Financial Management

Publisher:: Wiley
Publication date:: 2021-02-01

ISBN:: 0046-3892

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Latest documents

Avoiding inheritance taxes in family firms
This article documents a novel way to transfer control in family firms while avoiding inheritance taxes: intragroup mergers. I provide evidence that avoiding inheritance taxes is the motivation behind intragroup mergers in Korea. In 1999, Korea initiated a tax reform that bumped up personal inheritance taxes by 25 percentage points. In the posttax‐reform period, I find that family firms increase stock‐for‐stock intragroup mergers involving targets owned by heirs. Specifically, firms with heavy inheritance taxes acquire affiliates owned by heirs, who then convert private target shares into acquirer shares while avoiding inheritance taxes.
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Credit supply and capital structure adjustments
Using the staggered deregulation of the U.S. banking industry as a series of exogenous shocks, I study the effect of the credit supply on the speed of capital structure adjustment. I find robust evidence that interstate and intrastate banking deregulation are positively associated with leverage adjustments. Specifically, the speeds of adjustment to target leverage are faster in the postderegulation periods. I also find that the positive effect is driven by firms that are financially constrained, are financially dependent on banks, and have less access to the public debt market and by deregulated banks’ ability to geographically diversify the credit risk.
Corporate watchdogs
We investigate the role of financial analysts as corporate watchdogs. We show that firms that are subject to intense analyst monitoring are more likely to be investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission or to be the subject of a securities class action. Using cross‐sectional variations in managerial entrenchment, we find that this effect is not a reflection of the “dark side of analyst coverage,” analysts pushing executives to misbehave to exceed short‐term expectations. Our findings are robust to different identification strategies addressing the endogeneity of analyst coverage decisions.
Can online annual general meetings increase shareholders’ participation in corporate governance?
We find that annual shareholder meetings conducted online can significantly increase the participation of shareholders, especially minority shareholders. This finding is more evident when the cost of physically attending the annual meeting is higher and when the firm's ownership is more dispersed. We further document significant positive stock returns when firms initiate annual online meetings. We also find that such online meetings help improve corporate governance. Overall, we provide evidence that online shareholder meetings provide shareholders a cost‐effective way to participate in governance issues.
Predicting hedge fund performance when fund returns are skewed
We show that fund‐specific return skewness is associated with managerial skill and future hedge fund performance. Specifically, skewness in fund returns reflects managerial skill in avoiding large drawdowns. Using a new measure of investment skill that accounts for this managerial ability, we demonstrate that traditional performance measures underestimate (overestimate) managerial performance when returns exhibit positive (negative) fund‐specific skewness. Our new measure is particularly valuable during periods of economic crisis, when the annual risk‐adjusted outperformance is 5.5%.
Limited attention and portfolio choice: The impact of attention allocation on mutual fund performance
This study proposes that the performance of mutual fund managers is linked to how efficiently they allocate attention across assets in their investment set. Motivated by existing models of optimal portfolio choice and rational inattention, we posit that the efficiency of attention allocation increases when a manager chooses larger (smaller) active positions in assets that need more (less) information acquisition effort to resolve uncertainty about future payoffs. We show that the efficiency of attention allocation has a significantly positive impact on future fund performance. Efficient attention allocation has a lesser impact on performance as the total demands on a manager's limited attention increase.
Fast and slow cancellations and trader behavior
We investigate how short‐lived liquidity supply due to order cancellations affects the order‐placement behavior of slow traders. When order cancellations increase, slow traders submit fewer and less aggressive orders. Both short‐ and long‐lived liquidity supply have positive effects on the market overall, reducing spreads and increasing depth. We conclude that it is not necessary to require limit orders to have a minimum lifespan. We develop econometric and machine‐learning frameworks that allow traders to predict whether a quote is likely to have a short or long life, increasing the ability of slow traders to respond strategically to changing order flow.
Conditional currency hedging
I propose a simple and robust approach to hedge currency risk that can be directly applied by international investors in diverse asset classes. Compared to current mean‐variance approaches, it is robust to overfitting and thus better anticipates risk‐minimizing currency positions for global equity, bond, and commodity investors out of sample. Furthermore, correlations among currencies, equities, and commodities can be predicted by lagged implied foreign exchange volatility. This allows investors to dynamically adjust their hedges, resulting in significantly lower risk compared to other hedging alternatives while maintaining or even improving Sharpe ratio, particularly during crisis periods.