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(2020)ThesisI investigate the role of foreign patents (patents issued in countries outside of the US) in US firms’ patent portfolios. Foreign patents are substantial and prevalent for US firms. Foreign patents form about 39% of the average patent portfolio of US firms. Firms with foreign patent applications are financially stable, and these firms have a higher percentage of foreign sales to total sales. Besides, I exploit exogenous shocks to foreign sales (free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties) to identify the effect of foreign sales on the propensity to foreign patent. I find firms with a larger percentage of foreign sales have a higher propensity to foreign patent. Additional analysis reveals US firms have a higher propensity to patent in countries with strong patent rights.
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(2020)ThesisThis thesis is composed of three stand-alone research studies relating to the recent unconventional monetary policy adopted by the Bank of Japan (BOJ). The first study investigates the impact of the BOJ’s policy on stock prices and corporate activities. The empirical results show that the policy has generated heterogenous effects on stock prices. Firms with disproportionately higher BOJ investment experience significantly positive stock returns both in the short term and the long term. Corresponding to the positive price impact, the cost of equity capital reduces and firm value increases. However, further tests fail to find evidence of any real impact. Firms that benefit from a reduction in cost of equity capital do not increase external financing, corporate investment and employment. The concentrated capital structure in Japan and the biased investment scheme adopted may explain this weak policy impact. The second study examines whether and how excess reduction in free float affects stock liquidity. Using the BOJ’s equity purchase program as a natural experiment to tackle endogeneity problems, the results show that firms that experience a larger reduction in free float exhibit a reduction in stock liquidity. The negative effect of free float reduction on stock liquidity survives a battery of robustness tests. Further analyses of the underlying channels show that the number of common shareholders and institutional shareholders in a firm significantly decrease. These findings are consistent with a lack of free floating shares introducing frictions in the process of liquidity provision. The third study examines whether an increase in exchange traded funds (ETF) ownership via indexed investment impedes or improves price efficiency. Utilizing Japan’s ETF purchase program as the identification strategy, empirical tests show that prices of stocks that experience an increase in ETF ownership become less efficient in that they deviate more from a random walk and exhibit longer delays in responding to market information. An increase in ETF ownership is also associated with an increase in post-earnings announcement drift, a decline in analyst coverage, and a reduction in the coefficient of current returns to future earnings. These results together suggest that an excessive increase in ETF ownership curbs information arbitrage activities and results in less informative security prices.
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(2020)ThesisThis thesis consists of three stand-alone research projects on corporate ownership structure across countries, insider trading, and passive institutional investors. The first study examines the effect of social trust on corporate ownership structure. Using a large sample of public firms across 42 countries, I find that a culture of trust in a country leads to a more dispersed corporate ownership structure. I also investigate how trust affects the evolution of ownership structure following firms’ IPO and the channels through which trust leads to dispersed ownership. I show that corporate ownership is more likely to become widely held and diffuses at a faster speed in countries with a higher level of social trust. Trust also encourages the selling of block ownership by large shareholders and the use of equity financing by firms. The second study investigates whether fast economic integration but slow legal integration leads to more aggressive insider trading by foreigners in possession of material non-public information about domestic firms. Using a large sample of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) around the world, I find systematically a higher likelihood of insider trading in target firm securities before the announcements of cross-border deals compared to domestic deals. The difference is mainly driven by cross-border deals where the acquirer is from a country with high corruption and low social norms, and where the target is in a country with stricter enforcement of insider trading laws. The third study examines the role of family interest in explaining and influencing individual funds’ voting behaviour. Specifically, I focus on the voting patterns of index funds in the event of corporate M&As. I find that the interest of fund families in the target is significantly positively associated with the likelihood of an affiliated index fund voting for a deal in the bidder merger approval meeting. However, an index fund’s own interest in the target does not explain its voting pattern. A higher level of aggregate bidder ownership held by fund families that have greater active interest in the target is also associated with worse deal performance. Taken together, the evidence suggests that cooperation between active and index funds within fund families potentially weakens the resistance of bidder shareholders to bad mergers.
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(2021)ThesisThis paper explores extensive asset allocation possibilities and asset pricing tests shedding light into the cross-sectional and time-varying nature of combining multi-asset alternative risk premia. Existing literature in the multi-asset risk premia space is limited in terms of allocation studies as most research on combining factor exposures are only in the single-stock equity space. The literary gap is further exacerbated over the last decade with the explosion of new factors discovered. To address this, key asset allocation techniques commonly used in allocating across long-only traditional asset classes and equity factors are applied to multi-asset risk premia. The results seem to suggest the key assumptions of expected returns, followed by expected risks, higher moments and then lastly correlations in this order of importance are associated with building portfolios with higher risk-reward. To the best of my knowledge, this is one of the first papers that provide a comprehensive and practical study of a wide array of portfolio implementation approaches to multi-asset risk premia. This paper serves as an annex for investors to better understand the interaction and concentration of multi-asset risk premia exposures to meet their desired investment profiles.
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(2020)ThesisThe Mandatory Bid Rule (MBR) requires a bidder who acquires control over a firm to make a general offer to all remaining shareholders to purchase their residual shares. It is the most powerful institution that requires controlling shareholders to share the control premium with other shareholders in a control transaction. The MBR is considered to be a key method of protection for minority shareholders, but nevertheless faces strong criticism over high implementation costs and an on-going debate over its effectiveness in practice. From a utilitarianism perspective, the paper shows the relevance between the MBR and the effectiveness of minority shareholder protection mechanisms in a jurisdiction of legal transplantation. Using Mainland China as the test sample where the MBR was adopted, removed then re-introduced, the paper employs the empirical research methodology to highlight market reactions when the rule is removed. The paper analyses the efficiency of the MBR and outlines the types of environments and jurisdictional specifications where the MBR can operate at an optimal level, and alternatively, where the MBR will not be value-maximizing. It offers ideal legislation suggestions for similar jurisdictions considering transplanting MBR.
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(2021)ThesisThe aim of this thesis is to utilise transnational regulatory network (TRN) theory to examine the effectiveness of the regulatory framework promulgated by the International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) — to address the activities of transnational hedge funds. Scholarship employing TRN theory has not previously accounted for the distinctive role that IOSCO — a body well-described as a TRN — has played in developing hedge fund regulation to prevent, identify and mitigate systemic risk related to transnational hedge funds. It is a gap that this thesis attempts to fill. This thesis asks whether and in what ways the IOSCO framework contributes to systemic risk mitigation in relation to transnational hedge funds operating at the global level. It does so to help academics and policymakers to better understand and appreciate the value, and overcome the limitations of IOSCO in this respect. Using the case studies of the failure of Long-Term Capital Management at the end of the 20th century and the demise of Bear Stearns’ hedge funds during the global financial crisis, it argues that it is the systemic hazards posed by hedge funds that make them merit extra regulation at both national and transnational levels. Deploying the findings of the TRN theory, it further demonstrates that the IOSCO framework for transnational hedge fund regulation holds not only advantages to be maintained but also shortcomings to be overcome in addressing these systemic hazards. The significance of this study lies in its contribution to advancing comprehension of the global regulatory framework for transnational hedge funds. It makes the advance by introducing a focus on systemic risk mitigation, hitherto lacking, and developing a critical, doctrinal understanding of the relatively understudied rules and standards under IOSCO.
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(2021)ThesisThis thesis consists of three chapters that investigate the linkage between uncertainty and corporate investment decisions on an international basis. In first chapter, I investigate the extent of U.S. policy-related spillovers into 22 other real economies. I find that, after accounting for factors previously used to explain corporate investment, US Economic Policy Uncertainty (US EPU, hereafter) fluctuations affect foreign corporate investments through two channels. First, the single effect of US EPU on international corporate investment shows an unequivocal negative relation (the direct channel). Second, an increase in US EPU also attenuates the negative sensitivity of corporate investment towards the cost of capital (the indirect channel). Further, I find that while the direct channel of US EPU on corporate investment persists across several subsamples, its indirect channel relates to a high degree of dependence on the U.S. economy and opacity exhibited by local economies. The second chapter reconciles the contrary views on the foreign investors using local disaster shocks from 46 countries over the period 1998-2018. I find that local disaster shocks cause significant disruptions to corporate investments, but foreign institutional investors attenuate the costs of disaster risks. The benefits associated with foreign institutional investors are not uniformly held across all economies, where the role of foreign institutional investors is particularly measurable in countries with well-developed institutional environment. The third chapter focuses on the uncertainty at domestic level using national elections across 23 different countries. I find that the corporate investment cycle corresponds with the timing of national elections, but there is a cross-sectional difference in the firm-level investment sensitivity to elections. During election periods, while firms temporarily reduce investment expenditures relative to nonelection years, the decline is mainly sourced from firms with greater political exposures. Further, I find that the investment cycles are more volatile when the election outcomes are uncertain, and the institutional environments are weaker.
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(2020)ThesisIn the first chapter of this dissertation, I find that an increase in the likelihood of extreme temperatures leads to a decline in the availability of credit in a region. I also document that for certain loan types, such as a revolving line of credit, the price of credit is increasing in the likelihood of extreme temperatures. Lastly, I find that temperature shocks may propagate from one region to other regions via a bank lending channel. Such indirect exposure, to temperature shocks elsewhere, adversely affects firm-level outcomes. The second chapter of this dissertation focuses on the implications of temperature extremes for small businesses in a region. I find that an increase in the likelihood of extreme temperature leads to an adverse impact on the availability of credit in a region. I find that the average adverse effect of extreme temperatures on credit availability is present for all bank types based on size. The adversity of extreme temperature effect, on credit availability in a region, increases with bank size. In the third chapter of this dissertation, I propose a new heterogeneous-agent stochastic discount factor (SDF) that equals the previous period investment weighted average of agents' SDFs. I implement this SDF on the consumption growth of cohorts of households in the Consumer Expenditure Survey dataset from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. I use factor analysis to reduce the impact of measurement error present in consumption data. For quarterly data observed at a monthly frequency, the investment weighted SDF reconciles the historical equity premium for relative risk aversion of 7. The proposed SDF fares well when tested using classical asset pricing tests like Hansen-Jagannathan volatility bounds and JT test. The weighting methodology is the primary driver of my results.
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(2022)ThesisThis dissertation consists of three essays on asset pricing and market microstructure topics within the U.S. corporate bond market. The first essay investigates asymmetry in price pressure between customer buy and sell orders and demonstrates that it is a valuable measure of downside liquidity for corporate bonds. While evidence of a characteristic premium for illiquidity in the cross-section of corporate bonds is mixed, aggregate liquidity asymmetry has high explanatory power for the time series of market returns. Its statistical and economic significance justify it as a credible asset pricing factor. Average market-wide liquidity asymmetry comoves with interest rate and credit spread changes, investor sentiment, funding liquidity, dealer inventory, exchange-traded fund flows, and post-crisis regulatory change. The second essay documents the properties of market-wide corporate bond liquidity and demonstrates that liquidity risk is an important determinant of returns. In market downturns, transaction costs rise for sellers and fall for buyers. The negative relation between buyer and seller liquidity motivates a new across-measure liquidity factor that incorporates an asymmetric liquidity component. Shocks to market-wide liquidity explain a large portion of bond return variation in the time series. Primarily driven by the asymmetric component, the liquidity factor attracts a cross-sectional risk premium that is robust to controls for credit, equity, and interest rate factors, as well as the illiquidity level. The third essay provides new evidence of retail investors’ ability to predict returns based on transactions in U.S. corporate bonds with equity-like risk. Retail order flow is persistent and contrarian, and it predicts future returns in the cross-section. The profits of an equal-weighted, long-short strategy that buys (sells) bonds that experience high (low) net retail buying are economically meaningful. The alpha based on decile portfolios is significant at the 10% level when controlling for common equity and bond risk factors. However, due to high transaction costs and because retail purchase volume is concentrated in underperforming bonds, retail traders lose money in aggregate.
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(2023)ThesisThis thesis consists of three stand-alone studies in the field of energy finance market and household finance. The first study investigates the demographics and socio-economics factors influencing individuals’ decision to choose working from home before and after the coronavirus outbreak. I find that all factors impact the working from home choice before the coronavirus outbreak. However, the number of children becomes an uninfluenced factor, and female employees are more likely to work from home after the outbreak. Thus, I further report that female employees who work from home are less likely to have been promoted and received lower wages before the coronavirus outbreak. However, after the outbreak, they have a higher probability of job promotion and higher wage premium of working from home. This points to higher bargaining power with employers for females after the outbreak due to the changing in cultural norms and advanced working from home technologies. In the second study, I aim to analyse the impact of financial literacy on energy poverty in Australia and to explore important mechanisms of influence. The result shows that financial literate individual is less likely to face energy poverty. I also address the potential endogeneity by employing the mathematically skills as instrument variable. Additionally, I examine the channels that contribute to the relationship between financial literacy and energy poverty by focusing on the role of wealth and consumption. The result shows that wealth is the important channel through which financial literacy influences energy poverty while consumption could not classify as important channel. The third study investigates the macroeconomic effects of extreme weather in Australia by employing the index, Australian Actuaries Climate Index (AACI), to measure the extreme weather conditions. I find that the extreme weather shocks have a negatively impact on gross domestic product (GDP) and consumer price index (CPI). To provide better understanding of CPI, I analyse the CPI component and find that energy and food price are increased after extreme weather shock because higher energy demand for cooling and heating and lower agriculture output, respectively. In addition, the extreme weather shocks have the negative effect on interest rate while the positive impact on unemployment rate and energy consumption.