraction of aggregate excess returns reduces incentives to make bad investments. Efficiency is further improved by requiring funds to also use deal-by-deal debt financing, which becomes unavailable in states where internal discipline fails. Private equity investment becomes highly sensitive to aggregate credit conditions and investments in bad states outperform investments in good states.     

Who uses robo-advising and how?

Using propriety data from a large Indian robo-advisory firm, we show that users of robo-advisory services are relatively young, predominantly male, married, small investors, and professionals. We show that the majority of small retail investors utilize a systematic investment plan (SIP). Additionally, we document that there are differences in demographic characteristics, occupation, and geographic location of investors in utilizing SIP versus one-time lump sum investments. Furthermore, we find that daily user account creation increases during periods of high market volatility.     

Institutional Investors and Private Equity

Entrepreneurial finance literature has highlighted that institutionalinvestors are the main contributors to private equity funds.This paper complements these findings by documenting that institutionalinvestors also invest directly in private equity. A major concernfor such investments is the higher agency costs associated withprivate equity. We show that institutions invest in privatefirms with governance mechanisms that tend to reduce the expectedagency costs and risk of minority expropriation. Good governancemechanisms further allow institutional investors to enjoy thebenefits of syndication and thereby reduce idiosyncratic risk.In addition, we show that institutional investments tend tobe followed by further improvements in corporate governanceand tend to occur in high-growth firms within research and developmentintensive industries.     

A Study of Large Institutional Investor Trading Behavior Around Leveraged Buyouts

This study analyzes a segment of large institutional investors by focusing on their trading behavior around leveraged buyouts (LBO) during 1984–1992. Over 1,000 LBO-related transactions from the portfolios of the fifty largest life insurance companies in the U.S. form the data sample. The results indicate that large LBOs dominate the portfolios in both number and size of transactions. The average purchase occurs about four months prior to the initial LBO restructuring announcement, and the average disposal occurs about three-quarters into the life of the LBO event. About 25% of the portfolio is liquidated prior to the initial announcement, and only 4% of the purchases result after the initial announcement. Less than 6% of the transactions involve LBOs that are ultimately canceled. Finally, the sample of large institutional investors demonstrate an ability to predict the maximum share price to within 93%, and they earn a premium of about 15% over randomly-selected LBO-related portfolios. Overall, the results indicate that these large institutional investors demonstrated a superior ability in timing their LBO-related transactions.     

Investor Protection and Governance in the Valuation of Emerging Markets Investments

The combination of ineffective corporate governance at the company level and an uncertain legal and regulatory environment can significantly reduce the prices investors are willing to pay when investing in companies in emerging markets. The authors report the findings of their recent survey that asks investment professionals to compare the value of a hypothetical Australian company with that of its identical counterparts located in five emerging markets: Malaysia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Iran. The responding investors said they would value the emerging markets investments at discounts from the value of the Australian company that ranged from a low of 13.5% for its Malaysian counterpart to 51.2% for the Iranian company. Moreover, they indicated they would require costs of equity for these investments that were consistent with even larger valuation discounts. The investors' responses to the survey also suggest that corporate governance is especially important in countries with weaker investor protection. Well‐governed companies located in these countries enjoy significant value premiums that can partly offset the negative effect of the poor institutional environments, which suggests there may be a significant payoff for investors that succeed in improving the governance of the companies they invest in.     

股权制衡、法律保护与控股股东侵占——来自中国A股民营上市公司关联交易的实证分析

控股股东利用关联交易对中小投资者利益进行侵占已经成为公司治理研究中最重要的问题。本文采用中国A股民营上市公司的相关数据,从关联交易规模的角度实证检验了股权制衡因素和外部投资者法律保护对于控股股东侵占的影响。研究结果发现,股权制衡程度越高,控股股东的侵占水平会越低;但是法律保护和股权制衡之间存在替代关系,两者对于控股股东侵占的作用具有一定的重合性,如果同步提高的话,可能会削弱股权制衡对于控股股东侵占的限制作用。     

Accounting rules,equity valuation,and growth options

In a model with irreversible capacity investments, we show that financial statements prepared under replacement cost accounting provide investors with sufficient information for equity valuation purposes. Under alternative accounting rules, including historical cost and value in use accounting, investors will generally not be able to value precisely a firm’s growth options and therefore its equity. For these accounting rules, we describe the range of valuations that is consistent with the firm’s financial statements. We further show that replacement cost accounting preserves all value-relevant information if the firm’s investments are reversible. However, the directional relation between the value of the firm’s equity and the replacement cost of its assets is different from that in the setting with irreversible investments.     

Decomposing the persistence of international equity flows

The portfolio flows of institutional investors are widely known to be persistent. What is less well-known, however, is the source of this persistence. One possibility is the ‘informed trading hypothesis:’ that persistence arises from autocorrelated trades of individual investors who believe they have information about value and who face an imperfectly liquid market. Another possibility is that there are asynchroneities with respect to investment decisions across funds, across investments, or both. These asynchroneities could be due to wealth effects (across investments for a single fund), investor herding (across funds for a single investment), or generalized contagion (across funds and across investments). We use daily data on institutional flows into 21 developed countries by 471 funds to measure and decompose aggregate flow persistence. We find that the informed trading hypothesis explains about 75% of total persistence, and that the remaining amount is attributable entirely to cross-fund own-country persistence. While asynchroneities across funds investing in the same country are important, asynchroneities across countries, either within a given fund, or across funds, are not important. The cross-fund flow lags we identify might result from different fund investment processes, or from some funds mimicking others' decisions. We reject the hypothesis that wealth effects explain persistence.     

Taste,information, and asset prices: implications for the valuation of CSR

Firms often undertake activities that do not necessarily increase cash flows (e.g., costly investments in corporate social responsibility or CSR), and some investors value these non cash activities (i.e., they have a “taste” for these activities). We develop a model to capture this phenomenon and focus on the asset-pricing implications of differences in investors’ tastes for firms’ activities and outputs. Our model shows that, first, investor taste differences provide a basis for investor clientele effects that are endogenously determined by the shares demanded by different types of investors. Second, because the market must clear at one price, investors’ demands are influenced by all dimensions of firm output even if their preferences are only over some dimensions. Third, information releases cause trading volume, even when all investors have the same information. Fourth, investor taste provides a rationale for corporate spin-offs that help firms better target their shareholder bases. Finally, individual social responsibility can lead to corporate social responsibility when managers care about stock price because price reacts to investments in CSR activities.     

Leveraged Buyouts in the U.K. and Continental Europe: Retrospect and Prospect

The markets for management buyouts in the U.K. and continental Europe have experienced dramatic growth in the past ten years. In the U.K., buyouts accounted for half of the total M&A activity (measured by value) in 2005. And as in the U.S. during the‘80s, the greatest number of U.K. buyouts in recent years have been management‐ and investor‐led acquisitions of divisions of large corporations. In continental Europe, by contrast, the largest fraction of deals has involved the purchase of family‐owned private businesses. But in recent years, increased pressure for shareholder value in countries like France, Netherlands, and even Germany has led to a growing number of buyouts of divisions of listed companies. Like the U.K., continental Europe has also seen a small but growing number of purchases of entire public companies (known as private‐to‐public transactions, or PTPs), including the largest ever buyout in Europe, the €13 billion purchase this year of the Danish corporation TDC. In view of the record levels of capital raised by European private equity funds in recent years‐which, until 2005, exceeded the amounts invested in any given year‐we can expect more growth in private equity investment in the near future. In continental Europe, the prospects for buyouts remain especially strong, given both the pressure from investors to restructure larger corporations and the possibilities for adding value in family‐owned firms. But, as the authors note, today's private equity firms face a number of challenges in earning adequate returns for their investors. One is increased competition. In addition to the increased activity of U.S. private equity firms, local private equity investors are also facing competition from hedge funds and new entrants such as government‐sponsored operators, family offices, and wealthy entrepreneurs. Another major challenge is finding value‐preserving exit vehicles. Although an IPO is an option for the largest buyouts with growth prospects, most buyout investments are harvested either through sales to other companies or, increasingly, other private equity firms. The latter transactions, known as “secondary” buyouts, now account for a significant share of new funds invested by private equity firms across Europe.