CEO career horizon,corporate governance,and real options: The role of economic short‐termism

Research Summary: Combining studies on real options theory and economic short‐termism, we propose that, depending on CEOs’ career horizons, CEOs have heterogeneous interests in strategic flexibility, and thus, have different incentives to make real options investments. We argue that compared to CEOs with longer career horizons, CEOs with shorter career horizons will be less inclined to make real options investments because they may not fully reap the rewards during their tenure. In addition, we argue that long‐term incentives and institutional ownership will mitigate the relationship between CEOs’ career horizons and real options investments. U.S. public firms as an empirical setting produced consistent evidence for our predictions. Our study is the first to theoretically explain and empirically show that a CEO's self‐seeking behavior will impact real options investments. Managerial Summary: This article helps to explain how a CEO's self seeking‐behavior may shape a firm's real option investment, which could result in different level of strategic flexibility. We argue that CEOs with short career horizons have less time to exercise their firms’ real options, which should lower the investments in the firms’ real options portfolios relative to CEOs with long career horizons. We study a sample of U.S. public firms and find strong evidence that a CEO's expected tenure in the firm is positively related to the real options investments at the firm level. We find that this agency issue can be mitigated by adopting appropriate corporate governance mechanisms such as long‐term incentives and institutional investors.     

The HRM–capital market link: Effects of securities analysts on strategic human capital

This article develops theory about an agency problem affecting the strategic human capital (SHC) of the firm. It proposes three categories of SHC‐related choices managers must make that imply a trade‐off between near‐ and long‐term performance. Dispersed shareholding, firm coverage by securities analysts, and their practice of publishing quarterly earnings forecasts are argued to entail a bias in management incentives, shifting the balance in this trade‐off toward near‐term performance. To restore the balance, securities analysts would need to distinguish transitory from recurring effects of SHC‐related choices in their valuation models (e.g., treating certain labor cost savings during cyclical downturns as transitory). Restoring the balance would also require them to anticipate long‐term effects in their long‐term earnings forecasts (e.g., long‐term positive effects of retaining employees with valuable skills during cyclical downturns). The article discusses specific transitory cost effects and long‐term effects they could potentially take into account. The skills and incentives needed by analysts to account for such effects are argued to vary across firm segments.     

粤港澳大湾区城市群区域治理机制的架构思考:从政府治理权出发

推进建设粤港澳大湾区城市群,尤其应当重视各级政府在该区域治理机制架构中的地位。协调不同法域、不同层级和不同类型地方政府之间的治理权,是推进该城市群协调发展,并率先推进实现新型城镇化转型的基础和保障。就该区域而言,政府治理权的架构可以分为三个层次:根据中央顶层设计的区域布局,推动地方政府转换行使治理权的视阈,合理安排不同地方政府治理权,并建立权力协作机制;由此机制出发,协调区域内各地方的发展方向,深化彼此之间利益共生关系;最后,与利益共享对应,还应当配合财政供给改革,实现区域治理责任的成本共担。     

Myopic market pricing and managerial myopia

This paper develops a firm‐level measure of myopic market pricing, which captures the extent to which the market overvalues short‐term expected abnormal earnings relative to longer‐term ones. The empirical analysis shows that myopically priced firms manage earnings more actively and invest less in R&D. The impact of myopic market pricing is concentrated in firms where managers cater more to market pricing, that is, in firms with greater short‐term investor ownership, with CEO compensation that is more sensitive to the firm share price, and with higher equity dependence. Additional tests show that these findings are robust to the consideration of market (under)overpricing. The results suggest that when managers cater to market pricing, market myopia encourages managerial myopia.     

The Informational Role of Short Sellers: The Evidence from Short Sellers’ Reports on US‐Listed Chinese Firms

Using US‐listed Chinese firms as the setting, this paper studies a novel channel through which investors can acquire information about firms’ financial reporting quality, that is, the reports published voluntarily by short sellers. I find that short sellers tend to target firms that have financial reporting red flags and that exhibit ‘good’ operating performance and stock valuations. Targeted firms experience an average three‐day cumulative abnormal return (CAR) of ?6.4%, and ?13.6% for initial coverage of the firm, and the CARs are more negative when the reports allege more severe misconduct of the firms. Non‐targeted firms also experience losses in value following short seller reports, especially when they hire the same non‐Big 4 auditors as targeted firms and when their earnings quality is poor. In comparison, analysts fail to perform proper due diligence and are much less effective than short sellers in exposing misreporting risk in Chinese firms.     

A NEW LOOK AT SHORT‐TERM IMPLIED VOLATILITY IN ASSET PRICE MODELS WITH JUMPS

We analyze the behavior of the implied volatility smile for options close to expiry in the exponential Lévy class of asset price models with jumps. We introduce a new renormalization of the strike variable with the property that the implied volatility converges to a nonconstant limiting shape, which is a function of both the diffusion component of the process and the jump activity (Blumenthal–Getoor) index of the jump component. Our limiting implied volatility formula relates the jump activity of the underlying asset price process to the short‐end of the implied volatility surface and sheds new light on the difference between finite and infinite variation jumps from the viewpoint of option prices: in the latter, the wings of the limiting smile are determined by the jump activity indices of the positive and negative jumps, whereas in the former, the wings have a constant model‐independent slope. This result gives a theoretical justification for the preference of the infinite variation Lévy models over the finite variation ones in the calibration based on short‐maturity option prices.     

#br# 融资融券加大了沪深股市波动吗*

融资融券设计初衷是通过融资加强市场流动性和通过融券提供投资者规避价格下跌风险的金融工具，改善由供求关系严重失衡导致市场巨幅震荡的局面，实现资本市场长期稳定的目标。实际操作中，融资融券疏通货币市场和资本市场间的资金流动，撬动巨额资金涌入股市；融资规模扩张过快而融券做空力量薄弱，业务结构发展严重失衡，导致两融业务具有“小冲击、大波动”的金融加速效应，放大了外部冲击引起股价上涨和下跌的幅度。协整回归分析表明，两融业务规模的扩张和收缩对上证指数涨跌具有显著的同向影响。TGARCH事件模型结果进一步证实融资融券从稳定股价到加剧波动的功能变化。随着标的股票扩容和业务常规化，两融业务导致股市投机过度，加剧了沪深两市的资产价格异动，没有达到平抑波动的设计预期。     

浅谈中国概念股的信任危机

近年来,美国做空机构做空中国概念股的现象频频出现。文中基于浑水公司和香橼公司能够不断做空中国概念股的案例,对做空公司的发展,中国概念股的现状以及做空原因等进行分析,并辩证地看待做空机构的存在对资本市场发展的意义,同时对中国概念股如何应对做空机构,在危机中生存提出建议。     

近中期金融改革值得关注的几个问题

当前,国际金融危机影响依然存在,发达经济体、新兴经济体均面临结构调整,全球金融监管体制将全面改革。结合国内金融运行及金融业发展中存在的一些突出问题,文章以确立推进近中期金融改革的基本原则为出发点,从建立金融宏观审慎管理制度、研究应对危机债务成本的分摊机制等层面,提出当前需重点推进的几项金融改革及相关政策建议。