Improve Investment Efficiency Research Articles

The Crowding-Out Effects of Real Estate Shocks Evidence from China

We investigate the impacts of real estate price changes on firms’ investment and financing using detailed real estate transaction data in China. China witnessed the real estate prices rise for more than a decade and recent housing purchase restriction policies enforced in 46 cities generated negative price shocks. Using both IV and DID approaches, we document that the rising real estate price causes land-holding firms to borrow more and invest more while the policy shocks work in the opposite direction. Further decomposition of investment into land and non-land investments shows that the rising real estate prices cause firms to only increase investment in land, especially commercial land, while decrease non-land investment. We next focus on a sub-sample of non-land owners and show that these firms borrow less and invest less if they are affected more by real estate price rise and the effects are reversed due to policy shocks. The results are consistent with the existence of a crowding-out effect. First, rising real estate price fosters more investment into the real estate sectors, which crowds out non-real estate investment. Second, rising real estate price enlarges the financial constraint gaps between firms with land and firms without land, which cause resource misallocation. To understand the aggregate effect, we investigate investment efficiency changes. We show that the increased investment associated with land price rises in fact reduces investment efficiency while policy shocks improve investment efficiency. The evidence showing that net effect would be negative calls for caution in the policy debate that advocates for investment stimulation through real estate boom.

Filling the Gap: Infrastructure Investment in Brazil

Infrastructure bottlenecks have been identified as a key obstacle to growth affecting productivity and market efficiency, and hindering domestic integration and export performance. This paper assesses the state of Brazil’s infrastructure, in light of past investment trends and various quality and quantity indicators. Brazil’s infrastructure stock and its quality rank low in relation to that of comparator countries, chosen amongst main export competitors. We provide evidence that infrastructure affects domestic integration by analyzing price convergence of tradable goods across major cities. The government’s concession program will narrow part of the infrastructure gap, however, governance reforms will be crucial to improving investment efficiency.

Investigating the Impact of Financial Reporting Quality and Debt Maturity on the Investment Efficiency in the Companies Listed in Tehran Stock Exchange

Under neo-classical theory, firms invest until the marginal benefit equals the marginal cost of this investment in order to maximize their values. However, in the Keynesian framework, where expected investment is determined by the preference for growth or financial security, and in the agency framework, which considers information asymmetry problems, firms may deviate from their optimal investment levels and hence suffer from underinvestment or overinvestment. This study, examines the role of financial reporting quality and debt maturity in investment efficiency. The sample of this study includes 100 companies listed in Tehran's Stock Exchange during the period 2009–2013, and Estimated Generalized Least Squares (EGLS) method is used for processing and testing the hypotheses. The results show that financial reporting quality improves investment efficiency. Also, there is no significant relationship between debt maturity and investment efficiency.

Filling the Gap: Infrastructure Investment in Brazil

Infrastructure bottlenecks have been identified as a key obstacle to growth affecting productivity and market efficiency, and hindering domestic integration and export performance. This paper assesses the state of Brazil’s infrastructure, in light of past investment trends and various quality and quantity indicators. Brazil’s infrastructure stock and its quality rank low in relation to that of comparator countries, chosen amongst main export competitors. We provide evidence that infrastructure affects domestic integration by analyzing price convergence of tradable goods across major cities. The government’s concession program will narrow part of the infrastructure gap, however, governance reforms will be crucial to improving investment efficiency.

Board independence and firm performance in China

We provide the first comprehensive and robust evidence on the relationship between board independence and firm performance in China. We find that independent directors have an overall positive effect on firm operating performance in China. Our findings are robust to a battery of tests, including endogeneity checks using instrumental variables, the dynamic generalized method of moments estimator, and the difference-in-differences method. The positive relationship between board independence and firm performance is stronger in government-controlled firms and in firms with lower information acquisition costs. We also document that Chinese independent directors play an important role in constraining insider self-dealing and improving investment efficiency.

Does the Economic Stimulus Package Stimulate Firm Investment and Improve Investment Efficiency? Evidence from China

The Economic Stimulus Packages which was introduced in response to the recent global financial crisis has been debated vigorously for its implications for economic efficiency. Using Chinese firms in the period 2003-2013 from the supply side perspective, we show that with the implementation of an economic stimulus package in China, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) receive more bank loans and invest more than non-SOEs. We further find that the economic stimulus package distorts bank lending decisions and reduces firm investment efficiency of SOEs, non-SOEs from favoured industries and regions, and non-SOEs with political connections. Our findings are robust to event study analysis, controlling for bank-level unobserved heterogeneities, and other robustness tests. Overall, our findings support the view that the stimulus package and the associated increase of bank loan supply in China results in a resource misallocation to SOEs, so that resources are invested inefficiently, that is, the stimulus package stimulated investment by SOEs and crowded out investment by privately owned sectors.

Stock liquidity and capital allocation efficiency: Evidence from Chinese listed companies

Based on market microstructure theories and evidence, this paper investigates the relationship between stock liquidity and capital allocation efficiency using Chinese listed companies from 1998 to 2011. This paper finds that stock liquidity helps improve investment efficiency, mitigating both overinvestment and underinvestment. This finding is robust to numerous sensitivity analyses, including controls for endogeneity and for the other known determinants of investment efficiency, the choice of the measure of stock liquidity and investment efficiency. Further analysis shows that stock liquidity improves corporate capital allocation efficiency by reducing agency costs and increasing the information content of share prices.

Segment Disclosure Transparency and Internal Capital Market Efficiency: Evidence from SFAS No. 131

Using the adoption of SFAS 131, I examine the effect of segment disclosure transparency on internal capital market efficiency. SFAS 131 requires firms to define segments as internally viewed by managers, thereby improving the transparency of managerial actions in internal capital allocation. I find that diversified firms that improved segment disclosure transparency by changing segment definitions upon adoption of SFAS 131 experienced an improvement in capital allocation efficiency in internal capital markets after the adoption of SFAS 131. In addition, I find that the improvement in internal capital market efficiency was greater for firms that suffered more severe agency problems before the adoption of SFAS 131 and also for firms whose managers faced stronger incentives to improve efficiency after the adoption of SFAS 131. My results suggest that more transparent segment information can help resolve agency conflicts in the internal capital markets of diversified firms, thus improving investment efficiency.

Can Information Disclosure Technology Improve Investment Efficiency? Empirical Evidence from China

We study the impact of adopting a new financial reporting technology, XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) on firms’ investment efficiency in the Chinese market. Our primary finding is that adoption of XBRL is associated with improvement in investment efficiency. Specifically, XBRL implementation significantly curbs both under-and over-investment for all listed Chinese firms and the impact on over-investment is 6 to 9 times larger than that on under-investment. This negative association of XBRL adoption and investment inefficiencies is robust conditional on firms’ financial constraints as well as whether a firm is SOE (state-owned-enterprise), both of which affect a firm’s availability of capital and thus investment efficiency.

Almost marginal conditional stochastic dominance

Marginal Conditional Stochastic Dominance (MCSD) developed by Shalit and Yitzhaki (1994) gives the conditions under which all risk-averse individuals prefer to increase the share of one risky asset over another in a given portfolio. In this paper, we extend this concept to provide conditions under which most (and not all) risk-averse investors behave in this way. Instead of stochastic dominance rules, almost stochastic dominance is used to assess the superiority of one asset over another in a given portfolio. Switching from MCSD to Almost MCSD (AMCSD) helps to reconcile common practices in asset allocation and the decision rules supporting stochastic dominance relations. A financial application is further provided to demonstrate that using AMCSD can indeed improve investment efficiency.

Sectoral bubbles, misallocation, and endogenous growth

Stock price bubbles are often on productive assets and occur in a sector of the economy. In addition, their occurrence is often accompanied by credit booms. Incorporating these features, we provide a two-sector endogenous growth model with credit-driven stock price bubbles. Bubbles have a credit easing effect in that they relax collateral constraints and improve investment efficiency. Sectoral bubbles also have a capital reallocation effect in the sense that bubbles in a sector attract more capital to be reallocated to that sector. Their impact on economic growth depends on the interplay between these two effects. Bubbles may misallocate resources across sectors and reduce welfare.

Managerial Optimism, Investment Efficiency, and Firm Valuation

This study investigates the relationship between managerial optimism, investment efficiency and firm valuation. This study follows the Campbell’s measurement for managerial optimism and investigates the influences of the different levels of managerial optimism on improving investment efficiency and firm value when firms tend to under-invest or over-invest. The results indicate that an under-invested firm with a CEO who has a higher level of managerial optimism can improve the firm’s investment efficiency by reducing the degree of underinvestment, which further increases the firm’s value. However, when firms tend to overinvest, there is insufficient evidence to show that a firm with a lower level of CEO managerial optimism will effectively improve the firm’s investment efficiency and increase firm value by reducing the degree of overinvestment.The results generated in this study help scholars and practitioners understand how managerial optimism affects the investment efficiency of firms

The Importance of Financial Reporting and Affecting Factors on It

Financial reporting purposes stem from information needs and demands of outside the organization users. The main goal is economic effects of events and financial operations on the status and performance of the business unit for help to foreign entities and financial decision making in connection with the business unit. This research deals to investigate the relationship between the quality of financial reporting and investment efficiency. Expected higher quality of financial reporting improve investment performance by reducing information asymmetries between business unit and external suppliers. Quality of financial reporting can improve investment efficiency from two ways : First, through reducing information asymmetries between company and investors, thus reduce financial costs. Second, through reducing information asymmetries between investors and managers, thus reduce monitoring costs and improving project selection.

Financial reporting quality, debt maturity and investment efficiency

This study, conducted with a sample of Spanish listed companies during the period 1998–2008, examines the role of financial reporting quality and debt maturity in investment efficiency. The results show that financial reporting quality mitigates the overinvestment problem. Likewise, lower debt maturity can improve investment efficiency, reducing both overinvestment and underinvestment problems. We further find that financial reporting quality and debt maturity are mechanisms with some degree of substitution in enhancing investment efficiency: firms with lower (higher) use of short-term debt, exhibit higher (lower) financial reporting quality effect on investment efficiency.

Increased disclosure and investment efficiency

This paper investigates the relation between increased disclosure level and capital investment efficiency. We hypothesize that increased disclosure level can reduce information asymmetry, which in turn improves capital investment efficiency. Consistent with our hypothesis, we document a significantly negative association between disclosure level and measures of inefficient investments, such as level of investment inefficiency, overinvestment, and underinvestment, indicating that firms increased disclosure level are found to improve investment efficiency. These results are robustness after using various measures for level of investment inefficiency and increased disclosure and considering different types of disclosure such as voluntary disclosure. Overall, our findings suggest that through reducing information asymmetry, increased disclosure level induces managers to act in the best interest of shareholders, which improves capital investment efficiency.

Do Industry Specialist Auditors Improve Investment Efficiency?

This paper examines whether the investment efficiency of client firms with industry specialist auditors is higher relative to that with non-specialist auditors. Using a large sample from the period1976 to 2005, we find that investment efficiency of client firms with industry specialist auditors is significantly higher than that with non-specialist auditors. Furthermore, industry specialist auditors discourage both over-investment and under-investment, although they do so more in the over-investment side relative to the under-investment side. The results are generally unaffected by the different definitions of specialist auditors, clients’ firm size, yearly regressions, differences in the market share of specialist auditors, and the potential self-selection bias.Data Availability: All data can be drawn from publicly available sources.

Sectoral Bubbles and Endogenous Growth

Stock price bubbles are often on productive assets and occur in a sector of the economy. In addition, their occurrence is often accompanied by credit booms. Incorporating these features, we provide a two-sector endogenous growth model with credit-driven stock price bubbles. Bubbles have a credit easing effect in that they relax collateral constraints and improve investment efficiency. Sectoral bubbles also have a capital reallocation effect in the sense that bubbles in a sector attract more capital to be reallocated to that sector. Their impact on economic growth depends on the interplay between these two effects.

Climate Policy, Learning, and Technology Adoption in Small Countries

A significant reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions requires international cooperation in emission abatement as well as individual countries’ investment in the adoption of abatement technology. The existing literature on climate policy pays insufficient attention to small countries, which account for a substantial proportion of global emission. In this study, we investigate how climate policy and learning about climate damage affect investment in abatement technology in small countries. We consider three alternative climate policy instruments: emission standards, harmonized taxes and auctioned permits. We say that learning is feasible if an international environmental agreement (IEA) is formed after the resolution of uncertainty about climate damage. We find that, either with learning and quadratic abatement costs or without learning, harmonized taxes outperform emission standards and auctioned permits in terms of investment efficiency. Without learning, a large cost of nonparticipation (that a country incurs) in the IEA can be beneficial to the country. Whether learning improves investment efficiency depends on the size of this nonparticipation cost.

How to Apply Dynamic Optimization into Intertemporal Investment

The most important feature of cascaded hydropower investment, intertemporal optimization, is neglected to some extent. This paper focuses on how to make an optimal decision on intertemporal investment based on the case of cascaded hydropower. I incorporated intertemporal investment and financing constraints in dynamic programming, and proposed a new objective function. As a result, an intertemporal optimal dynamic model is established. The model highlights the fundamental framework of dynamic programming on cascaded hydropower development. The framework is robustly suitable to improve investment efficiency with respect to intertemporal optimization.

Bubbles and Credit Constraints

We provide an infinite-horizon model of a production economy with bubbles, in which firms meet stochastic investment opportunities and face credit constraints. Capital is not only an input for production, but also serves as collateral. We show that bubbles on this reproducible asset may arise, which relax collateral constraints and improve investment efficiency. The collapse of bubbles leads to a recession. We show that there is a credit policy that can eliminate the bubble on firm assets and can achieve the efficient allocation.