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Using a sample of China’s A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2019, this paper studies the impact of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) on corporate financialization. We find that the implementation of ESOPs has a significant inhibitory effect on corporate financialization, and a series of robustness checks indicate that the conclusion is valid. The mechanism tests show that ESOPs decrease corporate financialization by reducing management agency costs and improving internal control. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that ESOPs in firms with higher financing constraints, a lower external audit quality, and higher proportions of executive shareholdings and self-funded employee equity have a much stronger decreasing effect on corporate financialization.

Firms compensate managers to maximize shareholder value, yet these same incentives affect bondholder risk. We investigate the relation between executive equity pay and the cost of debt. Our findings indicate a “u-shaped” relation between bond yields and equity pay. These results are consistent with the notion that bondholders prefer a moderate amount of executive equity pay and above or below that level, bondholders increase yields to protect their interests. These findings suggest that moderate levels of equity pay mitigate the agency costs between firm shareholders and bondholders.

Despite the advantages of debt, a significant number of firms that have an established leverage policy deliberately become all-equity. These firms eliminate a substantial amount of long-term debt as the average firm’s leverage ratio is approximately 30 percent at the year-end prior to debt elimination. Firm-level “shocks” such as CEO turnover and changes in credit ratings cannot explain the dramatic recapitalization decision. Consistent with the tradeoff theory, firms that eliminate debt have lower benefits (less tax shield benefits, agency costs) and higher costs (probability of financial distress, access to capital markets, etc.) of leverage in the three prior years compared to a matched sample. We also find that the factors influencing the decision to eliminate all debt is different from those to significantly reduce leverage or to have very low debt levels. Firms primarily finance the approximately $70 million of average long-term debt eliminated using proceeds from sales of relatively unproductive assets and from equity issues. Interestingly, over half of these firms issue significant amount of new debt within three years of becoming all-equity. Firms with lower liquidity and non-debt tax shields, higher potential overinvestment agency costs, and those that issue equity at the debt elimination year are more likely to relever quickly.

Using hand-collected governance data and a two-stage least squares approach to control for the endogeneity of firm governance structure, this paper shows that private investments in public equity (PIPE) issuers with higher board independence grant investors lower price discounts and experience improved announcement effects, improved long-run operating and stock performance, and increased investment. Board independence also encourages issuers to place more shares with venture capital investors, and fewer shares with managerial investors. These findings suggest that strong independent governance can mitigate the agency costs inherent in PIPEs.

Understanding the association between quasi-indexer ownership and insider trading is important given the externalities that insider trading can impose on shareholders, the importance of quasi-indexers in the capital markets, and their mixed monitoring incentives. The prior literature has produced an inconsistent set of results regarding this association. These results are difficult to interpret because the association between them is likely endogenous, and prior studies have not employed effective identification strategies to address this issue. In this study, we examine the effects of quasi-indexer institutional ownership on insider trading using the plausibly exogenous discontinuity in quasi-indexer ownership around the Russell 1000/2000 index cutoff. Using both regression discontinuity and instrumental variable research designs, we find higher quasi-indexer ownership leads to less insider trading (both buys and sells) and less profitable sell trades. The effects for sells are concentrated among insider trades that, ex ante, are more likely to be based on private information. Our evidence on the profitability of buys is mixed. In addition, we find firms with higher quasi-indexer ownership are more likely to have and/or more strictly enforce blackout policies. Overall, our results suggest that quasi-indexers can reduce the agency costs associated with insider trading through their direct and indirect monitoring activities.

One of the reasons why a firm chooses to go private is the significant amount of cash flows which can exacerbate agency costs: this can indicate poor growth opportuni- ties and make external resources less required. In line with both knowledge economy and financial literature, the paper aims to indagate the relationship between agency costs, firm’s performance, and delisting. Despite there is evidence in finance that highlights the role of exchange regulators in the going private processes, just few studies focus on the voluntary delisting and its antecedents. Starting from the knowl- edge economy setting, this paper aims to define how firm’s financial performance moderates the relationship between agency costs and delisting choices. Based on a sample of non-financial firms delisted from the most important European stock mar- kets between 1997 and 2017, we applied an OLS regression to analyze the main var- iables that influence the going private processes. We find that a high level of stock market performance, associated with high level of free cash flows, promotes going private as a means of anticipating and preventing future value decreases. Finally, the paper provides practical implications for the development of new approach of delist- ing choice.

Based on a macro and micro cross view, we empirically test the interactions among monetary policy, accounting information comparability, and investment efficiency with a sample of A-share listed firms in China from 2005 to 2019. We find that tightening monetary policy will aggravate underinvestment behavior, such as inefficient investment, while improvement in accounting information comparability can effectively mitigate the negative impact of tightening monetary policy on underinvestment, so as to improve firm investment efficiency. Further study shows that, in a period of monetary policy tightening, firms with high agency costs and high financing constraints can significantly reduce underinvestment by improving the comparability of accounting information, thus improving the investment efficiency of firms. After distinguishing the type of firm ownership (state-owned enterprises vs. private enterprises), we find that firms can reduce the effect of insufficient investment during a period of monetary tightening by improving the comparability of accounting information, which is more significant in the sample of private enterprises (PEs).

We study the effects of a mandated increase in disclosure in a setting where managerial responses are particularly observable: mutual funds. We conjecture that mandating portfolio disclosure can harm some mutual fund investors. Portfolio disclosure imposes skill reassessment risks on fund managers which in turn translate into agency costs to investors, especially for funds characterized with high levels of ex-ante managerial skill uncertainty. Using a regulatory change that mandated more frequent portfolio disclosure as a natural experiment, we show that funds with high levels of ex-ante managerial skill uncertainty responded to the regulatory change with an increase in management fees and a decrease in risk taking behavior, relative to funds with low levels of ex-ante managerial skill uncertainty. These actions ultimately get transmitted to fund investors in the form of inferior net performance. Our findings shed new light on the costs of disclosure, as well as providing evidence on disclosure, agency, and governance issues of the investment management industry. * Mailing Addresses: Teodor Dyakov, Department of Finance, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, VU University Amsterdam, 1081 HV Amsterdam, E-mail: t.dyakov@vu.nl; Jarrad Harford, Department of Finance, Foster School of Business, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-3226, USA, E-mail: jarrad@uw.edu; Buhui Qiu, Discipline of Finance, The University of Sydney Business School, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia, E-mail: b.qiu@econ.usyd.edu.au. We would like to thank Ying Gan, Yaniv Grinstein, Joshua Madsen, Christopher Polk, Mathijs van Dijk, session participants at 2015 Financial Accounting and Reporting Section (FARS) Midyear Meeting, and seminar participants at Erasmus University and VU University Amsterdam for helpful comments and suggestions. All errors are our own.

This paper investigates the impact of herding behaviour of Chinese Securities Investment Funds (SIFs) on firm value by taking stock price informativeness and agency cost as intermediary variables. ...

Using Chinese A-share listed industrial firms between 2009 and 2016, we find that greater religious influence is negatively associated with firm cost stickiness. This negative association is more s...

This study analyzes the effect of bank CEO appointment structure and tenure on borrowers’ accounting practices and earnings management. Drawing on agency theory, we posit that agency costs are high...

We study how trade liberalisation affects the extent of corporate decentralisation using the World Bank enterprise survey in China. In particular, we examine the autonomy of production, investment and employment decision and the incentive compensation of CEOs of subsidiary firms after China's entry in the World Trade Organization (WTO). We show that subsidiary firm CEOs receive more decision autonomy and higher powered incentives when facing increased foreign competition in output market. In contrast, subsidiary CEOs receive less decision autonomy and flat incentive compensation when foreign competition in subsidiaries’ input market intensifies. When examining subsidiary CEOs’ autonomy in different decisions, we find that CEOs’ investment autonomy is more responsive to foreign competition than employment and production autonomy. We explain this difference through the agency cost angle by showing that firms whose CEOs with greater investment autonomy tend to spend more on managerial perks. Taken together, this paper sheds new light on how trade liberalisation reshapes firms’ decentralisation decisions in a multi‐tasking principal‐agent setting.

By employing the Chinese listed firm’s data from 2010 to 2017, this study explores the impact of share pledging on firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. Empirical results indicate a negative relationship between share pledging and CSR performance. This effect is robust after using alternative measures and different regression methods, and also consistent after tackling the endogenous issues. Furthermore, we find that risk-taking and agency cost are two possible underlying mechanisms through which share pledging reduces CSR. In addition, CSR reduction caused by share pledging leads to poorer economic performance and lower market value of firms.

We examine whether the combination of agency costs of debt and managerial optimism in high-tech IPOs creates inefficient R&D investment, thus undermining corporate value. We find that high-tech IPO...

We examine the within-firm resource allocation and restructuring outcomes at firms violating debt covenants. Using establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau, we find that covenant violations are followed by reductions in employment, investment, and more frequent establishment closures among violating firms’ noncore business lines and less productive establishments. These changes are concentrated among establishments at which manager-shareholder agency costs are pronounced and when key lenders have industry experience. Our findings suggest that enhanced creditor control reduces managerial agency costs and encourages a more efficient allocation of resources within the boundaries of firms in technical default.

This article aims to investigate the determinants of firm’s capital structure (debt ratio) such as asset structure, profitability, agency cost, innovation and technology, and firm size as a moderating variable. This study used quarterly data from the financial statements of food and beverage firms at the Indonesia Stock Exchange with a purposive sampling method that met the research criteria with panel data analysis. The findings show that firm size and asset structure affect leverage positively; however, profitability and innovation and technology negatively affect the debt ratio, while agency cost does not affect leverage. All findings are in line with the hypotheses except agency cost. The firm size as a moderating variable shows strengthening of the interaction between agency cost and innovation with leverage. However, interacting with firm size weakens the effect of the relationship between assets structure and profitability with the debt ratio. Managerial implications of the target of debt ratio that creates the value of the firm need to be flexible and controlled by the interaction of the firm size with firm characteristics and innovation to achieve an optimal firm value of F & B sector.

Agency cost theory suggests that a firm’s financial leverage is important to improve organizational efficiency. Using data of industrial companies of three biggest economies, this study analyzes ho...

We examine the extent to which shareholders strategically allow a weak governance structure in response to increasing competition pressures in the product market. We treat acquisitions by rival firms as shocks that increase threats in a competitive product market. We find that firms adopt greater entrenchment provisions when there are greater competition threats. Moreover, firms with high institutional ownership – especially by dedicated investors – and​ board independence within the compensation committee are particularly aggressive, which is consistent with our theory that aggressive behavior represents a strategic decision by shareholders. Finally, we find positive relationship between the adoption of entrenchment provisions and firm’s future performance, but only for the adoption under relatively severe competitive pressures.

This study investigates the notion that agency-driven information asymmetry may affect a firm’s stock liquidity. I postulate that less uncertainty about managerial agency problems may enhance liquidity provision by lowering dealers’ perceived adverse selection risk from trading with better-informed speculators. Consistent with my conjecture, I find that the staggered adoption of antitakeover provisions across U.S. states in the 1980s and 1990s — a plausibly exogenous shock unambiguously reducing the threat of (and speculators’ information advantage about) value-enhancing intervention — robustly improves the stock liquidity of affected firms relative to peer firms, especially at prior high fundamental or agency uncertainty and with poor governance. (JEL D22, G14, G34) Received January 14, 2020; editorial decision January 31, 2022 by Editor Andrew Ellul. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

We examine the relationship between the Governance Index (G-Index) and convertible bond use by firms, specifically in the presence or absence of covenants. We find that the better the shareholder governance (lower G-Index) of firms, the more they are likely to issue convertible instead of straight bonds. More importantly, we find that the complementary relationship between shareholder governance and convertible bond use is driven by the existence of certain covenants attached to these convertible securities. We also find that this effect is accentuated in firms with smaller size, higher market-to-book, R&D and intangibles as well as higher beta. We conclude that this link between strong shareholder rights and increased convertible bond use is conditional on the presence of covenants and therefore shows the important interaction of these three governance mechanisms. In addition, this triple link being emphasized in firms with higher agency costs and adverse selection problems is consistent with value-maximizing use of convertible bonds.

We study the impact of marital property legislation passed in the US South in the 1840s on households’ investment in risky, entrepreneurial projects. These laws protected the assets of newly married women from creditors in a world of virtually unlimited liability. We compare couples married after the passage of a marital property law with couples from the same state who were married before. Consistent with a simple model of household borrowing that trades off agency costs against risk sharing, the effect on investment was heterogeneous. It increased if most household property came from the husband and decreased if most came from the wife.

This research investigates the consequences of the increase in corporate use of short-term debt in China over the past decades. Using a sample of Chinese firms from 2007 to 2018, we empirically explore the effect of corporate use of short-term debt for long-term investment (SFLI) on audit pricing. We first examine the relationship between SFLI and audit pricing for different groups of firms. Then, we investigate the role of the increase in short-term debt in alleviating principal-agent conflicts and reducing agency costs. We have four primary empirical findings. First, auditors tend to charge SFLI clients higher fees. Second, the negative relationship between SFLI and audit fee is found in private firms, firms audited by Chinese domestic auditors, and firms with higher information asymmetry. Third, the time auditors spent on SFLI clients is significantly more than that spent on non-SFLI clients, suggesting that the decrease in audit fee is not due to the decrease in cost. Fourth, SFLI significantly reduces the agency costs of the firm, which auditors regard as a low risk signal and grant an audit fee discount. Our findings suggest that the decrease in debt maturity, not only influences managerial behaviors, but also influences auditors’ risk assessment and pricing decisions.

Real world contracts often contain incentive clauses that fail to fully specify conditions triggering payments, giving rise to legal disputes. When complete contract generate Pareto efficient allocations the L&E literature advocates that courts should fill in the missing clauses. This logic does not directly extend to environments with moral hazard, where complete contracts result in constrained efficient allocations. Despite this inefficiency we find that when agency and marginal agency costs are congruent, the legal system can do no better than guide its courts to complete contracts according to the parties’ intentions.

We study the impact of stronger shareholder control on bondholders. We find that the passage of shareholder-sponsored governance proposals causes a decline in credit default swap spreads, indicating a net positive effect on bondholders. Evidence suggests that the direct benefit of stronger shareholder control, through the “management disciplining” channel, is larger than the combined adverse effects of directly escalating shareholder-bondholder conflict and indirectly exacerbating exposure to shareholder opportunism. Results are stronger for firms with existing high levels of shareholder-bondholder conflict and for proposals that mitigate managerial entrenchment without exacerbating risk-shifting. Finally, stronger shareholder control improves credit ratings and operating performance in the long-term.

This paper examines how the firm’s choice of investment horizon interacts with rent-seeking by privately informed, multitasking managers and the labor market. Two main results surface. First, managers prefer longer-horizon projects that permit them to extract higher rents from firms, so short-termism involves lower agency costs and is value maximizing for some firms. Second, when firms compete for managers, firms practicing short-termism attract better managerial talent when talent is unobservable, but larger firms that invest in long-horizon projects hire more talented managers when talent is revealed. (JEL D82, D86, G31, G32, J41) Received July 25, 2019; editorial decision July 7, 2020 by Editor Uday Rajan.

This study tests the catering theory and explores the main determinants of dividend payments across a sample of eleven emerging countries. There is evidence of catering to investor sentiment for dividends in Middle Eastern and North African countries. Dividend payers are mature, profitable, large firms with lower growth opportunities, and high dividend premiums, which supports the catering, lifecycle, and agency theories. Catering behavior persists even after controlling for the effect of Arab Spring. Difference-in-difference analysis shows that countries highly affected by the political transition period are less likely to pay dividends in the post-Arab Spring period than less affected countries. Catering decreases significantly in the post-Arab Spring period as compared with during- and pre-Arab Spring periods, suggesting that investors prefer that managers retain earnings to reinvest and grow during unstable economic conditions. Furthermore, catering persists in countries with high corruption levels and poor legal quality to reduce agency cost, and substitute for weak legal systems with poor enforcement of laws.

This study examines the effect of managerial ownership on firm value in capital markets where outside governance mechanisms to discipline managers are weak or non-existent. We hypothesize that strong market forces in the U.S. confound the effect of managerial ownership on firm value, i.e., the convergence of interest argument. We test the hypothesis using data from 112 firms from Singapore Stock Exchange and 205 firms from the Stock Exchange of Thailand prior to the Asian financial crisis in 1997 when the market forces were weak, yet the investor protection was sufficient to prevent outright appropriation from management. For ease of comparison, we use methodologies from studies done on the U.S. sample firms during the same study period as ours. We find that, both in Singapore and Thailand, firm value is a function of managerial ownership, and the relation is of the famous inverted U-shaped. Moreover, the relation is robust under different model specifications. The results from Thai sample, with weaker market forces than in Singapore, lend support to many agency cost hypotheses advanced in the U.S. Our results provide useful implication for investors in emerging and frontier markets where outside governance mechanisms are yet to be fully developed.

We investigate how independent directors view corporate social responsibility (CSR). Exploiting the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the associated exchange listing requirements as an exogenous regulatory shock, we document that independent directors view CSR activities unfavorably. In particular, firms forced to raise board independence reduce CSR engagement significantly relative to those not required to increase board independence. Our results are consistent with the risk-mitigation view and the agency cost hypothesis where managers over-invest in CSR to mitigate their own exposure to non-systematic risk. The over-investments in CSR are curbed in the presence of a stronger, more independent, board of directors. Several robustness checks confirm the results, including fixed-effects and random-effects regressions, dynamic panel data analysis, instrumental-variable analysis, and propensity score matching, Lewbel’s (2012) heteroscedastic identification, and Oster’s (2017) method for coefficient stability. We also confirm the risk-mitigation hypothesis by showing that CSR activities reduce firm risk significantly. Our research design is much less vulnerable to endogeneity and is therefore likely to show a causal effect of board independence on CSR.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of corporate governance index on the cost of equity in companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange. This study collects data from 975 observations during the period 2012 to 2018 to test the hypotheses using multiple linear regression model for the panel data. In this research, the independent variable of corporate governance index comprises of 27 specific corporate governance attributes. The results of hypothesis testing showed that corporate governance has a negative and significant effect on the rate of capital cost. In other words, the quality of corporate governance can lower the rate of capital cost. This result suggests that, by using a powerful corporate governance system and by declining the information asymmetry (increasing transparency) and agency conflict, we would be able to enhance the quality of financial reports. It would strengthen the capital market, attract financial suppliers and investors, and absorb the required financial resources of the firm by a lower rate. The findings of the study suggest that companies are able to reduce the cost of equity by establishing strong corporate governance. This conclusion suggests the importance and effectiveness of corporate governance in the cost of equity.

This paper studies how workers' on-the-job search influences optimal incentives in organizations. We analyze a principal-agent model in which the agent multitasks between working for the principal and searching for other job opportunities. The agent partly uses on-the-job search to improve his bargaining position within the relationship. We show that the optimal contract may feature both excessive performance bonuses as well as efficiency wages. Both measures reduce the agent's search incentives, but do not completely eliminate rent-seeking under the optimal contract. On-the-job search therefore generates agency costs. The model suggests a new rational for excessive incentive pay and efficiency wages. ispartof: Games And Economic Behavior vol:121 pages:435-452 status: published

In this paper, we argue that corruption is likely to increase agency costs of equity, hence shareholders have higher incentives to control managers. When corruption is higher, firm managers need to use firm resources to make unofficial payments and they tend to take this opportunity to expropriate shareholders. Consequently, shareholders recognizing this risk need to force managers to pay more dividends in order to mitigate the agency problem. This paper examines the effects of corruption on dividend decisions in the light of agency theory. With a sample of 205,316 observations from 47 countries, we find that corruption is positively related to both the decision to pay dividends and payout ratio. Moreover, this relationship is stronger under strong creditor protection.

Corporate debt diversification (firms simultaneously utilizing multiple distinct debt sources) is a global phenomenon. However, how such financing affects firm value has not yet been examined. Using Indian firms, we investigate debt diversification’s impact on monitoring effectiveness, agency costs, and financial constraints – which can all affect market value. Results reveal a negative impact of debt diversification on firm value, particularly among group-affiliated firms. This negative impact is attributed to free riding among lenders: evidence suggests that increased agency costs resulting from inferior monitoring contributes to worse firm accounting performance. Further, debt diversification does not appear to reduce financial constraints.

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) are major players in the global markets. We contribute to the corporate governance literature by examining the possible value SWFs bring to their domestic holdings. We specifically examine the impact of SWFs’ ownership on firm executive compensation. Using data on Kuwaiti SWFs, we find that the pay-performance relationship diminishes as the cash flow rights of the SWF are greater. Moreover, having the SWF as the ultimate owner in the ownership chain of the firm does not alleviate the adverse effects of the divergence in cash flow and control rights. This evidence supports the notion that SWFs impose agency costs on their targets.

We examine the relative merits of state (SOE) and private (POE) ownership on firm invention output in emerging as well as developed economies. Firm SOE affords a vehicle by which governments throughout the world encourage risky investment in new technological paths. Yet, from a traditional agency–theoretical standpoint, SOEs are plagued by low-powered incentives and dysfunctional involvement (e.g., wasteful budgets and political meddling), which reduces SOE performance, relative to POEs. To examine this paradox, we build an extended agency model which, rather than overlooking agency cost drivers, entertains a more balanced view, in which these so-called agency “liabilities” in fact benefit SOEs, particularly in the sphere of inventions. We argue that, given relatively higher levels of managerial autonomy, SOEs may outperform POEs in some types of inventive output. We further propose that key boundary conditions operate to modify this base effect, in that contexts lacking political constraints – a condition found in most emerging economies – increase the risk of political meddling, reducing managerial autonomy so that any SOE inventive advantages wane significantly. We also hypothesize that this negative effect of weak institutions is attenuated in high invention productivity sectors. Empirically, we track the frequency, pioneerism, and impact of patent inventions of 521 SOEs and matched POEs for 16 years, across 43 countries and 22 industries. We find empirical support for our hypotheses based on a robust set of fixed-effects regression analyses, aided by a battery of checks to assess self-selection and omitted variable bias.

A defining feature of initial coin offerings (ICOs) is that entrepreneurs bear the full marginal investment cost but profit only partially from the marginal investment payoff. This design may exacerbate agency conflicts inherent in corporate finance. As a consequence, signals of entrepreneurial quality such as CEO loyalty, which is an established concept in social psychology and can easily be linked to potential agency conflicts in corporate settings, might be a first-order determinant of economic outcomes in the ICO market. Consistent with this, I find that loyal CEOs have to offer lower financial incentives to attract investors and are still able to raise more proceeds, conduct ICOs more thoroughly, and are less likely to fail. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that asymmetric information between entrepreneurs and investors entail agency costs that are decreasing in CEO loyalty.

This paper documents a previously unrecognized debt-related investment distortion. Using detailed project-level data for 69 firms in the oil and gas industry, we find that highly levered firms pull forward investment, completing projects early at the expense of long-run project returns and project value. This behavior is particularly pronounced prior to debt renegotiations. We test several channels that could explain this behavior and find evidence consistent with equity holders sacrificing long-run project returns to enhance collateral values and, by extension, mitigate lending frictions at debt renegotiations.

The large amount of cash that some corporations hold has recently come under public scrutiny. Prior research has used the agency cost framework to explain why managers prefer large corporate cash holdings. Using a novel and intuitive approach, the resource-dependence perspective, we document that directorate interlocks, in terms of network centrality and structural holes that enable firms to have access to resources, affects firms’ cash holdings. Specifically, the directorate interlocks facilitate firms to have bank loans that substitute for cash holdings. We further show that political connection by the firm’s leader amplifies the directorate interlocks’ effect to reduce cash holding.

This study examines the effect of financial reporting opacity and audit quality on stock price crash risk using listed firms in Japan. This study is the first research to examine the effect of financial reporting opacity on crash risk using a Japanese listed company. Furthermore, the effect of audit quality on crash risk is verified. High level auditors can mitigate crash risk by playing a role as a corporate governance device mechanism to reduce agency costs. We use a logistic regression and linear regression model to test whether financial reporting opacity and audit quality affect crash risk using listed firms in the Japanese stock exchange market during the fiscal years 2015 January through 2017 February. The results of this study suggest that the financial reporting opacity variable shows a positive relationship with CRASH, which states that a firm with more opaque financial reporting increases crash risk. The results suggest also that the firms audited by Big4 auditors experience less crash risk, implying that the audit quality in Japan can be one of the factors mitigating firm's crash risk. This study provides implications for financial reporting and audit quality to external stakeholders who wants to avoid losses.

This paper studies the implications of financial frictions on the welfare effects of business cycles, using the agency cost model of Carlstrom and Fuerst (1997). We decompose the total welfare effe...

In this paper, we consider a small- and micro-sized enterprise (SME) with assets-in-place invests a project. Especially, we assume that the fund needed by the investment are shared by the government’s direct investment through public-private partnerships (PPPs) and the bank-tax interaction (BTI), which is a financial innovation instrument to solve the financing problem encountered by the SMEs. We address the pricing of corporate securities and optimal investment strategies. By providing a comparison with the pure private lending, we discover that the BTI makes the investment much cheaper and more attractive, and therefore mitigates the problem of under-investment in unstable markets. In addition, the BTI can increase the total firm value, reduce the leverage ratio and bankruptcy probability. The credit line of the BTI contract increases with the factors that influence the loan structure of the SME, such as the volatility, the tax rate, the investment cost sharing and the credit multiple. Most importantly, there exists an optimal investment cost sharing, such that the agency cost between SMEs and the government reaches zero due to the direct investment through PPPs.

This study examines the impact of gender in the C-Suite on corporate decision making. In particular, we investigate the influence of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO)’s gender on the agency costs of free cash flow. We document that female CFOs reduce cash holdings in firms with excess cash, which should alleviate the agency conflict arising from managerial discretion. We also find that female CFOs at firms with surplus cash increase distributions to shareholders in the form of dividends. The empirical evidence also shows that the reduction in cash does not lead to suboptimal investment policies. Of the two competing hypotheses – gender-ethics hypothesis and risk-aversion hypothesis—these results are consistent with the view that female CFOs undertake more ethical but not more risk-averse decisions than their male counterparts. Our results are robust to a battery of robustness tests.

I use an accounting reform to assess the agency cost of debt in diversified firms. Those firms that switch from single to multiple segments following the reform suffer a 12% increase in their bond spread when compared with their stand-alone peers. Consistent with lenders anticipating underinvestment and asset-substitution incentives, diversified firms with high cash-flow volatility across divisions suffer the highest increase in borrowing costs. I employ a novel approach that allows abstracting from unobservable characteristics that would otherwise influence the pricing of diversified firms’ debt.

An assumption in agency costs theory is that agency costs can exert a negative impact on firm performance. In this study, we examine the impact of agency costs on firm performance of Vietnamese listed companies. Our sample includes 736 companies in Vietnam during the period om 2010 to 2015. We find that agency costs exert a negative impact on firm performance. Our results are robust to alternative econometric models, including an instrumental variables technique and a system generalized method of moment model. In addition, we show that a debt instrument can be a useful tool to reduce the negative impact of agency costs on firm performance.

One puzzling feature of domestic private equity (PE) funds in emerging markets is that such funds often have a “short fuse”, i.e., a much shorter lifespan than their developed market counterparts. Based on a simple agency model, we propose an explanation for this puzzle. We show that, under a long fuse, PE managers have incentives to game performance-based compensation schemes by opportunistically timing investments and burning money when early investments fail. Shortening the fuse restricts timing opportunism, but alleviates money-burning incentives only if managerial compensation is sufficiently concavified or the contract stipulates substantial investors' hurdle returns. Both of these options can force managers to concede rents to investors. Thus, managers face a tradeoff between rents and agency costs. In emerging markets, where agency costs are high, managers use a short fuse with incentive compatible compensation schemes to minimize agency costs. In contrast, in developed markets, where agency costs are low, managers use a long fuse to preserve rents. Based on these results, we further draw predictions on fund performance, managerial behavior, and investor rents for both long-fused developed-market funds and short-fused emerging-market funds. We also predict that, when institutional infrastructure in emerging markets improves and when domestic PE managers in emerging markets gain more experience, domestic PE funds in emerging markets will adopt the long-lifespan PE contracts typical in developed markets.

Abstract Hybrid ownership—sharing partial business ownership with the state—is a new form of political connections that entrepreneurs in developing countries may employ to improve their access to key resources. This study investigates hybrid ownership as a strategic decision of entrepreneurs running small businesses in Vietnam—a transition economy. Utilising the resource dependence theory and legitimacy viewpoint, we propose and evidently show that increased state ownership in hybrid firms leads to improved performance. However, increasing state ownership beyond a minority share threshold harms firm performance due to the presence of agency costs. Also, the involvement of the state in firm governance reduces the benefits gained from having state ownership. Plain English Summary Is the more the better? How much state ownership really matters for hybrid firms to enhance their performance? More state ownership means more access to resources and privileges; but too much state ownership may reduce firm efficiency due to its poor governance. Analysing more than one million observations of small businesses in Vietnam, this study offers three insightful implications. First, for academics, institutional conditions should be considered when investigating political connections, especially in an emerging market context. Second, for practitioners, political connections in the form of hybrid ownership when being held at an adequate level can boost firm performance. However, an exceeding level of state ownership in hybrid firms may become harmful. Third, for policymakers, we suggest that forming hybrid business ownership with the private sector helps firms make use of state-owned resources. This collaboration is a win-win solution as long as the state ownership remains at an adequate level.

Purpose- This study aims to determine the relationship between free cash flow and investment efficiency of quoted manufacturing companies in Nigeria. Design- An accounting-based model developed by Richardson (2006) was employed to measure investment efficiency and free cash flow. The population of the study consist of all the listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria. Similarly, the purposive sampling technique was employed to arrive at forty-eight companies for 2008-2018. Findings- The results of the study confirm the agency theory of free cash flow. Hence, it established that there is a positive and robust relationship between free cash flow and overinvestment. Practical Implications- the findings of this study has practical implications to various group of users of financial information such as investors, policymakers and other stakeholders in the listed manufacturing sector in Nigeria. The study recommends that policymakers reduce the cost of debt, and likewise, managers should emphasize the facilitation of equity capital. Originality- To the best of the researcher's knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationship between free cash flow and investment efficiency in Nigeria.

The increased equity lending supply (ELS) in the equity loan market, available for short sellers to borrow, exposes a firm to greater short selling threats. Considering short sellers' strong incentives to uncover firm-specific information and monitor managers, we hypothesize that short selling threats, proxied by ELS, enhance corporate investment efficiency. We find that ELS significantly reduces managerial tendencies to underinvest (overinvest) especially for firms prone to underinvest (overinvest). The effect of ELS on investment efficiency is stronger for firms with higher information asymmetry and weaker corporate governance , confirming short sellers' role in mitigating information and agency costs. However, short selling risk weakens the effect of ELS. Our evidence is robust to endogeneity checks and suggests that corporate investment can be driven by a particular capital market condition: the amount of lendable shares in the equity loan market.

Using a system of equations to account for the simultaneity, inter‐temporal and interdependent nature of corporate decisions, we document several new insights into how emerging market firms allocate funds across competing uses‐of‐funds. Emerging market firms save most of the operating cash flow. When the firms spend, they allocate the remainder to dividend payments first, followed by debt retirements, then equity repurchases and lastly investments. This pecking order of prioritizing savings and dividends ahead of other uses‐of‐funds highlight difficulties in accessing external finance and a stubbornly resilient signalling motive for firms operating under a high degree of information asymmetry and agency costs. We further find significant asymmetry and heterogeneity in the allocation of funds conditional on credit constraints, deviations from target and around the financial crisis. Our findings signal the need for policies that improve access to external finance and information disclosure in emerging markets.