How do bond investors perceive dividend payouts?

We explore how bond investors view corporate cash distributions through dividends and how that view influences corporate cost of debt. Explaining between 45 and 67 percent of variance in credit spreads at the time of issuance, our model reveals a non-linear association between dividend payouts and investment return expected by bondholders. In particular, while bondholders view cash disbursements in small amounts as a positive signal, large dividend payouts are viewed negatively. Our results thus provide support for both the signaling hypothesis and for the agency-cost-of-debt hypothesis. The results are robust even after controlling for firm size, growth opportunities, profitability, leverage, business risk, asset tangibility, and term structure. Exploiting the 2003 dividend tax cut as an exogenous shock, we demonstrate that our results are not vulnerable to endogeneity problems. Finally, we find no evidence of corporations timing the payouts strategically to influence the cost of debt.     

How do corporate political connections influence financial reporting? A synthesis of the literature

A large stream of research has analyzed the effects of corporate political connections (CPCs) on firms, including first evidence on their effects on financial reporting behavior. However, the evidence so far is inconclusive, and attempts to explain the causality of effects on reporting are limited. In this article, we present the results of a systematic review of the literature on CPCs. We draw on findings in the accounting, finance, and economics literature and derive a framework that identifies four channels through which CPCs affect financial reporting. Our review of the literature suggests that effects of political connections tend to be more ambiguous than suggested by individual studies that often offer directional hypotheses. We also identify eight distinct types of political connectedness and discuss their interrelations and the proxies used in the literature to measure them.     

How does service drive the service company?

"How Does Service Drive the Service Company?" presents commentators on Leonard A. Schlesinger and James L. Heskett's September-October article. Commentators include Michael R. Quinlan, Ron Zemke, Jim Snider, Dinah Nemeroff, Steven S. Reinemund, Robert Ayling, Karmjit Singh, James A. Perkins, Joseph E. Antonini, and Walter F. Loeb.     

How do US investors perceive the risk of local political corruption? Evidence from acquisition announcement

This study examines the impact of local political corruption on investors’ evaluation of firms’ mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the US. Using the number of corruption convictions of government officials reported by the US Department of Justice, we find that acquirers in more corrupt court districts experience lower acquirer announcement returns, lower combined acquirer and target announcement returns, and are less likely to complete acquisitions. We further find that the relation between local political corruption and acquirer announcement returns is worsened when acquirers operate primarily in the headquarters state. Overall, the results suggest that local political corruption has an adverse impact on investors’ evaluation of a firm’s M&A profitability.     

How do people perceive graphical risk communication? The role of subjective numeracy

This study aims to evaluate directly how a graphical risk ladder is perceived and how this perception is related to people’s subjective numeracy. Gaze durations and frequencies were used to examine visual attention. Participants (N = 47) appeared to focus on the target risk information, whereas referential information was less attended. Subjective numeracy was negatively correlated with total watching time and the absolute number of gaze events. Results suggest that participants with low subjective numeracy have more difficulty in comprehending the graph, and that they process the graphical information less efficiently than the participants with high subjective numeracy. In addition, the position of referential risks on risk ladders could influence people’s risk perception. Based on these findings, we provide some implications for the design of risk communication graphs and for the use of graphs in informing persons with low subjective numeracy about risks.     

How do financial contracts evolve for new ventures?

While previous research has characterized the key features of contracts between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, little is known about the contracts' evolution over time and across funding rounds. We overcome significant data challenges to compile a novel panel dataset of U.S. early-stage ventures that includes the main financial and control rights offered to investors at each (equity) funding round. We find that there is a ‘default contract’ with a distinct combination of rights that the majority of companies gravitate to. This default contract is typically implemented in the initial Series A funding round and rarely deviated from in later rounds. Whenever deviations do occur, terms are usually revised in favour of investors, and not entrepreneurs. Due to this stickiness of the default contract, for successful startups we argue that post-money valuations in later rounds can be a reasonable proxy for the economic value of the firm.     

How do financial analysts implement the Sum-of-the-Parts (SOTP) valuation framework?

In this study, we investigate how financial analysts implement the Sum-of-the-Parts (SOTP) valuation framework. Although SOTP constitutes a popular valuation approach among sophisticated practitioners and investors, it is mostly ignored by researchers and academics. We adopt a structured content analysis of 265 equity research reports written by 33 investment brokerage houses for 140 UK-based firms. We find that analysts typically use EBITDA multiples to implement SOTP. Furthermore, financial analysts are more likely to consider SOTP the dominant or preferred valuation model in their report. We show that managers disclose a greater quantity of segmental information if their firms are considered difficult to analyze and value by investors and creditors, thereby decreasing the information asymmetry with their capital providers. In specific circumstances, we document that financial analysts identify more segments in their SOTP analysis compared to the reportable segments in the firms' annual reports based on IFRS 8. We argue that the financial analysts' choice to employ a greater number of segments in their SOTP models might be primarily driven by their effort to support their reports' optimistic target prices. Finally, although SOTP seems theoretically ideal to estimate the value of a multi-segment firm, we do not find empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that SOTP significantly outperforms a full-blown Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model, when the latter is used separately to value the company as a whole.     

How do auditors perceive CEO's risk‐taking incentives?

Prior literature documents that executive compensation influences managerial risk preferences through executives’ portfolio sensitivities to changes in stock prices (delta) and stock‐return volatility (vega). Large deltas discourage managerial risk‐taking, while large vegas encourage risk‐taking. Theory suggests that auditors charge higher audit fees when standard audit procedures do not allow auditors to reduce audit risk including the risk arising from higher business risk. We posit and find evidence of a negative (positive) relation between CEO portfolio deltas (vegas) and audit fees. We also find a negative relation between CEO portfolio deltas and the issuance of going‐concern audit opinions (GCO).     

Self-monitoring or reliance on media reporting: How do financial market participants process central bank news?

We study how financial market participants process news from four major central banks—the Bank of England (BoE), the Bank of Japan (BoJ), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the Federal Reserve (Fed)—using a novel survey of 195 financial market participants from around the world. Our results indicate that, first, respondents rely more on media reports of central bank events than they do on self-monitoring. The only exceptions are interest rate decisions in the respondent’s home region. In general, the Fed is watched most closely, followed by the ECB, the BoJ, and the BoE. Second, ordered probit estimations reveal that the perceived reliability of media coverage is negatively associated with degree of self-monitoring and positively related to the probability of using media reports, particularly in the case of asset managers. The perceived importance of central bank events is positively related to the degree of self-monitoring in the case of traders. Finally, portfolio managers tend to self-monitor their home central bank significantly more often than other central banks.     

How do financial institutions react to a tax increase?

This paper empirically highlights the role and significance of taxes for the capital structure decisions of banks. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, I show that an increase in the local U.S. state corporate tax rate affects the banks’ financing as well as their operating choices. Better-capitalized banks raise their long-term non-depository debt and thus benefit from an enlarged tax shield. Worse-capitalized banks instead reduce their lending because a higher tax rate increases the tax-adjusted cost of funding, which renders the marginal loan unprofitable.     

Firm R&D and financial analysis: How do they interact?

This paper demonstrates, theoretically and empirically, that firms’ research and development (R&D) efforts and investors’ analyses of their prospects are mutually reinforcing. Entrepreneurs attempt more research when financiers are better informed about projects’ profitability because they expect financiers to provide more funding to successful projects. Conversely, financiers collect more information about projects when entrepreneurs undertake more R&D because the opportunity cost of missing out on successful projects is then higher. Two natural experiments confirm that this interaction occurs and suggest that it contributes to about one third of the total effect of a policy designed to stimulate R&D. Overall, the analysis suggests that policies aimed at promoting R&D – such as research subsidies or tax breaks – have a multiplier effect owing to the induced improvement in capital efficiency. As a result, those policies can be rendered more effective by coupling them with other policies designed to increase capital efficiency. The feedback effect that we document also helps explaining why innovative ecosystems such as that in the Silicon Valley are challenging to set up.     

Do investors perceive a change in audit quality following the rotation of the engagement partner?

Though Section 203 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) calls for the rotation of the audit partner every five years, we do not know whether investors value audit partner rotation. This is an important issue since many in the auditing profession believe that mandatory rotation of the audit partner is unnecessary and may in fact impair audit quality. We identify a sample of firms that disclosed changes in the engagement partner in the proxy statement and examine whether equity investors perceive a change in audit quality following the partner rotation. We find a significant increase in earnings informativeness following audit partner rotation. We also find that short sellers regard earnings in the post-rotation to be of higher quality than earnings prior to the rotation. Finally, cost of equity capital is lower following partner rotation. Our findings have important implications for the regulators, auditors, and investors.     

What do we know about the second moment of financial markets?

Recent research shows that the vast majority of scientific studies published in leading finance journals fails scientific replication (Hou, Xue, and Zhang, 2020; Harvey, Liu, and Zhu; 2016). This study argues that p-hacking, publication pressure and the selection bias from leading finance journals are perhaps not the underlying root cause for this issue. This study shows that standard methodologies often used in finance research are inevitably sample-specific due to the very nature of financial markets. While the consensus of earlier research postulates a rejection of the time-honored Levy hypothesis, the results of this study strongly indicate that the variance of variance does not exist in any of the financial key markets that are considered. An unexpected finding of this study is that the variance process governing the U.S. dollar foreign exchange rate market is generating more extreme events than the Bitcoin market. The results cast doubts on the validity of methodologies currently used in finance research.     

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.     

How do financial analysts interpret industrial firms' corporate refocusing announcements?

This study investigates how analysts perceive the effect of corporate refocusing announcements on UK industrial firms' future earnings by examining current-year and one-year-ahead earnings forecast revisions, current-year target price revisions and earnings forecast errors in the five years surrounding a refocusing announcement year. The results reveal that analysts adjust their earnings forecasts downward in a refocusing announcement year and the following two years, predicting that operating performance in the post-refocusing period is likely to decline relative to their former earnings forecasts. Secondly, there is no evidence that analysts issue biased earnings forecasts after refocusing announcements or that their forecasts appear less accurate. Thirdly, they adjust their earnings forecasts downward in a refocusing announcement year with downward market movement. However, they do not similarly adjust their earnings forecast upward with upward market movement. The magnitude of downward adjustments exceeds that of upward adjustments. They also adjust current-year target price forecasts downward with downward market movement in the year prior to a refocusing announcement.     

How do exchange rates co-move? A study on the currencies of five inflation-targeting countries

This paper does three things. First, it explores the type of asymmetry in exchange rate correlation for five inflation-targeting countries. We show their currencies co-move more closely with the currencies of some influential foreign countries during joint appreciations than joint depreciations against a world currency. Second, it establishes empirically the linkage between interest rate differentials and exchange rate correlation. We find evidence that both widening and narrowing interest rate differentials will reduce the correlation. Third, it proposes a new version of the asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation model. The model proves to be capable of providing great insight into the two issues investigated.     

How common are credit-less recoveries? Firm-level evidence on the role of financial markets in crisis recovery

We study firm recoveries from systemic sudden stops in developing countries, where firms' cash flows suffer exogenous shocks. Contrary to macro studies suggesting that output recovery precedes that of the financial sector, firm-level data shows that only in less than a third of firms, operating cash flows recover without a recovery in external credit, and even these firms have access to other sources of cash. Specifically, firms with high prior short-term debt exposure do experience a sharp reduction in short-term credit but increase operating cash flows during a crisis. Firms with high prior cash holdings experience negative cash flows and deplete their cash holdings. Thus, firms' financial prepositioning predicts recovery in cash flows and is consistent with trade-off theories of capital structure and with precautionary motives for cash holdings. We find no support for the maturity mismatch hypothesis, which predicts that firms with high short-term debt should have harder recoveries post crisis.     

Where are the smart investors? New evidence of the smart money effect

Previous research debates whether investors are smart enough to invest in funds that subsequently outperform. This paper documents a robust smart money effect among top-performing small fund investors, even after controlling for the momentum factor. I further explore the reason for the smart money effect and find that such outperformance comes from the market-timing ability of smart investors. Market-timing ability distinguishes smart investors from investors who naively chase the winners.