RCFS News

            Having learned from the financial crisis, policymakers the world over have reacted to the COVID-19 lockdowns by providing a lot of liquidity, in the form of debt, to the business sector. However, the longer it takes to make a full recovery, the greater is the danger that firms may find themselves not just illiquid in the short-run, but insolvent in the long-run. That is,… Read More »Paper Spotlight: The COVID-19 Shock and Equity Shortfall: Firm Level Evidence from Italy

Governments all over the world have responded to the COVID-19 outbreak by closing down significant parts of their economies, leading to a liquidity crisis for many firms. Default risk increased because firms’ stream of cash flows took a hit, and with it firms’ rollover risk. How did firms behave in their bid to shore up their precarious liquidity positions? In the paper “The Risk of Being a Fallen Angel and… Read More »Paper Spotlight: The Risk of Being a Fallen Angel and the Corporate Dash for Cash in the Midst of COVID

“Stock Market Information and Innovative Investment in the Supply Chain” by Lantian Liang, Ryan Williams, and Steven Chong Xiao

Here is an interesting fact that spans corporate finance and asset pricing: among U.S. public firms, innovation is mostly concentrated in a very small group of large corporations, and innovation “leaders” experience lower systematic risk than the “laggards.” Jan Bena and Lorenzo Garlappi, in their paper “Corporate Innovation and Returns,” investigate this fact by, first, proposing a winner-takes-all patent-race model, and then empirically showing that a firm’s expected return decreases… Read More »Paper Spotlight: Corporate Innovation and Returns

We are living through a pandemic-induced recession that has slashed many firms’ cash flows with a consequent negative impact on both employment and wage levels. Firms, fighting for survival, will be pressed to cut costs, and wages are an important budget line for the vast majority of firms. At the same time, workers are important assets for firms’ survival and prosperity. What are the effects of paying higher wages on… Read More »Paper Spotlight: Wages and Firm Performance: Evidence from the 2008 Financial Crisis

“Competition for Flow and Short-Termism in Activism” by Mike Burkart and Amil Dasgupta

              The COVID-19 pandemic, with its heavy toll on human lives, unemployment, and financial distress, should be considered as an important acid test for firms’ professed investments in their responsibility toward society. It is during such times that we can better understand how to interpret the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores, standard proxies for firms’ corporate social responsibility, and what is really driving… Read More »Paper Spotlight: Resiliency of Environmental and Social Stocks: An Analysis of the Exogenous COVID-19 Market Crash

Our publisher, Oxford University Press, has pledged to make content related to COVID-19 freely accessible online. The Review of Asset Pricing Studies and The Review of Corporate Finance Studies have forthcoming special issues on COVID-19. These papers will be freely accessible online as part of OUP’s collection. You can read these papers as they become available on advance access (RAPS) and advance access (RCFS).

The determinants of executive compensation packages are fraught with empirical difficulties due to unobserved firm-level, CEO-level, and assortative matching characteristics. In the paper “Managerial Attributes, Incentives, and Performance,” just published in the August 2020 issue (Volume 9, Issue 2), Jeff Coles and Frank Li examine the relative importance of observable and unobservable firm- and manager-specific characteristics in determining two fundamental attributes of executive incentives, delta and vega. They find that… Read More »Paper Spotlight: Managerial Attributes, Incentives, and Performance