Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Big for Everyone? Big Data, Firm Size and Performance

Big data (BD) analytics is considered one of the most important general-purpose technologies of our era. Given the pervasiveness of BD across industries, both policy-makers and scholars have become particularly interested in assessing the effects of BD on firm performance. However, previous studies have not investigated whether the performance benefits of BD accrue homogeneously to all firms or, instead, as some scholars warn, mainly to large companies. To address this question, we explore the effect of BD in two large and representative samples of firms. Our findings indicate that both large and small firms can gain from BD, yet large firms predominantly use BD to enhance efficiency via process innovation, whereas small firms use BD to increase sales through product innovation.
The Passing from the Classical to the Extended Form of the Holiday Effect on the Euronext

In some circumstances, the classical form of the Holiday Effect, consisting in abnormal returns that occur one trading day before and one trading day after a public holiday, could be replaced by an extended form, in which abnormal returns are found in an enlarged time interval. This paper explores the presence of the classical and the extended form of the Holiday Effect on four indexes of the Euronext capital market: AEX, CAC 40, ISEQ 20 and PSI 20. We perform this investigation for two periods: January 2000 - December 2011 and January 2012 - June 2020. For the first period the results suggest that classical form of the Holiday Effect predominated. Instead, for the second period we found abnormal returns in enlarged time intervals.
Media, Partisan Ideology, and Corporate Social Responsibility

We study the effect of conservative media on corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings of firms using the staggered expansion of Sinclair Broadcast Group: the largest conservative network in the U.S. local TV markets. The entry of Sinclair to a region is not driven by local economic or ideological factors. In a difference-in-differences setting, we find that CSR ratings of exposed firms decline significantly in all three dimensions: environmental, social, and governance. We provide evidence suggesting that change in local ideology is an important driver of the results. The effect is larger for firms in sin (alcohol, tobacco, and gambling) industries, with a history of federal prosecution, in conservative counties, with younger CEOs, and with lower institutional ownership. Exposure to Sinclair has a negative impact on local firms' Tobin's Q and stock returns.
Synthesis, Characterization and Biological Properties of Fe2ti3o9 Nanoparticles: Antimicrobial Activity and DNA Cleavage Ability

The study of nanomaterials, especially metal oxide nanoparticles, has provided new research opportunities to enhance their biological properties to offer promising solutions to global health concerns. Therefore, it is essential to design bimetallic oxide nanoparticles as potential antimicrobial agents and effective nanomaterials for DNA cleavage due to the increased ROS (reactive oxygen species) production affected by the synergy of the corresponding monometallic oxides coupling. In that vein, mono- and bimetallic oxide nanoparticles of iron and titanium like TiO2, Fe2O3, Fe2TiO5, and Fe2Ti3O9 were prepared and after analysis, their antimicrobial and DNA cleavage activities compared and investigated. According to the results, Fe2Ti3O9 nanoparticles exhibit the highest antimicrobial effect against Gram-negative (Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa) and Gram-positive (Bacillus subtilis and Staphylococcus aureus) bacteria, and the fungi (Candida albicans and Aspergillus oryzae) as well as the highest ability to cleave chromosomal DNA of Escherichia coli bacterium compared to other nanoparticles. The synergistic effect of Fe2O3 and 3TiO2 coupling, the smaller average size of 10 nm, larger interaction surface, and less crystallinity are led to increased oxidative stress via ROS production and consequently enhanced biological properties in Fe2Ti3O9 nanoparticles.
Monetary Policy Surprises and Corporate Credit Spreads

We study the effects of monetary policy surprises (MPSs) on corporate credit default swap (CDS) spreads. Using high-frequency surprises around Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements, we find a negative relation between changes in unexpected expansionary monetary policy and changes in CDS spreads using both panel regressions and time-series regressions. More importantly, we show that there is a strong cross-sectional effect of MPSs on CDS spreads. Unexpected expansionary monetary policy reduces the flight-to-safety and flight-to-liquidity phenomenon: The credit spread between investment-grade and high-yield CDSs narrows significantly following an unexpected monetary policy. Finally, we show that monetary policy affects CDS spreads through cash flow, financial constraints, and risk channels.
Manipulation and Obfuscation of the Financial Report

I model a signaling game of strategic reporting where the manager can bias and obfuscate the financial report in a market where investors only pay attention to randomly sampled parts of the financial report and then extrapolate the value of the firm based on this. The manager can inflate the stock price by obfuscating the financial report. This is done by disaggregating the report into a set of non-negative signals, capturing the profitability of different activities within the firm, whose mean is constrained to be equal to the reported profitability of the firm. Biasing the reported profitability increases the possible degree of obfuscation, incentivizing a larger bias, and causes mispricing if investors do not foresee the consequences of their extrapolative nature on the manager's reporting strategy. Even in the presence of extrapolative investors, the manager is never better off ex-ante by being able to bias, and if investors foresee the manager's strategic decisions, the bias will perfectly unravel and the manager's cost of biasing will be decreasing in investor sophistication whereas it is otherwise increasing.
Why Biased Endorsements Can Manipulate Elections

We study the electoral impact of biased endorsements in large Poisson elections with two candidates. Under fairly general conditions, we derive analytical approximations for the asymptotic voting equilibria. We show that, when the electorate is sufficiently polarized, manipulating public information about candidates' qualities can hardly affect the expected party vote shares from an ex-ante perspective. Nevertheless, such information manipulation can systematically affect the election outcome and voter turnout. We apply our framework to study the influence of the endorser's bias and the entry of new endorsers on the extent of electoral manipulation. With a single endorser, a rise in bias affects the election outcome in a non-monotonic way and reduces voter welfare. Importantly and surprisingly, manipulating election outcomes becomes easier, the larger is the electorate. Entry of a new endorser can systematically affect election outcomes and improve voter welfare in large elections if and only if the entrant is strictly less biased than all incumbents. Moreover, we show that such entry can either systematically increase or decrease voter turnout, depending on the biases of entrant and incumbent endorsers.
Rational Roots of Volatile Excess Volatility

Market prices tend to be significantly more volatile than the dividends they discount. Furthermore, volatility is not stable; it alternates between calm periods and storms of varying duration and intensity. These behaviors are often viewed as market defects or symptoms of the madness of crowds. In fact, rational learning about unstable drift provides a unified explanation. High earnings rationally breed optimism about future growth while low earnings rationally breed pessimism. This breeds excess volatility, roughly in proportion to the volatile variance of beliefs. The impact is highly significant in models fit to empirical evidence on GDP disaster risks. <br>
Horizontal Ownership Concentration and Communications Infrastructure Adoption: Historical Data Evaluation

Horizontal ownership concentration and its consequences is an extraordinarily important contemporary topic. Yet, outcomes evidence is slim. Based on historical data, this retrospective analysis has assessed the impact of horizontal acquisitions on communications infrastructure investment, using broadband technology adoption for the local exchange company population in the United States telecommunications industry as the evaluated case. These entities have engaged in a series of acquisitions of other horizontal company owners, and sector ownership has become concentrated, with a few firms controlling the bulk of the sector’s assets. Based on a battery of test procedures, to establish the robustness of results, the evidence indicates that horizontal ownership diffusion and concentration has been causally associated with materially-significant lower broadband deployment, and dominant firms have adopted almost half less broadband technology relative to the average deployment of such infrastructure. Additional tests using alternative ownership concentration measures support the main results. The results support the idea that spread of horizontal ownership is associated with competition softening and its consequences for acquired firms to behave in ways that could deter entry and compromise competitors’ businesses. <br><br>
U Disappeared: How Index Funds Reshape Intraday Stock Market Dynamics

We find the well-documented U-shaped intraday patterns of stock liquidity, volume, and price volatility for the U.S. stock market have disappeared. Bid-ask spreads decrease, not increase, toward the close of the trading day; trading volume disproportionally concentrates in the last five minutes (over 20%). The rise of index-tracking investment provides one explanation. To avoid tracking errors, index funds tend to trade near the close. The clustered trading by uninformed indexers improves stock liquidity but deteriorates price informativeness preceding the close. We show evidence by exploiting the variations in stocks’ index fund ownership and switches between the Russell 1000/2000 stock indexes.
Automating Governance: Blockchain Delivered Governance for Business Networks

This conceptual article seeks to integrate blockchain into current theory on the governance of inter-organizational exchanges within business networks. &nbsp; It is posited that a blockchain governance structure comprised of administrative, platform, and application level mechanisms represents a significant new antecedent and causal factor determining the extent of the need for the traditional contractual and relational mechanisms of governance. &nbsp; Further, that blockchain delivered governance can perform the functions of transaction coordination and safeguarding which are required in order to substitute for those traditional mechanisms of governance. &nbsp; A discussion points the way towards empirical verification of the model created, and examines the implications of blockchain delivered governance for practitioners. &nbsp; In developing this model, this article also seeks to make a contribution by placing attention on the need for the building of theory applying to blockchain, and for quantitative measurement of the effects of blockchain on organizations and business networks. &nbsp; This article concludes that the emergence of blockchain technology now provides the means by which automation of the specification, validation, and enforcement of private ordering between exchange participants can be achieved, and that this will justify a reformulation of existing theories of inter-organizational governance.
Mid-term Climate Change Risk in Catastrophe Bond Market

The catastrophe bond market is a good place to reveal how investors think about the climate risk in a mid-term foreseeable future. By studying catastrophe bond market transaction data, I find out that investors treat climate related bonds and non-climate related bonds differently. The yield difference between short-term climate related bonds and mid-term climate related bonds is significantly higher than the yield difference between short-term non-climate related bonds and mid-term non-related bonds. This yield difference is not caused by annual climate seasonality, different local property value growths, and different term structures. Tests on implied hazard rate of catastrophe bonds show similar results. I also find that the difference in yield difference between climate related bonds and non-climate related bonds gets larger after some major climate related disaster events happened between the year 2017 and the year 2018, which indicates that this difference could be connected to the investors' perception of the uncertainty of future climate situations.
Determinants of Mergers and Acquisitions in European Financial Entities: An Analysis of Operations in the Nineties

The aim of this paper is to further the study of mergers and acquisitions involving European financial entities which took place in the period 1993-2001. An ex-ante analysis describes the characteristics of the entities involved, both those taking over others or those being taken over, within a context where the main idea revolves around the reasons underlying these processes of financial concentration, mainly the search for operative synergy, improvement in the quality of management, diversification towards non-traditional activities and the increase of market share. The results point to the importance of size as a conditioning factor in these operations, given that it has a positive influence on the probability of being an acquirer, being acquired or being involved in a merger. Also, acquiring institutions are more profitable than those acquired, which present certain inefficiencies. In that sense, behind acquisition operations would be the desire to improve the management of the institutions acquired, thus increasing their profitability and efficiency. Lastly, there are certain patterns in the business, as the volume of deposits, which affect the participation of credit institutions in consolidation operations, especially those made by commercial banks.
Corporate Loan Spreads and Economic Activity

We use secondary corporate loan-market prices to construct a novel loan-market-based credit spread. This measure has considerable predictive power for economic activity across macroeconomic outcomes in both the U.S. and Europe and captures unique information not contained in public market credit spreads. Loan-market borrowers are compositionally different and particularly sensitive to supply-side frictions as well as financial frictions that emanate from their own balance sheets. This evidence highlights the joint role of financial intermediary and borrower balance-sheet frictions in understanding macroeconomic developments and enriches our understanding of which type of financial frictions matter for the economy
Varied Practice in Accounting for Extractive Activities under IFRS

Extractive firms form a major part of the stock markets of many countries which use IFRS for financial reporting, yet the key accounting issues are hardly regulated at all under a long-running ‘temporary’ standard. The resulting variety in practice has not been studied by any large-scale international survey. We hand-collect data on accounting policies from the annual reports of firms from 10 countries, focusing on the key issues of the scope of costs capitalized and the size of impairment pool. Many of our IFRS firms report the use of one of the two methods allowed in US GAAP: successful efforts and full cost. However, these are not defined in IFRS, and most of those firms do not use policies that are consistent with the US definitions of the methods. Instead, we identify nine distinct methods, which we classify by degree of conservatism. We find that there are highly significant differences in policies by country and by sub-industry (oil/gas versus mining).
Capital Market Consequences of Expectations Management in the Postregulation Fair Disclosure Period

This paper investigates the capital market consequences of expectations management in the postRegulation Fair Disclosure period. Results show that investors “punish” firms that deliberately issue pessimistic public guidance to dampen analysts’ expectations to a beatable level in the post-Regulation Fair Disclosure Era. I find that on average, the negative stock price effects caused by management’s pessimistic guidance dominate the positive stock price effects associated with the positive earnings surprises. Furthermore, both the short-term stock return over the combined guidance plus earnings announcement window and the long-term total period return are more negative for guidance firms than for firms that do not guide and thus miss financial analysts’ expectations.
Are Wall Street Analyst Rankings Popularity Contest?

We investigate the (sell-side) analyst rankings of Institutional Investor (I/I) and The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) using data from 1993-2005. We find that factors with a primary component of recognition are the most important determinants of the rankings, although performance measures are statistically significant determinants in some cases. The single exception to this finding is with existing WSJ stars, where industry-adjusted-investment-recommendation performance is the only significant determinant of repeating as a star. Further, in the year after becoming stars, the recommendations of WSJ stars are significantly worse than those of non-stars; and the recommendations and earnings forecasts of I/I stars, as well as the earnings forecasts of WSJ stars, are not significantly different from those of non-stars. We conclude that these rankings are largely "popularity contests. "
Do Foreign Institutional Investors Affect International Contracting? Evidence from Bond Covenants

We examine the impact of foreign institutional shareholders on the prevalence of restrictive bond covenants using a sample of 959 Yankee bonds from 29 countries over the period 2001–2019. We find a significantly negative relation between foreign institutional ownership and debt covenants. This inverse relation is strongest for U.S. institutional ownership of foreign-issued Yankee bonds, and for covenants designed to mitigate such opportunistic behavior as claims dilution and wealth transfers. We also show that the inverse relation between U.S. institutional ownership and restrictive debt covenants is moderated by country- and firm-level variables re-lated to corporate governance, information asymmetry, and agency costs of debt. Additional analyses show that U.S. institutional ownership has a significant pricing effect on Yankee bond investors by lowering the issuer’s cost of borrowing.
Adaptive Shrinkage Estimation of High Dimensional Moment Condition Model with Smooth Structural Changes

Structural change is a long-standing problem in time series econometrics and macroeconomics, and financial time series are likely to be affected by structural instability due to changes in preferences, technologies, policies, etc. Most of the existing literature on moment condition models assumed that structural parameters were fixed over the entire sample period. To allow for time-varying structural parameters in the high dimensional moment condition models, this paper proposes a shrinkage local generalized method of moment (SLGMM) which simultaneously achieves parameter estimation and moment selection. We show that our method consistently selects the correct moment conditions and the SLGMM estimator possesses the oracle property, that is, it is as efficient as the time-varying GMM estimator based on all valid moment conditions. Moreover, we establish the consistency and asymptotic normality of the SLGMM estimator. A Monte Carlo simulation and an empirical application on asset pricing are conducted to show the merits of the newly proposed method.
Hampered Interest Rate Pass-Through: A Supply Side Story?

This paper shows that the supply side of credit is a major factor for the phenomenon of hampered interest rate pass-through in monopolistic banking markets. Our data, covering all 1,555 small and medium sized banks in Germany, provides a clear way to partial out demand shocks; we are thus able to show that while market-power banks charge higher loan rates, they spare their borrowers a part of exogenous upward shifts in the yield curve and furthermore withhold a substantial part of rising market rates from their depositors. Because high market-power banks in our sample are relatively more profitable, they seem to be able to insure their relationship-customers against adverse shocks.
Optimal Growth under Model Uncertainty

The optimal growth of a wealth process toward a goal is studied under ambiguous markets with first- and second-order moment uncertainties relating to stock returns. Optimal strategies and value functions are solved explicitly. A verification theorem is proved to show that the results solve the original stochastic control problem. Quantitative analyses of the investment strategies indicate that a rational individual with ambiguity aversion reduces market participation when return and volatility are uncorrelated, while there is an exception for synchronous return and volatility. The welfare of shorting a discounted reward is computed, which demonstrates that in an ambiguous pricing economy, investors can generate a positive premium via appropriate asset allocations.
Political Elites and the ‘War on Truth’

Under what conditions do self-serving political elites choose to engage in `war on truth' (WOT)? We build on existing insights, which maintain that WOT promotes withdrawal and skepticism among voters, to show that seeding mistrust is one strategy for altering the information environment of the public. We build a formal model in which elites push the strategy when evidence on a policy issue goes against them such as during a political scandal. We characterize the `WOT trade-off' faced by panderers: immobilizing voters locks in the status quo and thereby prevents the public from enacting policy change the elite dislikes but it also undermines future policy changes the elite may in fact like. We draw on a number of illustrations from discourse pushed by the Kremlin on Western media markets and from the informational environment in ``diminished’’ democracies to demonstrate how our argument explains variation in the occurrence and intensity of conspiracy-pandering, one notable WOT strategy.
Can Lowering the Bar Revive Public Markets? Evidence from the JOBS Act

The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act has not led to a sustained recovery in IPO activity, but to poorer-quality firms raising public equity. Firms going public under the Act are largely cash-starved, pay dearly to raise equity, and often rely on further public issues to avert financial distress. Proceeds raised are used to do more hiring, repay debt, and boost executive pay, but not to increase investments. Many firms lose exemptions sooner than allowed by the Act, whereupon they face higher compliance costs. The JOBS Act has not revived public equity markets and may have even undermined their attractiveness.