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This paper investigates the time-varying relationship between earnings momentum and price momentum. Using a Markov-switching framework, allowing for variation between high volatility and low volatility states, we find that price momentum is significantly more influenced by earnings momentum in the high volatility state. Further for price momentum we find that loser firms display a higher degree of differential response to earnings momentum across the low and high volatility states than winner firms. Limited financing and investor sensitivity to future investment opportunities might explain these two results. Additional analysis indicates that loser firms tend to be more financially constrained. The results are robust using alternative instrument variables.

We show that free agent signings in U.S. professional sports are associated with localized sentiment trading effects. Responses are influenced by player performance, labor contract and sport structure characteristics unique to each league. Football signings lack guarantees and are noisy signals while the most informative baseball signings reflect player performance. Sentiment effects of basketball signings are mixed. Investors respond positively to contract extension announcements, but negatively to new contract negotiations, with either the current team or a different franchise. Exceptions are for free agents with high performance rankings or who are perceived to improve the odds of winning a championship. We also provide some evidence that sentiment trading is driven primarily by retail investors.

After decades of fast growth, the Chinese housing market has become twice as large as the US housing market. In this paper, we examine the effect of the housing boom on the capital structure of Chinese public-listed firms. We find a reverse U-shape relationship between the growing real estate prices and firm leverage. At a lower level of price growth, firms tend to increase leverage to exploit the appreciation of pledgeable assets from the boom. When the price growth reaches to a certain high level, the housing boom creates a positive wealth shock effect on shareholders that reduces the use of debt for their tunneling activities, given that shareholder tunneling is very predominant in China. The wealth shock effect is more dominant when the shareholders’ tunneling activities are more vigorous. Moreover, the reserve U-shape relation is more pronounced for firms with more powerful controlling shareholders, and for firms with high level of fixed assets or in the manufacturing industry. The results are still robust after we address the endogeneity issue that both housing price and firm leverage could be affected by a common factor.

We investigate the relationship between cost management and dividend payout decisions. Prior studies document that firms with consistent earnings or transitory losses tend to pay out dividends (Skinner and Soltes in Rev Acc Stud 16:1–28, 2011). Ham et al. (J Financ Econ 136: 547–570, 2020) suggest that dividends contain information about the level of permanent earnings. In addition, sales changes influence cost management because cost management has a direct effect on earnings. Prior research shows that when a firm experiences a temporary sales decline, managers are resistant to cutting resources (as quickly as they increase resources when sales grow) due to the expectation that sales will rebound (Anderson et al. J Account Res 41:47–63, 2003). We find that cost stickiness is positively associated with dividend yield. Furthermore, we show that this positive association is concentrated in firms with: (a) selling, general, and administration (SGA (b) higher ability managers; and (c) no successive sales decreases.

We examine whether a firm’s voluntary disclosures, proxied by management earnings forecasts, affect its innovation activity. A firm making more disclosures generates fewer patents and lower-quantity patents. Enactment of SOX is applied as a natural experiment for an exogenous shock to voluntary disclosure. Corporate innovation is reduced for accelerated filers, especially after SOX becomes effective. Nondedicated institutional ownership, R&D spillover, and rival firms’ innovation are higher for accelerated filers after SOX. There is more of a negative effect of voluntary disclosure on innovation activity when product markets are highly competitive, industry information diffusion is speedy, and disclosures are more informative.

Regulators and standard setters strive to enhance the transparency of corporate disclosures. To address concerns regarding the improper use of non-GAAP financial measures, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) implemented Regulation G and related amendments in 2003. US firms that report non-GAAP earnings must now reconcile them with the most directly comparable GAAP earnings, which are presented with equal or greater prominence than non-GAAP earnings. This paper examines the effect of Regulation G on analysts’ information environment for non-GAAP reporting firms. Before Regulation G, non-GAAP earnings reporting is associated with less accurate, more positively biased, and more dispersed analysts’ earnings forecasts. By contrast, the quality of analysts’ earnings forecasts for non-GAAP reporting firms is enhanced by higher accuracy, less bias, and lower dispersion after Regulation G. The case for Regulation G making non-GAAP disclosures more transparent may be relevant for regulators and standard setters when considering future disclosure regulations.

We assess information embedded in the difference between the reported book income and the taxable income (the book-tax difference, BTD hereafter) from the debtholders’ point of view. Using bank loan contracts of the U.S. publicly traded companies over years 2001–2017, we find that firms with larger book-tax differences pay higher interest for bank loans than do firms with smaller book-tax differences. Moreover, we find that banks reduce the use of financial covenants while increasing the use of general covenants for borrowers that have larger book-tax differences. In addition, banks are more likely to shorten loan maturity and require their loans to be collateralized for borrowers with larger book-tax differences. Furthermore, we find that the effects of BTDs on loan contracting are stronger if the CEOs of the borrowers are overconfident. Taken together, our findings suggest that larger book-tax differences increase a bank’s concerns regarding a borrower’s information risk and default risk. Thus, banks tend to take price and non-price protection against borrowers which have large BTDs.

Recent evidence suggests that ignoring structural breaks in volatility in financial asset returns can result in overestimation of volatility spillover among markets. This paper examines volatility spillover among major US equity sectors (i.e. Financial, Technology, Energy, Health, Consumer and Industrial) with bivariate GARCH models utilizing daily data from April 2006 to March 2021 after adjusting for volatility breaks. I find significantly less volatility spillover between sector returns after adjusting for detected volatility breaks into a bivariate GARCH model. I also show that after adding volatility breaks into a model the estimated hedge ratios change significantly and show considerably less variability over time, which can result in substantial savings in portfolio rebalancing costs.

Holding earnings surprises constant, investors react negatively to delayed earnings announcements. One standard deviation of delay (5 days) corresponds to about 21 bps negative abnormal returns over a two-day announcement window. We show that the results are robust after further controlling for various firm characteristics, earnings characteristics, and the industry effect. We examine alternative explanations, including the earnings manipulation hypothesis proposed in the literature, which suggests that delayed earnings announcements are susceptible to manipulation and are thus discounted by investors. We find no evidence supporting the earnings manipulation hypothesis. Instead, our results are consistent with the effect of concurrent information disclosure. We show that there is a cluster of bad news for late announcements. As investors react to not only a firm’s own announcements but also concurrent earnings announcements, the negative information of concurrent announcements contributes significantly to lower stock returns. In addition, information update by the management and analysts also has a significant effect on market reactions to delayed announcements. In particular, information update by analysts may help the market to incorporate future earnings information more efficiently into stock prices. We show direct evidence that negative market reactions to delayed earnings announcements contain information of future earnings.

We examine how auditors respond to accounting restatements using audit input data from Japan. We find that audit fees, the number of Certified Public Accountant (CPA) licensed staff, and the number of signing partners are higher for firms in the restatement year than in the year prior to the restatement. Our results also reveal that the increase in audit fees and the higher numbers of CPA-licensed staff and signing partners persist after the restatement year. The results are robust after excluding dismissal of auditors subsequent to the occurrence of restatements. We further find that client firms are not able to gain a fee discount but will be audited by greater numbers of partners if they switch auditors after the restatement. We also obtain consistent results using propensity score matching. Overall, our findings suggest that audit firms increase audit inputs (i.e., higher fees and more experienced staff with a CPA license) in response to their own mistakes (i.e., accounting restatements). Taken together, the results suggest that the increased audit fees may reflect the increase in the risks, but not the risks alone.

The LIBOR manipulation scandal of 2008 spurred extensive policy debates regarding the importance of market-based reference rates. The alternative reference rates committee (ARRC) eventually identified the secured overnight financing rate (SOFR) to be a suitable replacement to LIBOR. In this study, we question the underlying process behind the choice of SOFR as a replacement for LIBOR. Both academic literature and regulatory bodies fail to identify a consistent definition and criteria of a good reference rate. We fill in this gap in the literature by providing an empirically testable ‘checklist’ to evaluate any potential money market rate to gauge its suitability as a reference rate. We also carry out an empirical evaluation of various money market rates against our criteria and identify the 1-month AA non-financial commercial paper rate as the best available replacement for LIBOR.

We examine the effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the financial reporting quality of US firms over 1999–2015. We use accruals-based earnings management as a proxy for financial reporting quality and the index of Baker et al. (Quart J Econ 131:1539–1636, 2016) as an EPU measure to show that they exhibit a positive and significant association. We also find a causal effect by employing three political polarization instruments for EPU. In a cross-sectional analysis, we further show that the positive relationship between EPU and earnings management strengthens for firms operating in politically sensitive industries, for firms in more financial distress, and during recessionary periods. We also provide evidence that increased financial constraints facilitate the positive relationship between EPU and earnings management. These findings are robust to the use of alternative measures of economic policy uncertainty and when we employ real earnings management as a dependent variable. These results indicate that managers aim to provide outsiders with an improved financial position of the company when EPU is high. Our findings suggest that investors, analysts, creditors, and regulators should be wary of firms’ financial reporting quality in periods of high economic policy uncertainty.

In this study, we investigate the impact of social media on future stock price crash risk. A stock price crash occurs when managers hoard bad news over an extended period and disclose all the bad news at once. Using Stocktwits data, we calculate informed tweets measure, which is the number of tweets with hyperlinks to original source of information divided by the total number of tweets. Our results demonstrate that future stock price crash risk is lower when the proportion of informed tweets is higher, suggesting that informed tweets on social media disseminate information and limit managers’ ability to hoard bad news. The results continue to hold when we address potential endogeneity issues using two-stage least squares regression, change analysis, and firm-fixed effect models. The cross-sectional analyses suggest that the effect of informed tweets on social media is stronger when the information environment is lower, further supporting the hoarding aversion effect. The results also suggest that informed tweets on social media serve as external monitoring mechanism. Controlling for alternative information acquisition channels, such as Google or the SEC EDGAR database does not change the inferences.

This study aims to present direct evidence on whether the estimations of Level 3 fair values (L3FVs) are used as an earnings management tool. Researchers argue this possibility but there is a lack of direct evidence. Moreover, this study tests the moderating effect of managerial education level on using the estimation of L3FVs as an earnings management tool. The results show that the firms suspected of earnings management report relatively large abnormal valuation adjustments to L3FVs, suggesting that the estimations of L3FVs are used as an earnings management tool. Furthermore, the results indicate that the graduate education of accounting and financial managers in finance reduces the use of the estimation of L3FVs to manage earnings.

Prior research shows that noisy prices can introduce biases in returns causing equal-weighted portfolios to outperform value-weighted portfolios. In this paper, we reevaluate the superiority of EW portfolios in the presence of market frictions. We find that trading costs have limited impact on the performance of EW portfolios, while taxes cause the performance of both EW and VW portfolios to deteriorate by a similar magnitude leaving the superiority of EW portfolios intact. Besides mispricing, the results for small cap portfolios may also be affected by the size effect. Overall, EW portfolios earn annualized risk-adjusted returns between 1.23% and 1.79% even after accounting for trading costs and taxes.

This study examines the impact of CEO overconfidence on the level of short-selling activity, as proxied by the short interest ratio. This research employs 19,300 listed firm-year observations from the US market for the period 1998–2017. After controlling for firm and institutional characteristics, empirical results show that short interest is positively associated with CEO overconfidence. The findings further reveal that this positive correlation is more pronounced when the product market competition is high and when the firm is more financially constrained. This study is the first of its kind in that it comprehensively investigates the correlation between CEO overconfidence and short interest. The findings serve as valuable references for corporate governors with insights into the overconfidence effect of management. Likewise, investors benefit from information on the overconfidence effect as it allows them to better identify firms that match or do not match their financial goals and directions.

We extend the research on how CEOs address career concerns during their early tenure in firms and we argue that CEOs use a forecast precision strategy to highlight or obfuscate information in a way that may help them convey favorable signals on their abilities. Our findings show that new CEOs are more likely to increase forecast precision when the underlying forecast news is better to highlight positive signals and they will obfuscate more negative news by lowering forecast precision to moderate investors’ negative reaction. Additionally, our results show that CEOs especially use this approach when firms are headquartered in the states that have stricter enforceability of non-compete clauses. We also find that the association between forecast precision and forecast news is stronger when institutional monitoring is weak, CEOs are young, and/or hired from outside the firm. Our main findings remain unchanged when only quarterly forecasts are used in the analyses and are robust to different early tenure cutoffs.

This study examines whether a stronger corporate governance enforcement regime influences the investment decisions of foreign portfolio investors in an emerging market context. Using a natural experiment provided by an Indian corporate governance regulatory reform introduced in 2000, but for which stricter sanctions for non-compliance were imposed in 2004 our results provide strong evidence that governance reforms that include stricter sanctions for non-compliance lead to higher foreign ownership. Depending on specifications, the difference-in-differences estimates show that, on average, the effect is up to 2.8% increased foreign ownership post regulatory reform of 2004. The paper adds to the debate on simultaneity between foreign ownership and corporate governance as we show that in the context of an emerging market corporate governance regulations are extremely important in attracting foreign investors. In the context of prevalence of weak enforcement (of existing regulations) in emerging markets, this study provides empirical support to the notion that strictly enforcing the existing governance regulations has the potential to attract higher level of foreign investment. The results suggest that policy measures aimed at attracting foreign investors in emerging markets should not only concentrate on adopting the best international corporate governance practices but should also signal strong enforcement of these regulations by assigning significant penalties for non-compliance.

We document that diversified firms experience less negative seasoned equity offering (SEO) announcement returns than focused firms. The relatively better SEO announcement stock performance of diversified firms is more pronounced among issuers with operations across unrelated industries. Furthermore, following the SEO announcement, diversified firms’ stock returns exhibit post-announcement drift, suggesting a delay in information assimilation. Our findings support the information complexity hypothesis that a more sophisticated organizational form leads to a higher degree of complexity in information processing by investors, which in turn causes a delay in the impounding of information into stock prices.

This paper provides evidence on the impact of European Banking Union (BU) and the associated Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) on the risk disclosure practices of European banks. The onset of BU and the associated rules are considered as an exogenous shock that provides the setting for a natural experiment to analyze the effects of the new supervisory arrangements on bank risk disclosure practices. A Difference-in-Differences approach is adopted, building evidence from the disclosure practices of systemically important banks supervised by the European Central Bank (ECB) and other banks supervised by national regulators over the period 2012–2017. The main findings are that bank risk disclosure increased overall following BU but there was a weakening of disclosure by SSM-supervised banks relative to banks supervised by national authorities. We also find that the overall positive effect of the BU on bank disclosure is stronger for less profitable banks and in the most troubled economies of the Eurozone (GIPSI countries), while the negative effect on centrally supervised banks is stronger if bank CEOs act also as chairmen (CEO duality). We interpret these findings in light of the fact that the new institutional arrangements for bank supervision under which the ECB relies on local supervisors to collect the information necessary to act gives rise to inefficiencies with respect to the speed and completeness of the information flow between SSM supervised banks and the ECB, which are reflected in bank disclosure practices.

Using data from Taiwan, where listed firms are required to disclose monthly revenues, this paper examines the information value of mandatory interim revenue disclosures. We find that monthly revenue surprises have a significant effect on analysts’ earnings forecasts, suggesting that analysts incorporate such information into their earnings forecasts once the information is available. In addition, monthly revenue surprises significantly predict future earnings surprises, and their predictive power goes beyond the information provided by analysts’ earnings forecasts, suggesting that monthly revenue surprises provide leading information about future earnings growth but analysts do not fully reflect this information. Stock prices drift positively with monthly revenue surprises during the period prior to the quarterly earnings announcement. However, when quarterly earnings are finally announced, stock prices are no longer driven by monthly revenue surprises, suggesting that monthly revenue surprises have been fully incorporated into the stock prices. Overall, our results suggest that interim accounting information helps investors increase the speed of adjustments to fundamental news.

The literature is rich with examples of price clustering in financial markets. This study focuses on the relation between mutual fund ownership (both active and passive) and stock price clustering. To the extent that mutual funds are sophisticated investors, we posit that their trades are associated with lower levels of price clustering. We find support for this hypothesis as total, active, and passive mutual fund ownership are negatively related to the degree of price clustering. Surprisingly, price clustering’s association to passive (e.g. index) mutual fund ownership is an order of magnitude greater than to active ownership.

We find that stocks with low investor attention show a more substantial return-idiosyncratic volatility puzzle than stocks with high investor attention. We also document that high idiosyncratic volatility stocks with high investor attention at the end of the month when portfolios are formed are responsible for the puzzle, but they lose investor attention and have negative returns at the beginning of the next month. We further show that the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle exists only in the first half of the following month after portfolios are formed. It holds even for stocks with low investor attention.

We show how board social capital influences stock price crash risk. Considering that directors are embedded in two kinds of social capital—internal and external—the association of internal and external board social capital with future stock crash is theoretically proposed and empirically presented. A sample of Chinese firms from 2004 to 2018 is used, and findings reveal that internal board social capital—networking experience among directors within a board—increases future stock crashes. By contrast, external board social capital—the external social networks of directors—reduces future crash risk. Moreover, institutional investors’ monitoring attenuates the effect of internal social capital but increases that of external social capital on future crash risk. Furthermore, information quality, accounting conservatism, and tax avoidance are identified as three potential channels, which explain the relationship between social capital and crash risk. The proposed theory advances the understanding that different types of social capital can have a differential effect on board outcomes.

This study examines whether audit firm office size affects auditors’ risk tolerance in making client acceptance decisions. Analyzing publicly traded client portfolios of the Big 4 audit firms from 2003 to 2012, we find that large Big 4 offices are less likely to accept clients with high audit risk. This is particularly true when auditors face temporary capacity constraints arising from the exogenous demand shock by SOX 404 during the post-SOX 404/pre-AS5 period (2003–2007). However, the negative association between office size and risk consideration in client acceptance decisions attenuates when AS5 coupled with the financial recession results in a temporary capacity surplus in the post-AS5/financial crisis period (2008–2012).

Management quality is known to influence depository institution performance, but less understood are the characteristics of managers that influence performance. We empirically examine how the political ideology of a credit union’s CEO influenced decision making and performance during the financial crisis. Our results indicate that the return on assets of credit unions run by conservative CEOs are 22 basis points lower during the crisis relative to liberal CEOs. Returns are shown to be lower as a direct result of credit unions with conservative CEOs applying more conservative accounting practices for loan losses than their counterparts during the crisis, despite similar loan quality.

We examine the change in the level and significance of accrual and real earnings management over the period 1996–2018. Our univariate results show that both accrual and real earnings management continue to persist, although they have significantly decreased over time. After controlling for significant factors that have been shown to affect earnings management, we find that both accrual and real-activities earnings management have significantly decreased in the short term after the regulations, but accrual earnings management reverted back to its pre-regulation levels in the long run. Further, contrary to the findings of prior research (e.g., Cohen et al. in Account Rev 83:757–787, 2008) that managers have shifted away from accruals to real earnings management in the short-term post-regulation period, we find evidence that firms actually reduced real earnings management both in the short- and long-term post-regulation periods. The results are robust to alternative sample designs and inclusion of additional control variables, and go against the widely held beliefs that accruals-based earnings management is significantly less prevalent now than it used to be.

This paper proposes analytically vulnerable vanilla option pricing formulae that simultaneously consider the premature default, the correlation between the underlying asset and the issuer’s asset, and other outstanding debts of the issuer. Our pricing formulae can be easily extended to solve the problem of pricing vulnerable barrier options, which has been rarely studied before. We show that previous studies on pricing (non)-vulnerable vanilla options and barrier options are degenerate cases of our formulae. We conduct numerical experiments to analyze the relations among the financial/contract parameters and counterparty risk, and also empirically evaluate vulnerable vanilla warrants on the TAIEX issued by Capital Securities with detailed studies of parameter calibrations to examine the robustness of our approach.

In this paper, we examine firms’ motivation to conduct an Accelerated Share Repurchase (ASR) comparing to an OMR. ASRs have become the second most popular method of share repurchases in the US. Based on a comprehensive sample of ASR contracts, we find that the cumulative abnormal stock returns surrounding ASR announcements are positive and significantly higher than those for OMR, and ASR market reaction is positively linked to pre-repurchase stock return. The results suggest that firms use ASR to signal short-term undervaluation. We also find support for an earnings management explanation. Our findings strongly support the agency theory of free cash flow explanation for ASR comparing to OMR. The likelihood of conducting an ASR is higher for firms with a larger firm size, higher levels of cash and free cash flow, better operating performance, but a declining investment set. The use of ASR serves as a more efficient method to convey the short-term equity undervaluation and management’s commitment to return excess cash to shareholders.

We investigate the effect of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) on the shares of lead banks in syndicated loans by using quarterly data for the period from 2008 to 2011. We find that TARP capital injections to lead banks have a significantly positive effect on their shares of syndicated loans. Specifically, we estimate that the effect of TARP on the lending of lead banks increases their shares by 6.1% that is equivalent to an additional $50.37 million for an average syndicated loan of $840 million. The significantly positive effect is stronger for a lead bank that is larger, has a greater appetite for risk, and is not under supervisory stress. Overall, our results show that TARP was an effective mechanism for promoting the lending of lead banks. The larger fractional share of lead banks in syndicated loan packages signals both the loan quality and their commitment to mitigating the adverse selection and moral hazard problems. This study sheds new light on the mixed evidence of TARP on lending and contributes to the research and policy debates on the role of stringent supervisory scrutiny in lending.

The market for corporate control offers a rich framework to study the interaction between investment and financing decisions. Do corporations have specific preferences for the means of financing acquisitions, such using cash or equity to pay the claims of the target firm’s shareholders? This study builds a unique sample of 1041 corporate acquisitions over the period 2000–2018 in India, a major emerging economy with fast-growing capital markets. The study investigates separately corporate preferences for the means of payment and the financing sources for acquisitions, using multinomial logit and nested logit models. First, we find that different factors explain the payment and financing decisions. Second, the cash payment decision is best explained by the target’s relative size, greater tender offers, cross-border deals, and cash reserves. Third, the findings are most aligned with pecking order theory and cost of capital considerations.

For a panel of 1880 firms across 21 countries from 2004 to 2008, the impact of firm-level and country-level governance on payout policy is consistent with the La Porta et al. (J Finance 60(1):1–33, 2000) outcome model. In weak legal regimes, dividends increase in firm-level governance. In strong legal regimes, dividends decrease in firm-level governance while share repurchases increase, substituting tax-efficient, flexible share repurchases for rigid dividends. Consistent with the outcome model, payout decreases in growth opportunities when firm-level and country-level governance are high. These results are robust to an instrumental variable approach and alternative firm-level and country-level governance measures.

Default risk increases substantially during financial stress times due to mainly the two reasons: volatility clustering and investors’ desire to protect themselves from such increases in volatility. It manifested in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009 with unpleasant outcomes of many bankruptcies and severe financial distress. To account for these features, we adapted the structural credit risk approach to include both time-varying (return) volatility and risk premium about the return volatility itself. By applying the model to US banks, we obtain better bank default indicators in comparison to the benchmark models. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. University of York; Durham University; Korea Development Institute, KDI We thank the late Peter Christoffersen, Lynne Evans, Jens Hagendorff, Thomas Mazzoni, Aydin Ozkan, Martin Sola and seminar participants at the Durham University, the York University, England, the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, the Korea Development Institute, the Korea Capital Market Institute, the Bank of Korea and the Korean Institute of Finance for useful comments on earlier versions of the paper. Any remaining errors are our responsibility.

We assess the value of frequent issuers to investors in securitization markets by examining the initial yield spread of 6132 European mortgage-backed securities (MBS), covering a 20-year period between 1999 and 2018. We find that frequent issuers have certification value, and it increases as the credit cycle approaches its peak, as lending standards loosen, and information asymmetries in securitization markets increase. Investors value frequent issuers more favourably on riskier, difficult to evaluate MBS. We find that after the great financial crisis (GFC), investors began to attribute more value to frequent issuers, regardless of MBS credit quality. We also find that in the pre-crisis period, investors required higher yields to compensate for perceived rating shopping, which is not observed after the GFC. Finally, we show that investors expect higher yields on deals closed by subsidiaries of foreign banks.

Using a large sample of Chinese firms, we examine if the geographic proximity of audit committee chairs (ACCs) to firms is associated with accruals-based financial reporting quality. We define an ACC who is in the same province/municipality as the firm headquarters as “local” and an ACC who is not as “nonlocal”. We find that a local ACC is associated with higher accruals quality, evidenced by a decrease in the absolute value of discretionary accruals. The improvement in financial reporting quality may lie in the fact that the firms with local ACCs more likely appoint Top10 auditors and/or hold more audit committee meetings. Furthermore, we find that local ACCs are associated with better accruals quality in firms with more opaque information environments and higher uncertainties in future prospects, and that the relation between local ACCs and better accruals quality is weakened in firms with powerful CEOs. Our findings suggest that the informational benefit derived from the geographic proximity of local ACCs outweighs the resultant agency effect on financial reporting.

Using data from 2009 to 2016 data, we investigate the relation between leverage and investment in listed firms in China against the backdrop of rising shadow banking. We examine a component of Chinese shadow banking specifically related to firm financing: entrusted loans that arise through credit intermediation among non-financial listed firms. We identify credit intermediation by estimating the elasticity of liquid financial assets to financial liabilities. Our fixed-effect instrumental variable estimation shows that credit intermediation among Chinese firms positively affects firm investment efficiency. In particular, as firms lend to other affiliated firms, the enhanced lender-borrower interest alignment alleviates debt overhang problem that firms must otherwise fully endure in industries where there is no active credit intermediation. For private firms, affiliation with lending state-owned enterprises is a substitute for political connection, as both forge stronger interest alignment and reduce debt overhang. We observe a similar outcome for state-owned enterprises in industries where credit intermediation is performed by either private or state firms. Moreover, credit intermediation exerts some disciplinary effects on the investment of low-performance firms. Our findings are robust to different measures of firm performance.

This study investigates the impact of both social and news sentiments indices on the dynamic stock–bond correlation across wavelet-based time-scales over the period 1998–2016. Our results show that the news sentiments namely unemployment, tsunami and sanctions exhibit significant effects during expansion at the shortest time-scale of [2–4] days. These predictors remain significant with reverse signs during recession on the long investment horizon. Yet, the predictability of social media sentiments differs from that of news sentiments with the pattern of reversal in sign also presents for some proxies including windstorm and investment flows. Statistically, our further analysis confirmed the predictability of the sentiments out-of-sample. Excluding the news and social media sentiment effects has also resulted in minimizing the value-at-risk of the (40/60) stock/bond portfolios the most at the investment horizon of [32–64] days during recessions. Our results remain the same after performing some robustness checks.

Under Accounting Standards Update 2011-05, firms can present comprehensive income (CI), defined as the sum of net income (NI) and other comprehensive income (OCI), in a single continuous statement or two separate, consecutive statements. We identify whether firms use the one- or two-statement approach for the years 2012–2015 and assess the value relevance of CI, NI, and OCI under the alternative approaches. We find that NI is less value relevant under the one-statement approach relative to the two-statement approach, while the value relevance OCI is marginally enhanced. We also find that the decrease (increase) in value relevance of NI (OCI) under the one-statement approach is driven by a decrease (an increase) in the value relevance of operating income (unrealized gains/losses on securitized assets). Additional analyses demonstrate that the reduced value relevance of NI under the one-statement approach persists only in subsamples that report positive OCI. Our findings suggest that, consistent with arguments put forth in comment letters in support of the one-statement approach, increasing the prominence of OCI may result in investors incorporating this information to a greater extent in their valuation decisions. However, consistent with comment letters in opposition to the one-statement approach, we also present evidence that suggests presenting OCI in the same statement as NI may also draw attention away from the portion of NI that reflects the core operations of the firm.

We examine the effect of the U.S. Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009 on the credit card lending rate pass-through. Our findings show that the Act had no impact on the long-term relationship between the lending rate and funding costs. However, in the short-term, banks were quicker to raise rates in response to an increase in funding costs after the implementation of the CARD Act. Our study shows that financial regulations can have unintended consequences.

We investigate the extent to which a parsimonious measure of maximum likely loss that captures the tail risk of returns—known as value-at-risk (VaR)—explains the relationship between accruals and the cross-sectional dispersion of expected stock returns. We construct portfolios based on Sloan’s (Account Rev 71(3):289–315, 1996) total accruals (TA) measure and individual asset-level VaR, which reflects the dynamic behavior of the asset distribution. We document that VaR is in congruence with portfolio-level accruals and that there is a significant positive relationship between VaR and the cross-section of portfolio returns. Allowing a double-sort involving VaR and TA further suggests that the spread between low- and high-TA portfolios is significantly attenuated after controlling for VaR. We also conduct a firm-level cross-sectional regression analysis and demonstrate that the TA- and VaR-based characteristics—but not the factor-mimicking portfolios—are compensated with higher expected returns, and that VaR neither subsumes nor is subsumed by TA. Finally, our cross-sectional decomposition analysis suggests that the firm-level VaR captures at least 7% of the accrual premium even in the presence of size and book-to-market. These findings lend support for the mispricing explanation of the accrual anomaly.

This study investigates the changes in the marginal cost, revenue, and profit efficiencies after a series of deals by US acquiring banks for the period from 1992 to 2007 using the nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) method and the market reaction model. All the efficiency measures show increases in the first two deals but show significant decreases in the next two to three deals and substantial efficiency increases for the last two acquisitions. The efficiency losers are those that engage in just four mergers. Banks that undertake six to seven acquisitions recover their earlier efficiency losses to achieve a net 12.5% cumulative profit efficiency. The results of the market reaction model show that acquirers lose the most by the time they announce their third and fourth deals, 25.8% and 23.9% respectively, while targets gain the most when they acquire their fourth deal, 34.5%. The efficiency dynamics results show consistency with both the managerial hubris theory, where efficiency gains occur in early deals (first and second), and the learning theory where efficiency measures form a U-shape curve. These results show that the theories are complementary rather than contradictory. Moreover, frequent acquirers tend to be highly profitable, but most importantly they are externally attracted to finding targets with specific characteristics like a relatively small size, high percentage of operating assets, and a high cost efficiency.

This research examines the impact of local and international market factors on the pricing of stock indexes futures in East Asian countries. The purpose of this paper is to present a study of the significant factors that determine the major stock indexes futures’ prices of Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. This study first investigates the relationships between Hang Seng Index Futures, KLCI Futures, SiMSCI Futures, KOSPI Futures, Taiwan Exchange Index Futures and local interest rates, dividend yields, local exchange rates, overnight SP 10 years in-sample data are used for testing and developing the pricing models, and 1 year out-of-sample data is used for the purpose of verifying the predicted values of the stock indexes futures. Using simple linear regressions, local interest rates, dividend yields, exchange rates, overnight S&P500 and ATMI are found to have significant impact on these futures contracts. In this research, the next period close is predicted using simple linear regression and non-linear artificial neural network (ANN). An examination of the prediction results using nonlinear autoregressive ANN with exogenous inputs (NARX) shows significant abnormal returns above the passive threshold buy and hold market returns and also above the profits of simple linear regression (SLR). The empirical evidence of this research suggests that economic statistics contain information which can be extracted using a hybrid SLR and NARX trading model to predict futures prices with some degree of confidence for a year forward. This justifies further research and development of pricing models using fundamentally significant economic determinants to predict futures prices.

This paper examines how a concentrated tenant base affects the operating performance and market valuations of US REITs. We observe that REITs adopting a concentrated tenant base present higher corporate cash flows and lower expenses. However, we identify a concentration discount effect that REITs with a more concentrated tenant base experience lower market valuations. We argue that this concentration discount is a result of the trade-offs between the impacts of the tenant base on the operating performance, risk levels and growth potentials. We find that a concentrated tenant base is associated with higher liquidity risk and lower dividend growth, resulting in an inflated discount factor. Our findings are not subject to sub-samples of focused or diversified REITs and stay robust after correcting for the selection bias as well as controlling for the lease structure, tenant quality and anchor tenant effect.r

This study investigates the effect of news sentiment on stock market volatility using the Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model and measures the asymmetric effect with the GJR-GARCH model. We adopt patented linguistic analysis that considers the semantic orientation process to quantify financial news that may attract investor attention. This study distinguishes between unclassified market news sentiment and macroeconomic-related news effects. The evidence suggests that both contemporaneous and lagged news are determinants of market volatility. The effect is especially strong with the market aggregate news sentiment index (ANSI) and the negative ANSI, particularly during the 2008–2009 financial crisis period. This analysis of news sentiment improves the accuracy of in-sample and out-of-sample volatility forecasting.

This study investigates the effects of foreign exchange (FX) exposure on bank loan spreads. Private bank loans are a major form of corporate financing in both developing and developed countries. However, the international component of credit risk in bank loan pricing has been largely ignored. Controlling for firm- and loan-level characteristics, our results show that firm-level FX exposure is positively related to loan spreads. The results imply that, if other loan and firm characteristics remain constant, syndicated loan lenders view FX exposure as an additional risk factor that can impede future loan repayments. As a result, lenders price borrowing firms’ FX exposure, driven by cash flow volatility and foreign operation. The results are robust to different measures of FX exposure, firm fixed effects, cash flow volatility, and controlling for other confounding factors. Our findings are consistent with those of prior international finance studies that document a positive relation between firm-level cash flow volatility and FX exposure and provide important implications for MNCs and policymakers involved with cross-country operations.

The Campbell and Vuolteenaho (Am Econ Rev 94(5):1249–1275, 2004) two–beta model decomposes the systematic risk in the sensitivity of cash flow and discount rate change. We employed this model, which we call the Two Beta Decomposition Model (TBDM) and found that this model is useful to compute the cost of capital for unlisted companies (UCs) via a proxy from listed companies. This model includes not only the accounting return reaction to long-term changes in consumption, but also links fundamental reactions to temporal changes in risk aversion. We test this model along with three traditional alternatives that are potentially useful in computing the cost of equity for UCs: accounting betas (AB), unlevered betas (UB), and operational betas (OB). Our results show that AB, UB and TBDM can partially explain the cross-sectional variations of stock returns. Additionally, using a series of non-parametric ranking test along with several statistics of goodness of fit, we found that the TBDM is the model that produces the best fit among competing models followed by the UB which is currently the most used among proxy methods.

In this research we make the first attempt to construct automated Bitcoin trading systems that are based on classical candlesticks patterns. We than tried to alter the classical formations for better trading results. Our data consists Bitcoins prices from the beginning of 2012 till the end of July 2020. WE found that that out of the tree classical candlesticks pattern only Engulfing has been fertile in predicting Bitcoin's price trends shifts. The classical Engulfing pattern generated Profit Factor (PF) of 3.54 and $38,349 Net Profit (NP). We also found that using a strength proxy of 0.9% may improve the classical pattern results. The classical Harami formation failed to produce positive trading results and therefore does not fit Bitcoin trading platforms. On the other hand, a reversed Harami was proven to be a fertile Bitcoin trading strategy. Our research also finds that classical four bars Kicker signals seldom appears and therefore cannot help Bitcoin traders. On the other hand, a reversed Kicker pattern has found to be a winning strategy with relatively low risk. This strategy fits particularly long positions with 74.36% Percent of Profitable (PP) trades and 6.92 PF. We also find that all the examined candlesticks patterns better predict long trends than short trends.

We examine the relation between accounting reporting complexity and analysts’ performance and whether analysts’ qualifications, experience, and expertise in specific financial domains help them more effectively process complex information. We document an inverse relation between complexity and analysts’ performance. Further, we show that analysts’ firm-specific experience, industry focus, and CFA certification alleviate some of the adverse effects of complexity, whereas analysts’ general experience does not appear to do so. Using an XBRL-based approach, we also develop new measures of analysts’ expertise and find that expertise in the areas of fair value, derivatives and pension are more valuable than other analyst characteristics in attenuating the negative effects of complexity arising from transactions and events in these areas. Overall, this study underscores the importance of analyst characteristics and the need to simplify the complex disclosures in the notes to the financial statements.

In this paper, we explore the relations between liquidity, stock returns, and investor risk aversion as captured by the variance risk premium (VRP). This is motivated by theoretical and empirical evidence in the literature which suggests that investor risk aversion negatively correlates with asset liquidity, and ample empirical evidence documenting liquidity risk premium. We use monthly US data from January 1999 to December 2018 and show that innovations in the VRP Granger-cause stock returns, which in turn drive liquidity. Our findings are consistent with predictions of prior theories and highlight the predictability of the VRP. They also contribute to the on-going debate on the causal relation between stock returns and liquidity. Finally, we explore the channels through which the VRP impacts liquidity and find that the VRP influences market and momentum factors, and that movements in these factors lead to changes in liquidity. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

This study examines whether investors’ familiarity bias affects their earnings-based equity valuation. Building on theoretical and empirical findings from prior studies, we hypothesize that familiarity bias may reduce the earnings-based equity valuation of foreign firms. We also hypothesize that the perceived link between current earnings surprises and future operating cash flows is one channel through which familiarity bias affects earnings-based equity valuation. Using the setting of the earnings announcements of U.S.-listed non-U.S. firms and U.S. firms matched by industry, year, and firm characteristics, we find that U.S. investors discount the earnings response coefficient of non-U.S. firms relative to that of U.S. firms by 46%. Using analysts’ earnings forecast revisions immediately following the earnings announcements as the proxy for the market-perceived link between current earnings surprises and future operating cash flows, we find that analysts significantly discount the link for non-U.S. firms relative to U.S. firms. Both discounts exist only in the subsamples of non-U.S. firms toward which U.S. investors have a higher degree of familiarity bias. Thus, we provide empirical evidence of the effect of the familiarity bias on earnings-based equity valuation and the channel through which it affects equity valuation.