This study investigates a particularly brazen form of corporate abuse, in which controlling shareholders use intercorporate loans to siphon billions of RMB from hundreds of Chinese listed companies ...during the 1996–2006 period. We document the nature and extent of these transactions, evaluate their economic consequences, examine factors that affect their cross-sectional severity, and report on the mitigating roles of auditors, institutional investors, and regulators. Collectively, our findings shed light on the severity of the minority shareholder expropriation problem in China, as well as the relative efficacy of various legal and extra-legal governance mechanisms in that country.
Technological links and predictable returns Lee, Charles M.C.; Sun, Stephen Teng; Wang, Rongfei ...
Journal of financial economics,
06/2019, Volume:
132, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Employing a classic measure of technological closeness between firms, we show that the returns of technology-linked firms have strong predictive power for focal firm returns. A long-short strategy ...based on this effect yields monthly alpha of 117 basis points. This effect is distinct from industry momentum and is not easily attributable to risk-based explanations. It is more pronounced for focal firms that: (a) have a more intense and specific technology focus, (b) receive lower investor attention, and (c) are more difficult to arbitrage. Our results are broadly consistent with sluggish price adjustment to more nuanced technological news.
Using a database of more than 1.85 million retail investor transactions over 1991-1996, we show that these trades are systematically correlated-that is, individuals buy (or sell) stocks in concert. ...Moreover, consistent with noise trader models, we find that systematic retail trading explains return comovements for stocks with high retail concentration (i.e., small-cap, value, lower institutional ownership, and lower-priced stocks), especially if these stocks are also costly to arbitrage. Macroeconomic news and analyst earnings forecast revisions do not explain these results. Collectively, our findings support a role for investor sentiment in the formation of returns.
Applying a “co-search” algorithm to Internet traffic at the SEC׳s EDGAR website, we develop a novel method for identifying economically related peer firms and for measuring their relative importance. ...Our results show that firms appearing in chronologically adjacent searches by the same individual (Search-Based Peers or SBPs) are fundamentally similar on multiple dimensions. In direct tests, SBPs dominate GICS6 industry peers in explaining cross-sectional variations in base firms׳ out-of-sample: (a) stock returns, (b) valuation multiples, (c) growth rates, (d) R&D expenditures, (e) leverage, and (f) profitability ratios. We show that SBPs are not constrained by standard industry classification, and are more dynamic, pliable, and concentrated. We also show that co-search intensity captures the degree of similarity between firms. Our results highlight the potential of the collective wisdom of investors — extracted from co-search patterns — in addressing long-standing benchmarking problems in finance.
We show that analyst coverage proxies contain information about expected returns. We decompose analyst coverage into abnormal and expected components using a simple characteristic-based model and ...show that firms with abnormally high analyst coverage subsequently outperform firms with abnormally low coverage by approximately 80 basis points per month. We also show abnormal coverage rises following exogenous shocks to underpricing and predicts improvements in firms’ fundamental performance, suggesting that return predictability stems from analysts more heavily covering underpriced stocks. Our findings highlight the usefulness of analysts’ actions in expected return estimations, and a potential inference problem when coverage proxies are used to study information asymmetry and dissemination.
Between 2010 and 2017, Chinese investors used an investor interactive platform (IIP) to ask public companies around 2.5 million questions, the vast majority of which received a reply within two ...weeks. We analyze these IIP dialogues using a BERT-based algorithm and provide preliminary evidence on their causes and consequences. Our analyses show most questions reflect investors’ difficulties in processing information already in the public domain. Controlling for other news, higher IIP activity is associated with increases in trading volume, return volatility, market liquidity, and price informativeness as well as decreases in bid-ask spread. Financial statement-related postings increase around the adoption of new accounting standards. Collectively, our results show that investors face significant information processing costs but that IIP activities help reduce these costs, leading to improvements in stock price formation.
Using bottom-up information from corporate financial statements, we examine the relation between aggregate investment, future equity returns, and investor sentiment. Consistent with the business ...cycle literature, corporate investments peak during periods of positive sentiment, yet these periods are followed by lower equity returns. This pattern exists in most developed countries and survives controls for discount rates, equity flows, valuation multiples, operating accruals, and other investor sentiment measures. Higher aggregate investments also precede greater earnings disappointments, lower short-window earnings announcement returns, and lower macroeconomic growth. We conclude aggregate corporate investment is an alternative, and possibly sharper, measure of market-wide investor sentiment.
ABSTRACT
We develop and evaluate an accounting-based Loan Portfolio Risk (LPR) variable that captures time-varying contagion effects in default risk for a portfolio of bank loans. Our results show ...that an Equity-to-LPR ratio (ELPR) is additive in predicting bank failure up to five years in advance, after controlling for all the capital adequacy, asset quality, management experience, earnings, liquidity, and sensitivity to market risks (CAMELS) variables as well as other fundamental-based bank risk measures from prior studies. Further, we find that publicly listed banks with higher ELPR have lower market-implied costs of capital, especially under market stress conditions. We conclude that ELPR captures key aspects of bank risk that are missing in current Basel Committee risk-weighted-asset calculations.
JEL Classifications: E32; G14; G21; K23; M41; M48.
We examine whether an increase in ETF ownership is accompanied by a decline in pricing efficiency for the underlying component securities. Our tests show an increase in ETF ownership is associated ...with (1) higher trading costs (bid-ask spreads and market liquidity), (2) an increase in “stock return synchronicity,” (3) a decline in “future earnings response coefficients,” and (4) a decline in the number of analysts covering the firm. Collectively, our findings support the view that increased ETF ownership can lead to higher trading costs and lower benefits from information acquisition. This combination results in less informative security prices for the underlying firms.
Abstract
We introduce a parsimonious framework for choosing among alternative expected-return proxies (ERPs) when estimating treatment effects. By comparing ERPs’ measurement error variances in the ...cross-section and in the time series, we provide new evidence on the relative performance of firm-level ERPs nominated by recent studies. Generally, “implied-costs-of-capital” metrics perform best in the time series, whereas “characteristic-based” proxies perform best in the cross-section. Factor-based ERPs, even the latest renditions, perform poorly. We revisit four prior studies that use ex ante ERPs and illustrate how this framework can potentially alter either the sign or the magnitude of prior inferences.
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