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Before regulations were enacted to prevent such practices, information leaked through selective disclosure was incorporated into markets prior to the public release of news. "News days" did not deliver news to markets; now they do. We provide novel evidence of changes in returns and turnover behavior around the enactment of regulations barring selective disclosure practices in the United States and the EU. We conversely document lack of such changes in Australia and Japan, which did not implement similar measures. We conclude that selective disclosure resolves Roll's R 2 puzzle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effects of financial risk cycles on business cycles, using a panel spanning 73 countries since 1900. Agents use a Bayesian learning model to form their beliefs about risk. We construct a proxy of these beliefs and show that perceived low risk encourages risk-taking, augmenting growth at the cost of accumulating financial vulnerabilities, and, therefore, a reversal in growth follows. The reversal is particularly pronounced when the low-risk environment persists and credit growth is excessive. Global risk cycles have a stronger effect on growth than local risk cycles via their impact on capital flows, investment, and debt-issuer quality. 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use three facets of freedom of choice (opportunity, decisional autonomy, and immunity from interference) to develop a freedom of choice index for 46 countries and test its impact on commonality in liquidity. We find that the three aspects of individual freedom of choice are negatively related to country-specific market liquidity commonality. Building on Sen's (1993) theoretical framework, we document that in the presence of opportunities for making independent choices, immunity from encroaching activities, and decisional autonomy, investors tend to show less correlated trading decisions, measured by the levels of liquidity co-movement. To address possible endogeneity bias, we use 9/11 and country-level terrorist attacks as an exogenous source of variations to personal freedom of choice. We find that higher levels of perceived threats in a country restrain personal freedoms and tend to reduce freedom of choice effects on liquidity commonality. Our results are robust to alternative explanations, freedom of choice definitions, and model specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the relation between sovereign and corporate bond issuance. Sovereign bond issues that increase a country's maximum maturity are followed by increases in the maximum maturity of corporate issues. Our results point to issuance complementarities based on the benchmarking of corporate bonds to sovereign bonds. Sovereign and corporate bond issues are also substitutes, but substitutability requires the availability of a high-quality sovereign bond benchmark. By adding to existing theories focusing on substitutability, our findings highlight the role that the maturity of sovereign debt plays in capital market development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging nations are often distressed if their current administration and governance do not align with social and national needs. Among these worries, there is the fear of public funds misconduct and corruption in the nation’s major institutions. Indeed, inadequate administration results in embezzlement of funds, tax evasion, and low bureaucratic quality in all sectors. This study was undertaken to address the role of impartial administration specifically in the financial sector. The research considered a sample size composed of 12 countries from Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa in the period of 2000 to 2021. The net interest margin was considered a proxy for financial performance measurement. Additionally, an ordinary least squares and quantile regression was performed to record the effect of the variables on financial sector performance. Within this context, the findings exhibited different outcomes for these regions. For instance, in the Latin America region, the results revealed that public sector theft, bureaucratic quality, corruption level, local government index, and inflation have a negative impact on the performance of the financial sector while impartial public administration demonstrated a positive impact on financial performance. On the other hand, the Sub-Saharan African region demonstrated that bureaucratic quality, local government index, and inflation have a significant and positive impact on financial performance, whereas executive embezzlement and theft, corruption level, and government final expenditures were shown to negatively influence financial performance. Finally, the study’s findings provides insights into the policies and strategies to implement in order to support the financial framework.

In March 2018, the US used an immense trade deficit as an excuse to provoke trade friction with China. This study uses the EGARCH model and event study methods to study the impact of the major risk event of Sino-US trade friction on soybean futures markets in China and the United States. Results indicate that the Sino-US trade friction weakened the return spillover effect between the soybean futures markets in China and the US, and significantly increased market volatilities. As the scale of additional tariffs increased, the volatility of the Chinese soybean futures market declined; however, the volatility of the US soybean futures market did not weaken. In addition, expanding the sources of soybean imports helped ease the impact of tariffs on China’s soybean futures market, while the decline in US soybean exports to China intensified the volatility of the US soybean futures market. In addition, while the release of multiple tariff increases has had a short-term impact on the returns of soybean futures markets, the impact of trade friction has gradually decreased.

This study employs the Mainland-Hong Kong Stock Connect pilot program in China to investigate the influence of stock market liberalization on firm-level financial reporting quality (FRQ). First, through a staggered difference-in-difference specification strategy, we find that eligible firms experience a significant improvement in FRQ, as measured by a composite proxy of accrual earnings management, real activities manipulation, and financial report restatement. Second, cross-sectional analyses suggest that the effect is stronger when firms are headquartered in regions with weaker institutional environments, characterized by lower judicial efficiency and less developed financial markets. We also show that the impact is more pronounced when firms face less external pressure and possess more effective corporate governance before stock market liberalization. Third, further evidence highlights that augmented FRQ is associated with a reduction in regulatory compliance costs, an improvement in stock price efficiency, and a mitigation of financing constraints. Collectively, we shed new light on the role of stock market liberalization in shaping firms’ financial reporting behavior.

From 2007 to 2020, unlisted Chinese firms paid an average of over US $500 million to listed firms for their shell value in reverse merger transactions. We show that this large shadow price for a public listing sheds light on other features of Chinese markets, including (i) near-zero mortality rates, (ii) frequent major-asset restructurings (MARs), (iii) insensitivity of small-firm prices to corporate earnings, and (iv) a large size effect. A firm-level measure of expected shell probability (ESP) predicts stock returns, MARs, earnings-to-price sensitivity, and short-window returns to initial public offering-related regulatory news. Furthermore, adding ESP to existing pricing models for Chinese stocks significantly improves model performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts the tail-event driven network (TENET) framework to explore the connectedness and systemic risk of the banking industry along the Belt and Road (B&R) based on weekly returns of 377 publicly-listed banks from 2014 to 2019. We conduct the connectedness analysis from four levels (i.e., system, region, country and institution) and identify the systemic risk contribution of banks. We find that the dynamic total connectedness reached its peak during the outbreak of the abnormal fluctuations of Chinese stock market in 2015-2016 and its trough during the Brexit vote, and subsequently experienced several periodic fluctuations at a relatively high position. In the B&R banking system, the intra-regional tail risk spillovers are remarkably stronger than the inter-regional tail risk spillovers during the post-crisis period. In addition, the panel regressions estimated by the least squares dummy variable model show that the cross-border merger and acquisitions (M&As) and the merchandise trade export are important drivers for the tail-connectedness across the B&R countries. Our study provides regulators with insightful implications on the systemic risk supervision of the B&R banking industry.

This study investigates herd behavior exhibited by pension funds in the sovereign bond market before, during and after the European debt crisis. It uses unique monthly data on sovereign bond holdings of pension funds and transactions between December 2008 and December 2014. The dataset covers 67 large Dutch pension funds that invest in bonds from 109 countries. We find evidence of intensive herd behavior of Dutch pension funds in sovereign bonds. We also distinguish between European countries which suffer from the European debt crisis, such as Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain, and those that have not. We find high sell herding and low buy herding for the crisis countries during the European debt crisis, whereas in the non-crisis period their herd behavior does not differ substantially from that in non-crisis countries. When we control for institutional, macroeconomic, financial market and pension fund factors, sell herding in crisis countries is still significantly higher. However, we find no evidence of destabilizing behavior with respect to bonds of crisis countries during the European debt crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crises cause attentiveness in our society and awaken, depending on the degree of consternation, our ongoing interest. These events include financial crises, phenomenal incidents that shock the economic world and pose significant challenges for the governments. Two crises which stand out in this context are the Great Depression in 1929 and the financial crisis in 2007/2008. In addition to the comparative approach, the paper focuses directly on the typical repetitive mechanism (“recurrent pattern of banking and sovereign debt crises” (Reinhart & Rogoff, 2011): overheating, the forming of a bubble and the bursting of the bubble, largely started in the USA. Specific aspects included in this research area are crisis management in the decades mentioned above, the role of governments and banks, as well as the observation as to which crisis can be expected next. We can conclude that the current monetary systems led by complex financial instruments and addicted to low interest rates are prone to deliver another serious financial crisis.

We quantify the effect of macroprudential policy in mitigating domestic and foreign shocks to a small open commodity based economy estimated on Chilean data. The model features a heterogeneous banking sector and includes financial frictions through collateralized borrowing and unsecured loans with the possibility of endogenous haircuts or default. The estimation shows that shocks affect large and small banks differently through the heterogeneous adjustment of both the composition of assets and the level of liabilities. This implies that countercyclical capital buffers as well as the countercyclical liquidity coverage ratios need to be introduced jointly to maintain financial stability. Countercyclical capital buffers alone cause large and small banks to adjust their balance sheet sizes in opposite directions. Only combined capital and liquidity policies raise both types of banks costs while growing their assets and thus attenuate aggregate credit fluctuations over the business cycle.

In contrast to US companies, Chinese firms have concentrated ownership with the effect that the central agency problem emanates from controlling shareholders expropriating minority shareholders, a phenomenon referred to as 'tunneling'. This study examines the monitoring effect of mutual funds on the tunneling behavior of controlling shareholders. Due to the distinctive institutional settings in China, including a high level of ownership concentration, underdeveloped legal system in the stock markets and weak governance mechanisms in the mutual fund industry, we find that an increase in mutual fund ownership effectively mitigates the tunneling behavior of controlling shareholders thus improving firm performance. Nonetheless, after the mutual fund ownership reaches a certain threshold, an increase in concentrated mutual fund ownership is associated with heavier tunneling and lower firm performance. This may suggest that concentrated mutual funds collude with controlling shareholders in order to preserve their private interests. Moreover, the above effects are found to be more pronounced for firms with heavier tunneling activities. Our finding of the non-monotonic monitoring role of mutual funds brings attention to the private interest theory for mutual funds, an aspect that has been largely ignored in previous studies on mutual funds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by recent papers of Hull (Financ Stab Rev 14(July):71–80, 2010; J Deriv 20(1 (Fall)):26–29, 2012; J Financ Eng 1(3 (September)):1–8, 2014) on the topic, this note provides an overview of the OTC derivatives reform proposed by the G20 leaders in September 2009 as a response to the recent subprime crisis. The goal is to describe the major different legislations approved, and in some cases implemented, around the world (with a particular focus on US and Europe), and how this structural change in the OTC derivatives market will affect the way financial and non-financial firms operate. The main takeaway of this note is the (evolving) regulatory landscape will definitely push for the standardization of OTC products over time, implying a more transparent, liquid, and simpler OTC derivatives market. However, bespoke OTCs will still play a significant role in the market, simply because plain vanilla OTC instruments and exchange-traded derivatives (Futures, for example) are less suitable for hedging purposes. The structure of the OTC derivatives market will change in the next years. Firms around the world should be prepared to navigate a fast moving market and regulatory landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the benefits and risks of the distributed ledger technology (DLT) for the clearing and settlement of exchange-traded and OTC securities, followed by a description of the technology's potential role for central counterparties and central securities depositories. Although the industry and scholars are attempting to solve the technological and operational issues that DLT systems still face, outstanding legal risks are such that the financial industry is asking for more regulatory guidance and intervention. This article wants to contribute to the public policy debate by presenting potential regulatory barriers that may have to be removed for DLT to be fully adopted. In addition, it identifies areas requiring an update of the legal framework in order to address certain prudential and conduct risks that this technology could introduce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]