Investment decisions with financial constraints. Evidence from Spanish firms

This paper analyses to what extent the rejection of the investment dynamics implied by the Euler equation model with quadratic and symmetric adjustment costs can be attributed to the fact that the investment behavior of some firms in some periods is financially constrained by the availability of internal funds. I use a hierarchy of finance model which assumes that internally generated finance for investment is available at a lower cost than external finance, and implies the existence of distinct financial regimes depending on the firm’s financial policy. I estimate the empirical investment equation derived from the model using GMM, taking into account the endogeneity of the selection and allowing for debt finance, imperfect competition and the existence of a possible measurement error in the user cost of capital. The empirical results suggest that the Euler equation model is not seriously misspecified for a sub-sample of firms pursuing a particular financial policy.     

Financial literacy and portfolio diversification

We use a survey of individual investors disclosed by the Portuguese Securities Commission (CMVM) in May 2005 to study the impact of investors’ levels of financial literacy on portfolio diversification. We consider distinct aspects of financial literacy, and control for socioeconomic and behavioral differences among individual groups of investors. Our results suggest that investors’ educational levels and their financial knowledge have a positive impact on investor diversification. The information sources used by retail investors to gather information on markets and financial products also have a significant impact on the number of different assets included in a portfolio.     

Corporate social responsibility performance,financial distress and firm life cycle: evidence from Australia

This study examines the association between corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance and financial distress and additionally the moderating impact of firm life cycle stages on that association. Based on a sample of 651 publicly listed Australian firm‐years’ data covering the 2007–2013 period, our regression results show that positive CSR activity significantly reduces financial distress of the firm. In addition, the negative association between positive CSR performance and financial distress is more pronounced for firms in mature life cycle stages. Our results are robust to alternative proxy measures of financial distress, CSR performance and life cycle stages.     

The macroeconomic content of international equity market factors

Although existing research has examined the association between macroeconomic data and particular equity markets, little is known regarding the economic content of the latent factors common to international equity markets. This paper considers the macroeconomic information incorporated in unobserved common equity market factors, as well as the possibility that the macroeconomic sensitivities of the factors differ across alternative levels of volatility. Several models are estimated for 15 developed equity markets to examine the economic composition of the common factors, thereby providing an alternative perspective on the economic fundamentals underlying equity markets. A formal Bayesian selection process suggests that a common structure incorporating global and European factors is preferred to the baseline case of a single global factor or the extended scenario of dual global factors. The common factors are associated with a small set of macroeconomic variables.     

Portfolio allocation and the investment horizon: a multiscaling approach

A new approach is proposed for analysing portfolio allocation over various time scales. This new approach is based on wavelet analysis, which decomposes a given time series on a scale-by-scale basis. Empirical results indicate that, as the investment horizon lengthens, a greater weighting should be allocated to stocks. An explanation for this result is that the mean-reverting property of stock returns causes investors to perceive that stocks are less risky than bonds and T-bills at longer time scales compared with shorter time scales. When we include the effect of risk aversion, it is found that the higher the risk aversion, the less the Sharpe ratio, indicating that a more conservative investor prefers a smoother consumption stream.     

Preference hierarchies for internal finance, bank loans, bond, and share issues: evidence for Dutch firms

We estimate the incremental financing decision for a sample of some 150 Dutch companies for the years 1984 through 1997, thereby distinguishing internal finance and three types of external finance: bank borrowing, bond issues, and share issues. First, we estimate a multinomial logit model, which confirms several predictions of both the static trade-off theory and the pecking order theory as to the determinants of financing choices. Next, we estimate all possible ordered probit models to determine which financing hierarchy fits the data best. The results suggest that Dutch firms have a unique most preferred financing hierarchy: (i) internal finance, (ii) bank loans, (iii) share issues, and (iv) bond issues.     

Corporate social responsibility and financial fraud: evidence from China

This paper investigates the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on corporate financial fraud in China. We find that CSR scores are negatively associated with fraudulent financial activities, suggesting that CSR firms are less likely to engage in financial fraud. The results also indicate that the negative relation is more significant for CSR performance than CSR disclosure. Additionally, we demonstrate that the negative effect of CSR is more pronounced for firms with voluntary CSR practices, continuous CSR engagements, financial pressure and internal control weaknesses. Overall, we find that CSR is an ethical behaviour that reduces financial misconduct.     

Corporate governance and firm value: Evidence from Chinese state-controlled listed firms

The association between corporate governance and firm value has been extensively studied in Chinese listed firms. Based on the characteristics of their ultimate shareholders, Chinese listed firms can be categorised as (1) central state-controlled, (2) local state-controlled or (3) non-state-controlled. Some scholars have described Chinese government policy as ‘zhuada fangxiao’, thus suggesting that the corporate governance mechanisms (CGMs) of central state-controlled listed firms (SCLFs) are better than those of local state-controlled listed firms. Therefore, this paper specifically examines the influence of CGMs on the value of central SCLFs and local SCLFs. Analysis of 2006 firm-year observations from 2007 to 2009 suggests that the aggregate ownership of other large shareholders and the remuneration of top executives exhibit different effects on firm value in central and local SCLFs. The results also provide evidence that there is no endogenous effect of firm value on the ownership of the largest shareholder in central and local SCLFs.     

Earnings management and firm financial motives: A financial investigation of UK listed firms

This study focuses on the investigation of motives for and characteristics of UK firms that engage in earnings management activities. It concentrates particularly on the provision of voluntary accounting disclosures, the violation of debt covenants, management compensation, and on the equity and debt capital needs of firms and their relation with the use of earnings management. The study examines also the earnings management inclination of firms that seek to meet or exceed financial analysts' forecasts. The findings generally indicate that firms with low profitability and high leverage measures are likely to use earnings management. Also, firms that are in equity and debt capital need and are close to debt covenant violation also appear to be inclined to employ earnings management practices. Likewise, firms tend to use earnings management to improve their financial numbers and subsequently reinforce their compensation and meet and/or exceed financial analysts' earnings forecasts. In contrast, the study shows that firms that provide voluntary accounting disclosures appear to be less inclined to make use of earnings management.     

Group versus individual compensation schemes for senior executives and firm performance: Some evidence based on archival data

The objectives of this paper are (i) to provide evidence on the association between the choice of group versus individual compensation schemes for senior executives and firm characteristics, and (ii) to provide evidence on the economic consequences of adopting a particular compensation scheme. Our key findings based on 2517 firm years for the period of 2001–2010 show that on average, the choice between group or individual compensation schemes for senior executive compensation schemes are consistent with a firm’s economic characteristics and on average, the choice of compensation schemes does not affect subsequent firm performance. However, we find some evidence that firms that adopt compensation schemes inconsistent with their economic characteristics have lower subsequent performance. Our findings are robust to a number of sensitivity tests.     

Determinants of transfer pricing aggressiveness: Empirical evidence from Australian firms

This study examines the major determinants of transfer pricing aggressiveness. Based on a hand-collected sample of 183 publicly-listed Australian firms for the 2009 year, our regression results show that firm size, profitability, leverage, intangible assets, and multinationality are significantly positively associated with transfer pricing aggressiveness after controlling for industry-sector effects. Our additional regression results also indicate that firms augment their transfer pricing aggressiveness through the joint effects of intangible assets and multinationality.     

Time-varying beta and the Asian financial crisis: Evidence from Malaysian and Taiwanese firms

This paper empirically investigates the effects of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 on the time-varying beta of 10 firms from each of Malaysia and Taiwan. Daily data from 1990 to 2001 and the bivariate MA-GARCH model (BEKK) are applied to create the time-varying betas for the firms. Results provide ample evidence of the influence of the financial crisis and the period after on the time-varying betas of the twenty firms. Results provided are somewhat mixed, indicating a rise in the beta in some cases and a fall in other cases. Results also show that the 10 Malaysian firms applied were more affected than the Taiwanese firms.     

The organizational culture of public accounting firms: evidence from Taiwanese local and US affiliated firms

This study examines the organizational cultures of public accounting firms with data from US affiliated international accounting firms in Taiwan and Taiwanese local firms. Hypotheses are tested about the impact of the national culture of the US firms on their Taiwanese affiliates, and about cultural differences across function and rank. The study extends previous research by (1) examining an oriental country whose culture is significantly different from that of the US, (2) using the Hofstede, G., Neuijen, B., Ohayv, D. D., & Sanders G. (1990). Measuring organizational cultures: a qualitative and quantitative study across twenty cases. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35, 286–316 practices-based measure of organizational culture, and (3) examining the importance of the fit between employee preferences and organizational culture in influencing organizational commitment, job satisfaction and propensity to remain with the organization. Support is found for the cultural impact and fit hypotheses. Additonally, while culture is found to be relatively homogeneous across function, differences are found across rank.     

Financial data science: the birth of a new financial research paradigm complementing econometrics?

Financial data science and econometrics are highly complementary. They share an equivalent research process with the former’s intellectual point of departure being statistical inference and the latter’s being the data sets themselves. Two challenges arise, however, from digitalisation. First, the ever-increasing computational power allows researchers to experiment with an extremely large number of generated test subjects (i.e. p-hacking). We argue that p-hacking can be mitigated through adjustments for multiple hypothesis testing where appropriate. However, it can only truly be addressed via a strong focus on integrity (e.g. pre-registration, actual out-of-sample periods). Second, the extremely large number of observations available in big data set provides magnitudes of statistical power at which common statistical significance levels are barely relevant. This challenge can be addressed twofold. First, researchers can use more stringent statistical significance levels such as 0.1% and 0.5% instead of 1% and 5%, respectively. Second, and more importantly, researchers can use criteria such as economic significance, economic relevance and statistical relevance to assess the robustness of statistically significant coefficients. Especially statistical relevance seems crucial, as it appears far from impossible for an individual coefficient to be considered statistically significant when its actual statistical relevance (i.e. incremental explanatory power) is extremely small.     

Diversification,corporate governance and firm value in small markets: evidence from New Zealand

We find that diversified firms in New Zealand are associated with a value discount of 19–42 per cent relative to single‐segment (undiversified) firms. Although several competing explanations have been offered in the literature, we find that the strength of corporate governance explains between 15–21 per cent of this discount. Specifically, board size, busyness of directors, CEO ownership and whether or not compensation of directors includes equity‐based components collectively explain a large part of the reported discount. Our results from companies trading in New Zealand complement recent findings in the US by not only confirming the existence of a diversification discount but also emphasizing the role of poor governance in destroying shareholder wealth by pursuing a value‐destroying corporate strategy. All our results hold after controlling for potential endogeneity in the decision to diversify and the choice of corporate governance structure by employing two‐way fixed‐effects and dynamic‐panel generalized method of moments regression techniques.     

The usefulness of firm risk disclosures under different firm riskiness,investor-interest,and market conditions: New evidence from Finland

To date, there is only meager research evidence on the usefulness of mandatory annual report risk disclosures to investors. Although it has been argued that corporate disclosure decreases information asymmetry between management and shareholders, we do not know whether investors benefit from high-quality risk reporting in a highly regulated risk disclosure environment. In this paper, we performed association tests to examine whether the quality of firms' mandatory risk disclosures relate to information asymmetry in the Finnish stock markets. In addition, we analyzed whether the usefulness of risk disclosures depends on contingency factors such as firm riskiness, investor interest, and market condition. We demonstrate that the quality of risk disclosure has a direct negative influence on information asymmetry. We also document that risk disclosures are more useful if they are provided by small firms, high tech firms, and firms with low analyst coverage. We also found that momentum in stock markets affects the relevance of firms' risk reports.     

Maximizing survival,growth and goal reaching under borrowing constraints

In this paper, we consider the survival, growth and goal reaching maximization problems treated in Browne [Math. Oper. Res., 1997, 22, 468–493] and solve them in a market constrained due to borrowing prohibition. To solve the problems, we first construct an auxiliary market introduced by Cvitanic and Karatzas [Ann. Appl. Probab., 1992, 2, 767–818] and then apply the dynamic programming approach. Via our solutions, an alternative approach is introduced in order to solve the problems defined under an auxiliary market.     

State-ownership and financial constraints on investment of Chinese-listed firms: new evidence

We examine how state-ownership affects financial constraints on investment of Chinese-listed firms during 1999–2008. We find that although an average sample firm experiences some degree of financial constraints, state-ownership does not necessarily help in reducing the firm's financial constraints on investment. Further evidence shows that state-ownership does not lead to more borrowing from the Chinese banking sector, implying that state-ownership does not necessarily reduce the firm's financial constraints via the state-controlled banking sector. We consider not only the standard factors in the investment equation, but also the firm's equity financing behaviour explicitly. The result is robust to both the conventional proxy for financial constraints, i.e. the investment–cash-flow sensitivity, and a recently developed proxy for financial constraints, i.e. the KZ index. Our results suggest that China's corporatisation movement is effective in that soft budget constraints once enjoyed by former state-owned enterprises have been removed along with the progress of corporatisation. These firms, although still state-involved, can be seen as modern corporations operating in a market environment.     

How to speed up the quantization tree algorithm with an application to swing options

In this paper, we suggest several improvements to the numerical implementation of the quantization method for stochastic control problems in order to obtain fast and accurate premium estimations. This technique is applied to derivative pricing in energy markets. Several ways of modeling energy derivatives are described and numerical examples including parallel execution on multi-processor devices are presented to illustrate the accuracy of these methods and their execution times.