Under the current bank regulatory capital framework, loan loss reserves (LLR) are added back to regulatory capital up to a certain limit (henceforth, ‘add-backs’). This study examines how equity investors value these addbacks. Decomposing LLR into add-backs and other LLR, we find that add-backs have positive value relevance if such add-backs increase total regulatory capital and other LLR has negative value relevance. This positive value relevance of add-backs is driven by banks with low capital levels. Our finding indicates that the market perceives add-backs as capital rather than as an expense.

In this paper, we attempt to describe the relationship between the observation of coworker idiosyncratic deals (i-deals: Rousseau et al., 2006; Rousseau, 2005) and employee turnover intention by incorporating two explanatory mechanisms: workplace flexibility and procedural justice. We hypothesize contrasting implications of coworker flexibility i-deals and developmental i-deals on these two mediating mechanisms. Based on a sample of 176 employees, we find differential implications for the two types of i-deals and mediators. We discuss these findings and the implications of our research.

In this paper, we examine the contribution of labor quantity, labor quality, ICT capital, non-ICT capital, and the productivity of production system to potential output growth for 18 OECD countries from 1990 to 2016. For this, we develop a measure of a country’s potential output growth using a time-series analysis and apply panel data regressions to find empirical evidence. Empirical findings suggest that in developed countries, improvements in productivity and labor quality are major determinants that lead to an increase in economic potential.

Recent studies have provided evidence that the association between earnings and contemporaneous returns is stronger when returns are negative, reflecting accounting conservatism. In this paper, we investigate two important aspects in this asymmetric timeliness of earnings: (1) whether the contemporaneous earnings-return relation is concave and (2) whether earnings show asymmetric timeliness with respect to lagged returns. We show that the relation between earnings and stock returns is more salient for extreme negative returns, implying a concave relationship between earnings and returns. We also find asymmetric timeliness with respect to lagged returns. Moreover, we find similar results using earnings line items such as special items and discontinued items. Overall, our evidence suggests that the Basu-type regression without considering these two aspects biases the extent of conditional conservatism.

This paper tests whether item 7.01 of the Form 8-K filing, which is subject to the regulation FD, mitigates stock crash risk. The regulation FD forces the firm to communicate private information using information channel with broad coverage. Such communications may mitigate the firm’s stock crash risk by revealing the negative news in a more timely manner. Consistently, I find a negative association between the frequency of item 7.01 disclosures with the negative news (measured by market reaction surrounding the Form 8-K filing date) and subsequent stock crash risk. On the contrary, the results show that there is no association between the frequency of item 7.01 disclosures with the positive news and subsequent stock crash risk. Such association is more pronounced when the firm’s is not followed by equity analysts or do not have high percentage of institutional ownership. I also find that item 7.01 disclosures provide incremental information over other voluntary items or mandatory items of the Form 8-K filing. Finally, I use tone of the item 7.01 disclosures to identify whether the news is positive or negative, and find consistent results to the main findings. Overall, these findings suggest that communications subject to the regulation FD, especially the negative ones, are an important mechanism that mitigate stock crash risk.

This paper develops the credit risk of simple risky bond (Merton 1974) as expected option return to the maturity and analytically presents that the credit risk is influenced by the underlying asset risks. The paper moreover shows that the direction and magnitude of the influence depends on what the underlying asset risks are. Simulation results indicate that the relations between the credit risk and the asset risks are different among asset risks.

This paper investigates whether investors overreacted to the World Trade Center terrorist attack, using insurers’ stock returns. Short-term abnormal return reversals are observed after the 9/11 attack. The reversals may reflect the substantially increased uncertainty surrounding insurer stocks after the event, meaning that the price reactions are efficient risk adjustments. However, after controlling for the change in risk, I still find evidence of price reversals, which I attribute to investor overreaction. To bolster this claim, I provide cross-sectional evidence that reversals are stronger for insurers with higher information asymmetry, which have wider ex-ante bid-ask spreads and smaller numbers of analysts following. This result indicates that the reversals are likely due to behavioral biases.

How do consumers respond in financial contexts when a negative stereotype about an ingroup is salient? I predicted and found that, in such circumstances, consumers consistently preferred safe investment options to riskier yet potentially better-pay-off ones, as compared to the situation in which a negative ingroup stereotype is not salient. The results of three experiments suggest that consumers tend to prefer stable securities (e.g., Treasury bonds or stocks with low betas) versus unstable securities (e.g., stocks with high betas) when a negative stereotype to their group is made salient.

This project introduces the recent development of the Chinese VC industry. One characteristics of the Chinese VC market is that both cross-border VCs and local VCs play significant roles. The two types of VCs show clear difference in terms of invested sectors and geographic regions. This paper provides a literature review to address some mechanisms leading to the divergence. It also documents two mechanisms not addressed in the extant literature through interviews with local investors and startups: the rigidity of a typical startup’s fund structure and the types of limited partners of VCs explain why the divergence takes place in the first place and why the dissimilarity is likely to persist. The simple empirical analysis shows that cross-border VCs are more likely to invest in market-oriented high-tech sectors and regions with relatively well-established market institutions, while local VCs tend to invest in fields and regions of the nation’s strategic focus.

Bartram, Brown, and Stulz (2016) report a strong positive correlation between systematic and idiosyncratic stock return volatilities and suggest heterogeneous firm-level responses to market wide shock may be an underlying driver. We test the hypothesis using Korean stock market data by including additional factors that reflect the macroeconomic conditions to the single factor model used in Bartram, Brown, and Stulz. Even though the correlation decreases by about 25% from 0.85 to 0.64 with additional factors, a substantial positive correlation still remains. In addition, we cannot find evidence that a high correlation industry experiences more volatile corporate sector dynamics in terms of changes in firm ranking and market share.