Firm-specific Information Research Articles

Corporate value creation, stock price synchronicity and firm value in China: implications for beyond

PurposeThis study introduces Social Contribution Value per Share (SCVPS), an indicator devised by the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), as an easy-to-interpret Measurement of Corporate Social Performance (MCSP) to the international research arena. The authors first explore the informativeness role of voluntary disclosure of SCVPS in the stock market. The authors then go one step further to demonstrate the relationship between corporate value creation quantified by SCVPS and firm value.Design/methodology/approachThe study takes a new perspective – a quasi-natural experiment of SCVPS disclosure in 2008 and uses a Propensity Score Matched Difference in Difference model (PSM-DiD) to investigate the impact of SCVPS disclosure policy on stock price synchronization and firm value. Through manually recalculating all the values of SCVPS and its components, this study enables us to further investigate the relationship between corporate value creation for various stakeholders and firm value.FindingsThis study reveals that voluntary disclosure of SCVPS can signal firm-specific information to the market and reduce noise in returns, thus affecting stock price synchronization. The findings further demonstrate that such firm-specific information has value relevance to firm performance. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that corporate value creation for different stakeholders measured by SCVPS can significantly affect firm value. The moderating effects of ownership structures and industry types are also investigated, and an endogeneity test confirms the robustness of the findings.Practical implicationsThis study argues that SCVPS offers an economically viable way for firms, including small-and-medium-sized enterprises, in emerging economies to disclose corporate value creation and provide the public with a direct understanding and appreciation of the values created by corporations for stakeholders.Originality/valueThe result makes contributions to the MCSP literature and explores the informativeness of SCVPS disclosure. Besides, this paper demonstrates that SCVPS offers a good setting to explore the effect of corporate value creation on firm performance in an emerging market.

XBRL Adoption and Capital Market Information Efficiency

As a common standard for global business reporting, eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) can make up for the deficiencies of traditional financial reports in terms of standardized disclosure and information use costs, and provide firm-specific information to report users, reduce the level of corporate stock price synchronicity, and then improve capital market information allocation efficiency. Based on the financial data of Chinese listed companies from 2005 to 2011, this paper mainly focuses on the impact of XBRL adoption on stock price synchronicity.

Do site visits mitigate corporate fraudulence? Evidence from China

Corporate site visits emerge as an increasingly important means of information acquisition process for analysts and institutional investors. In this study, we test whether and how site visits mitigate corporate fraud risk using a unique dataset of site visits to Chinese listed firms. We find that corporate site visits can substantially reduce the incidence of corporate fraud, which is robust to adding a series of control variables, alternative model specifications and alternative measures of corporate fraud, as well as accounting for endogeneity issue and controlling for firm and time fixed effects. This negative effect is more pronounced for firms with poorer information environment and for firms with weaker corporate governance. Furthermore, we examine the mechanisms underlying the negative association between site visits and corporate fraud. Overall, this paper contributes to the literature by providing complementary evidence that site visits are important venues for analysts and institutional investors to collect firm-specific information and monitor the management of firms in China. Our findings also provide significant practical and policy implications for investors and regulators who seek to promote corporate information disclosure and mitigate the risk of corporate fraud.

Comment letter regulation and stock price synchronicity: evidence from China

ABSTRACT This paper investigates whether comment letter (CL) regulation affects stock price synchronicity. We find solid evidence that stock exchanges’ CL process can significantly reduce synchronicity, and this effect is attenuated by political connection and state ownership. Further study shows that the negative correlation is more pronounced when CLs address major accounting issues, target firms take longer time to prepare responses, and the responses are accompanied with verifications from related third parties. Our results confirm the positive role of the CL regulation in enhancing firm-specific information disclosure and have implications for the improvement of market efficiency in emerging nations.

Firm-specific investor sentiment, stock price synchronicity, and crash risk

ABSTRACT This article investigates the impact of firm-specific investor sentiment on stock price synchronicity and further examines the relationship between stock price synchronicity and crash risk. By analysing the dataset of the Chinese stock market, we find that higher firm-specific investor sentiment induces lower stock price synchronicity, which is inconsistent with the argument supported by a majority of previous studies that low price synchronicity represents high price informativeness. We also find a negative relationship between price synchronicity and future crash risk, supporting the view that in an irrational market, less return comovement is not associated with more firm-specific information but noise.

Impact of market-wide versus firm-specific information on financial analysts

PurposeThis paper documents the effect of different types of information on the value of financial analysts.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use the pooled OLS regression and the data of nonfinancial firms from France to test our hypotheses. The data covers the period between 1997 and 2019.FindingsThe results show that analysts are more likely to cover those firms that incorporated greater proportion of market-wide information in their prices. Consistent with the economies of scale view, the authors argue that analysts specialize in the interpretation market-wide information. By doing so, they are able to cover relatively large number of firms simultaneously. The results also show that the value of analyst coverage (measured as the impact of analyst coverage on firm value, probability of stock price crash and probability of stock price jump) is a function of the extent to which different types of information are incorporated in prices. The authors’ results suggest that the impact of analyst coverage on firm value and on probability of crash is less pronounced in firms that incorporate greater proportion of market-wide information. In case of probability of jump, the results show that the impact of analyst coverage is more pronounced firms that incorporate greater proportion of market-wide information.Originality/valueThe major contribution of this paper is to document the impact of different types of information on the extent of analyst coverage. Furthermore, this paper also uses various measures (the impact of analyst coverage on firm value, probability of stock price crash and probability of stock price jump) to show how different types of information affects the value of analyst coverage.

Political heterogeneity, subjective optimism, and stock market outcomes

ABSTRACT We demonstrate that political heterogeneity, proxied by the spread in subjective optimism between Democratic and Republican investors, affects stock market returns and volatility. Our intuition, drawn from the psychology literature on intergroup conflict, leads us to infer that increased political heterogeneity causes investors to become entrenched, not just in their political beliefs, but also in their economic outlook. Consequently, they become resistant to contrary news, and this behaviour is linked to lower market volatility and higher market returns. These findings are further underpinned by evidence that shows idiosyncratic volatility, which reflects the level of stock responses to firm-specific information, to decrease as political heterogeneity increases.

How Completely Do Analysts Incorporate Firm-Specific and Industry Information in Their Forecasts? Evidence and Implications for Post-Forecast Revision Drift

Prior studies find a positive relation between analyst forecast revisions and upcoming news, suggesting that analysts’ forecast revisions are incomplete with respect to available information. In this study, we use the association between forecast revisions and upcoming news to measure forecast completeness and show that post-forecast-revision drift is higher when forecasts are incomplete. We follow Hui and Yeung’s (2013) approach to separate forecast revision news into industry-wide and firm-specific components because they find that drift is primarily associated with the industry component. We find that forecast revisions are less complete for industry-wide news than for firm-specific news. Furthermore, analysts’ industry-wide revisions are less complete early in the year and when the underlying news is bad, and we find stronger post-forecast-revision drift in those cases. We also show that analysts who were optimistic in prior periods tend to issue forecasts that are less complete and that generate stronger drift than forecasts by other analysts. Our findings provide an explanation for the drift that contrasts with prior studies that attribute the drift to investors’ slow assimilation of the news in forecast revisions. Thus, our study sheds light on analysts’ role in conveying firm-specific and industry-wide news to investors and on the implications for post-forecast-revision drift.

Information demand and net selling around earnings announcement

Previous literature has shown the effectiveness of information dissemination channels on reducing information asymmetry from the supply-side. This paper mainly focuses on investigating the effects of information diffusion from the demand-side, i.e., investors’ voluntary demand for firm-specific information proxied by Baidu Search Volume Index. By taking the earnings announcement as an example for information asymmetry, we observe a net-selling behavior for investors during the pre-announcement periods that are closely related to changes of returns around the earnings announcements. More importantly, our empirical tests prove that the increased investors’ information demands help to alleviate the net-selling phenomenon as well as its further effects on earnings announcements returns that are resulted from the high information asymmetry during pre-announcement periods. In that sense, we conclude that investors’ information demand contributes to reducing information asymmetry by incorporating information into stock prices.

Location, location, location!*: a quality-adjusted rent index for the Oslo office market

PurposeCommonly used rent indices are based on average developments or expert opinions. Such indices often suffer from compositional biases or low data coverage. The purpose of this paper is to overcome these challenges using the authors' approach.Design/methodology/approachThe authors construct a quality-adjusted rent index for the office market in Oslo using detailed data from 14,171 rental contracts.FindingsThe authors show that compositional biases can have a large impact on rental price developments. By adding building-fixed effects to a standard hedonic regression model, the authors show that the explanatory power increases considerably. Furthermore, indices excluding location-specific information, or which include less granular location controls than at the building level, portray quite a different picture of rent developments than indices that do take this into account. The authors also exploit information on contract signature date and find that a more timely detection of turning points can be achieved by using the signature date instead of the more typically used start date of the lease.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is confined to Norwegian data, and an avenue for future research would be to explore if similar results are obtained for other countries. A weakness with the paper is that authors' do not observe quality changes over time, such as renovation. Controlling for time-varying and unit-specific attributes in hedonic models for the commercial real estate (CRE) market would be useful to purge indices further for compositional effects and unobserved heterogeneity. While the authors do control for building-fixed effects, there are additional variations within a building (floor, view, sunlight, etc.) that the authors do not capture. Studies that could control for this would certainly be welcome, both in order to estimate the value of such amenities and to see how it affects estimated rent developments. Another promising avenue for future research is to link data on rental contracts in the CRE market with firm-specific information in order to explore how firm profitability and liquidity may affect rental contracts.Practical implicationsThe authors show that the hedonic index yields a sharper fall in rents after the global financial crisis and more muted developments in the period between 2013 and 2015 than the average rent index. The results show that rents have followed their estimated equilibrium closely and have re-adjusted quickly in periods of deviation. From a financial stability perspective, the risk of a sharp fall in rents is reduced because rents often are in line with their fundamentals.Social implicationsThe authors find that a more timely detection of turning points can be achieved by using information on the signature date. This is an important finding. The financial system is heavily exposed toward CRE, and timely detection of turning points is critical for policymakers.Originality/valueThe financial system is heavily exposed toward the commercial real estate market and timely detection of turning points is of major importance to policymakers. Finally, the authors use our quality-adjusted rent index as the dependent variable in an error correction model. The authors find that employment and stock of offices are important explanatory variables. Moreover, the results show that rents have followed their estimated equilibrium path.

The effect of financial analysts on the economic implications of disclosed lease information – a note

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate whether financial analyst coverage affects the dissemination of disclosed operating lease information into cash flow predictions and stock prices.Design/methodology/approachThe difference in lease expense between capital/finance lease and operating lease reporting is estimated based on the approach in Hsieh and Su (2015). This difference is referred to as the earnings impact from operating lease capitalization and is only available from footnotes. The authors then include the level of financial analyst following in a cash flow model to study its impact on the cash flow predictive value of the earnings impact. Similarly, the level of financial analyst following is inserted in an earnings-return model to assess the effect of analyst coverage on the association between contemporaneous stock returns and earnings impact.FindingsThe authors find that the cash flow predictive value of the earnings impact shifts to the interaction between analyst coverage and the earnings impact, suggesting that the decision-usefulness of the earnings impact is conditioned on the level of analyst following. Nevertheless, the authors find that the earnings impact continues to have explanatory value for the contemporaneous stock returns, while the interaction between analyst coverage and the earnings impact does not. This finding suggests that the earnings impact is already fully reflected in stock prices regardless of analyst following.Research limitations/implicationsSince the estimation of the earnings impact from reporting operating leases as capital leases is based on the method developed by Imhoff et al. (1991), the results and inferences are thus constrained by the validity of the method.Practical implicationsThe authors find that financial analyst activities accelerate the incorporation of the earnings impact from operating lease capitalization in cash flow predictions, but it does not promote the impounding of the earnings impact into stock prices. This finding suggests that financial analysts' influence on the dissemination of the earnings impact hinges on the type of economic activity, and failing to consider the financial analyst following in studying the cash flow predictive value of the earnings impact would obscure the findings.Originality/valueThe authors extend the findings of prior research that financial analysts' activities promote the incorporation of firm-specific information into stock prices by investigating the impact of financial analysts on the dissemination of disclosed operating lease information.

The impact of disclosure quality on analyst forecasts in China

ABSTRACT Since the establishment of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) Disclosure Ranking System in 2001, the disclosure quality of listed companies has increased in China. As a result, analysts can access more timely, valuable, and reliable information to understand companies’ overall operating status, financial reports, and accrual components of earnings. As analysts can save time and costs when they have access to high-quality information provided by firms, their earnings forecast error and optimism bias are reduced, and analysts’ divergence of opinion on firm prospects decreases. Using a sample of 419 A-share firms listed on the Main Board of the SZSE over the 2001–2018 period, we investigate whether disclosure quality affects analysts’ forecasting behaviour in China’s securities market using SZSE disclosure ranking data, and find that high disclosure quality improves analyst forecast accuracy and reduces forecast optimism and forecast dispersion. We also find that disclosure quality is associated with an increase in a firm’s stock price synchronicity with the market and a decrease in industry-wide and firm-specific information, and that a good disclosure ranking can enhance the credibility of firm-specific information and therefore its usefulness to financial analysts in the emerging market of China.

Does capital market drive corporate investment efficiency? Evidence from equity lending supply

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.

XBRL Adoption and Capital Market Information Efficiency

As a common standard for global business reporting, eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) can make up for the deficiencies of traditional financial reports in terms of standardized disclosure and information use costs, and provide firm-specific information to report users, reduce the level of corporate stock price synchronicity, and then improve capital market information allocation efficiency. Based on the financial data of Chinese listed companies from 2005 to 2011, this paper mainly focuses on the impact of XBRL adoption on stock price synchronicity.

The impact of national culture on the synchronicity of cross-listed firms

We examine the impact of national culture on the relationship between International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption and stock price synchronicity for a sample of cross-listed firms in the U.S. We find that synchronicity decreases when the cross-listed firms reconcile their accounts from IFRS to U.S. GAAP. The synchronicity reduction is more pronounced for firms from secretive societies (i.e., low individualistic and masculine cultures, and high uncertainty avoidance and power distance cultures). Our results reveal that IFRS adoption improves firm-specific information, and national culture affects such improvement.

Does the trading volume of asset management companies’ bonds contain information on non-performing loans?

We investigate the relationship between the transactional activity of asset management companies (AMCs) in the non-performing loan (NPL) market and their corresponding debt issuances in a niche bond market in Borsa Istanbul. We analyze the determinants of the trading volume of AMC bonds to determine whether an issue's volume can reflect bond-specific factors after controlling for firm-specific information. We employ pooled ordinary least squares and random effects panel data regressions on a monthly data set of 26 bonds traded between 2012 and 2019. We find that higher trading volume is associated with larger issues, older bonds, and issuers of long-term debt only. These results suggest that the trading volumes of such bonds decrease when NPL transactions become rare due to worsening economic and financial conditions, at which point the investor demand for new issuances declines and the AMCs are forced to issue short-term debt instead to raise funds.

The impact of securities regulation on the information environment around stock-financed acquisitions

We investigate the effects of securities regulation, enacted by the European Union (EU) (namely, the Transparency Directive – TPD) to improve the quality of financial reporting and disclosure, on the information environment around stock-financed acquisition announcements. EU directives comprised in the Financial Services Action Plan aim to improve the information quality that flows to investors, which may help reduce the adverse selection discount when stock is used as the method of payment in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As). We use a difference-in-differences methodology and document a significant increase in announcement returns of stock-paid acquisitions by European acquirers after the change in regulation. We also find that this result accrues essentially to companies with better firm-specific information quality and companies domiciled in EU countries with better institutional quality and shareholder protection. Our results highlight how the impact of the same regulation may differ depending on country and firm-level attributes associated with the information environment.

Did Politicians Use Non-Public Macroeconomic Information in Their Stock Trades? Evidence from the STOCK Act of 2012

Existing research shows that members of Congress made informed trades prior to the passage of the STOCK Act of 2012. There is also evidence in the literature to suggest that the STOCK Act was able to deter politicians from trading based on non-public information. However, the question of whether politicians made informed trades at the market level (using non-public macroeconomic information, not just firm-specific information) in the first place and whether they continued to do so even after the passage of the STOCK Act remains unexamined. We analyze 101,191 individual stock transactions covering the 2004–2014 period and find that the STOCK Act adversely affected the ability of politicians’ aggregated stock trades to predict the stock market returns. Our results imply that politicians used non-public macroeconomic information prior to the STOCK Act, and this legislation was influential in deterring politicians from using non-public macroeconomic information in their stock trades. Our findings also provide input on the current debate on the need for the STOCK Act 2.0.

Commonality in disagreement

We examine the relationship between firms' individual disagreement and the aggregate disagreement. We find that a commonality in firms' individual disagreements exists at the market level, industry level, and geographic level. This commonality increases with a firm's asymmetric information, uncertainty, and the degree of coverage, but decreases with a firm's accounting information quality. We show that disagreement commonality can be a new measure of firm-specific information centering on analysts. We find a positive relationship between firms' commonality in disagreement and co-movement in their stock returns. A higher disagreement commonality may indicate lower usefulness of firm-specific information that strengthens the synchronicity between a firm's stock return and the market return. Our measure of disagreement commonality is especially useful among inefficient markets where analysts are heavily relied on by investors, such as Asia Pacific markets.

Analyst skills in producing aggregate and firm-specific information: when do these skills matter?

This paper explores whether analyst skills in producing aggregate and firm-specific information facilitate valuable research in different states of the economy. I find that stock market reactions to analysts’ forecast and recommendation revisions in downturns (upturns) increase with analysts’ skills in producing aggregate (firm-specific) information, measured as their prior forecast accuracy for high-cyclicality (low-cyclicality) firms. These effects are more pronounced at smaller firms and those with lower analyst coverage and institutional ownership. I perform a number of robustness checks and rule out alternative explanations related to analyst efforts, analyst attention, investor sentiment, and sample selection effects. I also find that analysts’ skills in producing aggregate (firm-specific) information are associated with timelier research output and more favorable career outcomes in downturns (upturns). Overall, the evidence is consistent with the idea that investors give more weight to analysts’ aggregate information skills in downturns and to firm-specific information skills in upturns.