Search Results
Report
Firms’ Cash Holdings and Monetary Policy Transmission
Liquidity, particularly cash holdings, may serve as an important cushion for firms to absorb macroeconomic shocks such as interest rate increases so that these shocks have only minimal effects on their operations, at least in the short term. For example, to finance their investments, firms with high levels of cash may not have to tap so deep into debt financing, the cost of which relates closely to interest rates. Understanding the role of corporate cash holdings is therefore paramount to formulating appropriate monetary policy in the current environment. This brief informs the ongoing policy ...
Report
How Firms’ Perceptions of Geopolitical Risk Affect Investment
Geopolitical risk has intensified in recent years, driven by events such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, escalating tensions between the United States and China, and conflicts in the Middle East. But how risky is the geopolitical landscape according to US firms? This brief presents a new index based on earnings call transcripts that reflects US firms’ perceptions of geopolitical risk and examines how those assessments affect their future investment, that is, their spending on long-term assets such as facilities, equipment, and technology.
Working Paper
Financial globalization, governance, and the evolution of the home bias
Standard portfolio theories of the home bias are disconnected from corporate finance theories of insider ownership. We merge the two into what we call the optimal ownership theory of the home bias. The theory has the following components. In countries with poor governance, it is optimal for insiders to own large stakes in corporations and for large shareholders to monitor insiders. Foreign portfolio investors will exhibit a large home bias against such countries because their investment is limited by the shares held by insiders (the "direct effect" of poor governance) and domestic ...
Working Paper
Analysis of Multiple Long Run Relations in Panel Data Models with Applications to Financial Ratios
This paper provides a new methodology for the analysis of multiple long-run relations in panel data models where the cross-section dimension, n, is large relative to the time-series dimension, T. For panel data models with large n, researchers have focused on panels with a single long-run relationship. The main difficulty has been to eliminate short-run dynamics without generating significant uncertainty for identification of the long run. We overcome this problem by using non-overlapping sub-sample time averages as deviations from their full-sample counterpart and estimating the number of ...
Working Paper
Analysis of Multiple Long-Run Relations in Panel Data Models
The literature on panel cointegration is extensive but does not cover data sets where the cross-section dimension, n, is larger than the time-series dimension T. This paper proposes a novel methodology that filters out the short-run dynamics using sub-sample time averages as deviations from their full-sample counterpart, and estimates the number of long-run relations and their coefficients using eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the pooled covariance matrix of these sub-sample deviations. We refer to this procedure as pooled minimum eigenvalue (PME). We show that the PME estimator is consistent ...
Working Paper
Analysis of Multiple Long Run Relations in Panel Data Models with Applications to Financial Ratios
This paper provides a new methodology for the analysis of multiple long-run relations in panel data models where the cross-section dimension, n, is large relative to the time-series dimension, T. For panel data models with large n, researchers have focused on panels with a single long-run relationship. The main difficulty has been to eliminate short-run dynamics without generating significant uncertainty for identification of the long run. We overcome this problem by using non-overlapping sub-sample time averages as deviations from their full-sample counterpart and estimating the number of ...
Working Paper
Uncertainty, Stock Prices and Debt Structure: Evidence from the U.S.-China Trade War
Using the recent U.S.-China trade war as a laboratory, we show that policy uncertainty shocks have a significant impact on stock prices. This impact is less negative for firms that heavily rely on bank debt whereas non-bank debt does not have a mitigating effect. Moreover, the mitigating effect of bank debt is concentrated among zombie firms. A zombie firm that derives half of its capital from bank debt has no negative stock price reaction to increased uncertainty. These results are consistent with bank debt providing insurance for zombie firms in bad economic times.
Working Paper
The Impact of Reserves Practices on Bank Opacity
Using a banking firm?s unexpected loan loss provision to proxy for earnings management, it is found to have a significantly positive effect on bank opacity. The explanatory power of earnings management on bank opacity is stronger during the pre-crisis period than during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. When we examine the effects of delays in loan loss recognition on bank opacity, we found strong statistical relations during the financial crisis period, while the results for the pre-crisis period are mixed. We conclude that bank opacity is related to unexpected loan loss provision as well as ...
Working Paper
The Effects of Institutional Investor Objectives on Firm Valuation and Governance
We find that ownership by different types of institutional investor has different implications for future firm misvaluation and governance characteristics. Dedicated institutional investors decrease future firm misvaluation relative to fundamentals, as well as the magnitude of this misvaluation. In contrast, transient institutional investors have the opposite effect. Using SEC Regulation FD as an exogenous shock to information dissemination, we find evidence consistent with dedicated institutions having an information advantage. The valuation effects are primarily driven by institutional ...
Working Paper
Secondary Market Liquidity and the Optimal Capital Structure
We present a model where endogenous liquidity generates a feedback loop between secondary market liquidity and firms' financing decisions in primary markets. The model features two key frictions: a costly state verification problem in primary markets, and search frictions in over-the-counter secondary markets. Our concept of liquidity depends endogenously on illiquid assets put up for sale relative to the resources available for buying those assets in the secondary market. Liquidity determines the liquidity premium, which affects issuance in the primary market, and this effect feeds back into ...