# Research articles for the 2021-05-25

A Threshold for Quantum Advantage in Derivative Pricing
Shouvanik Chakrabarti,Rajiv Krishnakumar,Guglielmo Mazzola,Nikitas Stamatopoulos,Stefan Woerner,William J. Zeng
arXiv

We give an upper bound on the resources required for valuable quantum advantage in pricing derivatives. To do so, we give the first complete resource estimates for useful quantum derivative pricing, using autocallable and Target Accrual Redemption Forward (TARF) derivatives as benchmark use cases. We uncover blocking challenges in known approaches and introduce a new method for quantum derivative pricing - the re-parameterization method - that avoids them. This method combines pre-trained variational circuits with fault-tolerant quantum computing to dramatically reduce resource requirements. We find that the benchmark use cases we examine require 8k logical qubits and a T-depth of 54 million. We estimate that quantum advantage would require executing this program at the order of a second. While the resource requirements given here are out of reach of current systems, we hope they will provide a roadmap for further improvements in algorithms, implementations, and planned hardware architectures.

Asset Pricing Implications Of The Mismatch Between Performance Window And Benchmark Duration
Hodor, Idan,Zapatero, Fernando
SSRN
This paper studies the asset pricing implications of the mismatch between asset managers' performance window and the cash-flow duration of their benchmarks. Our equilibrium mechanism provides the first plausible theoretical foundation for the recent empirical findings showing that the risk premium, volatility, and Sharpe ratio on the short-term asset are higher than the long-term asset. These findings are at odds with the leading equilibrium asset pricing models, such as long-run risk, external habit formation, and rare disaster risk models. Our continuous-time setup admits precise closed-form expressions. We provide novel empirical evidence to support other predictions of the model.

Beautiful Cycles: A Theory and a Model Implying a Curious Role for Interest
Gross, Marco
SSRN
Where do economic cycles come from? This paper contemplates an utmost minimalistic model and underlying theory that rest on two assumptions for letting them emerge endogenously: (1) the presence of interest-bearing debt; and (2) a degree of downward nominal wage rigidity. Despite its parsimony, the model generates well-behaved, self-evolving limit cycles and replicates six essential empirical facts: (1) booms are long- while recessions short-lived; (2) leverage is procyclical; (3) firm profit and wage shares in GDP are counter- and procyclical, respectively; (4) Phillips curves are downward-sloping and convex, and Okunâ€™s law relation is replicated; (5) default cascades arise endogenously at the turning points to recessions; (6) lending spreads are countercyclical. One can refer to the model as being of a Dynamic Stochastic General Disequilibrium (DSGD) kind.

Beyond Incomplete Spanning: Convenience Yields and Exchange Rate Disconnect
Jiang, Zhengyang,Krishnamurthy, Arvind,Lustig, Hanno N.
SSRN
We introduce convenience yields on dollar bonds into an incomplete-markets equilibrium model of exchange rates and interest rates. The convenience yield enters as a stochastic wedge in the Euler equation for exchange rate determination. The model identifies a novel safe-asset convenience yield channel by which quantitative easing impacts the dollar exchange rate. Our model addresses three exchange rate puzzles. (1) The model can rationalize the low pass-through of SDF shocks to exchange rates. (2) It helps address but does not fully resolve the exchange rate disconnect puzzle. (3) The model generates an unconditional log currency risk premium on the dollar that is in line with the data.

Board Composition and Performance of State-owned Enterprises: Quasi-experimental Evidence
Baltrunaite, Audinga,Cannella, Mario,Mocetti, Sauro,Roma, Giacomo
SSRN
The quality of governance crucially affects corporate outcomes, and may be particularly important for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) not disciplined by market competition forces. We examine the impact of board composition on the performance of companies controlled by public entities in Italy. For this purpose, we exploit a reform-induced exogenous change in board composition, aimed at increasing female representation and at reducing the revolving-door phenomenon. The lawâ€™s provisions were binding for SOEs, but not for companies with a minority share of public ownership, allowing us to adopt a difference-in-differences estimation. The results show that female presence on the boards of directors of SOEs has increased, while that of former politicians has decreased. The new directors have mostly replaced older and less talented men, thereby rejuvenating the boards and improving their quality. To assess the effects of the board shake-up on firm performance, we analyse companiesâ€™ balance sheets and survey information on citizensâ€™ satisfaction with the provision of local public services and on objective measures of their quality. While we detect no significant effects on firm productivity, we find that profitability increases and leverage decreases, thereby reducing corporate credit risk. Finally, there is evidence consistent with an improvement in the quality of SOEsâ€™ output.

Can Internet Banking Affect Households' Participation in Financial Markets and Financial Awareness?
Viviano, Eliana,Michelangeli, Valentina
SSRN
We are in a digital era. Internet banking has been increasingly offered by banks (through simple websites and easy-to-use mobile apps) and demanded by customers for managing their own finances without going to the physical branch. The availability of this new channel to interact with financial intermediaries can reduce households' cost of acquiring information and the time spent for financial transactions; therefore, it could also impact on households' choice to start investing in financial markets. As the decisions to adopt Internet banking and to entry into financial markets could be jointly determined, we derive a measure of bank supply of Internet-based services, which constitutes our instrumental variable and it is assigned to each household in the sample. We find that the adoption of Internet banking induces households to participate in financial markets and, in particular, to hold short term assets with a low risk/return profile. Over time the adoption of Internet banking also drives a higher understanding of basic standard financial concepts.

Climate, Agriculture and Food
Ariel Ortiz-Bobea
arXiv

Agriculture is arguably the most climate-sensitive sector of the economy. Growing concerns about anthropogenic climate change have increased research interest in assessing its potential impact on the sector and in identifying policies and adaptation strategies to help the sector cope with a changing climate. This chapter provides an overview of recent advancements in the analysis of climate change impacts and adaptation in agriculture with an emphasis on methods. The chapter provides an overview of recent research efforts addressing key conceptual and empirical challenges. The chapter also discusses practical matters about conducting research in this area and provides reproducible R code to perform common tasks of data preparation and model estimation in this literature. The chapter provides a hands-on introduction to new researchers in this area.

Conditional Non-Lattice Integration, Pricing and Superhedging
Christian Bender,Sebastian E. Ferrando,Alfredo L. Gonzalez
arXiv

Closely motivated by financial considerations, we develop an integration theory which is not classical i.e. it is not necessarily associated to a measure. The base space, denoted by $\mathcal{S}$ and called a trajectory space, substitutes the set $\Omega$ in probability theory and provides a fundamental structure via conditional subsets $\mathcal{S}_{(S,j)}$ that allows the definition of conditional integrals. The setting is a natural by-product of no arbitrage assumptions that are used to model financial markets and games of chance (in a discrete infinite time framework). The constructed conditional integrals can be interpreted as required investments, at the conditioning node, for hedging an integrable function, the latter characterized a.e. and in the limit as we increase the number of portfolios used. The integral is not classical due to the fact that the original vector space of portfolio payoffs is not a vector lattice. In contrast to a classical stochastic setting, where price processes are associated to conditional expectations (with respect to risk neutral measures), we uncover a theory where prices are naturally given by conditional non-lattice integrals. One could then study analogues of classical probabilistic notions in such non-classical setting, the paper stops after defining trajectorial martingales the study of which is deferred to future work.

Detecting p-hacking
Graham Elliott,Nikolay Kudrin,Kaspar Wuthrich
arXiv

We theoretically analyze the problem of testing for $p$-hacking based on distributions of $p$-values across multiple studies. We provide general results for when such distributions have testable restrictions (are non-increasing) under the null of no $p$-hacking. We find novel additional testable restrictions for $p$-values based on $t$-tests. Specifically, the shape of the power functions results in both complete monotonicity as well as bounds on the distribution of $p$-values. These testable restrictions result in more powerful tests for the null hypothesis of no $p$-hacking. When there is also publication bias, our tests are joint tests for $p$-hacking and publication bias. A reanalysis of two prominent datasets shows the usefulness of our new tests.

Economic Evaluation of Asset Pricing Models Under Predictability
Hansen, Erwin
SSRN
We perform an out-of-sample comparison of linear factor asset pricing models from an economic perspective under predictability. We assess the economic value added of several factor models when a Bayesian investor is faced with a portfolio allocation problem whereby each model imposes cross-sectional restrictions on the parameters of a predictive stock return regression. The empirical framework explicitly accounts for investor skepticism about the model, i.e., mispricing uncertainty. Using several US portfolios as test assets, we find that the 5-factor model of Hou et al. (2020) outperforms competing models across investment horizons. The behavioral factor models of Stambaugh and Yuan (2017) and Daniel et al. (2020) also appear competitive at short (one and six months) and long (one year) horizons, respectively. The evidence shows that mispricing uncertainty tends to reduce economic added value.

Environmental Kuznets Curve & Effectiveness of International Policies: Evidence from Cross Country Carbon Emission Analysis
Elvan Ece Satici,Bayram Cakir
arXiv

In this article, we are presenting the relationship between environmental pollution and the income level of the selected twenty-four countries. We implemented a data-based research analysis where, for each country, we analyzed the related data for fifty-six years, from 1960 to 2016, to assess the relationship between the carbon emission and income level. After performing the related data analysis for each country, we concluded whether the results for that country were in line with the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. The EKC hypothesis suggests that the carbon emission per capita starts a declining trend when the country-specific high level of income is reached. The results of our data analyses show that the EKC hypothesis is valid for high-income countries and the declining trends of carbon emission are clearly observed when the income level reaches a specific high enough level. On the other hand, for the non-high income countries, our analysis results show that it is too early to make an assessment at this growth stage of their economies because they have not reached their related high-enough income per capita levels yet. Furthermore, we performed two more additional analyses on high-income countries. First, we analyzed the related starting years of their carbon emission declining trends. The big variance in the starting years of the carbon emission declining trends shows that the international policies are clearly ineffective in initiating the declining trend in carbon emission. In addition, for the high-income countries, we explained the differences in their carbon emission per capita levels in 2014 with their SGI indices and their dependence on high-carbon emission energy production.

Fat Tails and Black Swans: Exact Results for Multiplicative Processes with Resets
Damián H. Zanette,Susanna Manrubia
arXiv

We consider a class of multiplicative processes which, added with stochastic reset events, give origin to stationary distributions with power-law tails -- ubiquitous in the statistics of social, economic, and ecological systems. Our main goal is to provide a series of exact results on the dynamics and asymptotic behaviour of increasingly complex versions of a basic multiplicative process with resets, including discrete and continuous-time variants and several degrees of randomness in the parameters that control the process. In particular, we show how the power-law distributions are built up as time elapses, how their moments behave with time, and how their stationary profiles become quantitatively determined by those parameters. Our discussion emphasizes the connection with financial systems, but these stochastic processes are also expected to be fruitful in modeling a wide variety of social and biological phenomena.

Financial Structure and Bank Relationships of Italian Multinational Firms
Bronzini, Raffaello,D'Ignazio, Alessio,Revelli, Davide
SSRN
This paper examines the financial structure and the bank relationships of Italian multinational firms. We show that multinationals are on average more leveraged than non-internationalized firms. Moreover, they have a larger share of financial and bank debt out of total debt, maintain more bank relationships, are less dependent on the main bank for the firm, and benefit from lower interest rates. Lastly, multinationals take greater advantage of intra-group financing than non-internationalized firms. These results are robust to estimation methods that tackle the potential endogeneity of the choice to go international, such as matching and instrumental variables estimation.

How residence permits affect the labor market attachment of foreign workers: Evidence from a migration lottery in Liechtenstein
Berno Buechel,Selina Gangl,Martin Huber
arXiv

We analyze the impact of obtaining a residence permit on foreign workers' labor market and residential attachment. To overcome the usually severe selection issues, we exploit a unique migration lottery that randomly assigns access to otherwise restricted residence permits in Liechtenstein (situated between Austria and Switzerland). Using an instrumental variable approach, our results show that lottery compliers (whose migration behavior complies with the assignment in their first lottery) raise their employment probability in Liechtenstein by on average 24 percentage points across outcome periods (2008 to 2018) as a result of receiving a permit. Relatedly, their activity level and employment duration in Liechtenstein increase by on average 20 percentage points and 1.15 years, respectively, over the outcome window. These substantial and statistically significant effects are mainly driven by individuals not (yet) working in Liechtenstein prior to the lottery rather than by previous cross-border commuters. Moreover, we find both the labor market and residential effects to be persistent even several years after the lottery with no sign of fading out. These results suggest that granting resident permits to foreign workers can be effective to foster labor supply even beyond the effect of cross-border commuting from adjacent regions.

Impact of Financial Inclusion on the Socio-Economic Status of Rural and Urban Households of Vulnerable Sections in Karnataka
Manohar Serrao,Aloysius Sequeira,K. V. M. Varambally
arXiv

Financial inclusion and inclusive growth are the buzzwords today. Inclusive growth empowers people belonging to vulnerable sections. This in turn depends upon a variety of factors, the most important being financial inclusion, which plays a strategic role in promoting inclusive growth and helps in reducing poverty by providing regular and reliable sources of finance to the vulnerable sections. In this direction, the Government of India in its drive for financial inclusion has taken several measures to increase the access to and availing of formal financial services by unbanked households. The purpose of this paper is to assess the nature and extent of financial inclusion and its impact on the socio-economic status of households belonging to vulnerable sections focusing on inclusive growth. This has been analyzed with the theoretical background on financial access and economic growth, and by analyzing the primary data collected from the Revenue Divisions of Karnataka. The results show that there is a disparity in nature and extent of financial inclusion. Access to, availing of formal banking services pave the way to positive changes in the socio-economic status of households belonging to vulnerable sections which are correlated, leading to inclusive growth based on which the paper proposes a model to make the financial system more inclusive and pro-poor.

Independent Policy, Dependent Outcomes: A Game of Cross-Country Dominoes across European Yield Curves
Chatziantoniou, Ioannis,Gabauer, David,Stenfor, Alexis
RePEC
This study investigates the dynamic transmission mechanism between 2Y, 5Y and 10Y interest rate swaps (IRS) for six European currencies (CHF, DKK, EUR, GBP, NOK and SEK) from August 6, 1999 to March 4, 2021 applying the time-varying parameter vector autoregressive connectedness approach in the spirit of Antonakakis et al. (2020). Furthermore, the connectedness approach (Diebold and Yılmaz, 2012, 2014) is extended to allow analyzing aggregated and conditional connectedness measures which improve their interpretability and obtain more in-depth information concerning the cross-maturity/cross-currency propagation mechanism. We document that EUR and DKK have been the most prominent transmitters of shocks in the network. We also find that the 10Y IRS has increasingly assumed a net-transmitting role at the expense of the 2Y IRS – in line with a shift towards unconventional monetary policy and quantitative easing. From a policymaking perspective, this implies means that the role of the domestic short-term interest rate has lost relevance for the monetary transmission mechanism at the expense of the foreign long-term interest rate.

Innovative Empirical Model for Predicting National Banksâ€™ Financial Failure with Artificial Intelligence Subset Data Analysis in the United States
Kasztelnik, Karina
SSRN
The principal objective of this research study was to investigate the impact of the Great Economic Recession of 2008 on national banksâ€™ equity investment valuations and create an empirical model for predicting national banksâ€™ financial failure in the United States. The focal period of the study was from 2009 to 2012, and public data sources used. It is not known to what extent national banksâ€™ stock value investments are based on the return on equity. This causal-comparative study explores the degree to which national banksâ€™ value investment in terms of the price to earnings ratio impacts their return on equity and the extent to which these banksâ€™ stock value investment in terms of dividend yield impacts their return on equity. We used statistical modeling and the machine learning model to find hidden patterns in the input data. The principal finding of this research is that the median earnings per share in 2012 and the dividend yield in 2009 were significantly larger than the median return on equity in 2009 and 2012. Additionally, the dividend yield in 2012 was significantly smaller than the median return on equity in 2012. These findings can contribute to improving our understanding of how banks can predict financial failure using the new machine learning features of artificial intelligence to build an early warning system with the innovative risk measurement tool.

Is Media Really the Great Information Equalizer? The Effects of WSJ Coverage of Firm Earnings Announcements on Peer Information Asymmetry in Information Transfers
Xia, Jingjing
SSRN
Prior research generally finds that the financial media levels the playing field among investors by reducing information acquisition costs for unsophisticated investors. In the setting of information transfers, I demonstrate that when media coverage is likely to reduce the industry information acquisition costs for both sophisticated and unsophisticated investors, their information gap may be widened. Specifically, I find that same-day Wall Street Journal (WSJ) coverage of a focal firmâ€™s earnings announcement (EA) exacerbates information asymmetry of its industry peers around the focal firmâ€™s EA day. However, when the WSJ article is published one day after the EA, there is no change in peer information asymmetry on both the EA day and the day after. Additional analysis shows that the effects of same-day WSJ coverage on peer information asymmetry are stronger when it is more likely to reduce peer investorsâ€™ industry information acquisition costs and when inferring the implications of the focal firm EA for the peer entails higher information integration costs. These findings suggest that media coverage may increase information asymmetry among investors despite its importance in information dissemination.

Judicial Efficiency and Bank Credit to Firms
Rodano, Giacomo
SSRN
This paper analyses empirically the effect of judicial efficiency on bank credit contractual terms for the universe of Italian corporations borrowing from the banking sector. Exploiting within-country variation in the length of bankruptcy proceedings across different jurisdictions, the paper uses a spatial regression discontinuity design that compares credit conditions applied to firms located in municipalities on different sides of jurisdiction borders, controlling for bank characteristics. The results show that judicial efficiency is associated with a reduction in the cost of credit as well as with an increase in its availability for firms, in particular for those at high risk of default. Judicial efficiency increases leverage and investment for high risk firms. All these results suggest that the banking system tilts credit conditions in favor of safe firms as court inefficiency increases. Finally, court efficiency is also associated with a reduction in both the stock and the flow of Non Performing Loans.

Les sous-jacents thÃ©oriques de la Â« finance durable Â» au dÃ©fi des objectifs climatiques (The Theoretical Underpinnings of â€˜Sustainable Financeâ€™ Policies in the Face of Climate Objectives)
Chenet, Hugues,Zamarioli, Luis
SSRN

Limited Liability and the Demand for Coinsurance by Individuals and Corporations
Bergesio, Andrea,Koch-Medina, Pablo,Munari, Cosimo
SSRN
Within the context of expected utility and in a discrete loss setting, we provide a complete account of the demand for insurance by strictly-risk averse agents and risk-neutral firms when they enjoy limited liability. When exposed to a bankrupting, binary loss and under actuarially fair prices, individuals and firms will either fully insure or not insure at all. The decision to insure will depend on whether the benefits the insuree derives from insurance after having compensated the damaged party are sufficiently attractive to justify the premium paid. When the loss is nonbinary, even when prices are actuarially fair, any amount of coinsurance can be optimal depending on the nature of the loss.

Liquidity Stress Testing in Asset Management - Part 2. Modeling the Asset Liquidity Risk
Roncalli, Thierry,Cherief, Amina,Karray-Meziou, Fatma,Regnault, Margaux
SSRN
This article is part of a comprehensive research project on liquidity risk in asset management, which can be divided into three dimensions. The first dimension covers liability liquidity risk (or funding liquidity) modeling, the second dimension focuses on asset liquidity risk (or market liquidity) modeling, and the third dimension considers the asset-liability management of the liquidity gap risk (or asset-liability matching). The purpose of this research is to propose a methodological and practical framework in order to perform liquidity stress testing programs, which comply with regulatory guidelines (ESMA, 2019, 2020) and are useful for fund managers. The review of the academic literature and professional research studies shows that there is a lack of standardized and analytical models. The aim of this research project is then to fill the gap with the goal of developing mathematical and statistical approaches, and providing appropriate answers. In this second article focused on asset liquidity risk modeling, we propose a market impact model to estimate transaction costs. After presenting a toy model that helps to understand the main concepts of asset liquidity, we consider a two-regime model, which is based on the power-law property of price impact. Then, we define several asset liquidity measures such as liquidity cost, liquidation ratio and shortfall or time to liquidation in order to assess the different dimensions of asset liquidity. Finally, we apply this asset liquidity framework to stocks and bonds and discuss the issues of calibrating the transaction cost model.

M&A Advisor Misconduct: A Wrong Without a Remedy?
Tuch, Andrew F.
SSRN
Merger and acquisition ("M&A") transactions are among the most high profile of corporate transactions. They are also among the most contentious, with around eighty percent of all completed deals litigated in recent years. And yet investment banksâ€"essential advisors on these dealsâ€"have generally succeeded spectacularly in avoiding liability, an anomaly considering the routine nature of deal litigation and the frequency with which they face lawsuits in their other activities. This article examines this anomaly, explaining the doctrinal and practical reasons why it arises. In doing so, it puts in context aiding and abetting liability, a recently-successful shareholder strategy to bring M&A advisors to heel. The article shows how this litigation strategyâ€"a direct action by shareholders alleging secondary liability against the corporation's M&A advisor based on the underlying wrong of directorsâ€"may delicately side-step the traditional obstacles. This strategy has succeeded on occasion, provoking widespread alarm in the investment banking communityâ€"but the strategy marks only a modest increase in liability risk for M&A advisors. In fact, the liability framework for M&A advisors remains piecemeal and unlikely to be effective in deterring M&A advisor misconduct. The article concludes by examining reform options, arguing in favor of greater industry self- regulation.

Managerial Talent and Managerial Practices: Are They Complements?
Baltrunaite, Audinga,Bovini, Giulia,Mocetti, Sauro
SSRN
We examine the role of managerial talent and its interaction with managerial practices in determining firm performance. We build a matched firm-director panel dataset for the universe of limited liability companies in Italy, tracking individuals across different firms over time. We define managerial talent as management's capacity to boost firms' total factor productivity, estimated using a two-way fixed effects model. Combining the data with survey information on a representative sample of firms, we then document that our measure of talent correlates with ex-ante and ex-post indicators of ability, i.e. managers' educational attainment and their forecast precision with respect to the firm's future performance. Most important, we leverage information on the adoption of managerial practices within the firm to examine potential synergies between managerial talent and structured managerial practices, thus bridging two separate strands of the literature. While talent and structured practices do boost firm productivity on their own, there is evidence of complementarities between the two. These findings hold both in a cross-sectional setting and in a panel analysis that accounts for time-invariant firm heterogeneity. Overall, our results indicate that the effectiveness of managerial practices depends on managers' ability to implement them.

Models, Markets, and the Forecasting of Elections
Rajiv Sethi,Julie Seager,Emily Cai,Daniel M. Benjamin,Fred Morstatter
arXiv

We examine probabilistic forecasts for battleground states in the 2020 US presidential election, using daily data from two sources over seven months: a model published by The Economist, and prices from the PredictIt exchange. We find systematic differences in accuracy over time, with markets performing better several months before the election, and the model performing better as the election approached. A simple average of the two forecasts performs better than either one of them overall, even though no average can outperform both component forecasts for any given state-date pair. This effect arises because the model and the market make different kinds of errors in different states: the model was confidently wrong in some cases, while the market was excessively uncertain in others. We conclude that there is value in using hybrid forecasting methods, and propose a market design that incorporates model forecasts via a trading bot to generate synthetic predictions. We also propose and conduct a profitability test that can be used as a novel criterion for the evaluation of forecasting performance.

Bartlett, Robert P.
SSRN

No arbitrage SVI
Claude Martini,Arianna Mingone
arXiv

We fully characterize the absence of Butterfly arbitrage in the SVI formula for implied total variance proposed by Gatheral in 2004. The main ingredient is an intermediary characterization of the necessary condition for no arbitrage obtained for any model by Fukasawa in 2012 that the inverse functions of the -d1 and -d2 of the Black-Scholes formula, viewed as functions of the log-forward moneyness, should be increasing. A natural rescaling of the SVI parameters and a meticulous analysis of the Durrleman condition allow then to obtain simple range conditions on the parameters. This leads to a straightforward implementation of a least-squares calibration algorithm on the no arbitrage domain, which yields an excellent fit on the market data we used for our tests, with the guarantee to yield smiles with no Butterfly arbitrage.

Perception of corruption influences entrepreneurship inside established companies
F. Javier Sanchez-Vidal,Camino Ramon-Llorens
arXiv

Based on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) surveys and conducting a panel data estimation to test our hypothesis, this paper examines whether corruption perceptions might sand or grease the wheels for entrepreneurship inside companies or intrapreneurship in a sample of 92 countries for the period 2012 to 2019. Our results find that the corruption perception sands the wheel for intrapreneurship. There is evidence of a quadratic relation, but this relation is only clear for the less developed countries, which sort of moderate the very negative effect of corruption for these countries. The results also confirm that corruption influences differently on intrapreneurship depending on the level of development of the country.

Political Relations and Media Coverage
Ruf, Thomas,Song, Jun,Zhang, Bohui
SSRN
We study the impact of political relations on media coverage. Using a sample of 3,290 American Depository Receipts (ADRs) from 45 countries, we find that poor political relations between the US and an ADR firmâ€™s home country induce negative coverage by the US media of the ADR firm. To alleviate endogeneity, we adopt Franceâ€™s and Germanyâ€™s opposition to the Iraq War and the inauguration of the US president as two shocks to bilateral political relations between the US and foreign countries. In placebo tests, we show either no negative effect of political relations on ADR firmsâ€™ press releases and non-US media coverage or such an effect not driven by firmsâ€™ US sales. We further document the three economic mechanisms underlying the impact of political relations on media coverage: US journalistsâ€™ country sentiment, a countryâ€™s popularity among US readers, and the US mediaâ€™s political beliefs. Finally, we document the two consequences of negative coverage by the US media: investors respond to negative news in a short horizon but quickly adjust with a stock price reversion in a long horizon, and negative coverage leads to a higher likelihood of firms terminating their ADRs.

Post-Covid-19 Recovery and Resilience: Leveraging Reforms for Growth and Inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa
Thakoor, Vimal,Ganum, Paola
SSRN
Covid-19 has exacerbated economic and social vulnerabilities across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). There is a risk that growth could be lower for longer, with a setback to development. Post-pandemic reforms thus become even more important, especially with constrained scope for fiscal and monetary stimuli. Reforms could boost per capita growth by an additional 0.3-1.3 percentage points, relative to the 1.9 percent average since 2010. Such growth would reduce per capita income doubling time from 37 years to about 22 years. Low-income countries stand to gain the most from reforms. The largest gains come from governance, products markets, and factor accumulation. Importantly, these reforms can be implemented in the post-pandemic environment characterized by weaker social and distributional outcomes.

Price Rigidities and Credit Risk
Augustin, Patrick,Cong, Linxiao Francis,Corhay, Alexandre,Weber, Michael
SSRN
We develop a capital structure model in which firms feature differential flexibility in adjustingoutput prices. Inflexible-price firms have lower profits and higher cash flow volatility, leading in equilibrium to lower financial leverage, shorter debt duration, higher cost of debt, more stringent debt covenants, and higher precautionary cash holdings. Moreover, a cash-flow volatility shock increases the cost of debt more for inflexible-price firms. We confirm these predictions empirically and exploit the 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy to show that inflexible price firms with high pre-shock rollover risk exposure experience a significantly larger increase in credit spreads following the event.

Quantum algorithm for credit valuation adjustments
arXiv

Quantum mechanics is well known to accelerate statistical sampling processes over classical techniques. In quantitative finance, statistical samplings arise broadly in many use cases. Here we focus on a particular one of such use cases, credit valuation adjustment (CVA), and identify opportunities and challenges towards quantum advantage for practical instances. To improve the depths of quantum circuits for solving such problem, we draw on various heuristics that indicate the potential for significant improvement over well-known techniques such as reversible logical circuit synthesis. In minimizing the resource requirements for amplitude amplification while maximizing the speedup gained from the quantum coherence of a noisy device, we adopt a recently developed Bayesian variant of quantum amplitude estimation using engineered likelihood functions (ELF). We perform numerical analyses to characterize the prospect of quantum speedup in concrete CVA instances over classical Monte Carlo simulations.

Risk Aversion Propagation: Evidence from Financial Markets and Controlled Experiments
Huang, Xing,Xu, Nancy R.
SSRN
While the time variation in investor risk appetite is widely examined, there is scant research on how investor risk appetite may respond in an international context. We study risk aversion (RA) propagation from US to other major developed economies using both financial market data and controlled experiments. By exploiting daily financial market and news data between 2000 and 2017, we identify US risk aversion events -- both high and low -- and show that the international pass-through of US high RA events is significantly higher (61%) than that of US low RA events (43%), suggesting asymmetric US risk aversion propagation. Next, in our experiment, non-US subjects when primed with a US financial bust shock exhibited asymmetrically lower positive emotion, higher negative emotion and higher risk aversion than those primed with a US boom shock. The foreign nature of negative shocks may change emotions more than that of positive shocks, hence resulting in asymmetric risk aversion propagation. Our evidence shows that such an emotion''-related mechanism explained up to 20% of the asymmetry.

Size, Value, Profitability, and Investment Effects in International Stock Returns: Are They Really There?
SSRN
Using data on 65,000 stocks from 23 countries, the authors re-evaluate the performance of the Fama-French (2015) factors in global markets. The results provide convincing evidence that the value, profitability, and investment factors are far less reliable than commonly thought. Their performance depends strongly on the geographical region and period examined. Furthermore, most factor returns are driven by the smallest firms. Virtually no value or investment effects are present among the big firms representing most of the total market capitalization worldwide. Given that the smallest firms are typically not investable by major financial institutions, these findings cast doubt on the five-factor modelâ€™s applicability in international markets.

Stock Price Crash Risk and the adoption of Poison Pills: Evidence from Brazil
Paiva Azevedo, Yuri Gomes,Schwarz, Lucas,Bomfim Gomes, Hellen,Ambrozini, Marcelo Augusto
SSRN
We examine the effect of stock price crash risk on the adoption of poison pills by Brazilian public firms. By using firm-level data of 191 Brazilian firms from 2010-2018, we find that stock price crash risk is not a driver that lead the adoption of poison pills. However, further results show that managers are not drawing on stock price crash risk as a pretext to entrench themselves, considering that more crash-prone companies do not face a higher likelihood of adopting a particular Brazilian type of poison pills that signals aggressive managerial entrenchment intentions, namely eternity poison pills.

Terrorism and Patriotic Investors: Evidence from the 1920 Wall Street Bombing
Jansen, David-Jan
SSRN
This paper argues that patriotism does not necessarily account for market resilience in the face of terror. Studying the 1920 Wall Street bombing, I find that rallying-around-the-flag does not explain the upbeat nature of the first trading session after the attack. In fact, NYSE-traded firms with patriotic terms (such as "American'' or "U.S.'') in their name underperformed by 1 percentage point. The absence of a clear international actor behind the attack may explain the absence of patriotic trading. I also point out an alternative, economic reason for the upbeat market, which centers around Mexican Petroleumâ€™s postponement of its ex-dividend date.

The Catalytic Role of IMF Programs
Maurini, Claudia,Schiavone, Alessandro
SSRN
This paper investigates the impact of IMF programs on private capital flows in the assisted countries. We look at the impact on inflows and outflows of both traditional and precautionary programs, also taking into account the characteristics of the programs. Using the entropy balancing method to address the selection bias, we find that traditional IMF programs have an anticatalytic effect on private capital inflows; this effect is mainly driven by programs that went off-track and by exceptional access programs. By contrast, precautionary programs are found to have a catalytic effect, working mainly through outflows.

The Price Fixer: Compliance Tales from the Other Side
Stephan, Andreas
SSRN
This paper fills an important gap in the antitrust compliance literature by exploring the perspective of the price fixer in breaches of competition law. It provides a critical analysis of statements made by price fixers, their competition lawyers and in-house counsel involved in cartel cases. The study draws on a combination of publicly available statements and anonymised accounts collected over 15 years of engaging with each of these three groups. It concludes that those responsible for cartels are motivated by varying factors and do not necessarily understand or accept that cartel behaviour is wrongful. Also, disciplining those individuals is complicated by the incentives created through leniency and settlement programmes. These findings highlight the importance of continued investment in compliance and the broader need for education in competition law to make it less likely that infringements will occur in the first place.

Three Remarks On Asset Pricing
Olkhov, Victor
SSRN
We make three remarks to the main CAPM equation presented in the well-known textbook by John Cochrane (2001). First, we believe that any economic averaging procedure implies aggregation of corresponding time series during certain time interval Î" and explain the necessity to use math expectation for both sides of the main CAPM equation. Second, the first-order condition of utility max used to derive main CAPM equation should be complemented by the second one that requires negative utility second derivative. Both define the amount of assets Î¾max that delivers max to utility. Expansions of the utility in a Taylor series by price and payoff variations give approximations for Î¾max and uncover equations on price, payoff, volatility, skewness, their covarianceâ€™s and etc. We discuss why market price-volume positive correlations may prohibit existence of Î¾max and main CAPM equation. Third, we argue that the economic sense of the conventional frequency-based price probability may be poor. To overcome this trouble we propose new price probability measure based on widely used volume weighted average price (VWAP). To forecast price volatility one should predict evolution of squares of the value and the volume of market trades aggregated during averaging interval Î". The forecast of the new price probability measure may be the main tough puzzle for CAPM and finance. However investors are free to chose any probability measure they prefer as ground for their investment strategies but should be ready for unexpected losses due to possible distinctions with real market trade price dynamics.

Value Creation, the Benefit Principle and Efficiency-Related Allocation of Taxing Rights
Schoen, Wolfgang
SSRN
The paper looks at a concept in international taxation that has gained prominence and declined more quickly than any other, namely the idea that the international allocation of taxing rights should be shifted back to "where the value is created". It focuses on the question of what we can learn from this rapid rise and fall.

What Drives Investors to Chase Returns?
Michelangeli, Valentina,Huntley, Jonathan,Reichling, Felix
SSRN
We use data on one-participant retirement savings plans to identify a behavioral bias in savings decisions. Investors who earn top-decile returns increase contributions to their accounts more than other investors. Using characteristics of the investors, characteristics of their retirement savings accounts, and multivariate regression analysis, we first show that such return chasing'' behavior is robust to controls for financial illiteracy, macroeconomic conditions, learning, transaction costs, housing prices, and informational frictions. We then use a structural two-asset model with tax-deferred and taxable assets to show that a permanent increase in expected returns produces investment responses for younger or liquidity-constrained investors that are consistent with our data. Our results provide evidence that younger investors' recent portfolio experiences have highly persistent effects on their expectations.

Zombies on the Brink: Evidence from Japan on the Reversal of Monetary Policy Effectiveness
Igan, Deniz,Hong, Gee Hee,Lee, Do
SSRN
How does unconventional monetary policy affect corporate capital structure and investment decisions? We study the transmission channel of quantitative easing and its potential diminishing returns on investment from a corporate finance perspective. Using a rich bank-firm matched data of Japanese firms with information on corporate debt and investment, we study how firms adjust their capital structure in response to the changes in term premia. Investment responds positively to a reduction in the term premium on average. However, there is a significant degree of cross-sectional variation in firm response: healthier firms increase capital spending and cash holdings, while financially vulnerable firms take advantage of lower long-term yields to refinance without increasing investment.