Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
New Entry Threats and Corporate Disclosure: Evidence from the U.S. High-Tech Sector

We evaluate two competing views – the proprietary costs theory and the entry deterrence theory – in explaining the relationship between entry threats and firms’ disclosure. We examine if entry threats from technology startups influence firms’ information disclosure in the high-tech sector, where significant turbulence emerges from new ventures. Leveraging a new measure of new entry threats (NET) based on text mining of publicly available information, we show that a higher level of NET faced by incumbent firms are associated with a decrease in the transparency of its information disclosure, measured by two indicators: a disclosure index derived from analyst forecasts, and confidential treatment orders filed by firms. Our results support the proprietary cost theory of disclosure. Interestingly, we find this effect to be more pronounced in sectors where proprietary information is vulnerable to misappropriation, and in industries associated with higher worker mobility. We discuss implications for research and insights for practitioners.
A Survey of Data Pricing Methods

The advancement of information technologies such as Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing and the increasing deployment and use of the Internet of Things have promoted the capture, processing and storage of data over the last few years at a rate not seen before. The amount of data that are created, captured, or replicated globally was 33 Zettabytes in 2018 and is predicted to grow to 175 Zettabytes by 2025. The considerable amount and high availability of data have a substantial potential value to businesses and governments. <br><br>Data are symbols that describe the properties of objects and events. Information is processed data that provide answers to “who”, “what”, ”where”, “when” and “how many” questions. Data themselves are not necessarily meaningful. Information is derived from data with a specific purpose and, thus, is meaningful in certain contexts. <br><br>This paper attempts to comprehensively review the state of the art of existing data pricing methods to provide a general understanding of this emerging research area. Also, it proposes a novel classification of data pricing methods in which the methods are grouped according to the fundamental properties of data to be priced.
Adaptation to Climate Change: Evidence from Banks’ Loan Loss Provisions

This paper examines whether and how banks adapt to long-run climate change. We show that banks increase their loan loss provisions by 7% in response to a 1°F increase in three-year weighted average abnormal temperature. Such an effect is more pronounced when banks have greater pre-existing credit exposure to the agriculture sector, the real estate sector, or personal loans. It also becomes stronger when the local economic condition is poorer. Further exploring the heterogeneous impacts of climate change, we find that short-run market pressure and financial innovation can act as countervailing forces, reducing the loan loss provision sensitivity to climate change.
The Halloween Effect in US Sectors

All US stock market sectors and industries perform better during winter than during summer in our sample from 1926-2005. In more than two-third of all sectors and industries this difference in summer and winter returns, known as the Halloween effect, is statistically significant and in half of all sectors and industries risk premia are negative during summer. However, while all sectors and industries show this effect, there are large differences across sectors and industries. The effect is almost absent in sectors related to consumer consumption but strong in production sectors. We illustrate how these differences between sectors might be used to improve the risk return trade off using sector rotation based on Fidelity sector funds and show how an investor might have benefited from such a trading strategy.
The Revival of Shelf-Registered Corporate Equity Offerings

We report that traditional seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) are no longer firms' preferred choice for raising seasoned public equity. Traditional offerings have recently been surpassed by shelf-registered offerings in terms of both annual frequency and total capital raised. This represents a dramatic shift from the 1980s, during which the overwhelming majority of firms favored traditional over shelf-registered offerings. We find that the growth in shelf use is related to firms increasingly valuing and using the option feature of shelf registration to defer offerings. Moreover, the evidence indicates that the way firms now use shelf offerings resolves the shelf under-certification problem and results in no larger market penalties and significantly lower underwriter fees relative to non-shelf offerings. Finally, firms often use universal shelf filings and choose between debt and equity offerings based on the prevailing relative market conditions.
Nonrandom Survival and Long-Run Performance of IPO Firms

I show that IPO firms with worse performance are more likely to be delisted. Consequently, the observed alpha of IPO firms on average understates their true alpha, creating the reverse survivorship bias. Alpha of the calendar time portfolio of IPO firms is unaffected by the reverse survivorship bias and offers an unbiased measure of the average true alpha. Seasoned firms, who have survived a long period, have greater expected returns than IPO firms because of the positive performance-survival relationship and thus are a biased benchmark for IPO firms. Therefore, buy-and-hold abnormal returns relative to matched seasoned firms underestimate IPO firm performance.
Secrets of Successful Crowdfunding Campaigns

Crowdfunding has broken the barriers between an aspiring entrepreneur and financial markets. Kickstarter, a leading crowdfunding platform, which works on the ‘all-or-nothing’ model, provides various facilities to the project owners to gather the funds from the contributors in return of a reward. The facts signify that most of the projects fail to reach the funding goal. This study sampled 200 successful projects randomly by quota sampling from each category to assess commonalities in the successful projects on Kickstarter. The study assessed the marketing appeals, video presentation, shipment facilities, and project owner details to check the commonalities among successful projects. The results revealed that although rational appeals generate more funding, however, emotional appeal is widely used in successful projects. The paper will be helpful for the fundraisers to know the recipe for a successful project and to funders to enhance their chance of exceeding the funding goals.
The Moral Investor: Sin Stock Aversion and Virtue Stock Affinity

Does morality in business affect investors’ choice of stocks? Building on the source preference literature, we propose a novel measure of moral stock preference and offer a nested model relating it to social preference, attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR), and belief bias. We investigate moral stock preference experimentally in terms of sin stock aversion (SSA) and virtue stock affinity (VSA) and arrive at three main findings: (1) SSA and VSA are both observed, with the effect of SSA being stronger, (2) SSA/VSA is positively correlated with social preference, with the effect of altruistic giving being stronger than that of trust or trustworthiness, and (3) SSA/VSA is correlated with belief bias, the effect of which is stronger than that of social preference. The asymmetry between SSA and VSA – avoiding “bad” matters more than doing “good” – points to moral loss aversion based on a disproportionate avoidance of sin stocks compared to favoring virtue stocks. Together, our findings demonstrate the validity of our model, with social preference, attention to CSR, and belief bias working in tandem to capture the decision maker’s moral stock preference.
Does Asymmetric Information Drive Capital Structure Decisions?

Using a novel information asymmetry index based on measures of adverse selection developed by the market microstructure literature, we test if information asymmetry is an important determinant of capital structure decisions, as suggested by the pecking order theory. Our index relies exclusively on measures of the market's assessment of adverse selection risk rather than on ex ante firm characteristics. We find that information asymmetry does affect the capital structure decisions of U.S. firms over the sample period 1973-2002. Our findings are robust to controlling for conventional leverage factors (size, Q ratio, tangibility, profitability) and several firm attributes, such as funding needs, sales growth, real investment, stock return volatility, stock turnover, and intensity of insider trading. For example, we estimate that on average, for every dollar of financing deficit to cover, firms in the highest adverse selection decile issue 30 cents of debt more than firms in the lowest decile. Overall, this evidence explains why the pecking order theory is only partially successful in explaining all of firms' capital structure decisions. It also suggests that the theory finds support when its basic assumptions hold in the data, as it should reasonably be expected of any theory.
How Much Does Aggregate Demand Travel Across the Atlantic?

We identify the spill-over of demand shocks between the world's two largest advanced economies; the US and the euro area. We estimate a Bayesian VAR with sign restrictions, using standard restrictions for the domestic impact of the shock but a novel approach to identify the geographic location of the shocks and rule out common shocks. For the latter, we use the relative performance of small open economies that are neighbors of the US and the euro area, respectively Canada and Sweden, in addition to restricting the relative effects on the US, the euro area and the rest of the world. We find that demand spill-overs of US and euro area demand shocks become smaller on average when imposing relative restrictions, while they become larger in periods which are well-known to be specific to the US (global financial crisis) or the euro area (euro area sovereign debt crisis). Our results are confirmed by running a ‘placebo test’ where we replace the euro area with a small euro area economy, which should not have an independent effect on the US economy due to its small size.
Security Offerings

This essay surveys the extant literature and adds to the empirical evidence on issuance activity,flotation costs, and valuation effects of security offerings. We focus primarily on public offerings of equity for cash, although we also review and present new evidence on debt offerings and private placements. The essay has four major parts: (1) We review aggregate issue activity in exchange listed securities from 1980 through 2004. Following the IPO, only about one-half of the publicly traded firms undertake a public security offering of any type, and only about one-quarter undertake a SEO. Thus, SEOs are relatively rare, which is consistent with adverse selection costs being an important consideration when raising cash externally. (2) We review the evidence on direct issue costs across security types and flotation methods, including the more recent SEO underpricing phenomenon. A large number of studies provide evidence on the determinants of underwriter compensation, and confirm the importance of variables capturing information asymmetries and underwriter competition. (3) We survey and interpret the valuation effects of security issue announcements. In the period since the Eckbo and Masulis (1995) survey, many studies examining announcement-period stock returns have focused on the effects of flotation method choice and foreign offerings. The well-known negative average announcement effect observed for U.S. SEOs appears to be a somewhat U.S.-specific phenomenon. (4) We review and extend evidence on the performance of issuing firms in the five year post-issue period. The literature proposes either a risk based-explanation or a behavioral explanation for the phenomenon of low average realized returns following IPOs and SEOs. Standard factor model regressions fail to reject the null that the low average returns are commensurate with issuers' risk exposures. Recent theoretical developments suggest that lower risk levels following equity issues may be linked to issuers' investment activity, a promising direction for future research.
Public Entrepreneurial Finance around the Globe

This paper examines how government funding programs geared towards early-stage companies interact with private capital markets. Using hand-collected data on 755 government programs worldwide, we find that governments’ allocations to such funding programs have been comparable to global venture capital disbursements in the past decade. Government programs were more frequent in periods with more private venture activity, a relationship that was stronger in nations with better public governance. The programs’ structures often relied on the local private sector. The private sector’s involvement was greater when government programs targeted earlier-stage companies and when rankings of government effectiveness were higher. We find that such government funding programs increased local innovation, particularly when the programs focused on early-stage ventures or collaborated with the private sector. These findings are most consistent with the explanation that the reliance on private capital markets enabled governments to mitigate investment frictions and improve capital allocation.
Dynamic Nexus Among Gold Price, Exchange Rates, and Equity Return of Pakistan

This paper investigated the relationship between the gold price and the exchange rate on the equity return of Pakistan. The equity market provides an opportunity for investors to capitalize on diverse markets and expand their investment portfolio. This paper consisted of monthly Gold prices in the US dollar; monthly exchange rates of US dollar in terms of Pakistani Rupee and stock market index were taken for the period of January 2010 to December 2019. The unit root is used for the stationary test, Cointegration, Granger Causality test for a lead-lag relationship. The empirical result shows that exchange rates and stock prices data series are non-stationery and integrated of order one. The result showed that there is a long-run relationship between stock price and exchange rate and gold price. Finally, we applied a Granger causality test to find out and the casual relationship among gold price, exchange rate, and stock prices. Outcomes show that there is no causal relationship between stock price and exchange rate. However, there is a causal relationship between stock price and gold price.
Financing a Black Box: Dynamic Investment with Persistent Private Information

This paper studies the implication of persistent private information on a firm's optimal financing and investment policies. In a dynamic agency model, an investor supplies capital to an entrepreneur with an opaque production technology. The investor observes neither the true productivity of the technology nor the actual amount of the output produced. The entrepreneur can generate private benefit from misreporting productivity and diverting output, both of which bear a persistent negative effect on the long-term growth of the technology. In contrast to the predictions of standard investment models, the persistence of the agency friction rationalizes overinvestment especially among firms with a strong history of cash flow but a low Tobin's q, and reconciles the optimal financing policy with the empirical observations of a strong investment-cash-flow sensitivity and a weak or even negative investment-q sensitivity.
Factors Impacting Research Productivity of Academic Staff at the Iraqi Higher Education System

Research productivity is a vital element in enhancing the university ranking and, it is an important metric to measure the performance of academic staff. The purpose of this study is to identify the factors impacting research productivity of academic staff at Cihan University Erbil, Iraq. A survey was carried out among 87 academic staff randomly selected at the university to determine the impact of Fund, Collaboration, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and Job Satisfaction on Research Productivity. The data was analyzed by using Smart PLS 3.2. 9. The results indicated that Fund, Collaboration, ICT and Job Satisfaction had positive and significant impact on Research Productivity, although Fund has the highest impact on Research Productivity. The implication of this study is the management of universities should pay greater attention on research funding opportunities, rewarding collaboration among researchers, enabling ICT and improving job satisfaction to boost research productivity of the academic staff. For future research, it is recommended to measure the mediating roles of the variables and consider sampling academic staff from other universities to increase generalizability.
Using Monotonicity Restrictions to Identify Models with Partially Latent Covariates

This paper develops a new method for identifying econometric models with partially latent covariates. Such data structures arise naturally in industrial organization and labor economics settings where data are collected using an "input-based sampling" strategy, e.g., if the sampling unit is one of multiple labor input factors. We show that the latent covariates can be nonparametrically identified, if they are functions of a common shock satisfying some plausible monotonicity assumptions. With the latent covariates identified, semiparametric estimation of the outcome equation proceeds within a standard IV framework that accounts for the endogeneity of the covariates. We illustrate the usefulness of our method using two applications. The first focuses on pharmacies: we find that production function differences between chains and independent pharmacies may partially explain the observed transformation of the industry structure. Our second application investigates education achievement functions and illustrates important differences in child investments between married and divorced couples.
Do Indirect Investment Barriers Contribute to Capital Market Segmentation?

Using a sample of emerging market closed-end funds, I find evidence that indirect investment barriers exert powerful effects, opposite to the effects of capital controls, on asset pricing differences across countries. I show that not only do indirect investment barriers contribute to international capital market segmentation, but they can lead to segmentation even in the absence of strong capital inflow restrictions. This result is consistent with Bekaert and Harvey's (1995) conclusion that "other markets appear segmented even though foreigners have relatively free access to their capital markets. " The empirical results of this paper provide a rational market segmentation explanation of both premiums and discounts in emerging market closed-end funds, and they are consistent with the deterrent effect of indirect barriers on equity flows to emerging markets found in the capital flow literature. Keywords: market segmentation, emerging markets, capital controls, indirect investment barriers, closed-end country funds
Je ne regrette rien? An Empirical Test of Regret Theory and Stock Returns

We examine the asset pricing implications of regret theory. In our model, investors mentally represent a stock by the distribution of its past returns and evaluate it following regret theory. Investors feel the sensation of regret if their investment performs worse than an unchosen alternative and anticipate this feeling in their evaluation. Consequently, stocks with a high (low) potential for regret get undervalued (overvalued) and, on average, earn high (low) subsequent returns. We find empirical support for this prediction in the cross-section of U.S. stocks. Our results cannot be explained by common risk factors, return reversals, and other behavioral theories.
Examining the Structural Effect of Working Time on Well-Being Evidence from Abu Dhabi

Does working time affect workers’ quality of life? We studied this question in the context of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi drawing on the results of its Quality of Life Survey conducted in 2019/2020. The empirical analysis examined the effect of working hours on various elements of the quality of life framework including health, job and income, life satisfaction and happiness, social connections, and mental feelings. Preliminary analysis along with path analysis justified the significance of eight variables: work-life balance, frequency of meeting with friends, happiness, stress, time spent with family, self-assessment of health, satisfaction with income, and difficulty in fulfilling family responsibilities. Path analysis showed direct effect of working hours on four variables: work-life balance, happiness, frequency of meeting with friends, and stress. In addition, the model became significantly less efficient when including variables such as job satisfaction, job security, time spent in sport, sleeping, and leisure. The implications were discussed in the light of international literature and in the context of Abu Dhabi.
How to Improve Mobile Money Service Usage and Adoption by Nigerians in the Era of COVID-19

The paper aims to investigate how to improve mobile money service adoption and usage by Nigerians during the era of COVID-19 by examining the challenges faced by mobile money users in Nigeria. The study used a mixed method to sample 300 targeted informal sector operators offline using questionnaires and 200 respondents online (ardent digital products users) using Google form. In reaching the targeted online sample, the study distributed the google form through social media while a judgmental and accidental sampling technique was employed to target the informal economy participants. Both the online and offline data revealed that poor mobile network (infrastructural deficiency), security concerns, cost of services, and poor complaints resolution top the biggest hindrance facing mobile money adoption and usage in Nigeria. While the introduction of community-based complaints resolution, fixing security bugs, reduction in the cost of service, and effective stakeholder collaboration top the measures of improving mobile money adoption and usage in the country. The study identified popular misconceptions about mobile money and also provide evidence that the process of recruiting respondents influences the outcome of the result. <br>Originality/value: First to collect sample both online (targeting ardent digital product users) and offline (targeting informal economy operators). <br>
Oil prices and Clean Energy Stock Prices Revisited

Sadorsky (2012) analyzes correlations and volatility spillovers between oil prices and stock price indices of clean energy and technology companies. In this paper, we replicate the original analysis of Sadorsky (2012), extend the sample period and present new findings. The extended sample analysis shows that the correlation estimates reported in the original paper have not changed since 2010 despite increased efforts to tackle climate change. A re-analysis demonstrates that return and volatility spillovers are economically negligible consistent with efficient markets and economic theory but in stark contrast with the title and focus of the original paper. We further show that a two-asset portfolio analysis yields results with limited practical relevance. Our study highlights the importance of a theoretical grounding of empirical research.