We show that country-level creditor rights influence dividend policies around the world by establishing the balance of power between debt and equity claimants. Creditors demand and managers consent ...to a more restrictive payout policy as a substitute for weak creditor rights in an effort to minimize the firm's agency costs of debt. Using a sample of 120,507 firm-years from 52 countries, we find that both the probability and amount of dividend payouts are significantly lower in countries with poor creditor rights. A reduction in the creditor rights index from its highest value to its lowest value implies a 41% reduction in the probability of paying a dividend, and a 60% reduction in dividend payout ratios. These results are robust to numerous control variables, sample variations, model specifications, and alternative hypotheses. We also show that the agency costs of debt play a more decisive role in determining dividend policies than the previously documented agency costs of equity. Overall, our findings contribute to the growing literature arguing that creditors exert significant influence over corporate decision-making outside of bankruptcy.
We provide new evidence that the prosocial attitudes of local residents play a significant role in determining a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement. We show that firms are more ...likely to engage in CSR initiatives when they are headquartered in areas with large senior citizen populations and where a large fraction of the population makes charitable donations. In contrast, we find that firms are less likely to engage in CSR initiatives when they are headquartered in areas with large religiously affiliated groups. After establishing the local demographic roots of CSR demand, we then examine the relationship between the firm's CSR activities and its market valuation. Our results suggest that CSR initiatives create value when they are properly aligned with local residents' prosocial attitudes. Overall, our study stresses the role of local residents' CSR preferences in mediating the relationship between CSR and market valuations.
Dividend Smoothing and Firm Valuation Brockman, Paul; Hanousek, Jan; Tresl, Jiri ...
Journal of financial and quantitative analysis,
06/2022, Letnik:
57, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We examine the relationship between dividend smoothing and firm valuation across 21 countries using several empirical methods and smoothing measures. Our main results show that dividends are ...capitalized at significantly larger values for high-smoothing firms than for low-smoothing firms. We also find that dividend-smoothing premiums are higher in countries with weak shareholder protection – suggesting that smoothing serves as a substitute mechanism to reduce agency costs. Overall, our findings support the view that managers use dividend smoothing predominantly as a bonding mechanism to reduce agency costs (Leary and Michaely (2011)), and not as a rent extraction mechanism (Lambrecht and Myers (2012)).
We examine the impact of cross-listing on firm-specific information utilizing the unique features of the Chinese capital markets. By separating the trading activity of domestic Chinese investors from ...that of foreign non-Chinese investors, we are able to isolate each investor group's relative ability to impound firm-specific information into stock prices. We show that the cross-listed H-shares traded by foreign investors incorporate significantly more firm-specific information than their A-share counterparts traded by domestic Chinese investors. We find a similar pattern between H-shares and A-shares even after a 2007 regulatory change that allowed domestic Chinese investors to trade in the H-share market. This finding suggests that while institutional factors (e.g., stricter listing rules, stronger investor protection) can explain some of the benefits of cross-listing, foreign investors' ability to utilize firm-specific information plays a separate and distinct role in generating cross-listing benefits. The level of information improvement due to foreign investors depends on the quality of the cross-listed firm's corporate governance.
The ongoing global financial crisis has led to the largest increase in state intervention since the Great Depression. Direct government ownership in publicly-traded corporations has increased ...dramatically since 2008. How will this increase in public ownership affect the governance of these erstwhile private companies? We examine the impact of government ownership on corporate governance using a sample of firms from the European Union, a region that is relatively familiar with active government participation. Our main finding is that government ownership is associated with lower governance quality. We further show that while government intervention is negatively related to governance quality in civil law countries, it is positively related to governance quality in common law countries. Finally, we find that the preferential voting rights of golden shares are especially damaging to governance quality.
In this study, we examine the relation between managerial ability and the quality of a firm’s information environment. An emerging stream of research has identified managerial ability as an important ...determinant of accruals quality and management forecast quality. However, our understanding of the impact of managerial ability on a firm’s broader information environment is incomplete because it captures more than these specific financial reporting disclosures. Using a composite index based on various proxies for a firm’s information environment, we find a positive relation between managerial ability and a firm’s information environment. Consistent with our argument that managers’ equity incentives improve disclosure quality, we find that the quality of a firm’s information environment improves when managers have higher levels of equity incentives. We contribute to the literature by providing more complete and conclusive evidence about the impact of managerial ability on a firm’s broader information environment.
This study examines the impact of block ownership on the firm’s information environment. Previous research shows that stock price efficiency depends on the cost of acquiring private information, as ...well as on the precision of this information. Blockholders have a clear advantage over diffuse, atomistic shareholders in terms of the precision and acquisition cost of their private information. We hypothesize that this informational advantage will manifest itself primarily in the firm-specific component of stock returns. Our empirical findings confirm that blockholders increase the probability of informed trading and idiosyncratic volatility, and decrease the firm’s stock return synchronicity. These results hold for both inside and outside blockholders, but are insignificant for blocks controlled by employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). Overall, our findings support the contention that ownership structure plays a significant role in shaping the firm’s information environment.
Commonality in Liquidity: A Global Perspective Brockman, Paul; Chung, Dennis Y.; Pérignon, Christophe
Journal of financial and quantitative analysis,
08/2009, Letnik:
44, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We conduct a comprehensive study of commonality in liquidity using intraday spread and depth data from 47 stock exchanges. We find that firm-level changes in liquidity are significantly influenced by ...exchange-level changes across most of the world’s stock exchanges. Emerging Asian exchanges have exceptionally strong commonality, while those of Latin America exhibit little if any commonality. After documenting the pervasive role of commonality within individual exchanges, we examine commonality across exchanges. We find evidence of a distinct, global component in bid-ask spreads and depths. Local (exchange-level) sources of commonality represent roughly 39% of the firm’s total commonality in liquidity, while global sources contribute an additional 19%. We also investigate potential sources of exchange-level and global commonality. We show that commonality is driven by both domestic and U.S. macroeconomic announcements.
Prior studies demonstrate that high CEO compensation risk encourages managers to engage in risk‐seeking behavior, thus intensifying agency conflicts between creditors and borrowers. We argue and ...document that accounting conservatism plays an important role in mitigating debt holder and shareholder conflicts over asset substitution arising from high CEO compensation risk. Our empirical results show that firms with high CEO compensation risk tend to use more timely loss recognition and this positive relationship is more pronounced for firms with high leverage. Additional results show that the positive relationship between CEO compensation risk and borrowing costs is reduced for firms using timely loss recognition, suggesting that creditors perceive timely loss recognition as a risk‐reducing mechanism. Using the passage of FAS 123R as a quasi‐natural experiment on managerial compensation risk, we find a significant reduction in the use of timely loss recognition for firms experiencing a decrease in CEO compensation risk after the passage of FAS 123R. Lastly, we show that timely loss recognition is positively associated only with the compensation risk of the firm's primary decision maker (i.e., its CEO) and not with the compensation risk of subordinates.
Investor Protection and Firm Liquidity Brockman, Paul; Chung, Dennis Y.
The Journal of finance (New York),
April 2003, Letnik:
58, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The purpose of this study is to investigate the relation between investor protection and firm liquidity. We posit that less protective environments lead to wider bid-ask spreads and thinner depths ...because they fail to minimize information asymmetries. The Hong Kong equity market provides a unique opportunity to compare liquidity costs across distinct investor protection environments, but still within a common trading mechanism and currency. Our empirical findings verify that firm liquidity is significantly affected by investor protection. Regression and matched-sample results show that Hong Kong-based equities exhibit narrower spreads and thicker depths than their China-based counterparts.
PDF
