We empirically evaluate 20 prominent contributions to a broad range of areas in the empirical corporate finance literature. We assemble the necessary data and then apply a single, simple econometric method, the connected-groups approach of Abowd, Karmarz, and Margolis (1999), to appraise the extent to which prevailing empirical specifications explain variation of the dependent variable, differ in composition of fit arising from various classes of independent variables, and exhibit resistance to omitted variable bias and other endogeneity problems. In particular, we identify and estimate the role of observed and unobserved firm- and manager-specific characteristics in determining primary features of corporate governance, financial policy, payout policy, investment policy, and performance. Observed firm characteristics do best in explaining market leverage and CEO pay level and worst for takeover defenses and outcomes. Observed manager characteristics have relatively high power to explain CEO contract design and low power for firm focus and investment policy. Estimated specifications without firm and manager fixed effects do poorly in explaining variation in CEO duality, corporate control variables, and capital expenditures, and best in explaining executive pay level, board size, market leverage, corporate cash holdings, and firm risk. Including manager and firm fixed effects, along with firm and manager observables, delivers the best fit for dividend payout, the propensity to adopt antitakeover defenses, firm risk, board size, and firm focus. In terms of source, unobserved manager attributes deliver a high proportion of explained variation in the dependent variable for executive wealth-performance sensitivity, board independence, board size, and sensitivity of expected executive compensation to firm risk. In contrast, unobserved firm attributes provide a high proportion of variation explained for dividend payout, antitakeover defenses, book and market leverage, and corporate cash holdings. In part, these results suggest where empiricists could look for better proxies for what current theory identifies as important and where theorists could focus in building new models that encompass economic forces not contained in existing models. Finally, we assess the relevance of omitted variables and endogeneity for conventional empirical designs in the various subfields. Including manager and firm fixed effects significantly alters inference on primary explanatory variables in 17 of the 20 representative subfield specifications.

Little is known about the underlying sources of gains from takeovers. Using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I show that one source of gains is increased productivity of capital and labor in target plants. In particular, acquirers significantly reduce investments, wages, and employment in target plants, though output is unchanged relative to comparable plants. Acquirers also aggressively shut down target plants, especially those that are inefficient. Moreover, these changes help explain the merging firms' announcement returns. The total announcement returns to the combined firm are driven by improvements in target firm's productivity, rather than cutbacks in wages and employment. Also, targets with greater post-takeover productivity improvements receive higher offer premiums from acquirers. These results provide some of the first empirical evidence on the direct relation between productivity, labor, and stock returns in the context of takeovers.

Abstract: Mathematical analysis has been introduced into the analysis and decision of commercial bank outlets, by which ten index of influencing factors are selected to establish the analysis of outlets distribution and decision-making model; Hengshui Branch of Chinese Construction Bank in Hebei is taken as a sample, in which the factor analysis and cluster analysis are employed for the research and analysis, therefore, a breakthrough has been achieved in the thought of commercial banks and approaches of analysis and decision-making. The research in the paper shows that the mathematical analysis can completely provide scientific data for the distribution of commercial bank outlets; the division will provide evidence for analysis and decision-making of commercial bank, such as marking factor, competitive factor, geography factor and economic factor, which has provided scientific methods and evidence for the optimized resource distribution of commercial banks.

This paper examines whether foreign investor heterogeneity plays a role in stock liquidity on a sample of 27,976 firms from 39 countries for the period from 2003 to 2009. Results show that foreign direct ownership is negatively, while foreign portfolio ownership is positively, associated with various measures of stock liquidity. Furthermore, liquidity also reduces more (less) in firms with larger foreign direct investment FDI (foreign portfolio investment, FPI) during the 2008 market downturn. As predicted by finance theory, foreign investors influence stock liquidity through both trading activity and information channels. Our findings also indicate that the presence of FDI investors improves firm valuation and operating performance even at the expense of an increase in the firm’s cost of capital, suggesting that the value-enhancing benefits from FDI investors’ monitoring efforts outweigh the liquidity costs and high adverse selection premium demanded by less informed investors. In contrast, the positive impacts of FPI ownership on firm performance, as previously documented in existing literature, becomes negative and also not robustly significant after controlling for liquidity.

In this paper, we study market crowd psychological behaviors in learning by correlation analysis, using every trading high frequency data in China stock market. We introduce a notion of trading conditioning in terms of operant conditioning in psychology and measure its intensity by accumulative trading volume probability in a time interval in the transaction price-volume probability wave equation that can describe market crowd coherence in their interacted trading behavior. We find that there is, in general, significant positive correlation between the rate of price volatility mean return and the change in the intensity of market crowd trading conditioning. They behave significantly disposition effect in stock selling and herd behavior in stock buying with expectation on return simultaneously. Specifically, “the herd” have significant stronger expectation on price momentum than its reversal. Second, there is also a significant negative correlation between them in a subdivided term; market crowd show buy-and-hold behavior when price rises steadily, and panic selling when it drops abruptly in depth. We explain both the puzzle of more peaked, heavily tailed, and clustered characteristics in return distribution by coherence and that of market crowd behavioral “anomalies” by trading conditioning in a unified transaction price-volume probability wave framework.

We examine whether and how variations in the level of market development across regions in China affect controlling shareholders’ decisions to participate in Chinese public companies’ rights offerings. We find significant positive relations between measures of market development and controlling shareholders’ participation, as well as evidence that controlling shareholders’ participation benefits minority shareholders. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that better market development in an economy can provide de facto protection for minority shareholders by creating implicit incentives for controlling shareholders to act in the interests of minority shareholders. Because our study holds constant minority shareholders’ de jure rights, these results suggest a reputation channel exists for macro-level institutions to affect firm-level governance that is distinct from the direct channel of explicitly granting de jure rights to minority shareholders.

Given that the impact of the world economy on the China economy and its stock market may have increased substantially in the last few decades, we examine whether US economic variables can predict the Chinese stock market. We find that although before China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the end of 2001, the US economic variables generally do not show significant predictive power on the Chinese stock market, they do provide significant predictive power after 2001. Moreover, we show that the US economic variables can be used in conjunction with China economic variables to achieve better return forecasts for the Chinese stock market, which turn out to be economically important from an investment perspective.

Gunnar Myrdal, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, noted in his book <The Challenge of World Poverty--A World Anti-Poverty Program in Outline> that" Social inequality is clearly connected with the position, and it may best defined as the extreme lack of social mobility and the serious hamper on the possibility of free competition", " Social and economic inequality is a major cause of poverty in a country. From the perspective of planning, this means that greater equality is the prerequisite to make a country out of poverty".? Establishing a financial innovation mechanism that can meet the needs of the poor and achieving the equal status of the poor on capital gain can alleviate or even eradicate poverty. This paper describes a financial mechanism through which the poor can sell their own income rights to obtain funds for self-development so that they can get out of poverty status and an idea about establishing income rights trading markets.

What are the effects of policy reversals which were initiated by the US bureaucracy in response to the 2008 global financial crisis? Answering this question is challenging because US capital markets are relatively mature and policy reversals are far and in between in recent years. Specifically, the challenges include the one-time nature of these US policy reversals, the confounding effects of many programs targeting interrelated segments of the capital markets at the same time as well as possible endogeneity issues. China, on the other hand, offers a natural experiment to study the effects of policy reversals. In the last three decades, the Chinese government has initiated many policy changes to liberalize the capital markets and some of these have been reversed several times. Using hand-collected data of policy reversals targeting the Chinese stock markets from 1994 through 2009, we are able to address the first two challenges. To resolve any endogeneity issue, we focus on the impact of such policy reversals (targeted at the Chinese stock markets) on the Chinese repo markets, which trade market-driven interest rates. We find that the Chinese policy reversals are indeed effective in reducing the term spread, the volatility of the interest rate, and the volatility of the term spread. Our results suggest that the policy risk is systematically priced in financial securities, implying that policy makers can rely on financial market indicators to objectively evaluate their policy decisions.

对证券市场之间互动关系的研究，不仅有助于揭示市场信息的跨国（境）传播机制特别是国 际金融风险的传导机制，还可以增进人们对证券市场微观结构与信息效率的认识。本文应用 Hong（2001）、Hong et al. (2009）新近提出的信息溢出检验方法，详细考察并比较了我国A 股市场与美股、港股在次贷危机前后的互动关系，首次揭示了三者联动结构与信息传递的全 景图，包括互动的方式、方向、相对强度、当期影响与多期滞后关系以及时变性。研究结果 表明：（1）在三者的关系中，美股处于主导地位，并且对港股、A 股市场具有金融传染效应；（2） A 股市场不再是“独立市”，A 股不仅能够反映美股、港股等外围市场的重要信息，而且已具 有影响外围市场的能力；（3）A 股与美股、港股之间的互动关系体现在均值溢出、波动率溢 出、极端风险溢出等多个层面，既有线性关系也包括非线性关联方式。