Beyond a bias toward local stocks, investors prefer companies in certain cities over others. This study uses the geographic network of investor-followed stocks from stock watchlists to identify intercity investment preferences in China. We measure the city-pair connectivity by its likelihood of sharing an investor in common whose stock watchlist is highly concentrated in the firms of that city pair. We find that a higher connectivity-weighted aggregate stock demand-to-supply ratio across connected cities is associated with higher stock valuations, higher turnover, better liquidity, and lower cost of equity for firms in the focal city. The effects are robust to controls for geographic proximity and the broad investor base, are stronger among small firms, extend to stock return predictability, and imply excess intercity return comovement. Our results suggest that city connectivity revealed on the stock watchlist helps identify network factors in asset pricing.

Beyond a bias toward local stocks, investors prefer companies in certain cities over others. This study uses the geographic network of investor-followed stocks from stock watchlists to identify intercity investment preferences in China. We measure the city-pair connectivity by its likelihood of sharing an investor in common whose stock watchlist is highly concentrated in the firms of that city pair. We find that a higher connectivity-weighted aggregate stock demand-to-supply ratio across connected cities is associated with higher stock valuations, higher turnover, better liquidity, and lower cost of equity for firms in the focal city. The effects are robust to controls for geographic proximity and the broad investor base, are stronger among small firms, extend to stock return predictability, and imply excess intercity return comovement. Our results suggest that city connectivity revealed on the stock watchlist helps identify network factors in asset pricing.

Utilizing the removal of the bank lending interest rate floor (IRFD) in China as an exogenous shock of banking liberalization, we find that IRFD leads to a significant rise in firms’ cost of equity capital, which is consistent with the prediction from the MM theory. The identified effects are more pronounced among firms with weaker ex-ante corporate governance and more severe ex-ante agency problems. We also find that IRFD witnesses an increase in the amount of acquired bank loans, a decrease in the average interest rate, and an increase in free cash flow. Further evidence also suggests IRFD provokes a drop in firms’ investment quality. Overall, our findings highlight an unexplored role of banking sector deregulation on firms’ cost of equity capital.

What are the benefits to a firm of having investors with gambling preference as shareholders? Motivated by studies showing that gambling investors prefer lottery-like stocks and require lower expected returns to take risk, we hypothesize that firms with positively-skewed assets can use stock splits to attract investors with gambling preference to share risk and to lower cost of equity. Indeed, analyzing a sample of Chinese firms that split their stocks through stock dividends and using proprietary trading data to measure retail investors’ gambling preference, we find that, on average, shareholders increase by 54% and retail gambling investors increase by 119% following stock dividends. Furthermore, while firms become more risk-taking, their cost of equity declines substantially, largely due to the increased retail gambling investors’ pricing influence. Thus, stock splits are effective for improving risk-sharing efficiency, and gambling investors contribute to lowering the cost of capital.

This study examines relation between financial development and the cost of equity capital and finds the following main results: (1) stock market development in general reduces cost of equity, consistent with its role in liquidity provision, information asymmetry reduction, and risk diversification helping to reduce systemic risk; (2) banking development only weakly decreases the cost of equity, consistent with the pervasive state-ownership in large banks constraining their efficiency. Further analysis reveals that the relation between stock market development and cost of equity is more pronounced in large firms and in firms with lower growth potentials, suggesting that stock market development fails to support small and/or growth firms. Moreover, the relation is more pronounced in region with low accounting quality, weak law enforcement, or lower market integration, and in period prior to split share structure reform. The evidence suggests that stock market developments and other institutional arrangements substitute each other in reducing cost of equity. This study contributes to literatures on financial development and cost of equity, and also holds immediate policy implications.

This study analyses financial consequence of the moral hazard activities of the controlling shareholder. Using a sample of Chinese listed companies during 2002 to 2009, we find that firms with a wider divergence between the controlling shareholder’s control rights and cash flow rights are more financially constrained and the cost of equity is significant higher in these firms. Our results suggest that potential tunneling and other moral hazard activities of the controlling shareholder are facilitated by his excess control rights. These activities have a real impact on corporate financial outcomes.

We develop a model of a financial institution to study how shareholder—debt holder conflicts interact with prudential capital regulation and accounting measurement rules. Our analysis highlights the result that, for highly leveraged financial institutions—when prudential regulation play an important role—debt overhang and asset substitution inefficiencies work in opposing directions. We demonstrate that, relative to the “historical cost” regime in which assets and liabilities on an institution’s balance sheet are measured at their origination values, fair value could alleviate the inefficiencies arising from asset substitution, but exacerbate those arising from underinvestment due to debt overhang. The optimal choices of accounting regime and prudential solvency constraint balance the conflicts between shareholders and debt holders. Under fair value accounting, the optimal solvency constraint declines with the institution’s marginal cost of investment in project quality and the excess cost of equity capital relative to debt capital. Fair value accounting dominates historical cost accounting provided the solvency constraints in the respective regimes take their optimal values. If the solvency constraints are sub-optimally chosen, however, historical cost accounting could dominate fair value accounting.

We find that firms that timed their external financing more in the past (i.e., that issued more capital when market conditions were good) have a lower expected cost of equity than those that timed their issuance less. This result is economically significant, and holds for numerous specifications. The benefits of market-timing activity are more pronounced for equity than for debt. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the gains from future market-timing activity are priced by current investors, and suggest that investors in the secondary market believe in the ability of firms to successfully time the market. We also find that the benefits of timing activity are enhanced for firms with a higher fraction of shares held by dedicated long-term investors, and are reduced for firms with shareholders that are more likely to time their own trades.

In this paper, we examine the cost of equity capital for politically connected firms. After controlling for several firm- and country-level determinants, our results show that politically connected firms have a lower cost of equity capital than their nonconnected peers. Our results are robust to alternative measures and proxies for the cost of equity capital. We thus provide strong evidence that investors require a lower cost of capital for politically connected firms, suggesting that these firms are generally considered to be less risky than non-connected firms. Our findings imply that the benefits of political connections outweigh their costs. We conjecture that this perception is fueled by the soft budget constraints generally enjoyed by politically connected firms, and by their lower default probability, given the assurance of corporate bailout in the event of financial downturns.

This paper provides evidence on the significant impact of illiquidity or non-marketability on security valuation. A typical listed company in China has several types of share outstanding: (i) common shares that are only tradable on stock exchanges, (ii) restricted institutional shares (RIS) that are not tradable and can only be transferred privately or through irregularly scheduled auctions, and (iii) state shares that are only transferable privately. These types of share are identical in every aspect, except that market regulations make state and RIS shares almost totally illiquid. Our analysis focuses on the price differences between RIS and common shares of the same company, using both auction and private-transfer transactions for RIS shares. Among our findings, the average discount for RIS shares relative to their floating counterpart is 77.93% and 85.59%, respectively based on auction and private transfers. The price for illiquidity is thus high, significantly raising the cost of equity capital. This illiquidity discount increases with both the floating shares’ volatility and the firm’s debt/equity ratio, but decreases with firm size, return on equity, and book/price and earnings/price ratios (based on the floating share price). However, RIS share price can either increase or decrease with the quantity being transacted, depending on whether it is through a private placement or an auction.