Elections and Capital Flows

This paper investigates the extent to which elections affect capital flows. I find little evidence of political capital flow cycles in advanced economies. In emerging and developing countries, however, presidential elections significantly lower preelection foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows but have no effect on other types of capital flows. Furthermore, I find evidence that these cycles are not caused by economic crises related to elections or preelection manipulation of policy variables. These results suggest that uncertainty about future government policies, which should have greater impact on more irreversible forms of capital flows like FDI, may be an important factor in generating this cycle.     

Firm profitability and expected stock returns: Evidence from Latin America

Despite their higher valuation ratios, larger size, and higher investment needs, profitable firms outperform, in both raw and risk-adjusted returns, unprofitable firms in Latin America. The positive effect of firm profitability on stock returns is pervasive in univariate and bivariate sorts, panel regressions, across sub-regional markets, and among small and large stocks. A five-factor model that includes market, size, distress, profitability, and investment factors prices profitability portfolios better than other popular factor models. Five-factor alphas of profitability portfolios tend to be lower and less statistically significant, both individually and collectively, than alphas from other three widely-used pricing models.     

Disappearing investment-cash flow sensitivities: Earnings have not become a worse proxy for cash flow

According to a recent conjecture in the literature, earnings have become a poorer proxy for cash flow from operations over time. We find that since 1988, when cash flow statements started to be consistently reported in Compustat, the cash effectiveness of earnings has actually increased for a large sample of US manufacturing firms. This occurs despite the introduction of fair value accounting and increasing accounting accruals during the last three decades. Also contrary to the conjecture, using more comprehensive measures of cash flow does not restore the investment-cash flow sensitivity, which continues to be around 0.05 in more recent periods.     

Financial globalisation and the labour share in developing countries: The type of capital matters

In this paper, we investigate how de facto financial globalisation has influenced the labour share in developing countries. Our main argument is the need to distinguish between different types of capital in this context as they differ in their effect on the host countries' production process and vary concerning their bargaining power vis-à-vis labour. Our econometric analysis of the impact of foreign direct versus portfolio investment in a sample of about 40 developing and transition countries after 1992 supports this claim. Using different panel data techniques to address potential endogeneity problems, we find that foreign direct investment has a positive effect on the labour share in developing countries, while the impact of portfolio investment is significantly smaller and potentially negative. Our results also highlight that de facto foreign investment cannot explain the decline of the labour share in developing countries over the investigated period.     

政府质量、市场化程度与现金—现金流敏感性——来自后金融危机时期的经验证据

在中国式经济增长进程中,政府作为"幕后推手"日益引发各界关注。政府的质量取决于政府所提出的制度安排,而企业行为是对政府所制定的制度的反应。本文以2009—2011年我国上市公司经验数据为样本,检验政府质量、市场化程度与现金—现金流敏感性间的关系。实证结果发现,随着政府质量的提升,企业运用内部现金流积累现金的倾向减弱,表现为现金—现金流敏感性降低。同时发现,这种变化在不同市场化程度地区的企业中会呈现不同的特征。具体而言,伴随政府质量的提升,市场化程度较低地区的企业受惠于制度环境的优化,其现金—现金流敏感性显著降低,而市场化程度较高地区的企业这一变化并不明显。本文为解释地方政府推出制度优化经济环境的微观机制提供了经验证据。     

Analysts' Cash Flow Forecasts,Audit Effort,and Audit Opinions on Internal Control

We examine the economic impact of analysts’ cash flow forecasts by looking at how external auditors respond to financial analysts’ issuance of cash flow forecasts. Using a differences‐in‐differences approach, we find that financial analysts’ initiation of cash flow forecasts leads to reduced auditor fees and audit report lags. Moreover, after cash flow forecast initiation, firms report fewer Section 404(b) internal control weakness disclosures. These findings suggest that cash flow forecasts constrain earnings manipulation and improve management accounting behavior, thereby reducing inherent and control risk and strengthening firms’ internal control over financial reporting.     

Financing investment in East Asia: Regional or global savings?

This paper investigates the extent to which domestic investment in East Asian countries is financed by domestic, (East Asian) regional and global savings in order to infer the relative importance of regional vs. global capital markets in East Asia. Panel regression results show that regional saving in East Asia plays a much more important role than global saving in financing investment in the region. The results suggest that global capital flows, despite its huge volume in East Asia, does not contribute to proper investment financing. The results also show that Japanese saving has significant effects on regional investment but Chinese saving does not.     

国库现金转存商业银行的货币效应分析及管理建议

近年来,我国国库现金余额因国家财力增长及预算收支进度不均衡等因素出现大幅上升,闲置国库现金运用对货币供应的影响日益显著。该文根据商业银行资产运用特点,通过模型构建简单分析了国库现金转存商业银行的年度货币效应,以揭示其货币效应的影响因素,并从建立健全法规规章、提高国库收支预测水平等方面,提出进一步完善国库现金业务管理的相关建议。     

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.