The Impact of Ambiguity on Managerial Investment and Cash Holdings

Standard finance theory suggests that managers invest in projects that, in expectation, produce returns that justify the use of capital. An underlying assumption is that managers have the information necessary to understand the distributional properties of the pay‐offs underlying the decision. This paper examines firm investment behavior when managers are likely to find it more challenging to develop expectations of pay‐offs, namely during periods of increased macroeconomic ambiguity. In particular, we examine how macroeconomic ambiguity – proxied by the variance premium (Drechsler, 2010 ) and the dispersion in forecasts of corporate profits from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (Anderson et al., 2009 ) – impacts managerial capital investment and cash holdings. Consistent with ambiguity theory, we find that macroeconomic ambiguity is negatively associated with capital investment and positively associated with cash holdings. These results are robust to alternative explanations related to risk, investor sentiment and economic conditions. Moreover, consistent with recent theoretical real options literature, we find that ambiguity reduces the value of investment opportunities, while risk increases the value of such opportunities. Overall, these findings provide initial empirical evidence on the economic distinction between ambiguity and risk with respect to managerial investment and cash holdings.     

企业供应链占资与税务筹划:调节效应及影响因素的分析与检验

供应链占资是企业经营过程中普遍存在的现象,本文从税务筹划动机的视角探讨企业供应链净占资对其税务筹划程度的影响。研究发现,企业的供应链净占资与税务筹划程度显著正相关。进一步研究发现,对财务人员实施股权激励的企业,供应链净占资对企业进行税务筹划的正向边际作用更大;高现金流风险会放大供应链净占资对税务筹划的正向影响。本文丰富和拓展了企业税务筹划影响因素的相关研究,为政府在供给侧改革过程中有效减轻企业税费负担提供参考。     

Which Net Capital Flows Matter?

This article classifies extreme net capital flow episodes into four types and analyzes the macroeconomic impacts of each type. First, we find that all types of episodes increased drastically in the 2000s relative to previous years. Second, we conclude that liability-flow-driven episodes have more significant macroeconomic impacts than do asset-flow-driven episodes. Third, we show that only drastic positive net capital flows that were driven by liability flows were associated with a higher probability of banking crises in the 2000s. The results suggest that the detailed classification of extreme net capital flows provides insight into these movements’ macroeconomic impacts and policy implementations.     

区域中心城市创新生态圈要素架构、生态特征与运行机制

区域中心城市创新生态圈以生物学为隐喻，注重发挥创新主体的能动作用，能够放大区域中心城市发展优势。在回顾创新生态圈理论渊源的基础上，界定区域中心城市创新生态圈内涵，明确创新生态圈要素构成；以企业聚集发展为逻辑起点，探讨区域中心城市创新生态圈生态特征；基于生态学、创新理论等跨学科知识，构建区域中心城市创新生态圈演进模型，探究其运行机制。研究认为，区域中心城市创新生态圈具有开放式协同、动态自调节、多样性共生、自组织演化等生态特征，其运行机制由协同共生机制、风险识别与防控机制、利益分配机制和环境匹配机制共同组成。     

Corporate Cash Holding in Asia

In this paper, we analyze the determinants of corporate saving in the form of changes in cash holdings for 11 Asian economies using firm‐level data from the Oriana Database for the 2002–2011 period. We find some evidence that cash flow has a positive impact on the change in cash holdings (i.e. that the cash flow sensitivity of cash is positive) and that the positive impact of cash flow on the change in cash holdings is larger and more significant in the case of smaller and presumably more constrained firms than in the case of larger and presumably less constrained firms in both developed and developing economies. Both of these findings corroborate the importance of financial constraints in Asian firms. In addition, we find that the cash flow sensitivity of cash declined after the global financial crisis and that Tobin's q has a positive impact on the change in cash holdings, especially in the case of larger and presumably unconstrained firms.     

FX Intervention in the New Keynesian Model

We develop an open-economy New Keynesian Model with foreign exchange (FX) intervention in the presence of a financial accelerator and shocks to risk appetite in international capital markets. We obtain closed-form solutions for optimal monetary and FX intervention policies assuming the central bank cannot commit to future policies, and we compare the solution to that under policy commitment. We show how FX intervention can help reduce the volatility of the exchange rate, of inflation, and of the output gap, thus mitigating welfare losses associated with shocks in the international capital markets. We also show that, when the financial accelerator is strong, there is a risk of indeterminacy (self-fulfilling currency and inflation movements) although FX intervention can reduce this risk and thus reinforce the credibility of the inflation targeting regime. Model simulations match well the impact of a VIX shock obtained by local projections on a panel of inflation targeting emerging markets.     

Credit card cash‐out as informal financing: Evidence from China

Using a proprietary account‐level database from a commercial bank in China, we document that credit card holders can ease their credit constraints through the practice of cash‐out based on bogus transactions using credit cards. We find that such behaviour might be beneficial to both cardholders and banks. First, we find that a 1% increase in the cumulative number of credit card cash‐out transactions lowers the probability of default by 9.59%. Second, for private businesses, a 1% increase in the number of abnormal cash‐out transactions lowers overdue risk by 13.45%. Third, by lowering the overdue risk, the card‐issuing bank earns a larger profit. Our results are consistent with the notion that unconventional credit card cash‐out can mitigate the extent of capital misallocation in emerging markets.     

Relationship between foreign capital flows,domestic investment and savings in the SADC region

The importance of foreign capital in the domestic economy cannot be underestimated as it bridges the gap between domestic capital demand and supply. Given this background the paper studies the relationship between the different types of foreign capital flows in the Southern Africa Development Region (SADC) region – foreign direct investment (FDI), remittances, cross border bank flows (CBF), overseas development assistance (ODA) – and domestic savings and investment, employing the panel cointegration test and the dynamic ordinary least squares method (DOLS). The empirical results reveal that there is a strong positive relationship between domestic investment and domestic savings, FDI and remittances. These findings indicate that FDI remittances help in overcoming the limits on the domestic capital formation in the SADC region through permitting a rate of investment which is in excess of that which can be generated by domestic savings. Important policy implications on attracting foreign capital flows are discussed in the paper.     

What is the major determinant of cross-border banking flows?

This study examines the major determinant of cross-border credit flows through global banks across 70 countries. Employing a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model, we decompose volatilities of banking flows into the contribution of a global common factor, regional common factor, and country-specific factor. The results indicate that the global and regional common factor explains about 40–50 percent of volatility in overall cross-border banking flows. In particular, the contribution of the global common factor increased in the 2000s. Simultaneously, main determinants are largely heterogeneous across countries: this implies that the desirable policy response to credit inflows may differ for each host country.     

Does the value of cash holdings deteriorate or improve with material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting?

We find that cash holdings are more valuable for firms disclosing material weaknesses in the Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) 404 internal control assessments. We estimate that the value spread for firms with weak controls vs. effective controls is about $0.25 for an extra dollar of cash. Our results are not driven by account-level weaknesses but by more severe, company-level weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting (ICFR). Further, the economic consequences of cash resources significantly decrease with the remediation of previously reported material weaknesses. These results suggest that the favorable (precautionary) impact induced by weak ICFR appears to more than offset the adverse (agency) effect entailed by ineffective ICFR. Overall, our results survive alternative variable specifications, sample splits, matched sample analyses, and a variety of controls.