Internal information quality and financial policy peer effects

This paper investigates how firms' internal information quality (IIQ) influences the peer effects of their financial policies. Using earnings announcement speed and insider trading profitability difference as measurements, we find that when IIQ is low, firms are more likely to change their leverage following a similar change made by peer firms in the same industry. Our further analysis shows that this mimicking behavior hurts firms' operating performance, and is more prevalent when firms are also characterized by poor corporate governance. Overall, our results indicate that poor information quality could amplify the agency problem, therefore leading to stronger peer effects in corporate financial policies.     

Watch Your Basket ‐ to Determine CEO Compensation

CEOs (chief executive officers) are paid more if they outperform other firms in their blockholders’ portfolios. For every percentage point by which their own firm's return exceeds the return of the largest blockholder's basket of investments in a year, their compensation increases by over $9,800. Once we benchmark to this portfolio, industry returns and own firm returns are of little importance. When the firm is a larger portion of the blockholder's portfolio and when the blockholder is experienced, the reward for outperforming the blockholder's portfolio is greater. Our results are robust to alternate industry classifications and definitions of blockholders.     

When do peers matter?: A cross-country perspective

We assess the importance of industry peers for a firm's own decision making strategy, using a rich sample of data covering 47 countries and 87 different industries between 1990 and 2011. Following the instrumental variable approach suggested by Leary and Roberts (2014), we find that, similar to U.S. firms, foreign firms do follow their peers when they make financial policy decisions. A standard deviation increase in peer firms' average leverage leads to about 5 percentage point increase in a firm's own leverage. We also find evidence that firms are more likely to follow their peers when investor protection laws including information disclosure and minority shareholder protection are weak, when creditor rights laws are strong, and when equity markets are more developed, suggesting that peers matter the most when firms have the greatest need to learn and to demonstrate their quality. These results hold even when we perform the analysis on a matched sample of firms.     

Effects of Foreign Presence in a Transition Economy: Regional and Industrywide Investments and Firm-Level Exports in Ukrainian Manufacturing

We investigate the effects of regional and industrywide foreign presence and foreign direct investment (FDI) on the export volumes of Ukrainian manufacturing firms using unpublished panel data from 1996-2000. Foreign presence through FDI may have negative competition effects on domestic firms' performance; at the same time, domestic firms' productivity may be increased by technology transfer or training and demonstration effects. From a Cournot competition model that includes negative competition and positive technology spillover effects, we hypothesize that foreign presence and FDI might positively affect domestic firms' output and exports. Our estimation results support these hypotheses, suggesting in particular that large firms and durable goods producers benefit most from foreign presence and investments.     

Corporate Investments: Learning from Restatements

This study analyzes the information conveyed by the restatements of financial reports. We argue that restatements contain news about the investment projects of the restating firms' competitors. This news causes competitors to revise their beliefs about the projects' value, and to modify their subsequent investment decisions. Accordingly, we hypothesize that changes in competitors' investments after restatement announcements are related to news in the restatements. Consistent with our prediction, we find that changes in competitors' investments following restatement announcements are significantly related to various proxies for news in the restatements, such as competitors' and restating firms' abnormal returns at the restatement announcements. We conclude that restatements convey information about the investment projects of restating firms' competitors.     

Controlling shareholder share pledging and stock price crash risk: Evidence from China

Using the unique setting of the Chinese market from 2003 to 2018, this study examines how share pledging behavior affects firms' stock price crash risk by analyzing the costs and benefits of the controlling shareholder's pledging decision to hoard bad news. We find that during the controlling shareholder share-pledging period, pledged firms exhibit significantly higher future stock price crash risk than their non-pledged counterparts. The risk is also higher during this period relative to in shareholders' own pre-pledging and post-pledging benchmark periods. Considering the internal and external information environment, we further observe a less pronounced increase in stock price crash risk for pledged firms with a strong internal control system and for those with more media attention. Together, our results reveal controlling shareholders' hedging motivations for engaging in pledging activities and the role played by the internal and external information environment in constraining the opportunistic behavior of controlling shareholders.     

Agency hazard,managerial incentives,and the wealth effects of joint venture investments

Grounded in agency theory, this study explores whether the separation of ownership (by shareholders) and control (by managers) in firms is an essential determinant of the valuation effect of joint ventures (JVs). This is achieved by examining the efficacy of incentive alignment mechanisms and their contingency effects. Based on a sample of 963 U.S. firms' JV investments, the results show that poor JV performance is linked to lower levels of executive ownership and reduced equity compensation. The possibility of managers acting for their own self-interest in corporate JV investments is further supported by the stronger positive performance effect of incentive alignment mechanisms documented when firms have a higher level of free cash flow or undertake JVs in unrelated business domains. Both performance measures of short-run announcement effects and long-run stock returns yield similar results. Our results underscore the importance of governing executives' self-interested actions in their JV engagements.     

Prudent man or agency problem? On the performance of insurance mutual funds

Active equity mutual funds managed by insurance companies underperform peer funds by over 1% per year. There is no evidence that insurance funds make less risky investments; instead they have lower risk-adjusted returns and their fund flows are less sensitive to performance when they perform poorly. Across insurance funds, those with heavy advertising, directly established by insurers or using parent firms' brandnames, and those whose managers simultaneously manage substantial non-mutual-fund assets, are more likely to underperform. We conclude that insurers' efforts to cross-sell mutual funds aggravate agency problems that erode fund performance.     

The spillover effect of fraudulent financial reporting on peer firms' investments

We investigate how high-profile accounting frauds affect peer firms' investment. We document that peers react to the fraudulent reports by increasing investment during fraud periods. We show that this finding is not driven by frauds that have a higher ex ante likelihood of detection or by an association between fraud and investment booms. In addition, we find that peers’ investments increase in fraudulent earnings overstatements, and in industries with higher investor sentiment, lower cost of capital and higher private benefits of control. We also find evidence consistent with equity analysts potentially facilitating the spillover effect.     

Making honest men of them: Institutional investors,financial reporting,and the appointment of female directors to all-male boards

In this paper, we theorize that dedicated institutional investors are more likely than transient institutional investors to appoint female directors to investee firms with all-male boards, particularly those with high opacity. We conjecture that dedicated investors appoint female directors as a governance mechanism to improve the financial reporting quality of these investee firms. Specifically, we find that through the appointment of female directors, dedicated institutional investors trigger the release of stockpiled negative accounting information, thereby increasing the likelihood of a stock price crash risk. We also show that dedicated investors, through the appointment of female directors, improve investee firms' corporate disclosure environment by decreasing earnings management. Finally, we find that through continued service on investee firms' boards, female directors reduce the future likelihood of a stock price crash.     

Foreign investors and corporate governance in Korea

This paper has two aims. The first aim is to investigate whether poor corporate governance negatively affects equity participation of foreign investors. The second aim is to investigate whether firm-level efforts for better corporate governance attract more foreign investments. Our regression results suggest foreign equity ownership is negatively associated with firms' ownership concentration but is positively associated with firms' efforts for better corporate governance. Interestingly, foreign investors show different behavioral patterns from their domestic counterparts, as the latter group shows less sensitivity to the corporate governance issue than the former group.     

Enterprise Risk Management and the Cost of Capital

Enterprise risk management (ERM) is a process that manages all risks in an integrated, holistic fashion by controlling and coordinating any offsetting risks across the enterprise. This research investigates whether the adoption of the ERM approach affects firms' cost of equity capital. We restrict our analysis to the U.S. insurance industry to control for unobservable differences in business models and risk exposures across industries. We simultaneously model firms' adoption of ERM and the effect of ERM on the cost of capital. We find that ERM adoption significantly reduces firm's cost of capital. Our results suggest that cost of capital benefits are one answer to the question how ERM can create value.     

Mandatory disclosure of comment letters and analysts' forecasts

Comment letters (CLs) have been adopted as the main supervision mechanism for information disclosure by the two main Chinese stock exchanges since 2013. Both CLs and firms' responses have been publicly disclosed since the end of 2014. Using nonfinancial listed firms from 2013 to 2019 as our sample, we investigate the impact of CLs and their mandatory disclosure on analysts' forecast quality. The results show that, in the pre-disclosure period, there is no significant relation between CLs and analysts' forecast quality. However, in the post-disclosure period, CLs are positively (negatively) correlated with analysts' forecast accuracy (optimism). The quality of analysts' forecasts is much higher when CLs contain more questions. In addition, the impact of CLs is larger for samples with a lower percentage of star analysts or samples with higher earnings volatility. CL recipients tend to disclose more information on their internal and external risks, which can offer additional information to analysts.     

Relative performance evaluation in board cash compensation: UK empirical evidence

This paper presents an empirical examination of whether evidence of the implicit use of relative performance evaluation (RPE) can be found in the cash compensation of boards of directors for 169 UK non-financial listed companies that existed for all of the period from 1971 to 1998. We perform two types of analyses. Initially, we estimate individual firm time series regressions of the change in board cash compensation against measures of firm and peer group performance. The measures of firm performance we use are annual cash stock market returns and pre-tax accounting earnings. Peer group measures of performance are industry value-weighted average cash stock market returns and industry value-weighted average pre-tax accounting earnings. Subsequently, we analyse the data as a balanced panel.We provide evidence that board cash compensation is positively related to accounting earnings and negatively associated with peer group pre-tax accounting earnings. Some evidence suggests that board cash compensation is related to firm stock market returns but none suggests it is related to peer group market returns. This result implies the presence of RPE based on accounting earnings in the design of UK board compensation, with the cash compensation of boards of directors implicitly (partially) protected from industry uncertainties.     

Peer effects in R&D investment based on interlock network: Evidence from China

Different from extant literature on peer effects within industries or locations, this study aims to investigate whether and why the R&D investment of a focal firm is influenced by that of interlocked peer firms. Using instruments based on intransitivity, we identify positive interlock-based peer effects in R&D investment. Firm-pair evidence corroborates the existence of peer effects by showing that interlocks render similar R&D policies and exogenous policy-induced fractures of interlocks lead to diverging R&D investments. Further analysis indicates that the interactive effects are more salient among firms with access to greater peer information and more severe information asymmetry, suggesting that peer effects are consistent with the information theory. Moreover, peers from different industries/places and focal firms with orientation to the differentiation strategy, embodying greater supply and demand of heterogeneous information, are associated with stronger peer effects. Finally, corporate patent outcomes and Tobin's Q positively react to peers' R&D investment, a sign that the interlock-based peer effects are beneficial to the performance of the focal firm.     

Economic policy uncertainty and imitation behaviors of corporate social responsibility practices: Evidence from China

In this paper, we examine whether firms facing higher economic policy uncertainty (EPU) are more likely to show similar corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices compared with their peer firms. Drawing upon institutional theory, in response to uncertainty under complex circumstances, managers tend to imitate peer firms' strategic actions to acquire legitimacy. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find that EPU increases the likelihood that a focal firm will show CSR practices similar to its peer firms. Such a likelihood is amplified for firms that (1) bear more negative media coverage, (2) have higher industry competition intensity, (3) belong to heavy-polluting industries, and (4) for the first-time disclosures. Our results hold when we employ a series of endogeneity tests and robustness checks.     

Partial cross ownership and tacit collusion

We examine the effects that passive investments in rival firms have on the incentives of firms to engage in tacit collusion. In general, these incentives depend in a complex way on the entire partial cross ownership (PCO) structure in the industry. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for PCO arrangements to facilitate tacit collusion and also examine how tacit collusion is affected when firms' controllers make direct passive investments in rival firms.     

Attention! Distracted institutional investors and stock price crash

Using the extreme returns of firms in unrelated industries of institutional shareholders' portfolios as exogenous variations in institutional investor distraction (Kempf et al. 2017), we find a positive and significant relation between institutional shareholder distraction and stock price crash risk. The effect is associated with weakened monitoring, and it becomes stronger when alternative corporate governance is weaker and when managers' incentives to hoard bad information are stronger. Managers reduce firms' accounting conservatism when institutional investors become distracted, which is evidence of an increased motivation to hoard bad news. Overall, our findings shed additional light on the important monitoring role of institutional investors in corporate governance.     

Financial Structure,Acquisition Opportunities,and Firm Locations

This paper investigates the relation between firms' locations and their corporate finance decisions. We develop a model where being located within an industry cluster increases opportunities to make acquisitions, and to facilitate those acquisitions, firms within clusters maintain more financial slack. Consistent with our model we find that firms located within industry clusters make more acquisitions, and have lower debt ratios and larger cash balances than their industry peers located outside clusters. We also document that firms in high‐tech cities and growing cities maintain more financial slack. Overall, the evidence suggests that growth opportunities influence firms' financial decisions.     

Tournament-based incentives and mergers and acquisitions

This research examines the relation between tournament-based incentives, which are proxied by the difference between a firm's CEO pay and the median pay of the senior managers, and mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We find that tournament-based incentives are positively related to firm acquisitiveness and acquiring firms' stock and operating performance. Further analysis indicates that positive acquisition performance increases the likelihood of the CEO being promoted from inside the acquiring firm. Our evidence is consistent with the view that tournament-based incentives motivate acquiring firms' managers to make greater efforts and take more risk that result in superior acquisition performance.