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Institutional investors appear to have selective preferences regarding corporate social responsibility. They appear indifferent to the presence of positive environmental (E) and social (S) indicators, but underweight stocks with negative ES indicators. This asymmetric pattern is particularly strong for longer-horizon institutions. Our empirical analyses indicate that this pattern is likely driven by economic incentives as the presence of negative ES indicators reflect downside risks: higher stock return skewness and probability of eventual bankruptcy and/or delisting. Positive ES indicators seem irrelevant in this context. Time-varying economic incentives also drive the dynamic pattern of institutional ownership of stocks with static negative indicators due to their controversial products (e.g., tobacco and firearms).

We examine the caste affiliation of corporate leadership in India. We find that the affirmative action policies targeted to the public sector have not filtered into the private sector. Indian boards are not very diverse—usually dominated by directors from a single caste. Boards dominated by one caste also tend to have a CEO from the same caste, putting into question how independent some directors may be. Over one third of the directors are interlocked by holding multiple directorships. However, this interlocking is done with firms dominated by the same caste. Therefore, Indian corporate leadership fails to obtain the benefits of having directors with weak social ties. The lack of caste diversity in boards, CEOs, and interlocks are all associated with lower firm value.

Morningstar’s disclosure of fund level carbon risk (CR) scores reveals that pre-disclosure (environmentally) sustainable funds in the US had lower portfolio CR scores than convention funds and showed a further significant relative reduction post-disclosure, consistent with a causal impact of disclosures. Contrary to perception, conventional funds that are signatories to UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) or those with secondary sustainability mandates appear to be pretentious―behaving more like other conventional funds rather than sustainable funds. Indeed, fund managers are sensitive to disclosures only in the presence of binding commitments to environment sustainability. Sustainable funds lower their CR score by reducing exposure to fossil fuels, not by increasing exposure to renewables.

The underlying physiological mechanisms of biases are not well understood. As such, we examine the impact of testosterone and cortisol levels on several commonplace investment biases using realistic trading simulations. Cortisol, the biological marker of stress, is positively related to the disposition effect and portfolio turnover, which is consistent with the relation between judgment errors and stress in social settings. Testosterone, the male hormone, is also positively related to portfolio turnover, which is consistent with androgen-driven behaviors. Overall, the results show that the endocrine system plays a significant role during financial decision-making, that has important consequences for the financial industry.

For more than 1500 private equity funds in China over the period from 1992 to 2013, we construct fund level performance metrics with investment level return data and examine performance and capital flows. The median (mean) fund IRR, net of fees, is 9.0% (51.7%), based on a sample that controls for survivorship bias. Fund IRRs are neither related to fund own characteristics, such as fund size, nor to overall market conditions around the time when the fund is raised. Competition reduces fund performance: returns are lower when there are many competitors entering the industry at the same time. Although experienced partnerships are more likely to raise a follow-on fund and to raise more capital, fund performance is not related to general partnership (GP) investment experience. Further, there is no performance persistence across funds managed by the same GP. Lastly, there is some evidence of investor maturity when judged on GPs' historical performance. This evidence characterizes a burgeoning yet immature PE industry in China.

We develop and test an ownership structure pecking order. Our ownership pecking order sorts out which structures are likely to have relatively fewer agency costs versus higher agency costs. At the top of the pecking order are firms with a single controlling shareholder, they have the lowest agency costs when that shareholder is not the government. Next is the presence of multiple large shareholders. They are even more effective when the large shareholders are of the same type. The structure with the highest agency costs consists of a single large non-controlling shareholder. Our empirical tests confirm this pecking order.

Can firms overcome credit constraints with a corporate culture of high integrity? We empirically address this question by studying their investment–cash flow sensitivities. We identify firms with a culture of integrity through textual analysis of public documents in a sample of Chinese listed firms and also through corporate culture statements. Our results show that firms with an integrity-focused culture have lower investment–cash flow sensitivity, even after we address endogeneity concerns. However, we also find that for the culture to reduce the investment–cash flow sensitivity, external stakeholders must be able to verify this culture through a low information asymmetry environment. Overall, our findings show that a corporate culture of high integrity can mitigate a firm’s external transaction costs.

How a situation or question is proposed can influence what people think of it. People react differently to “If you quit smoking, you will live longer” than to “If you don’t quit smoking, you will die sooner.” Although both statements provide the same information,...

As a part of the ongoing liberalization of the marketplace, Chinese regulators adopted the guideline called “Regulation of Equity Incentive Plans (trial)” to allow firms to provide employee incentives through employee stock option plans. Firms began initiating the plans in 2006. We investigate the impact of these plans on firm performance by comparing option-award firms with similar non-award matching firms. The change in ROE for the option-award firms is significantly higher than the matching firms. This is primarily due to their performance holding up better during the global financial crisis while the matching firms’ performance deteriorates. The stock price of these firms shows a positive reaction to the announcement, but no long-term abnormal returns. The better ROE performance for option-award firms is strong for subsets of the sample that are likely to benefit more from incentivized employees; specifically, privately owned firms, firms with higher board independence, and smaller firms. After various robustness tests, we conclude that the higher performance comes from the employee incentives, rather than earnings manipulation, a replacement of cash compensation, a binding of employees to executives, or gaming vesting periods.

Compared to matched conventional mutual funds, socially responsible mutual funds outperform during periods of market crises. This dampening of downside risk comes at the cost of underperforming during non-crisis periods. Investors seeking downside protection would value the asymmetry of these returns. This asymmetric return pattern is driven by the mutual funds that focus on environmental, social, or governance (ESG) attributes and is especially pronounced in ESG funds that use positive screening techniques. Furthermore, the observed patterns are attributed to the funds’ socially responsible attributes and not the differences in fund portfolio management or the characteristics of the companies in fund portfolios.

Consistent with the predictions of Brennan and Thakor's (1990) model of shareholder preferences, we find that, on average, institutional shareholders are net sellers during share repurchases. After controlling for liquidity provision and characteristics investing, we find that a one standard deviation increase in share repurchases during a given quarter is associated with a 0.11 standard deviation decrease in institutional investor demand. We estimate that 37% of the inverse relation is attributed to institutional investors executing liquidity provision strategies, 8% is explained by institutions reacting to the investment characteristics signaled by a repurchasing firm. We attribute the majority, 55%, to the information asymmetry between institutions and individual investors. This work is one of the first to exploit the SEC mandate requiring firms to report the actual number of shares they repurchase each quarter, beginning in 2004. Using actual number of shares repurchased, we find evidence of institutional investors increasing their selling as firms increase their repurchasing. This finding is robust to models of endogeneity and autocorrelation in share repurchases and institutional investor trading.

We examine the association between institutional ownership and defined benefit (DB) pension decisions. We find that institutional ownership is negatively associated with pension underfunding, opportunistic increases in the expected rate of return assumption in the presence of underfunding, and significant ownership of the firm's own stock in the DB plan portfolio. Furthermore, these relations are stronger when institutional ownership is concentrated, when institutions are nontransient investors, or when institutions are relatively large. These results suggest that institutional investors are monitoring firm pension decisions, particularly those institutions with stronger monitoring incentives or resources.

Purpose – The authors examine whether the stronger information content of chief financial officer (CFO) insider trading relative to that of chief executive officers (CEOs) results from a different willingness to exploit the information asymmetry that exists between executives and outside shareholders (scrutiny hypothesis) or from differing financial acumen between CFOs and CEOs (financial acumen hypothesis). The authors consider the information content of equity purchases for CEOs and CFOs. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The authors examine purchase-based insider trading portfolio returns before and after the implementation of SOX in firms with high versus low regulation, for routine and opportunistic managers, and in samples of CEOs with prior CFO experience. Findings – The authors provide evidence that SOX affected executives differently and provide support for the scrutiny hypothesis. CFO-based portfolios remain the most profitable post-SOX, but the magnitude of returns has fallen in absolute and relative terms compared to returns for CEOs. Superior financial acumen of CFOs does not appear to be supported. CEO purchase trade returns appear to be lower than CFO returns because CEOs face greater visibility and scrutiny and thus limit their own trading aggressiveness. Originality/value – This research contributes to the literature in explaining why CFOs best CEOs in their insider trading purchases and documents that in the post-SOX period, CFO insider trading superiority disappears.

Japan's most powerful known earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m. on Friday, March 11, 2011. We study the unusual trading behaviors of individual and foreign investors in Japan during the aftermath of this natural disaster. Individual investors typically show contrarian trading patterns, so the sharp downturn in the Nikkei should cause positive net purchases. Instead, purchases were significantly less than sales in the week after the earthquake. Foreign investors typically show positive feedback and momentum trading patterns. However, in the week after the earthquake, they seemed to have stabilized the Japanese stock markets by dramatically increasing their trading activity and net purchases.

Stocks appear to have investor clienteles based on their business practices and products. The variety in expressive benefits each individual receives from owning controversial stocks causes them to modify their portfolio to accommodate their beliefs. We examine the ownership of firms with social concerns and sin stocks (tobacco, alcohol and gambling). Women tilt their portfolios towards stocks with progressive labor policies for women and minorities. Younger investors avoid companies with poor environmental records but seek companies with progressive labor policies. Democratic voters favor stocks with progressive policies regarding women/minorities and gays/lesbians and are less likely to own sin stocks. Christian objections to homosexuality lead their members to invest less in stocks with progressive labor policies for gays and lesbians. The Christian denominations vary, though, in regard to sin stocks. Catholics are more likely while Mormons are less likely to own a sin stock relative to other investors. Socially responsible investors are clearly not all alike. Social characteristics that are important to one investor may not be important to another socially conscious investor.

The typical new start-up firm acquires external financing in stages through its development. Researchers have frequently examined the later stages of financing; however, they have rarely analyzed the early stages of financing. This study examines the determinants of the initial start-up financing of entrepreneurial firms in 27 countries. There are information asymmetries and moral hazard problems inherent in the funding of an initial start-up firm. Empirical results show that institutional investors rely on the experience of entrepreneurs in managing start-ups and the quality of investor protection to reduce moral hazard. On the other hand, informal investors are also common in initial start-up funding. They tend to be attracted to the type of products in the new firm. In comparison, informal investors are likely to have a social relationship with the entrepreneur, and thus have information about that person’s skill and character, which renders entrepreneurial experience less important.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to introduce a non‐normality premium (NNP) to identify the extra return that will compensate an investor for a non‐normal return distribution. The NNP quantifies the economic significance of non‐normality to complement a statistical significance test of non‐normality, such as the Jarque‐Bera test.Design/methodology/approachThe NNP is patterned after the risk premium, the amount that compensates an investor for the risk of an investment. The theoretical NNP is examined on the margins with Taylor series approximation and applied to hedge fund data.FindingsAn increase of 1 in the skewness has the same effect on an investor as an increase in the mean of 2.5 basis points per month. An increase of 1 in the kurtosis has the same effect on an investor as a decrease in the mean of 0.15 basis points per month. A sample of 716 hedge funds revealed that while 72 per cent statistically reject normality, only 29 per cent require more than a single basis point per month difference in the mean to compenscate an investor for the non‐normality.Originality/valueThe NNP allows for a valuation on the higher moments (skewness and kurtosis) of an investor's return distribution. The evaluation is tailored to the individual through use of a utility function. Once applied to an alternative investment vehicle, it is learned that rejecting normality is not sufficient grounds to suspect that the non‐normality is important to investors.

Using a comprehensive sample of 2002 and 2005 U.S. public retirement systems, we found that public pension plan underfunding grew dramatically in these years despite a good economy, increasing state tax revenues, and strong stock market returns on average, plans were only 83% funded. Teacher plans and plans with the most retirees were more underfunded. We found no significant differences related to asset allocations or actuarial assumptions about inflation and rate of return. A primary factor associated with significantly lower underfunding was more female active participants in the plan, suggesting another risk to women's retirement income.

This paper introduces the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal's special issue on behavioral finance in Asia. We first briefly discuss behavioral finance in general, and then we explain why behavioral finance in Asia is an important topic worth studying. We describe the papers published in this special issue, and in doing so, we place the papers within the appropriate context of the growing literature on behavioral finance. We close by acknowledging the referees of this special issue and by offering brief concluding thoughts.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between disclosure level and the cost of equity capital for a sample of international firms cross-listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Increased disclosure has the potential to reduce information asymmetry, reduce the cost of financing and increase analyst following. Using an international asset pricing model, we find that listing firms experience a decrease in both disclosure risk and systematic risk while matching firms do not. Further, we find that the magnitude of the decrease is related to three types of disclosure: accounting standards; analyst following; and exchange/regulatory investor protection. Our results suggest that increased disclosure through accounting standards is beneficial to investors and that disclosure can be accomplished through information intermediaries, e.g., analyst following. For firms with the lowest levels of disclosure prior to cross-listing, all three types of disclosure appear to be valuable.

We examine the operating performance of Thai firms after they go public. Overall, we find that their performance declines. We then explore the relationship between managerial ownership and the change in firm performance. We find that firms with ‘low’ and ‘high’ levels of managerial ownership experience positive relationships between managerial ownership and the change in performance (alignment-of-interest hypothesis), while firms with ‘intermediate’ levels of managerial ownership exhibit a negative relationship between managerial ownership and the change in performance (entrenchment hypothesis). Examining the operating performance of IPO firms from an emerging market and finding a curvilinear relationship between managerial ownership and the post-IPO change in performance represents two significant contributions to the IPO literature.

When government sponsors of public pension plans experience tight fiscal constraints, they manipulate the plans' actuarial assumptions to lower their required contribution. Examining the salary growth assumption, amortization period, and expected rate of return, we find evidence that entities facing financial constraints are more likely to have optimistic accounting assumptions than those which are not. Additionally, we find these plans have a greater propensity for underfunding than plans from less fiscally constrained states. Finally, the problem is further complicated by the political pressure placed on some pension plans. We find evidence that plans subject to political pressure are also more likely to have optimistic accounting assumptions and to be more underfunded than those plans not facing political pressure.

The recent retirement plan debacle of the Enron employees has caused regulators and lawmakers to think about new ways to protect and help retirement plan participants. When investigating participant investment decisions, researchers have traditionally studied the retirement plan characteristics and employee characteristics. More recently, some researchers have extended the analysis to social influences, such as social norms and peer affects. Others have expanded into behavioral finance and examined the role of various psychological biases. This paper combines and summarizes these four sets of influences so that researchers and policy makers can better understand all the influences affecting an employee when making retirement plan contribution and investment decisions.

We find positive and significant wealth transfers from individuals to institutions following a share repurchase. It appears that institutional investors are informed shareholders that use share repurchases as an opportunity to magnify the effect of their informational advantage over individual investors. On average, we find wealth transfers from individuals to institutions in the amount of $910 million, over the year following a share repurchase. In the largest stocks, we estimate wealth transfers to institutions as large as $2.7 billion over the five years following a share repurchase. The firm’s share repurchase activity partially obscures the impact of the institutional trading and the ultimate change in ownership. This result is robust to an array of alternative methodologies. We find that institutions usually own a larger portion of the firm, relative to individuals, after a repurchase, even when they are net sellers. They simply sell less than individual investors. Thus, using net changes in ownership as a proxy for relative institutional investor demand can lead to false inference as to the relative informational advantage of institutional investors in quarters with significant repurchasing activity.

This study investigates the trading behavior of institutional and individual investors around both firm-specific news releases in the Wall Street Journal and macro-economic announcements. For the firm-specific news releases we find that investors conduct a high degree of trading around news releases, especially earnings and dividend news. Institutions buy and sell on both good and bad news, while individual investors only trade on good news. The length of the news article (visibility) is also an important attribute to motivate individual investor trading. Lastly, both institutions and individuals buy large firms after good economic news and sell large firms after bad economic news. The trading of small firms does not appear to be motivated by macro-news.

In this paper, we examine the usefulness of expected rates of return (ERR) for public pension plans. Specifically, we test the correlation between the expected rate of return on plan assets and asset allocation. We also examine the predictive power of ERR on the actual returns of the pension assets. We find that the correlation between expected return and the percentage of assets that are equity securities is relatively weak. Further, we find that the percentage of assets that are equity securities is a much better predictor of actual returns than the disclosed expected return in public pension plans. These results provide evidence to support SFAS No. 87, which requires the disclosure of plan assets and against recently promulgated SFAS No. 132, which eliminates this disclosure requirement. The evidence also supports GASB 25'sStatement of Net Plan Assets.

We examine whether the stronger information content of Chief Financial Officer (CFO) insider trading relative to that of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) results from a different willingness to exploit the information asymmetry that exists between executives and outside shareholders (scrutiny hypothesis) or from differing financial acumen between CFOs and CEOs (financial acumen hypothesis). We consider the information content of equity purchases for CEOs and CFOs. We examine purchased-based insider trading portfolio returns before and after the implementation of SOX in firms with high versus low regulation, for routine and opportunistic managers, and in samples of CEOs with prior CFO experience. We provide evidence that SOX affected executives differently and provide support for the scrutiny hypothesis. CFO-based portfolios remain the most profitable post-SOX, but the magnitude of returns has fallen in absolute and relative terms compared to returns for CEOs. Superior financial acumen of CFOs does not appear to be supported. CEO purchase trade returns appear to be lower than CFO returns because CEOs face greater visibility and scrutiny and thus limit their own trading aggressiveness.

Behavioral finance : an overview / Kent H. Baker, John R. Nofsinger -- Traditional versus behavioral finance / Robert J. Bloomfield -- Behavioral finance : application and pedagogy in business education and training / Rassoul Yazdipour, James A. Howard -- Heuristics (rules of thumb) / Hugh Schwartz -- Neuroeconomics and neurofinance / Richard L. Peterson -- Emotional finance / Richard J. Taffler, David A. Tuckett -- Experimental finance / Robert J. Bloomfield, Alyssa Anderson -- The psychology of risk and uncertainty / Victor Ricciardi.

We examine the relation between minority shareholder protection laws, ownership concentration, and board independence. Minority shareholder rights is a country-level governance variable. Ownership structure and board composition represent firm-level governance variables. Prior research hypothesizes anddocuments a negative relation between countries' minority shareholder rights quality and firms' ownership concentration. We introduce the hypothesis that shareholder protection rights and firms' board independence are positively related. When a country's minority shareholder rights are strong, thenminority shareholders should have the legal power to affect board composition. Using a sample of large firms from 14 European countries, we test both hypotheses and find that countries with stronger shareholder protection rights have firms with lower ownership concentrations and with more independent directors, consistent with both hypotheses. We also find evidence that ownership concentration and board independence are negatively related.

This study tests the hypothesis that non-domestic cross-listing is associated with increased firm visibility. We examine visibility changes on the two exchanges with the largest number of non-domestic listings: the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Noting that the costs associated with NYSE listing are greater than those for LSE listing, we also test the hypothesis that non-domestic cross-listing on the NYSE is associated with larger visibility increases than LSE listing. Our proxies for visibility are analyst coverage and media attention. Our tests using analyst coverage generally support our hypothesis that non-domestic cross-listing increases visibility, while tests using media attention provide partial support of the hypothesis. Further empirical tests support the hypothesis that non-domestic cross-listing on the NYSE is associated with a larger visibility increase than on the LSE, which partially compensates firms for the higher costs associated with NYSE listing. All of our results are robust to conditioning on the firm's home country capital market type (developed or emerging); the country's geographical region; analysts' tendencies to initiate coverage on firms with good prospects; and the popularity of a firm's industry or country.

This paper documents the emergence of economically targeted investments (ETIs) and social investments on pension funds. We find that these dual purpose investments are usually concessionary and reduce portfolio investment return. When fiduciary standards are weakened, public pension fund assets become easily abused by political objectives. Pension beneficiaries suffer by reduced investment returns, increased underfunding, and unfriendly actuarial assumptions. We also review the recommendations and policy implications of the Department of Labor's Work Group on Economically Targeted Investments. This Work Group is trying to allow, even encourage, private pension funds to invest in ETIs.