What drives corporate liquidity? An international survey of cash holdings and lines of credit

We survey chief financial officers from 29 countries to examine whether and why firms use lines of credit versus non-operational (excess) cash for their corporate liquidity. We find that these two liquidity sources are employed to hedge against different risks. Non-operational cash guards against future cash flow shocks in bad times, while credit lines give firms the option to exploit future business opportunities available in good times. Lines of credit are the dominant source of liquidity for companies around the world, comprising about 15% of assets, while less than half of the cash held by companies is held for non-operational purposes, comprising about 2% of assets. Across countries, firms make greater use of lines of credit when external credit markets are poorly developed.     

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.     

Fintech and banking: What do we know?

This paper is a review of the literature on fintech and its interaction with banking. Included in fintech are innovations in payment systems (including cryptocurrencies), credit markets (including P2P lending), and insurance, with Blockchain-assisted smart contracts playing a role. The paper provides a definition of fintech, examines some statistics and stylized facts, and then reviews the theoretical and empirical literature. The review is organized around four main research questions. The paper summarizes our knowledge on these questions and concludes with questions for future research.     

Implicit recourse and credit card securitizations: What do fraud losses reveal?

In this paper, we develop and test a model of implicit recourse in asset-backed securitizations. Fraud losses on securitized assets are generally incurred by the bank and do not affect the performance of securitization trusts, while credit losses do affect the trust’s performance and are potentially borne by the owner of the securitized assets. Thus, the classification of losses as either fraud or credit losses provides a potential avenue of implicit recourse to manipulate the performance of securitization trusts. Using annual data from 2001 to 2006, we find that the performance of the credit card securitization portfolio is negatively related to fraud losses reported by the bank. We examine these results in light of the proposed Basel II capital rules and argue that a bank’s incentive to provide implicit recourse will increase under the anticipated regime.     

What do retail FX traders learn?

What is the benefit of experience? Using data from a leading trading platform we find no evidence that retail FX traders learn to trade better, but they do appear to learn about their innate abilities as traders and respond appropriately. In particular, following an unsuccessful trading day, they are more likely to cease trading, to trade smaller amounts and to trade less frequently. These effects are stronger for younger and less experienced traders who might be expected to have more to learn than older, more experienced traders. As regards learning through experience, surprisingly we find that more seasoned traders demonstrate a slight decline in performance once we account for the endogenous decision to cease trading, and even very experienced traders consistently lose money.     

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 learn from ratings about corporate social responsibility? New evidence of uninformative ratings

The rise of investments professionally managed with a socially responsible mandate has generated growing interest in environmental and social ratings. However, it is not clear how informative these ratings are or whether they are distorted by greenwashing. Based on the ratings of the leading provider, I offer the first evidence linking greenwashing to ratings inflation. Better ratings do not predict less future corporate bad behavior. This is of concern because it undermines the signaling value of these ratings. To understand these results, I develop a model where the rating agency may underinvest in greenwashing detection while firms have incentives to window dress and engage in greenwashing. Finally, controlling for greenwashing improves ratings predictive quality.     

Credit risk and the business cycle: What do we know?

We perform a meta-regression analysis to characterize the relationship between ex post credit risk, measured through non-performing loans and real GDP growth. Although the prior empirical literature reveals a statistically significant inverse association, the precise effect of growth performance to credit quality diverges and remains subject to several qualifications. Using estimates from 56 studies and applying a Bayesian meta-regression analysis we explore the systematic patterns of the heterogeneity in the reported estimates. According to our evidence, the specification form as well as features related to the type of data, and the sample period are factors that systematically influence the estimated results.     

Can interest rates really control house prices? Effectiveness and implications for macroprudential policy

This paper investigates how changes in the central bank policy and retail mortgage rates affected real housing prices in New Zealand during the period 1999–2009. We find that real interest rates are significantly and positively related to real housing prices, indicating that increases in the policy rate may not be effective in depressing real housing prices. By testing interest rates, we also find some evidence of housing price bubbles. Our findings suggest that the central bank could have limited housing price bubbles if it had started to intervene in the housing market prior to 2003. Our results set international exemplars for using policy rates or macroprudential tools to cool the housing market, where the extent of policy rate adjustments is limited by internal or external economic factors.     

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.     

Oil price and stock market co-movement: What can we learn from time-scale approaches?

This paper study the relationship between oil and stock markets in G7 countries, by distinguishing between interactions based on fundamentals (long-term interdependence: high memory impact) and contagion (short-term interaction: transitory contamination). To do this, we propose in the first time two complementary frequency approaches based: the evolutionary co-spectral analysis and the wavelet approach allowing a time-varying measure of the dynamic correlation between the oil and stock markets over time and across time horizons. We find that interdependence between oil price and the stock market is more pronounced in the short and medium terms than in the long term. In addition, we prove that stock markets are more sensitive to oil shocks originating from demand shocks. These findings provide important policy implications for both policymakers, in terms of taking relevant actions regarding oil shocks originating from the demand side, and investors, in terms of a policy of diversification that depends on horizons.     

Is managerial ability a moderator? The effect of credit risk and liquidity risk on the likelihood of bank default

This study investigates the effect of credit and liquidity risks as well as the moderating role of managerial ability on the likelihood of European commercial bank default during the period 2006 to 2017. We employ data envelopment analysis and a tobit model to measure banks' efficiency, the z-score to measure the likelihood of their default, and perform endogeneity and model specification robustness tests. Our results reveal that both risks significantly affect the likelihood of bank default and that the high skill of managers does not attenuate this effect. Rather, in the case of credit risk, managerial ability extenuates this effect. Managerial overconfidence and narcissism may explain the latter result. Another plausible explanation is that highly skilled managers who are likely to be rewarded with performance-based compensation schemes may be incentivized to hide bad news for an extended period of time. Such a scenario would increase the likelihood of bank default.     

What do asset prices have to say about risk appetite and uncertainty?

Building on intuition from the dynamic asset pricing literature, we uncover unobserved risk aversion and fundamental uncertainty from the observed time series of the variance premium and the credit spread while controlling for the conditional variance of stock returns, expectations about the macroeconomic outlook, and interest rates. We apply this methodology to monthly data from both Germany and the US. We find that the variance premium contains a substantial amount of information about risk aversion whereas the credit spread has a lot to say about uncertainty. We link our risk aversion and uncertainty estimates to practitioner and “academic” risk aversion indices, sentiment indices, financial stress indices, business cycle indicators and liquidity measures.     

The EONIA spread before and during the crisis of 2007–2009: The role of liquidity and credit risk

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the factors affecting the spread between the Euro Overnight Index Average (EONIA) and the main policy rate of the European Central Bank (ECB). Up until the period when Lehman Brothers collapsed in mid-September 2008, the spread was small and positive. After this point, the liquidity surplus that developed from the fixed rate full allotment tendering arrangement in refinancing operations drove the widening of EONIA spread (trading below the ECB policy rate), although other factors also played a significant role. This paper explains the drivers of spread across alternative non-crisis/crisis regimes. In addition, the paper examines how the EONIA spread reacts to shocks imposed on a range of liquidity and credit risk factors in alternative crisis/non-crisis regimes. The results have implications for factors that should be monitored closely across both regimes, and also the implications that this may have for steering an unsecured overnight rate in crisis times.     

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.     

Implementing statistical criteria to select return forecasting models: what do we learn?

Statisticl model selection criteria provide an informed choiceof the model with best external (i.e., out-of-sample) validity.Therefore they guard against overfitting ('data snooping').We implement several model selection criteria in order to verifyrecent evidence of predictability in excess stock returns andto determine which variables are valuable predictors. We confirmthe presence of in-sample predictability in an internationalstock market dataset, but discover that even the best predictionmodels have no out-of-sample forecasting power. The failureto detect out-of-sample predictability is not due to lack ofpower.     

Monetary policy effects in times of negative interest rates: What do bank stock prices tell us?

This paper investigates bank stock performance following different monetary policy actions in times of positive and negative interest rates. Controlling for the broader stock market, monetary policy announcements that cause an unanticipated downward shift in the yield curve and a flattening of the shorter-end of the yield curve are found to persistently reduce bank stock prices once the interest rate environment is negative. Consistent with the deposits channel of monetary policy, the effects are larger and more persistent for banks that are relatively dependent on deposit funding. By contrast, a surprise movement in the slope of the longer-end of the yield curve does not impact bank stock prices in times of negative interest rates. Accounting data confirm that a parallel drop in the yield curve following a monetary policy decision in a negative interest rate environment hurts banks through shrinking deposit margins.     

25 years and counting of corporate finance: What have we learned and where are we going?

This Special Issue pays tribute to the Journal of Corporate Finance (JCF) and its cutting-edge research. We do this by taking stock of the trends of research published in the Journal over the last 25 years, reviewing areas being researched currently, and offering some insight into fruitful areas of corporate finance research going forward. To that end, the Special Issue includes a blend of articles that represent the past, present, and future of corporate finance research. In particular, we highlight areas of corporate finance research that may be promising and offer insights on the potential of JCF going forward.     

What do we know about the role of financial reporting in debt contracting and debt covenants?

The paper examines the role of financial reporting in debt contracting and in particular focuses on the definition, measurement, and monitoring of accounting-based covenants used to manage agency relationships arising from borrowing by firms. The paper also reviews research in areas of financial reporting where the presence of accounting-based covenants provides incentives to managers, notably choice of accounting method, lobbying on standard setters' proposals, and accounting earnings management. Although US dominated and latterly increasingly focused on large datasets and quantitative and analytical methods, relevant research is available from a range of methodologies and countries and the paper reflects this variety and identifies both inter-jurisdictional differences and inter-temporal changes in debt contracting practices. Despite the extensive research which is reviewed important areas for new research remain.