The effect of cross‐listing on insider trading returns

Holding privileged positions within firms, insiders can acquire excessive private benefits based on their informational advantage. The bonding hypothesis suggests that this can be prevented when a firm is cross‐listed on an exchange with higher regulatory and legal costs compared with its home exchange. When cross‐listed insiders buy and sell shares, the returns earned are lower than in domestic firms. This difference is attributable to the increased shareholder protection in cross‐listed firms that constrains the extraction of private benefits, such that when cross‐listed insiders trade, they trade for non‐informational reasons.     

On the Determinants and Dynamics of Trade Credit Use: Empirical Evidence from Business Start‐ups

Abstract:   Business start‐ups provide an excellent opportunity for testing various hypotheses on why firms use trade credit. At the time of start‐up, failure risk and financial constraints are typically large. Also, start‐ups have no established relationships with banks and suppliers. The literature has related all these features to trade credit use. Moreover, as firms grow older, these characteristics become less pronounced, allowing us to test the dynamics of trade credit use. We find that start‐ups use more trade credit when financial constraints are large, when suppliers have a financing advantage over banks in financing high‐risk firms, when entrepreneurs value private benefits of control and when transaction costs are important. Furthermore, the dynamic implications of these theories are supported.     

Data breaches (hacking) and trade credit

This study examines the relationship between data breaches (hacking) and trade credit for U.S. firms. Employing a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we observe that breached firms face shorter payable periods from suppliers than the control group. Data breaches increase the operational risk of breached firms. Suppliers associate high information risk with breached firms. Our findings remain robust to alternative specifications and are more pronounced for firms with no in-house IT expertise and an increased number of stolen records. Overall, our findings suggest that supplier firms become more prudent with the extension of trade credit after data breaches.     

The Determinants of Corporate Trade Credit Policies in a Bank‐dominated Financial Environment: the Case of Finnish Small Firms

This paper examines trade credit policies of small firms operating in a bank‐dominated environment (Finland). We find that creditworthiness and access to capital markets are important determinants of trade credit extended by sellers. The level of purchases is positively correlated with the level of accounts payable. Larger and older firms and firms with strong internal financing are less likely to use trade credit, whereas firms with a high ratio of current assets to total assets, and firms subject to loan restructurings use it more. Negative loan decisions by financial intermediaries increase and a close bank‐borrower relationship decreases the probability that a firm does not take advantage of trade credit discounts.     

How Do Firms Choose Between Intermediary and Supplier Finance?

This paper examines firms’ short‐term financing choices between intermediated loans and trade credit. I test two sets of empirical hypotheses: 1) hypotheses concerning the cross‐sectional differences in the level of intermediary finance for firms that use different levels of trade credit and 2) hypotheses concerning the dynamics of trade credit growth. I find strong evidence that for firms with high agency costs, the use of trade credit facilitates access to conventional bank loans. The evidence is consistent with theories based on the signaling role of trade credit provision and suppliers’ liquidation advantage.     

As told by the supplier: Trade credit and the cross section of stock returns

With superior information about their customers’ prospects, suppliers extend trade credit to capture future profitable business. We show that this information advantage generates significant return predictability. After controlling for major firm characteristics, firms that rely more on trade credit relative to debt financing have higher subsequent stock returns. The return predictability by trade credit is stronger among firms with lower borrowing capacity or profitability, and is more significant for firms with a higher degree of information asymmetry. Our findings suggest that trade credit extension reveals suppliers’ information that diffuses gradually across the investing public.     

The impact of audit committee expertise on audit quality: Evidence from UK audit fees

Governance regulators currently place great emphasis on ensuring the presence of financial expertise on audit committees (Sarbanes-Oxley, 2002; UK Corporate Governance Code 2010–2016). Underlying this is a belief that greater expertise enhances the effectiveness of audit committees and, by extension, the quality of the external audit. This study investigates the impact of audit committee expertise on one measure of audit quality - audit fees paid by FTSE350 companies. Our analysis finds that audit committees possessing greater levels of financial expertise are associated with higher audit fees. When we segregate financial expertise between accounting and non-accounting, we find that the positive impact identified is driven by non-accounting expertise. Furthermore, when we separate FTSE100 and FTSE250 firms we find the impact of financial expertise is confined to FTSE250 firms. Our findings are important as they highlight the usefulness of segregating financial expertise between specialists and non-specialists, something which regulators in the UK and in the USA currently do not do. Our findings also highlight the potential value of audit committee expertise in smaller as opposed to larger listed firms, suggesting that the value of expertise to audit quality depends on the specific financial reporting challenges firms face.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Effect of Financial Distress on Trade Credit

This paper studies the use of supplier's trade credit by firms in financial distress. Trade credit represents a large portion of firms’ short‐term financing and plays an important role in financial distress. We find that firms in financial distress use a significantly larger amount of trade credit to substitute for alternative sources of financing. Firms that are smaller, with less market power, and with more unique products tend to use more trade credit financing when in distress. We also find that firms that significantly increase their trade payables when in financial distress, experience an additional drop of at least 11% in sales and profitability growth over the previously documented 21% average drop for financially troubled firms.     

Optimal versus suboptimal choices of accounting expertise on audit committees and earnings quality

By employing a Heckman two-stage selection model, we identify whether employing a financial expert with or without accounting expertise on the audit committee is optimal and how earnings quality varies across these optimal and suboptimal choices. Using four earnings quality measures (informativeness, timely loss recognition, earnings persistence, and accruals quality), we find no differences in earnings quality between firms optimally choosing an expert with or without accounting expertise, consistent with Demsetz and Lehn (J Polit Econ 93:1155–1177, 1985) and others who argue that when firms optimize their choice (i.e., accounting expertise), there should be no difference across the characteristic (i.e., earnings quality) being examined. We do find, however, earnings quality is significantly higher for firms that optimally choose an accounting expert relative to firms that choose (with/without accounting expertise) suboptimally. Finally, firms suboptimally choosing an accounting expert exhibit no improvement, or even lower earnings quality, than firms that optimally choose no accounting expert. Our results provide important evidence of the impact accounting expertise has on earnings quality when considering the firm’s choice.     

Financial sector diversification and MNC valuation

We extend the literature on MNC performance by examining the relationship between market valuation of MNCs and intangibles associated with financial expertise. We identify firms as having financial expertise if they have diversified their business in the financial sector. We argue that financial expertise enhances the ability of MNCs to internalize financial transactions and take advantage of financing and investment opportunities around the world. Therefore, it is a potentially significant source of market power. Our test results demonstrate that as the degree of multinationality increases market valuation is positively related with financial expertise even after we account for several other control factors. Our findings imply that MNCs with financial expertise can be viewed as possessing an additional intangible, which essentially is the financial equivalent of the traditionally examined intangible assets, such as technological “know-how,” goodwill, and managerial expertise.     

Trading Better Versus Making More: Evidence from an Emerging Market

Using transaction data from Egypt, we examined the controversy over which investor—domestic or foreign—has superior trading performance in emerging markets. We account for informational and behavioral differences across investors by classifying them by origin and type and comparing their performance in trade execution versus profitability. Domestic institutions execute trades at the best prices with the greatest advantage against foreign institutions. This advantage is reduced when foreign institutions focus on large firms and trades. Profitability analysis revealed, however, that domestic investors accrue significant losses against foreign investors, suggesting that trading better does not necessarily translate into making more money.     

Trade Receivables Policy of Distressed Firms and Its Effect on the Costs of Financial Distress

This paper studies the trade receivables policy of distressed firms as the trade-off between the firm's willingness to gain sales and the firm's need for cash. We find that firms increase trade receivables when they have profitability problems, but reduce trade receivables when they have cash flow problems. We also find that a firm that significantly cuts its trade receivables when in financial distress will experience an additional drop of at least 13% in sales and stock returns over the previously documented 20% average drop for financially troubled firms. Moreover, the performance decline of a firm in financial distress is significantly higher if the firm cuts trade receivables than if it does not.     

Audit committee characteristics and financial statement comparability

Financial statement comparability enables weighing the similarities and differences in financial performance between firms. Prior studies mainly focus on the role of accounting standards in the production of comparability, but the role of economic agents has been largely overlooked. We find that a firm's audit committee size and financial expertise affect its financial statement comparability. Financial information tends to be more comparable among industry peers when audit committees are larger and more members have financial and accounting expertise. The effect of audit committee expertise on comparability is stronger for firms with less independent and smaller boards, for firms with non-Big 4 auditors and for firms with CEOs serving as the chairperson of the boards.     

How important are small banks to small business lending?: New evidence from a survey of small firms

Typically, small banks lend a larger proportion of their assets to small businesses than do large banks. The recent wave of bank mergers has thinned the ranks of small banks, raising the concern that small firms may find it difficult to access bank credit. However, bank consolidation will reduce small business credit only if small banks enjoy an advantage in lending to small businesses. We test the existence of a small bank cost advantage in small business lending by conducting the following simple test: If such advantages exist, then we should observe small businesses in areas with few small banks to have less bank credit. Using data on small business borrowers from the 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finance, we find that the probability of a small firm having a line of credit from a bank does not decrease in the long run when there are fewer small banks in the area, although short-run disruptions may occur. Nor do we find that firms in areas with few small banks are any more likely to repay trade credit late, suggesting that such firms are no more credit constrained than firms in areas with many small banks.     

Information technology,organizational design,and transfer pricing

We show how information technology affects transfer pricing. With coarse information technology, negotiated transfer pricing has an informational advantage: managers agree to prices that approximate the firm's cost of internal trade more precisely than cost-based transfer prices. With sufficiently rapid offers, this advantage outweighs opportunity costs of managers’ bargaining time, and negotiated transfer pricing generates higher profits than the cost-based method. However, as information technology improves, the informational advantage diminishes; the opportunity costs of managers’ bargaining eventually dominate, and cost-based methods generate higher profits. Our results explain why firms generally prefer cost-based methods, and when negotiated methods are preferable.     

Do insiders trade on government subsidies?

We examine whether and how insiders trade on government subsidies, a major instrument through which the governments intervene in the economy. Using a novel dataset of government subsidies of Chinese listed firms, we find that net insider purchase increases significantly during the month of subsidy receipt. The effect of subsidies on insider trading is weaker in firms with a more transparent information environment and when subsidies are granted in a more predictable manner. In contrast, the effect is more pronounced for politically connected firms. Further analysis shows that the subsidy-trading relation may reflect both insiders’ informational advantage concerning subsidies and their superior ability to detect mispricing-related opportunities. Our findings provide new insights into the capital market consequences of government subsidies through the lens of insider trading.     

Asset redeployability and trade credit

We examine the relationship between asset redeployability and firms' use of trade credit. Using a large sample of US public firms, we document that firms with more redeployable assets use significantly less trade credit. Our cross-sectional analyses show that the negative relation between asset redeployability and trade credit is more salient for firms with more financing constraints, high levels of information asymmetry, and less corporate liquidity. These findings remain robust to alternative measures of asset redeployability, trade credit, and alternative regression specifications, and they are not driven by an endogeneity problem. Finally, we find that firms with fewer redeployable assets adjust trade credit to the target level relatively quickly when compared with firms having more redeployable assets. Overall, findings from this study provide robust evidence that asset redeployability has an important bearing on firms' short-term financing.     

Improving corporate governance where the State is the controlling block holder: evidence from China

This paper examines changes in values and returns for Chinese firms around announcements of block-share transfers among government agencies, State-owned enterprises and private investors. We find that transfers to all three types of investors result in positive abnormal returns around transfer announcements, even when the transfers do not create a new controlling block holder and when transfers are between State entities. We also find that transfers from State entities to private entities result in larger increases in value and returns than transfers between State-controlled entities – consistent with the superior incentives and expertise of private investors. We conclude that corporate governance can be improved at State-controlled firms by improving incentives and expertise of controlling block holders.     

The Korean Construction Industry as an Exporter of Services

This article analyzes the experience of the overseas constructionindustry in the Republic of Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, emphasizingthe factors that made Korean construction firms competitivein the world market. Korean construction exports to the MiddleEast and the roles of Korean workers, entrepreneurs, and thegovernment are examined. Recent erosion of Korea's competitivenessin labor-intensive construction in the Middle East is discussedin relation to the need to develop expertise in design and engineeringprojects and to increase access to construction markets in developedcountries through bilateral or multilateral trade negotiations.The importance of the issue of labor movement in the currentUruguay Round negotiations in services trade is emphasized.     

Trade credit: theories and evidence

Firms may be financed by their suppliers rather than by financialinstitutions. There are many theories of trade credit, but fewcomprehensive empirical tests. This article attempts to fillthe gap. We focus on small firms whose access to capital marketsmay be limited and find evidence suggesting that firms use moretrade credit when credit from financial institutions is unavailable.Suppliers lend to constrained firms because they have a comparativeadvantage in getting information about buyers, they can liquidateassets more efficiently, and they have an implicit equity stakein the firms. Finally, firms with better access to credit offermore trade credit.