Rating agencies have become more conservative in assigning corporate credit ratings over the period 1985 to 2009; holding firm characteristics constant, average ratings have dropped by three notches. ...This change does not appear to be fully warranted because defaults have declined over this period. Firms affected more by conservatism issue less debt, have lower leverage, hold more cash, are less likely to obtain a debt rating, and experience lower growth. Their debt spreads are lower than those of unaffected firms with the same rating, which implies that the market partly undoes the impact of conservatism on debt prices. This evidence suggests that firms and capital markets do not perceive the increase in conservatism to be fully warranted.
Research Summary
We examine how managers' political power reallocates resources in the internal capital market. By shifting the focus from financial to firm‐specific, non‐financial resources that are ...difficult to evaluate and zero‐sum in nature, we revise the prevailing view that managers' political power plays a significant yet contingent role under financial constraint and weak governance. We instead characterize managerial political power as an intrinsic, inescapable determinant of internal competition and resource allocation. Our research design links sentence‐by‐sentence, qualitative analyses of the legal opinion delivered as breaking news during the corruption trials involving a key executive at Samsung group with minute‐level shifts in share prices. This study presents a politics‐based theory of the internal capital market and highlights the methodological potential of quantitative case studies.
Managerial Summary
Managerial politics presents a vexing yet persistent reality of organizational life and the inter‐divisional competition for resources. We attribute its pervasiveness to the contest over non‐financial resources with fuzzy ownership and significant yet uncertain value, such as bargaining power over internal transfer pricing, managerial attention, and control over new business opportunities. Because of the zero‐sum dynamics of these non‐financial resources and their constant scarcity, political contests cannot be suppressed through the provision of financial slack or agency controls and even extend to family members. Appointing rival managers along clearly separated lines of businesses may curb, but not eliminate, managerial politics. We show that investors are acutely aware of the value of managers' political power and make investment decisions based on them.
The present study focuses on the development of one of the key institutions of the market economy – namely, the securities market in terms of its role in promoting competitive conditions in the ...financial services sector. Due to a variety of objective and subjective factors, banks have become the most dominant institutions in all CIS countries in terms of, both, accumulating and redistributing financial resources. Particularly, the research outlines the background to capital market formation and development in CIS countries through a brief history of the CIS; considers the necessity of capital market and its regulation in CIS countries; reviews the institutional and legal framework of capital market regulation, and analyzes certain problems of capital market development.
This study evaluates alternative measures of the tone of financial narrative. We present evidence that word-frequency tone measures based on domain-specific wordlists—compared to general ...wordlists—better predict the market reaction to earnings announcements, have greater statistical power in short-window event studies, and exhibit more economically consistent post-announcement drift. Further, inverse document frequency weighting, advocated in Loughran and McDonald (2011), provides little improvement to the alternative approach of equal weighting. We also provide evidence that word-frequency tone measures are as powerful as the Naïve Bayesian machine-learning tone measure from Li (2010) in a regression of future earnings on MD&A tone. Overall, although more complex techniques are potentially advantageous in certain contexts, equal-weighted, domainspecific, word-frequency tone measures are generally just as powerful in the context of financial disclosure and capital markets. Such measures are also more intuitive, easier to implement, and, importantly, far more amenable to replication.
The market for secondary venture capital transactions provides a way for investors to obtain liquidity if the investee start-up corporation has not yet reached sufficient maturity for an IPO. It also ...creates divestment opportunities for badly performing ventures that investors would rather abandon. We analyze the way in which the opportunistic behavior and liquidity constraints of venture capital funds channel deal flow into the secondary venture capital market. Such opportunistic behavior leads to the strategic exit of seed financing venture capitalists. These exits enlarge investors' opportunity set of strategies and therefore affect the deal terms with entrepreneurs. In this paper, we show that two contracts are possible in a world with financially constrained venture capital investors, staged investments, and premature divestment opportunities. Both contracts have their disadvantages. With the first, the venture capitalist will never liquidate a project, even if it is a lemon, but will instead engage in a secondary transaction. With the second contract, although lemons will be systematically abandoned, high-quality ventures may also be liquidated. Entrepreneurs need to consider these effects when aiming to maximize their benefits and must trade off the contract parameters accordingly. Our model provides guidance to entrepreneurs in this respect, helps to explain deal flow into the secondary venture capital market, and offers several empirical predictions.
•Secondary VC transactions provide liquidity to investors, but the market for “secondaries” is under researched.•We elaborate on “strategic exits” and develop a theory why this market is not a market for lemons.•The rising liquidity affects the VC's opportunity set of exit strategies and the deal terms with entrepreneurs.•Our model helps to explain deal flow into the secondary VC market and offers empirical predictions.
Highlighting the sources, processes and outcomes of moral struggles in and around markets, this volume advances our current understanding of markets and their contested moralities.
Amidst a backdrop of global economic challenges and shifting market dynamics, this study highlights the transformative role of data elements in enhancing enterprise performance within capital ...markets, particularly focusing on China’s leading position in the digital economy as a model with implications for global markets. This study utilized a panel data set consisting of 10,493 observations from 2687 listed enterprises in Shanghai and Shenzhen A-shares from 2015 to 2023. An econometric analysis was conducted using a two-way fixed effects model to explore the impact of enterprise data elements on capital market performance in the digital economy and its underlying mechanisms. The research reveals that the digitization of enterprise production factors can significantly enhance performance in the capital market. The study further suggests that enterprise innovation and enterprise value play a crucial role in mediating this effect. This paper introduces a new concept called “data elements”, which expands the definition and assessment methods of enterprise data capabilities. It goes beyond just digital transformation at the application level and includes data governance at the basic ability level. This approach provides a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of the different elements of data. Moreover, the research expands the research scope of microeconomic entities’ economic benefits, thereby extending the value contributed by enterprise data elements to their performance in the capital market. Additionally, this study reveals the relationship between enterprise data elementization and capital market performance through intermediary analysis of enterprise innovation performance and enterprise value, which unveils the “black box” and clarifies the transmission pathway. The findings of this research hold considerable theoretical value and have far-reaching practical implications for government policies concerning data elements and the development of high-quality enterprises, suggesting pathways for global markets to leverage data for enhanced enterprise performance and economic resilience. The results are particularly useful for policymakers, enterprise managers, and scholars in understanding and implementing data-driven strategies in capital markets.
I find evidence consistent with managers manipulating real activities to avoid reporting annual losses. Specifically, I find evidence suggesting price discounts to temporarily increase sales, ...overproduction to report lower cost of goods sold, and reduction of discretionary expenditures to improve reported margins. Cross-sectional analysis reveals that these activities are less prevalent in the presence of sophisticated investors. Other factors that influence real activities manipulation include industry membership, the stock of inventories and receivables, and incentives to meet zero earnings. There is also some, though less robust, evidence of real activities manipulation to meet annual analyst forecasts.
This paper shows that incentives created by the impending turnover of local politicians can accelerate the pace of initial public offering (IPO) activity in certain politicized environments. Focusing ...on China, we exploit a research setting where politicians are rewarded for capital market development, firms rely on political connections for access to capital, rent-seeking behavior is rampant, and the objectives of the state might not be to maximize capital market efficiency. We find that the rate of exchange eligible firms engaging in an IPO temporarily increases in advance of impending political promotion events. This effect holds for both state-owned and non-state-owned entities. For state-owned firms, the effect is strongest in those provinces where the politicians are more likely to be rewarded for market development activity. For non-state-owned firms, the temporary increase in IPO activity appears to be (rationally) opportunistic in nature, with the effect stronger around events more likely to disrupt the firms' political connections. Promotion period IPOs underperform non-promotion period IPOs in terms of both future financial performance and long-run stock returns, have controlling shareholders who retain a larger fraction of the company, and are more likely to divert proceeds away from their intended use after the offering.
PDF
