D&O insurance and IPO performance: What can we learn from insurers?

We investigate whether a firm’s directors’ and officers’ liability insurance contract at the time of the IPO is related to insured firms’ first year post-IPO performance. We find that insurers charge a higher premium per dollar of coverage to protect the directors and officers of firms that will subsequently have poor first year post-IPO stock performance. A higher price of coverage is also associated with a higher post-IPO volatility and lower Sharpe ratio. Our results are robust to various econometric specifications and suggest that even when the high level of information asymmetry inherent to the IPO context prevails, insurers have information about the firms’ prospects that should be valuable to outside investors.     

What can we learn from a singular case like Enron?

This story narratively contends that lessons to be learnt from Enron collapse far exceed punishments of illegal behaviors as well as some new auditing and accounting regulations. But this requires to convince the external validity of a singular case. Usual ways of claiming external validity doesn’t appear to suit this situation. Participants then try Deleuze’s concept of repetition and examines the insight this permits to gain on Enron possible lessons. This external validity criteria is finally discussed, still grounded on Enron case.     

What do we know about the price spillover between green bonds and Islamic stocks and stock market indices?

This paper investigates the risk transmission, linkages, and directional predictability between green bonds, Islamic stocks, and other asset classes. Using daily data from November 2008 to August 2020, we use the Standard & Poor's (S&P) Green Bond Index to represent the green bond market and the Dow Jones Islamic World Index and the S&P Global Shariah Indices to represent Islamic stocks. The other asset classes considered include the S&P 500 Stock Composite, S&P 500 Bond, and S&P 500 Energy indices. This paper uses the novel quantile cross-spectral (coherency), the windowed scalogram difference (WSD), and the cross-quantilogram (CQ) correlation approaches. The results from the quantile coherency analysis reveal a negative spillover effect from green bond price returns to Islamic stocks in the long run, which indicates that the green bond market poses a long-run systemic risk to Islamic stocks. From the WSD analysis, the results show that the integration between green bonds and Islamic stocks, the S&P 500 Stock Composite, and the S&P 500 Bond index is weaker during volatile market conditions. The CQ correlation suggests that the dependency between green bonds and other asset returns is concentrated in the lower quantiles and that this dependency is weaker at longer lags. Our results underscore the significance of green bonds in investor portfolios as a new investment asset class.     

What can we learn about the market reaction to macroeconomic surprise? Evidence from the COVID-19 crisis

We investigate the impact of macroeconomic surprise and uncertainty on G7 financial markets around COVID-19 pandemic using two real-time, real-activity indexes recently constructed by Scotti (2016). We applies the wavelet analysis to detect the response of the stock markets to the macroeconomic surprise and an uncertainty indexes and then we use NARDL model to examine the asymmetric effect of the news surprise and uncertainty on the equity markets. We conduct our empirical analysis with the daily data from January, 2014 to September, 2020. Our findings indicate that G7 stock markets are sensitive to the macroeconomic surprise and uncertainty and the effect is more pronounced at the long term than the short term. Moreover, we show that the COVID-19 crisis supports the relationship between the macroeconomic indexes and the stock prices. The results are useful for investment decision-making for the investors on the G7 stock indices at different investment horizons.     

Institutional investor horizon and stock price synchronicity: Do product market competition and analyst coverage matter?

This paper provides new insights into the relation between institutional investment horizon and stock price synchronicity and investigates whether this relationship depends on the intensity of product market competition and analyst coverage. Based on a sample of French listed companies, we find that long-term (short-term) institutional investors are associated with lower (higher) stock price synchronicity. The results also show that the negative effect of long-term institutional investors is more accentuated for firms in less competitive markets and with high analyst coverage. An additional analysis shows that the synchronicity reduction effect does not vary during the financial crisis. Overall, these findings suggest that unlike their short-term counterparts, long term investors reduce asymmetric information and help disseminate firm-specific information into stock prices.     

On corporate financial distress prediction: What can we learn from private firms in a developing economy? Evidence from Greece

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - Using a large dataset that includes nearly 31,000 Greek private firms we examine the determinants of the probability of corporate financial distress....     

Stakeholders and the stock price crash risk: What matters in corporate social performance?

This study provides evidence for the differential impacts of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives targeting different stakeholder groups on stock price crash risk. In particular, it highlights CSR's role in mitigating risk and creating shareholder value. Our results reveal that managerial bad news hoarding and the resultant stock crashes are largely determined by the social CSR dimension, and this effect is predominantly seen in undervalued firms. Moreover, social CSR subcategories aimed at specific stakeholder groups (such as the community, employees, or customers) tend to mitigate future crashes. In contrast, firms' environmental initiatives and governance characteristics seem to have trivial effects on stock crashes. Using a quasi-natural experiment, we find that the mitigating effect of social CSR dimension on crash risk is likely to be causal.     

Stock market aversion? Political preferences and stock market participation

We find that left-wing voters and politicians are less likely to invest in stocks, controlling for income, wealth, education, and other relevant factors. This finding from unique data sets in Finland is robust both at the zip code and at the individual level. A moderate left voter is 17–20% less likely to own stocks than a moderate right voter. The results are consistent with the idea that personal values are a factor in important investment decisions, in this case leading to “stock market aversion.” The results are inconsistent with alternative explanations such as wealth effects, risk aversion, reverse causality, return expectations, or social capital.     

Social impact measurement: What can impact investment practices and the policy evaluation paradigm learn from each other?

In the past decade, public authorities around the world have fostered an increasing interest for social enterprises and the ways to develop and scale them. Part of this interest has focused on better understanding social enterprises’ impact, especially through practices derived from impact investing and philanthropy such as social impact measurement (SIM). This paper looks at the differences between “traditional” policy (or programme evaluation - PE) as it is carried out by public actors and SIM as it is practiced by impact investors and the stakeholders they support (particularly social enterprises), focusing on what can be learnt from these gaps. We take the case of France, where we compare public praxis for both SIM and PE based on a documentary analysis and complementary interviews. We find that both disciplines are bridged by a common theoretical foundation and, to a certain extent, by participative approaches. We also identify three main gaps, which are (i) the way outcomes are treated in PE and SIM; (ii) how stakeholder participation is managed and how it affects the ownership of the evaluation process by the involved parties; and (iii) how metrics and indicators are approached. We assess the benefits and drawbacks associated with each gap, we determine ways to bridge them and we identify five forces contributing to their creation.     

Why do companies delist voluntarily from the stock market?

We analyse the motives and market valuation of voluntarily delisting from the London Stock Exchange. We show that firms that delist voluntarily are likely to have come to the market to rebalance their leverage rather than to finance their growth opportunities. During their quotation life, their leverage and insider ownership remained very high, they did not raise equity capital, and their profitability, growth opportunities, and trading volume declined substantially. They also generate negative pre-event and announcement date excess returns. These results hold even after controlling for agency, asymmetric information, and liquidity effects, and suggest that firms delist voluntarily when they fail to benefit from listing. Overall, these firms destroyed shareholder value and they should not have come to the market.     

Is the UAE stock market integrated with the USA stock market? New evidence from asymmetric causality testing

The integration and development of financial markets is an important issue because it can result in economic growth via increasing exchange and more efficient allocation of scarce resources. It is also important for defining and conducting appropriate policies to counteract adverse spill-over effects across markets. The main goal of this paper is to assess the degree of integration or segmentation of the UAE stock market with the USA market by conducting new causality tests developed by Hatemi-J (forthcoming) that separate the effect of positive shocks from the negative ones. The empirical results based on standard symmetric causality tests indicate that the UAE market is segmented from the USA market. However, when the asymmetric causality tests are implemented the results reveal clearly that the UAE market is indeed integrated with the USA market. These results show, in addition, that the degree of integration is stronger when the markets are falling than rising.     

COVID-19 social distancing and the US service sector: What do we learn?

This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 social distancing on the US service sector. Results from four industry indexes (hotels, entertainment, restaurants and airlines) indicate that conditional correlations among index pairs exhibited substantial increases. Iterated Cumulative Sums of Squares (ICSS) tests in dynamic conditional correlations show that while the relationship between airlines and entertainment venues is unstable, restaurants and hotels demonstrate stable co-movement. Markov regime-switching regression analysis suggests the pandemic is affecting mainly the entertainment and airline industries, with gradual deterioration in the hotel industry, led by small-market-cap companies. However, we see no evidence of a negative impact on the restaurant industry from the pandemic in our analysis period. This may be related to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Based on our results, we recommend employment of effective working capital and supply chain management methods in the service sector to streamline the operations of affected companies. In addition, all other sectors should utilize appropriate methods of risk measurement and should take 'Black Swans' into account to incorporate a more accurate probability of unexpected events.     

Less is more? New evidence from stock market volatility predictability

The complex nature of stock market volatility has motivated researchers to apply a variety of predictors to obtain reliable predictive information for precise forecasting. This study seeks to examine the effectiveness of the novel Global Financial Uncertainty (GFU) indices, comprising of only five sub-indices, in predicting stock market volatility using the widely used mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) model. The results demonstrate the remarkable and stable predictive power of GFU, even during crises and global financial uncertainty shocks. Specifically, the financial uncertainty index from Europe plays a significant role in our analysis. Importantly, we find that the GFU index outperforms a large number of other indicators in stock volatility forecasting. The statistical and economic significance of the predictive power of GFU is remarkable. Our study provides significant insights for market participants and policymakers that highlight the need to prioritize global financial uncertainty.     

Does the stock market affect firm investment in China? A price informativeness perspective

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between firm-level investment and the stock market in China from a price informativeness perspective. We find that firm investment does not significantly respond to the stock market valuation, because stock prices contain very little extra information about the future operating performance of firms. This finding is further supported by the relative investment response test and the relative price information content test based on the informativeness proxy of price non-synchronicity combined with firm information transparency.     

Does mutual fund ownership reduce stock price clustering? Evidence from active and index funds

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - The literature is rich with examples of price clustering in financial markets. This study focuses on the relation between mutual fund ownership (both...     

Release of a liquidity regulation: What do we learn for credit and house prices?

This paper studies the effects of the release of a limit on banks’ maturity transformation – akin to the Net Stable Funding Ratio – for mortgage supply and house prices. After the regulatory easing, credit supply increased only for the banks that were previously constrained by the regulation and not for the others. We also show that the expansion in mortgages triggered by the deregulation accelerated house prices. The effect was channeled through higher demand for housing and the relaxation of borrowers’ financial constraints. Even though the impact of the credit supply shock persisted, the interaction between credit and house prices was not conducive to a housing market overheating.     

Do conference calls facilitate market price discovery? Evidence from Taiwan

This study examines whether conference calls accelerate the speed at which the market and analysts understand the implications of the accrual components of current earnings on future earnings. We analyze Taiwan’s listed firms from 2001 through 2014 and find that (1) delayed market reactions to earnings news during the following 12?months occur less often for firms than for host conference calls, and (2) conference calls are associated with a significant improvement in the accuracy of analysts’ earnings forecasts. One possible explanation for our results is that conference calls improve the efficacy of investors’ and analysts’ reactions to earnings announcements by conveying information regarding the accrual components of reported earnings. Our results have implications for other Asian economies that have relatively opaque information environments and weak shareholder protections.     

Cryptocurrencies and stock market indices. Are they related?

In this paper, we investigate the stochastic properties of six major cryptocurrencies and their bilateral linkages with six stock market indices using fractional integration techniques. From the univariate analysis, we observe that for Bitcoin and Ethereum, the unit root null hypothesis cannot be rejected; for Litecoin, Ripple and Stellar, the order of integration is found to be significantly higher than 1; for Tether, however, we find evidence in favour of mean reversion. For the stock market indices, the results are more homogeneous and the unit root cannot be rejected in any of the series, with the exception of VIX where mean reversion is obtained. Concerning bivariate results within the cryptocurrencies and testing for cointegration, we provide evidence of no cointegration between the six cryptocurrencies. Along the same lines, testing for cointegration between the cryptocurrencies and the stock market indices, we find evidence of no cointegration, which implies that the cryptocurrencies are decoupled from the mainstream financial and economic assets. The findings in this paper indicate the significant role of cryptocurrencies in investor portfolios since they serve as a diversification option for investors, confirming that cryptocurrency is a new investment asset class.     

What moves international stock and bond markets?

We study the relation between international mutual fund flows and the different return components of aggregate equity and bond markets. First, we decompose international equity and bond market returns into changes in expectations of future real cash payments, interest rates, exchange rates, and discount rates. News about future cash flows, rather than discount rates, is the main driver of international stock returns. This evidence is in contrast with the typical results reported only for the US. Inflation news instead is the main driver of international bond returns. Next, we turn to the interaction between these return components and international portfolio flows. We find evidence consistent with price pressure, short-term trend chasing, and short-run overreaction in the equity market. We also find that international bond flows to emerging markets are more sensitive to interest rate shocks than equity flows.     

Bank ownership and stock price informativeness. Does politics matter?

This study investigates the effects of ownership on the informativeness of the stock prices of 636 commercial banks from 59 countries for 2002–2014. We find strong and robust evidence that state ownership is associated with stock prices having less information in developing countries. This result is consistent with the conjecture that state ownership is associated with a less transparent environment that discourages investors from trading on private information. Furthermore, we find that politics magnifies the effect of state ownership on the informativeness of stock prices during election years. In particular, we show that stock prices are less informative for state ownership in countries with civil law or parliamentary systems. These findings shows that the political channel plays an important role in determining the expropriation by government shareholders, especially in developing countries.