How do commodity futures respond to macroeconomic news?

This paper investigates the impact of seventeen US macroeconomic announcements on two broad and representative commodity futures indices. Based on a large sample from 1989 to 2005, we show that the daily price response of the CRB and GSCI commodity futures indices to macroeconomic news is state-dependent. During recessions, news about higher (lower) inflation and real activity lead to positive (negative) adjustments of commodity futures prices. In contrast, we find no significant reactions during economic expansions. We attribute this asymmetric response to the state-dependent interpretation of macroeconomic news. Our findings are robust to several alternative business cycle definitions.

What do price discovery metrics really measure?

A market is typically considered to dominate price discovery if it is the first to reflect new information about the fundamental value. Our simulations indicate that common price discovery metrics – Hasbrouck information share and Harris–McInish–Wood component share – are only consistent with this view of price discovery if the price series have equal levels of noise, including microstructure frictions and liquidity. If the noise in the price series differs, the information and component shares measure a combination of leadership in impounding new information and relative avoidance of noise, to varying degrees. A third price discovery metric, the ‘information leadership share’ uses the information share and the component share together to identify the price series that is first to impound new information. This third metric is robust to differences in noise levels and therefore correctly attributes price discovery in a wider range of settings. Using four recent empirical studies of price discovery we show that the choice and interpretation of price discovery metrics can have a substantial impact on conclusions about price discovery.     

Is the intrinsic value of a macroeconomic news announcement related to its asset price impact?

The literature documents a heterogeneous asset price response to macroeconomic news announcements. We relate this heterogeneity to a novel measure of the intrinsic value of an announcement—the announcement’s ability to nowcast GDP growth, inflation, and the federal funds target rate—and find that differences across the intrinsic values of several U.S. macroeconomic announcements explain a significant fraction of the variation in the impact each of these announcements has on U.S. Treasury yields. We also decompose the intrinsic value into the announcement’s relation to fundamentals, a timeliness premium, and a revision premium, and find that the former two characteristics are the most important ones in explaining the heterogeneous response.     

How does news sentiment affect the states of Japanese stock return volatility?

This paper examines the impact of public news sentiment on the volatility states of firm-level returns on the Japanese Stock market. We firstly adopt a novel Markov Regime Switching Long Memory GARCH (MRS-LMGARCH), which is employed to estimate the latent volatility states of intraday stock return. By using the RavenPack Dow Jones News Analytics database, we fit discrete choice models to investigate the impact of news sentiment on changes of volatility states of the constituent stocks in the TOPIX Core 30 Index. Our findings suggest that news occurrence and sentiment, especially those of macro-economic news, are a key factor that significantly drives the volatility state of Japanese stock returns. This provides essential information for traders of the Japanese stock market to optimize their trading strategies and risk management plans to combat volatility.     

How do banks price liquidity? The role of market power.

We empirically examine the effects of different measures of liquidity on interest margins of a sample of U.S. commercial banks from 2001 to 2018. Overall, the results reveal that liquidity ratios exert a positive influence on bank margins. Furthermore, the study investigates the role of market power in the relationship between liquidity and interest margins. It is documented that dominant banks incorporate the costs associated with investing in liquidity into the bank margins to a lesser extent than banks with less market power, suggesting that the cost of complying with regulatory liquidity standards is reduced when the competition in the banking sector is less intense. The study highlights that market competition might be important in the design and implementation of liquidity regulations.     

How do share repurchases affect ownership concentration?

We study how share repurchases affect the ownership stake of outside blockholders in 950 publicly-traded US corporations from 1996 through 2001, using a control function approach to address the possible endogeneity of repurchases. We find that share repurchases tend to make outside ownership less concentrated: repurchasing 1% of outstanding common equity decreases the fraction owned by large shareholders by around one and a half percentage points. This may decrease outside shareholders' influence over firm decision-making. Our results are confirmed when we restrict the sample to institutional owners, but not to individual owners.     

The fair value of a token: How do markets price cryptocurrencies?

With the rise of cryptocurrency tokens as a new asset class, the question of the fair evaluation of a cryptocurrency token has become a question of increasing importance. We estimate the pricing kernel with which users price factors affecting their token holdings. We investigate how traditional risk factors such as market risk are evaluated, as well as how blockchain specific risk factors are priced in. In order to do so, we introduce an asset pricing model and modify its properties to make it applicable to cryptocurrency markets. We group the risk factors into market related and Bitcoin- and Ethereum blockchain specific risk factors. We find that blockchain specific risk factors are priced in. There is evidence that risk factors have moved from Bitcoin to Ethereum specific risk factors with an increasing importance of market factors, providing evidence for a decoupling of on-chain and off-chain trading activity.     

How do sovereign credit rating changes affect private investment?

Sovereign credit rating changes have an influence on real private investment of re-rated countries. We find significant increases in private investment growth following upgrades in sovereign ratings. These increases, however, are transitory. We also find significant, temporary declines in private investment growth following sovereign rating downgrades. The results hold after accounting for re-rated countries’ growth opportunities, endogeneity, and other factors that could affect private investment. The irreversible nature of investment may be the explanation for the temporary changes in the growth rates of physical capital investment associated with revisions in sovereign credit ratings.     

How do UK financial institutions really price their banking products?

This paper has several objectives. The first is to explore the type (or types) of imperfect competition that prevailed in the retail banking sector in the 1990s. A general linearised pricing model is employed to test for the degree to which competition in certain markets deviated from the competitive ideal. The key finding, is that, with the exception of mortgage products, deposit and loan rate setting by UK financial institutions is best described by the Salop–Stiglitz model of monopolistic competition, with bargain and rip-offs. Cournot type behaviour is evident in some cases. Indirectly, the presence of perfect contestability is largely ruled out. Another objective is to compare these findings with the results of a similar study conducted nearly a decade ago, when financial reforms introduced to encourage greater competition were relatively recent. Based on the results of this study, the policy lesson is that financial firms exhibit different types of price setting behaviour depending on the banking product. The policy implication is to require firms to produce comparable information for consumers, thereby helping to contain the loss of consumer surplus in imperfectly competitive markets.     

Do analysts affect bad news timeliness?

I investigate the effect of analysts on the speed with which bad news is reflected in earnings. Intuitively, the more analysts that cover a firm, the more costly it will be for the firm to keep bad news suppressed. Thus, analyst coverage should positively affect bad news timeliness (BNT) (but not necessarily the differential timeliness of bad news over good news, or conditional conservatism). Using brokerage house mergers as a natural experiment with a difference-in-differences design, I find that an exogenous decrease in analyst coverage decreases BNT; that is, analysts positively affect BNT. The decrease in BNT is robust to controlling for unobserved firm heterogeneity, using a propensity score matched sample, persists for up to three years after the brokerage house merger, and is stronger for firms with relatively low analyst coverage before the merger. The result improves our understanding of how analysts affect a firm's information environment.     

Is there price discovery in equity options?

We use tick-by-tick quote data for 39 liquid US stocks and options on them, and we focus on events when the two markets disagree about the stock price in the sense that the option-implied stock price obtained from the put-call parity relation is inconsistent with the actual stock price. Option market quotes adjust to eliminate the disagreement, while the stock market quotes behave normally, as if there were no disagreement. The disagreement events are typically precipitated by stock price movements and display signed option volume in the direction that tends to eliminate the disagreements. These results show that option price quotes do not contain economically significant information about future stock prices beyond what is already reflected in current stock prices, i.e., no economically significant price discovery occurs in the option market. We also find no option market price discovery using a much larger sample of disagreement events based on a weaker definition of a disagreement, which verifies that the findings for the primary sample are not due to unusual or unrepresentative market behavior during the put-call parity violations.     

How do partial acquisitions affect the wealth of acquiring firms? The case of Japanese firms

This study examines how and why partial acquisitions affect the wealth of acquiring firms in Japan. Few studies have focused on acquiring firms in partial acquisitions, whereas many studies have investigated target firms. The empirical results show that the shareholder wealth of acquiring firms, which can increase through partial acquisitions, is much lower than that of target firms. In addition, acquiring firms and their targets differ in how they enhance their wealth from partial acquisitions—acquiring firms can enhance their wealth by exploiting the wealth of target firms, while target firms can enhance their wealth by obtaining support from acquiring firms.     

How do CEO incentives affect corporate tax planning and financial reporting of income taxes?

We examine how different accounting metrics used to evaluate CEO performance for annual bonuses affect the level of corporate tax planning as well as financial reporting for income taxes. We predict and find that firms using cash flow metrics report lower GAAP and cash effective tax rates (ETR) than firms using earnings metrics. We also find that firms using after-tax earnings metrics report lower GAAP ETRs but similar cash ETRs as firms using pre-tax earnings metrics. Further analyses show that firms using after-tax earnings metrics are more likely to designate foreign earnings as permanently reinvested and have lower discretionary reserves for tax uncertainty. Hence, it appears that both types of firms engage in similar levels of tax planning, but firms evaluating CEOs with after tax-earnings metrics incentivize different financial reporting choices.     

How do firm- and country-level governance mechanisms affect firms’ disclosure?

This paper examines how a country’s regulatory environment interacts with firms’ institutional corporate governance arrangements to affect the disclosure that these firms provide in their annual reports. Prior literature indicates that firms with stronger corporate governance arrangements demonstrate higher levels of disclosure. We investigate whether this effect varies with the legal environment. The transparency-increasing effect of strong corporate governance might be reinforced by a strong legal environment, suggesting a complementary relationship between these two factors with respect to transparency. However, strong corporate governance arrangements may serve as bonding mechanisms in weak legal environments, suggesting a substitutive relationship between corporate governance and the regulatory environment. Using a sample of listed firms from 16 European countries, we find evidence suggesting that corporate governance arrangements and the legal environment substitute with respect to their effects on corporate disclosure.     

How do oil supply and demand shocks affect Asian stock markets?

This paper examines how oil market shocks affect Asian stock prices using the structural vector autoregression (VAR) approach. Global oil supply and demand shocks are disentangled using sign restrictions and elasticity bounds. Oil price increases are bad news only if the source is from oil-market-specific demand shifts. Northeast Asian stock markets are more resilient as investors’ expectation of continued economic growth outweighs the adverse effect of higher oil prices. Increased global economic activity also stimulates stock prices. Global oil shocks are more important in explaining variability in Asian stock returns compared with the United States, suggesting different dynamics in Asia.     

How do agency problems affect firm value? – Evidence from China

Using newly available data, we examine the effects of the agency conflicts between ultimate controlling shareholders and minority shareholders in China's publicly listed firms between 2004 and 2009. We measure the severity of these agency problems by the excess control rights of the ultimate controlling shareholders. We show that higher excess control rights are associated with significantly lower firm value. We identify two channels through which the excess control rights affect firm value: (1) related-party loan guarantees, and (2) legal violations. We find that higher excess control rights are associated with significantly larger amounts of related-party loan guarantees (scaled by assets) for non-state and private firms, but not for state-owned firms. We find that, for non-state and private firms, the excess controls rights are associated with (1) significantly higher probability that the firm will issue value-destroying related-party loan guarantees and (2) significantly worse stock market reactions to the announcements of related-party loan guarantees. However, these results do not hold for state-owned firms. We also find that higher excess control rights are associated with significantly higher probability, frequency and severity of legal violations for non-state and private firms, but not for state-owned firms.     

Monetary policy news and exchange rate responses: Do only surprises matter?

We use data from the Federal Funds Futures market to show that exchange rates respond to only the surprise component of an actual US monetary policy change and we illustrate that failure to disentangle the surprise component from the actual monetary policy change can lead to an underestimation of the impact of monetary policy, or even to a false rejection of the hypothesis that monetary policy impacts exchange rates. Unlike the recent contributions to the literature on exchange rates and monetary policy news, our testing method avoids the imposition of assumptions regarding exchange rate market efficiency. We also add to the debate on how quickly exchange rates respond to news by showing that the exchange rates under study absorb monetary policy surprises within the same day as the news are announced.     

Inflation responses to commodity price shocks – How and why do countries differ?

This paper relates the inflationary impact of commodity price shocks across countries to a broad range of structural characteristics and policy frameworks over the period 2001–2010, using several approaches. The analysis suggests that economies with higher food shares in CPI baskets, fuel intensities, and pre-existing inflation levels were more prone to experience sustained inflationary effects from commodity price shocks. Countries with more independent central banks and higher governance scores seem to have contained the impact of these shocks better. The effect of the presence of inflation targeting regimes, however, appears modest and not evident during the 2008 food price shock. The evidence suggests that trade openness, financial development, dollarization, and labor market flexibility do not significantly influence the way in which domestic inflation responds to international commodity price shocks.     

How do staggered boards affect shareholder value? Evidence from a natural experiment

The well-established negative correlation between staggered boards (SBs) and firm value could be due to SBs leading to lower value or a reflection of low-value firms' greater propensity to maintain SBs. We analyze the causal question using a natural experiment involving two Delaware court rulings—separated by several weeks and going in opposite directions—that affected the antitakeover force of SBs. We contribute to the long-standing debate on staggered boards by presenting empirical evidence consistent with the market viewing SBs as leading to lower firm value for the affected firms.     

How does the call market method affect price efficiency? Evidence from the Singapore Stock Market

On August 21, 2000, the Singapore Exchange (SGX) adopted the call market method to open and close the market while the remainder of the day’s trading continued to rely on the continuous auction method. The call method significantly improved the price discovery process and market quality. A positive spillover effect is observed from the opening and closing calls. Day-end price manipulation also declined after the introduction of the call market method. However, the beneficial impact from the call market method is asymmetric, benefiting liquid stocks more than illiquid stocks.