Essays On Model Uncertainty And Corporate Financial Policies

This thesis has three essays that study the intersections of macroeconomics, finance, and text analysis. The topics include executives' attention and financial decisions, economic policy uncertainty and stock market forecasting, and the stock market performance in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. The essays hope to provide unique measurements of attention and uncertainty, empirical evidence, and theories to understand the connections and differences between classic theories and agents' behavior in actual economic activities. The first essay is my job market paper. I examine the attention of executive managers and their financing behavior, focusing on the information acquisition process. Corporations are sensitive to both macroeconomic and firm-specific challenges. Executives must choose overall attention capacity and divide finite attention between these topics. By using natural language processing and quarterly earnings call transcripts, I assess the information content of this dialog. The attention capacity quantifies the effective information used to make borrowing decisions, consisting of information processing macro and firm-specific issues. The attention allocation measures the ratio of attention paid to macroeconomics. Executives make two critical decisions during the information acquiring process. First, executives decide the overall attention capacity, determined by the general uncertainty. Second, executives decide the optimal attention allocated between macro and firm-specific topics. In the rise of uncertainty from either subject, executives' attention capacity increases (scale effect) and assign greater awareness to this topic (substitution effect). I show that the substitution effect is higher than the scale effect. Using an optimal static capital structure model with endogenous information choice, I demonstrate that an executive can tolerate a higher leverage rate when actively acquiring information. Thus, the information decision process is crucial to understanding the recent rising leverage phenomenon.The second essay examines the relationship between the stock market performance and the economic activities in the time of Covid-19. Stock prices and workplace mobility trace out striking clockwise paths in daily data from mid-February to late May 2020. Global stock prices fell 30 percent from February 17 to March 12, before mobility declined. Over the next 11 days, stocks fell another 10 percentage points as mobility dropped 40 percent. From March 23 to April 9, stocks recovered half their losses, and mobility decreased further. From April 9 to late May, both stocks and mobility rose modestly. This dynamic plays out across the 35 countries in our sample, with notable departures in China, South Korea, and Taiwan. The size of the global stock market crash in reaction to the pandemic is many times larger than a standard asset-pricing model implies. Looking more closely at the world's two largest economies, the pandemic had greater effects on stock market levels and volatilities in the U.S. than in China, even before it became evident that early U.S. containment efforts would flounder. Newspaper-based narrative evidence confirms the dominant - and historically unprecedented - the role of pandemic-related developments in the stock market behavior of both countries. The third essay tests the prediction power of the mainland China Economic Policy Uncertainty in forecasting the Chinese stock market. Rational asset pricing theory indicates that the fluctuations of the real economy have a significant impact on the stock market. The Chinese stock market is highly regulated and sensitive to regulations and market policies uncertainty. Using an efficient Dynamic Model Averaging (eDMA) model, this paper investigates how well the newspaper-based Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) index can predict the returns of the Chinese Shanghai Stock Exchange Index. Empirical evidence shows that EPU mutes the impact of monetary policy as a predictor. Also, eDMA significantly improves the forecasting performance compared to other forecasting methodologies.

In the first chapter, I propose a new design of Early Warning Systems to detect early warning signals of an impending financial crisis. The problem of EWS is formulated from a policy maker's perspective. Hence the probability threshold is obtained by minimizing the policy maker's welfare loss. This paper employs the Bayesian Quickest Change Detection as the methodology to detect the early warning signals. We show that the BQCD method outperforms the Logit model used in traditional EWS models based on results of simulation exercise and the out-of-sample prediction of the 1997 Asian financial crises. In the second chapter, I investigated the timing of U.S. monetary policy response to the 2007 financial crisis. The LIBOR-OIS spread jumped significantly on Aug 9, 2007, indicating an unusual increase in distress of the financial sector, but it was not until Aug 17, 2007, that the Federal Reserve responded with a 50 basis points of reduction of the primary credit rate after an unscheduled meeting. I further assumed that the policy maker was uncertain about the intensity of the financial crisis, and that monetary policy responded to more severe financial crisis more intensively. In order to increase the accuracy of choosing the right policy regime, waiting for more information may be desirable. I found that for certain specifications of the intensity of the financial crisis, the optimal timing of the Federal Reserve's policy response should be Aug 15, 2007. I concluded that uncertainty about the intensity of the financial crisis played an important role in the timing decision of the policy maker. In the third chapter, I investigated the issue of international monetary policy coordination under uncertainty. The consensus is that international monetary policy coordination is welfare improving, but some argue that the improvement is not significant quantitatively. This paper studied the role of model uncertainty in international monetary policy coordination, and found that considering model uncertainty can enhance welfare gain of coordination.

This dissertation contains three distinct essays in the broad area of corporate finance. The first two essays examine the role of an independent director who is also a blockholder (IDB), a potent governance mechanism, on executive compensation, and corporate financial and investment policies, respectively. The last essay examines insider trading in takeover targets. The first essay examines three issues. First, we investigate the determinants of an IDB's presence in a firm. Second, we examine the relations between IDB presence and (1) the level and structure of CEO compensation, and (2) CEO turnover-performance sensitivity. Third, we analyze if IDB presence is related to firm valuation. Our findings suggest that the presence of an independent blockholder on the board promotes better incentives and monitoring of the CEO, and consequently leads to higher firm valuation. In the second essay, we examine how the presence of an IDB affects: (1) four key financial and investment policy choices of a firm: the levels of cash holdings, dividends, investments and financial leverage, and (2) firm risk. We also examine how the market values IDB presence and changes in various policy choices associated with IDB presence in a firm. We find that firms with IDBs have significantly lower levels of cash holdings, dividend yields, repurchases, and total payout, but higher levels of capital expenditures. We also find that firms with IDBs have lower risk. Overall, IDB presence appears to reduce agency problems between managers and shareholders. The third essay brings large-sample evidence on whether the level and pattern of profitable insider trading before takeover announcements is abnormal for a broad cross-section of targets of takeovers during modern times. We find an interesting and subtle pattern in the average pre-takeover trading behavior of target insiders. While insiders reduce both their purchases and sales below normal levels, their sales reduce more than purchases, leading to an increase in net purchases. This pattern of 'passive' insider trading is confined to the six-month period before takeover announcement, holds for each insider group, for all measures of net purchases examined, and in certain sub-samples with less uncertainty about takeover completion.

In the first of three essays, we study the relationship between corporate debt structures and the strength of creditor rights. Firms use a more concentrated debt-type structure as a reaction mechanism to stronger creditor rights. We show that managers form more concentrated debt structures in response to stronger creditor rights in order to first, reduce bankruptcy costs and second, to provide more monitoring incentives for creditors. Across 46 countries, we document that firms have more concentrated debt-type structures in countries with stronger creditor rights. Based on an examination of the cross-sectional heterogeneity of firms to different creditor rights regimes, we confirm our two proposed mechanisms. This study extends the literature of debt structure to an international setting and is the first to document the effect of cross-country legal and institutional determinants on the choice of debt structures. In the second essay, we investigate how uncertainty about economic policies influence corporate credit spreads. We find a large and positive association between corporate credit spreads and a news-based index of policy uncertainty. We document that a one standard deviation increase in policy uncertainty results in 25 basis points increase in the credit spreads of corporate bonds controlling for bond, firm and macro-economic variables. We find that the influence of policy uncertainty on corporate credit spreads differs across firms and is more pronounced for firms with higher investment irreversibility and dependence on government spending. We also document a larger impact of policy uncertainty during economic recessions. Our results show that not only firm-level default probabilities, but also bond-CDS bases increase in response to elevated policy uncertainty. The third and final essay empirically measures the financial and economic costs (benefits) to firm value associated with deteriorations or improvements in the firm’s credit quality. We document that firms incur economically large and statistically significant costs to their values following credit-rating deteriorations. Consistent with an asymmetric effect, we find significant but smaller firm-value benefits associated with credit-rating upgrades. The financial costs to a firm’s market value associated with each notch downgrade to the investment and speculative grade categories are 7.1% and 14.8%, respectively, and these costs are generally larger than the economic costs to the firm value from credit rating downgrades. Using a continuous KMV distance to default model, we conclude that deteriorations (improvements) in a model-generated credit rating quality can also adversely (positively) affect firm value. Our findings have implications for corporate financing and leverage decisions, and for the unresolved underleverage puzzle (Graham, 2001).

The compendium of papers in this volume focuses on aspects of economic uncertainty, financial instabilities and asset bubbles.Economic uncertainty is modeled in continuous time using the mathematical techniques of stochastic calculus. A detailed treatment of important topics is provided, including the existence and uniqueness of asymptotic economic growth, the modeling of inflation and interest rates, the decomposition of inflation and its volatility, and the extension of the quantity theory of money to allow for randomness.The reader is also introduced to the methods of chaotic dynamics, and this methodology is applied to asset pricing, the European equity markets, and the multi-fractality in foreign currency markets.Since the techniques of stochastic calculus and chaotic dynamics do not readily accommodate the presence of stochastic bubbles, several papers discuss in depth the presence of financial bubbles in asset prices, and econometric work is performed to link such bubbles to monetary policy.Finally, since bubbles often burst rather than deflate slowly, the last section of the book studies the crash of October 1987 as well as other crashes of national equity markets due to the Persian gulf crisis.

The field of financial optimization combines financial valuation approaches and economic optimization models. Most applications are characterized by dynamic settings where decisions over time are subject to many facets of uncertainty. Characterizing optimal decision making in these settings is of upmost importance in many areas of economic policy. The purpose of this research is to investigate economic policy issues in natural resource management and banking regulation through the application of methods of financial dynamic optimization under uncertainty in three essays: The first essay develops a general optimal stopping real option model for the management of mean reverting losses subject to stochastic jumps as an American call option. The model is numerically solved using the explicit finite difference method and provides comparative static results that reveal an important relationship between the two process parameters long run mean level of losses and speed of mean reversion which influence the termination value and therefore, the optimal stopping results. The second essay applies the optimal stopping real option model developed in the first essay as an environmental control investment analysis tool to manage uncertain future invasive species damages. Based on application size, control strategy, and level of control effectiveness, separate policy menus are developed that provide optimal investment rules by reporting critical invader damage, real option, and time values for five selected scenarios. The analysis demonstrates the effects of different control strategy levers and reveals that negative skewness of the jump distribution has an effect on the policy results. The third essay analyzes the impact of capital requirement regulation on the risk taking behavior of value maximizing banks using a financial intermediation model. The paper investigates four cases of intertemporal effects of capital regulation on risk choices when banks face different regulatory conditions. The results reveal differences in a bank's risk taking behavior based on profit, multiplier, and leverage effects. The interrelationship of retention rate, discount factor, and risky asset return has important implications for first and/or second best regulation. An optimal regulation rule is derived and three alternative regulation tools are characterized.