Delegation and the regulation of U.S. financial markets

We analyze the institutional determinants of U.S. financial market regulation with a general model of the policy-making process in which legislators delegate authority to regulate financial risk at both the firm and systemic levels. The model explains changes in U.S. financial regulation leading up to the financial crisis. We test the predictions of the general model with a novel, comprehensive data set of financial regulatory laws enacted specifically between 1950 and 2009. The theoretical and empirical analysis finds that economic and political factors impact Congress’ decision to delegate regulatory authority to executive agencies, which in turn impacts the stringency of financial market regulation, and our estimation results indicate that political factors may have been stronger and resulted in inefficiencies.     

Political booms and currency crises

This paper shows evidence that political booms, defined as the rise in governments’ popularity, are associated with a higher likelihood of currency crises. The reasoning behind this finding is that prudent economic policies to address underlying weaknesses in the economy may be political costly for incumbent governments in the short-term. Hence, popularity-concerned governments may not have enough incentives to take such corrective actions in a timely manner. This approach, in turn, can deteriorate economic fundamentals and increase related risks in the economy which can eventually lead to crises. This paper sheds light on this phenomenon in the case of currency crises, suggesting that currency crises can be viewed as “political booms gone bust” events. Moreover, it finds that higher international reserves, higher exports, and a higher degree of financial openness alleviate the effect of political booms on currency crises.     

Financing energy efficiency retrofits in Chilean households: The role of financial instruments,savings and uncertainty in energy transition

High firewood consumption for heating produces high levels of pollution in cities in central and southern Chile, with serious consequences for health and quality of life. Energy efficiency measures (EEMs) have been identified as the best strategy to reduce air pollution and maximize social benefits. However, their adoption has been slow. The objective of this article is to investigate household preferences for financial incentives needed to promote private investments in EEMs in Central-Southern Chilean households and study the role of energy savings and the uncertainty about potential savings in the investment decision, with the aim of finding solutions to increase the adoption of these technologies. We use a choice experiment to explore the trade-off between the investment costs, financial instruments, energy savings, and the uncertainty about achieving the theoretical savings provided by engineering and architectural models. The results show that financial instruments play the most important role in this decision, followed by the savings achieved by the retrofit. Householders prefer to finance their investments with a mix of their personal resources and medium-term credits, trying to avoid long-term commitments. Although uncertainty was found to be a significant variable, it seems to play a small role in the investment decision.     

Depletion of psychological,financial, and social resources in the hospitality sector during the pandemic

This study details how psychological, financial, and social factors shape employee deviant interpersonal behaviors during a pandemic. Data were collected with a survey of 372 front-line employees of hotels and analyzed with PLS-SEM. The findings showed social disconnectedness and perceived risk of unemployment leads to perceived isolation, which further creates depression in employees. The findings also showed that depression is positively related to employee deviance. Financial strain is a major cause of perceived isolation, depression, and deviant behaviors among front-line employees. Results also proved that social support reduces fear of isolation, depression, and employee deviance. This study provides guidelines that hotels need to understand the psychological stance of employees and design policies to overcome employee perceived fears and psychological disorders.     

违约与杠杆周期——一个带有救助的金融加速器模型

我国为应对2008年国际金融危机的冲击采取了一系列经济刺激政策,在发挥“稳增长”作用的同时,也在一定程度上导致我国企业部门杠杆水平快速上升,但与此同时,不良贷款率并没有随企业部门杠杆的上升而显著增加。为了解释企业部门违约与杠杆的周期特征,本文在金融加速器模型(Bernanke et al.,1999)基础上,引入政府对企业部门的违约救助机制,建立DSGE模型进行讨论。进一步地,本文还通过一个不合意的去杠杆政策试验表明,忽略资产价格稳定(或者说金融稳定)前提下的去杠杆政策,反而会使企业部门的杠杆和违约率同时上升到一个较高水平。最后,引入一个盯住预期资产价格的动态救助规则能够发挥稳定经济的作用,并提高社会福利水平。     

Environmental proactivity,competitive strategy,and market performance: The mediating role of environmental reputation

This article examines the impact of small and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) proactive environmental strategy on market performance through the mediating mechanism of environmental reputation. In addition, we investigate the potential moderating role of competitive strategies on the environmental reputation-market performance nexus. Data were collected from 223 SMEs. Using the hierarchical multiple regression analysis, the results show that a proactive environmental strategy positively enhances environmental reputation. Also, the influence of proactively environmental strategy on market performance is mediated by environmental reputation. In addition, our findings show the relationship between environmental reputation and market performance is greater for firms that adopt the differentiation strategy but not significant for firms adopting the low-cost and integrated strategies. Our study offers several theoretical and practical implications.     

Application of bootstrap re-sampling method in statistical measurement of sustainability

Sustainability is of essential interest for many organizations and is defined as the ability to maintain existing resources at a certain rate or level when encountered with barriers. Factors affecting sustainability are categorized as enablers (capacities) and barriers (challenges) that have positive and negative effects on sustainability, respectively. To evaluate the status of sustainability, organizations need a measurement method to account for all the aspects of the sustainability classified into social, economic, and environmental tiers. Previously many researchers have provided indexes and measure specific to the studied field, which is not applicable to other areas. Furthermore, the proposed methods fail to cover all the aspects of sustainability. This study investigates a statistical method to measure the sustainability and the application of the bootstrap re-sampling method in order to overcome the problem with normality assumption when the sample size is not large enough and thus develop a more realistic stochastic model. The Bootstrap re-sampling method enables the unbiased estimation of population parameters such as mean and standard deviation. The proposed method is evaluated by comparing its results with those found in the literature.     

Effects of financial constraints on export performance of firms during the global financial crisis: microeconomic evidence from Korea

This study uses a manufacturing firm-level panel data set of South Korea for 2006–2013 to investigate the effect of financial constraints on the export performance of firms, with particular emphasis on the corporate ownership structure. The empirical results show that foreign multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiaries are not affected by financial constraint during both crisis and noncrisis periods, implying advantages of foreign ownership. However, domestic firms suffer more from financial constraints on exports during crisis years. In particular, domestic firms without parent firms are financially constrained during both crisis and noncrisis periods. However, those with parent firms do not experience financial constraints during noncrisis periods, although they too suffer from them during crisis periods. Thus, parent–subsidiary linkage among domestic firms plays an important role in alleviating financial constraints on export activity in noncrisis years but not as much during crisis years. Therefore, domestic parent firms exhibit less resilience to the global financial crisis, in comparison to foreign MNC parent firms.     

Are REITs more resilient than non-REITs? Evidence from natural experiments

REITs draw attention from investors around the world, yet our understanding of the various risks associated with such securities is limited. Using the introduction of Arrowhead, a low-latency high-frequency trading platform, to the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the financial crisis of 2008 as natural experiments, we compare the resilience of REITs and equities in terms of liquidity and volatility. The results indicate that the introduction of Arrowhead improved the quality of the Japanese REIT market but also increased the probability of flash crashes. We also find that although the financial crisis significantly deteriorated overall equity market quality, the Japanese REIT market was resilient. Finally, using a difference-in-differences regression model, we show that the higher transparency and better price discovery of REITs, compared to non-REITS, protected them from the negative effects of the financial crisis and the introduction of Arrowhead. Overall, our analysis shows that REITs are more resilient than non-REITs.