Animal spirits in financial economics: A review of deviations from economic rationality

John Keynes made the notion of animal spirits a central part of economics in 1936. However, recent financial literature is dominated by asset pricing models based on strict economic rationality and struggles to accept the notion of animal spirits. This essay is an overview of the causes and consequences of financial market inefficiency and failure and the role of animal spirits in finance. Unlike prior literature, it combines insights and evidence from multiple fields such as finance, economics, psychology, and politics, to understand the many reasons for market failure. It then uses this understanding to develop five simple practical principles to guide regulations required to mitigate the effects of market failures. The results should be of much interest to finance scholars, money managers, business executives, and policy makers.     

Peer effects in financial economics: A literature survey

The paper reviews the growing literature on peer effects in finance from theoretical and empirical viewpoints. In particular, we assess the importance of peer behavior on firms’ financial policies, analyze the channels through which they operate, and gauge their magnitude. We particularly review empirical works on herding and peer effects in two subfields of finance: corporate finance and the financial markets. We also discuss the results of many relevant peer-reviewed academic studies and provide research and policy implications. The main conclusion is that peer effects are important in shaping investor and firm decisions. The most critical problem in the peer effect literature is employing an identification strategy to ensure that results are not driven by endogeneity. The paper also discusses ways to address this identification issue and provides a future research agenda.     

Coauthorship and subauthorship patterns in financial economics

Acknowledgments are a special kind of intellectual partnership. Acknowledged scientists in published papers are called subauthors. We examine collaboration patterns between authors and subauthors in four finance journals from 1994 to 2013: the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. We employ social network analysis and discover that the majority of subauthors form a compact giant component with small average distances between the nodes. Moreover, the subauthorship network in finance has a non-overlapping structure, exhibiting low clustering coefficients and a plethora of cohesive groups of nodes.     

Fourth annual conference on financial economics and accounting

Announcement

Fourth annual conference on financial economics and accounting     

Cooperative financial institutions: A review of the literature

Financial cooperatives play an important role in the financial systems of many countries. They act as a safe haven for deposits and are major sources of credit for households and small- and medium-sized firms. A not-for-profit orientation (in many cases) and a focus on maximising benefits to members have ensured the enduring popularity and sustainability of financial cooperatives. This is particularly evident since the global financial crisis when financial cooperatives continued to extend credit to members as many profit-orientated commercial banks restricted credit to households and firms. The overarching theme of the first part of this review is the structural and behavioural characteristics of financial cooperatives. In this part we consider, the origin and diffusion of financial cooperatives, network arrangements, the business model, relationship banking, balancing the interest of members, tax treatment and regulatory framework. The second part has performance and contribution to the real economy as the overarching theme. In this part we consider, efficiency and sustainability, mergers, acquisitions and failures, the benefits (and challenges) of FinTech and the contribution of financial cooperatives to the real economy including during times of crisis. The paper concludes with a summary of what we now know (and do not know) about financial cooperatives and provides suggestions as to where future research may usefully concentrate.     

Breaking down the barriers between econophysics and financial economics

This article highlights the current misunderstanding between economists and econophysicists by adopting the financial economists' viewpoint in order to explain why the works developed by econophysicists are not recognized in finance. Because both communities do not share the same scientific culture, and for the other reasons developed in the article, economists often consider econophysics as a strictly empirical field without theoretical justification. This paper shows the opposite; it also tries to facilitate the dialogue between econophysicists who often do not explain in details their theoretical roots and financial economists who are not familiar with statistical physics. Beyond this clarification, this paper also identifies what remains to be done for econophysicists to contribute significantly to financial economics: 1) development of a common framework/vocabulary in order to better compare and integrate the two approaches; 2) development of generative models explaining the emergence of power laws; and 3) development of statistical tests for the identification of such statistical regularities.     

Anti-money laundering and financial fraud detection: A systematic literature review

Money laundering has affected the global economy for many years, and there are several methods of solving it presented in the literature. However, when tackling money laundering and financial fraud together there are few methods for solving them. Thus, this study aims to identify methods for anti-money laundering (AML) and financial fraud detection (FFD). A systematic literature review was performed for analysis and research of the methods used, utilizing the SCOPUS and Web of Science databases. Of the 48 articles that aligned with the research theme, 20 used quantitative methods for AML and FFD solution, 13 were literature reviews, 7 used qualitative methods, and 8 used mixed methods. This study contributes by presenting a systematic literature review that fills two research gaps: lack of studies on AML and FFD, and the methods used to solve them. This will assist researchers in identifying gaps and related research.     

CEO/CFO characteristics and financial reporting quality: A review

This study reviews the literature on the association between different facets of CEO/CFO characteristics and the properties of accounting information. The review is organized around three broad themes, namely, the association between financial reporting quality and CEO/CFO turnover, the effect of managerial overconfidence on financial reporting outcomes, and finally the effect of CEO/CFO gender on reporting outcomes. This review illustrates the importance of considering CEO/CFO characteristics as an important determinant of financial reporting outcomes. This study offers insights to policy makers interested in enhancing the governance function to enhance the credibility of financial reporting. The review informs regulators that designing governance structure disregarding CEO/CFO characteristics may not bring desired benefits.     

A quality-based global assessment of financial research

We conduct rankings on finance programs based on a rich database of citations for all articles from a set of 23 quality finance journals during 1990–2010. Our work represents a new perspective on the evaluation of faculty research as compared to the traditional counting of total number of publications in the literature. Our findings show that the top-five institutions are the University of Chicago, Harvard University, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University. In general, the top programs are able to produce a large number of high impact articles and a majority of their citations are drawn from premier finance journals. In addition, European and Asia–Pacific institutions are doing very well during the recent years. Our author assessment suggests that for an author with at least five normalized citations per year from articles that appeared in the 23 finance journals, she will be in the top 1.7 % of all authors.     

Derivative accounting and financial reporting quality: A review of the literature

The financial crisis of 2008 increased the call for standard setters and financial regulators to review the effectiveness of derivative regulation in improving financial reporting quality. Prior literature defines financial reporting quality as the extent to which financial statements provide information that is useful to investors and creditors in their investment decisions (Schipper, 2003; Schipper & Vincent, 2003). This review summarizes the empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of derivative regulation in achieving its stated objective. Extant literature shows that although derivative regulations have improved information provided to investors, there is still room for improvement. Recommendations from this stream of literature suggest that the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) require managers to provide more complete, transparent, and forward-looking disclosures surrounding their derivative positions (Campbell, 2015; Franco-Wong, 2000). This review may be useful to standard setters, practitioners, and accounting academics by providing a synthesis of extant academic literature on the effectiveness of current derivative regulation. As the FASB and International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) continue to expand derivative accounting rules, this review may also be useful in identifying areas for future academic research.     

现代财务经济学中一个重大的理论与现实课题--关于按人力资本分配问题的探讨

按人力资本分配是生产力和科学技术高度发展的产物，是市场经济高度发展的产物，是竞争的需要。科学计量人力资本所享的利润，既能确保物力资本保值增殖，有利于资本积累，又可保证人力资本的正当权益，有利于对人力资本进行激励，推动企业发展。     

The economics of conflicts of interest in financial institutions

A conflict of interest exists when a party to a transaction can gain by taking actions that are detrimental to its counterparty. This paper examines the growing empirical literature on the economics of conflicts of interest in financial institutions. Economic analysis shows that, although conflicts of interest are omnipresent when contracting is costly and parties are imperfectly informed, there are important factors that mitigate their impact and, strikingly, it is possible for customers of financial institutions to benefit from the existence of such conflicts. The empirical literature reaches conclusions that differ across types of conflicts of interest but are overall more ambivalent and certainly more benign than the conclusions drawn by journalists and politicians from mostly anecdotal evidence.     

International review of financial analysis: A retrospective evaluation between 1992 and 2020

We provide a comprehensive analysis of the International Review of Financial Analysis (IRFA) between 1992 and 2020 using bibliometrics, regression analysis, and structural topic modeling (STM). Using bibliometric analysis, we find that IRFA's publications and their citations have grown considerably over the years. IRFA also experienced substantial growth in its authors' collaboration network. U.K. and U.S. authors are the journal's most frequent contributors. We use regression analysis to identify article age, a special issue, lead article, European author affiliation, title length and novelty, and the number of authors, figures, keywords, and references as critical predictors of IRFA's citations. Finally, using STM, we find that IRFA's conceptual structure reflects 12 major topics with corporate ownership and governance, and stock market volatility and spillover as the most prominent. The study contributes to the editorial board and other IRFA stakeholders as well as scholars alike. Awareness of IRFA's trends can be pivotal in understanding the patterns in the overall finance domain.