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This study investigates the impact of foreign institutional investors (FIIs) on corporate green innovation. We manually collected data on foreign institutional ownership (FIO) from 34 international jurisdictions between 2009 and 2020. We find that FIO has a positive, robust, and causal effect on the green innovation practices of Chinese listed companies. Moreover, our heterogeneity analyses indicate that this positive effect is more pronounced for FIIs originating from jurisdictions exhibiting greater environmental consciousness of and advancements in green technology as well as for those FIIs committed to the United Nations—supported Principles of Responsible Investment. Furthermore, we provide evidence suggesting that environmental information disclosure and monitoring serve as potential mechanisms through which FIIs catalyze corporate green innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Korean firms that are cross-listed in the US market, this paper investigates whether there are standalone effects of geographic and market proximity of institutional investors on monitoring performance. We find that Korean institutional ownership is negatively associated with earnings management while the US institutional ownership has no impact on earnings management. This suggests that there is the geographic proximity advantage over the market proximity advantage in the emerging markets. Furthermore, we also show that the impact of geographic proximity is stronger for firms with high informational opacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the role of institutional investors on firm value in Brazil. Given this purpose, we construct a longitudinal dataset of Brazilian companies in which 2,019 distinct institutional investors from 47 countries had equity holdings from 2009 to 2018. In contrast with previous studies, panel data regressions indicate that foreign institutional ownership decreases corporate value, even when we mitigate for endogeneity concerns through the generalized method of moments estimator. Additionally, the negative effect of foreign institutional ownership on firm value is greater during times of high political uncertainty. Our findings suggest that foreign institutional investors may induce family-controlling shareholders to adopt short-term strategies that destroy company value, which is consistent with the "locust foreign capital" view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates: (i) the effect of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) engagement and ownership attributes on firm performance and (ii) whether different ownership attributes (institutional, foreign, and state ownership) moderate the association between ESG engagement and firm performance. Employing an extensive sample from 22 emerging countries worldwide, we provide cross-country evidence that ESG engagement and its three pillars, i.e. environmental, social, and governance pillars, enhance firm performance, proxied with ROA and Tobin's Q. Moreover, institutional and foreign ownership positively impact firm performance. We present novel evidence that the positive impact of superior ESG engagement on firm performance is lower for higher institutional ownership companies than lower institutional ownership companies, but greater for higher foreign ownership companies than lower foreign ownership companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a comprehensive sample of Chinese-listed firms and the generalized difference-in-differences (DID) approach, we find that information quality significantly improves after an exogenous removal of short selling ban. Treated firms engage less in accruals management and experience fewer restatements. Auditors exert more effort and spend more time in auditing financial statements. We further demonstrate that the improvement of information quality is driven by increased investor attention and media coverage of the treated firms. The results are more pronounced in firms with lower institutional ownership and in non-state-owned firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate how the financialization of nonfinancial corporations (NFCs) affects corporate risk-taking. We find that NFCs' financialization has an adverse effect on corporate risk-taking, supporting the "crowding-out" effect. Short-term financial investments undermine firms' incentives to chase risky but profitable investment projects. The negative association between NFCs' financialization and corporate risk-taking is more pronounced in state-owned enterprises and firms with lower institutional ownership, showing that financialization leads managers to become more myopic and reduce long-term investments. Further, the sensitivity of financialization and corporate risk-taking varies with financial asset classification. We address both selection and endogeneity concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2007 to 2017, this paper examines the impact of Confucianism on earnings management. We find that Confucianism is significantly negatively associated with earnings management. Further analyses suggest that the inhibitory effect of Confucianism on earnings management is more pronounced when firms have weak monitoring mechanisms such as poorer corporate governance, lower institutional ownership, and less analyst coverage. Moreover, only Confucianism has a significant restraining effect on earnings management after controlling for both Confucianism and religion. Overall, our study not only contributes to the literature on earnings management from the perspective of informal systems but also deepens our understanding of the economic consequences of Confucianism at the firm-level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a hand-collected database, we evaluate 328 illegal insider trading cases in the Chinese financial market from 2007 to 2018. Insiders, on average, make less profits than a single buy-and-hold strategy in the same period. This low performance is exacerbated when target firms are state-owned and with high institutional ownership. A firm's size, 6-month past returns, debt ratio, and firm age have marginal impacts on the illegal returns. Two potential mechanisms derived from the US market are tested but they show divergent roles in our model setting. This study calls for alternative mechanisms in understanding market efficiency in emerging markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study examines the influence of institutional investors on firm investment efficiency based on nonfinancial firms listed on Chinese stock exchanges over the period 2009–2014. Our results show that institutional ownership generally improves firm investment efficiency. However, after considering the independence of institutional ownership, we find that only pressure-resistant institutional ownership increases firm investment efficiency by alleviating both overinvestment and underinvestment. We also find that the pressure-resistant institutional investors' horizon matters. In particular, pressure-resistant institution investors who have higher shareholdings are more stable—that is, they tend to hold shares longer and thus have a more intensive effect on firm investment efficiency. Our results also show that relaxing external financing constraints, reducing agency costs, and increasing executive incentives significantly improve firm investment efficiency. The results are robust to controlling for endogeneity. Documenting the positive influence that pressure-resistant institutional investors have on firm investment efficiency and the channels through which they improve firm investment efficiency should be of interest to investors, regulators, and academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the influence of trust beneficiary protection on the risk-taking level of trust companies is examined by using a sample of 45 trust companies from 2006 to 2012. Quantified assessment indicators are established to evaluate the protection of trust beneficiaries. The results show that concentrated ownership reduces risk taking in state-controlled trust companies. And in regions with better legal systems, the inhibition of beneficiary protection over trust company risk taking is stronger. Additionally, further analysis shows that risk taking is beneficial to the performance of trust companies, and inertia is observed in trust company risk taking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Institutional ownership is an important factor in corporate governance. Institutional investors play important roles in firms because of their substantial shareholdings and their capability to monitor managers. However, the question is whether they are capable of monitoring the managers. The literature has provided different evidence for the monitoring role of institutional investors. This study attempts to provide insights into the monitoring roles of institutional investors by examining the relationship between institutional ownership and earnings quality on the Tehran Stock Exchange. Institutional investors are classified into two groups, namely active institutional investors and passive institutional investors, based on their monitoring power in Iran. A multidimensional method is used to measure the various aspects of earnings quality, such as earnings response coefficient, predictive value of earnings, discretionary accruals, conservatism, and real earnings management. The results show that institutional ownership has a positive effect on earnings quality. Similar to total institutional ownership, active institutional ownership has positive effects on proxies of earnings quality. Nonetheless, passive institutional ownership does not have any power to affect earnings quality. Moreover, lead-lag tests of the direction of causality suggest that institutional ownership leads to more earnings quality and not the reverse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We investigate whether ultimate ownership affects firms’ adjustment speed toward target capital structures for Chinese publicly listed companies over the period 1999–2009. We divide our sample into state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-SOEs according to their ultimate ownership. We find that SOEs have higher leverage ratios and slower adjustment speeds toward target capital structures. Our results are consistent with the trade-off theory, implying that the political resources of SOEs can lead to a higher persistence and slower leverage adjustment speeds in comparison to non-SOEs. Finally, our results also raise a question: Why do Chinese companies adjust their capital structure so fast? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a search frequency index from Baidu.com as a measure of investor attention, we find that investor attention has a significant and positive effect on the stock return within a week in China’s stock market. This effect is reversed from the second week on, but the transitory positive effect in the beginning cannot be completely offset by the reversal of stock returns within a year. It was further found in this study that a higher fraction of institutional ownership yields weaker transitory effects from investor attention on the stock return the next week and stronger return reversals after a month. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objective of this study was to examine, using a vector autoregressive model, whether the difference in earnings growth rates caused different reaction speeds in stock prices. Monthly returns of stocks listed in the Taiwan stock market from May 2003 to April 2013 were used as empirical data in this study. The analytical results showed that the returns of portfolios with higher earnings growth rates significantly led those portfolios with lower earnings growth rates when size, trading volume, institutional ownership ratio, and revenue factors were controlled, respectively. This paper finds that the earnings growth rate is a significant determinant of the lead-lag patterns observed in monthly stock returns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we empirically examine the determinants of capital structure in China, using 1,006,395 firm-year observations spanning 1998-2007. Consistent with the general findings in developed markets, we find that the long-term debt ratio is positively related to firm size and asset tangibility while negatively related to profitability and growth opportunities. We also conclude that the long-term debt ratio is positively related to state ownership and legal-person institutional ownership, consistent with the political patronage hypothesis that firms in which the government has more of a stake are more likely to incur long-term debts. These results are robust to a battery of validity checks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of shareholding stability of institutional investors on firm performance. We analyze 647 sample companies listed in the Taiwan Stock Exchange from 2005 to 2009 using the coefficient of variance of institutional holding proportion as the measure for ownership stability. The empirical results show that increasing stability of institutional holdings is related to better firm performance. The low-risk and younger firms with higher CEO incentive compensation, larger insider holdings, and higher growth usually have better performance. Furthermore, when the long-term institutional shareholdings, particularly of foreign institutions, are higher, the firm performance is better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reexamines the relationship between ownership and firm performance. Using an unbalanced panel data in the emerging Taiwan market, we adopt a simultaneous equations framework to explore the persistence of the relationship across the life cycle of firms over time. Empirical results suggest that firm performance is a function of institutional ownership, especially in the mature stage. Through dynamic specification, evidence appears to account for lack of persistence of the impacts of ownership on performance over time. To alleviate a potential simultaneity issue, we construct a lagged specification to examine the sensitivity of our results. Consequently, the main results are found to be robust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]