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This dissertation comprises two essays in financial economics. They study how firms finance and invest in innovative and intangible assets. The first essay examines the impact of technology spillovers on corporate financing decisions for innovative firms. I find that greater technology spillovers lead to higher leverage in innovative firms. Furthermore, in firms with greater technology spillovers, equity is more costly relative to debt. I find that these financing effects are generated by at least three related mechanisms: information asymmetry, asset redeployability, and equity undervaluation. All three mechanisms lead firms to substitute away from equity and toward debt. The results are robust to exploiting variation in RandD tax credits to identify the causal effect of technology spillovers. The second essay is coauthored with Ambrus Kecskés at York University and Sattar Mansi at Virginia Tech. My coauthors and I enter the long-lived debate about whether stakeholder capital investment increases shareholder value. We argue that long-term investors are natural monitors that can ensure that managers choose stakeholder capital investment to maximize shareholder value. We find that long-term investors increase the value to shareholders of stakeholder capital investment, not as a result of higher cash flow but rather of lower cash flow risk. Also following prior work, we use indexing by investors and the staggered adoption of state laws on stakeholder orientation for identification. Our findings suggest that firms can create value for shareholders by investing in stakeholder capital as long as managers are properly monitored by long-term investors. / Ph. D.

In this research, I classify all stocks into two groups: dividend and non-dividend payers and hypothesize that profitability premium may only exist among the firms with unforeseeable future cash flows, i.e., non-dividend payers. As expected, my empirical results support that profitability premium only exists among non-dividend payers but is very trivial among dividend payers. Dividends have a moderate effect on profitability premiums. To dig further into the source of profitability premium, I investigated risk and behavioral explanations from three perspectives: macroeconomics, industry, and total risks investors perceive for a firm. The evidence from empirical analysis supports that the profitability premium is mainly driven by the overpriced, unprofitable non-dividend payers, which, on average, have negative earnings announcement returns. In contrast, there is no significant positive or negative abnormal return from earnings announcements for portfolios sorted by profitability among dividend payers. Furthermore, the evidence from analyst forecast errors confirms that analysts are over-optimistic about unprofitable non-dividend-paying stocks and disagree more with their EPS forecast. Overall, the study finds that investors' expectation errors are the source of the profitability premium. It rejects the idea that risk is the profitability premium driver.

Yes / This paper investigates the impact of investor sentiment on the mean-variance relationship in 14 European stock markets. Applying three approaches to define investors’ neutrality and determine high and low sentiment periods, we find that individual investors’ increased presence and trading over high-sentiment periods would undermine the risk-return tradeoff. More importantly, we report that investors’ optimism (pessimism) is more determined by their normal sentiment state, represented by the all-period average sentiment level, rather than the neutrality value set in sentiment surveys.

Yes / This paper investigates the role of institutional investor sentiment in the mean–variance relation. We find market returns are negatively (positively) related to market’s conditional volatility over bullish (bearish) periods. The evidence indicates institutional investors to be sentiment traders as well.

Yes / We study the asset pricing implications arising from imperfect investor protection using a new governance measure. This is defined as the product of institutional quality in a country and the proportion of free float shares, which captures the impact of controlling block holders. Using monthly returns of 4756 blue chip firms from 50 international equity markets for 13 years, we show through tests of variants of the augmented-CAPM, that a two factor CAPM augmented with a factor mimicking portfolio based on our new investor protection metric yields the highest explanatory power, especially for markets that exhibit true variation in ownership types.

Since there is segmentation and homogeneity among the real estate securities market that almost parallels that of the traditional financial capital markets, investing globally now adds new venues and outlets that were once very scarce or nonexistent to private investors less than a few decades ago. This paper will examine the various outlets that are now available to both domestic and international investors, the relationship that exists among those securities, and the present and future implications of such opportunities. The results imply that there are both strong and weak relationships across various countries in regards to their correlations, as some countries have positive and negative correlations with other various nations giving way to diversification possibilities. This information is useful to investors that wish to look beyond the borders of their nation for greater returns and diversification.

This thesis studies how the investor attention proxied by Google search volume affects different aspects of market behavior. My results show that a surge in online attention is associated with an increase in trading activity and stock price volatility, but no effect is detected for daily returns. Yet, if market sentiment is taken into account, the relationship comes to the surface for returns as well. The returns tend to decrease with attention hikes in negative sentiment periods and the opposite is observed for periods of positive sentiment, suggesting that Google web search captures predominately attention of sentiment investors. Moreover, I demonstrate that with the outburst of financial crisis, the interdependence between attention and trading activity was intensified. Lastly, I provide evidence that web search may shed some light on IPO-related puzzles. The initial returns seem to be higher for IPOs that receive above average attention, and are likely to be reversed in long-term. In addition, it is ascertained that web search volume may act as a proxy for market overreaction to the offerings. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

本論文研究了累積投票對中國上市公司業績的影響。我們主要研究三個問題。第一個問題是研究哪类所有权机构的公司更易于采取累积投票，第二是通過累積投票產生董事會成員和通過直接投票產生的董事會成員可能存在的差異。第三個問題是研究累積投票選出成員對公司治理和公司業績產生的影響。通過控制公司的特點，我們發現，控股股东占很大比例的公司（即便是在30%规定采取累积投票线下）更易于采用累积投票，其二，累積投票選舉產生的董事會和監事會更可能是專業人士，而且平均而言，累積投票選出的董事和監事會成員，比那些由直接投票選舉產生的董事會和監事會成員，擁有更多的公司股票. 此外，有證據表明他們更有可能代表股東利益而非管理層或大股東利益，這些證據不僅表明他們更有能力履行其職責，並且表明他們的個人利益與公司利益之間更為一致。本文延伸了現存的研究，並且證明了累積投票選舉產生的董事會對公司績效有積極的影響。但是，證據表明累計投票監事的比例增加並不會顯著改善公司績效。這些證據表明，累積投票在某種程度上改進了中國上市公司的公司治理狀況。 / This paper investigates the impact of cumulative voting on the performance of listed corporations in China. We focus on three main issues: investigating effects of corporations’ ownership structure on cumulative voting adoption, exploring differences (if any) in personal attributes between the board members elected by cumulative voting and those elected by straight voting, and identifying the influence of cumulative voting members on corporate governance and firm performance. Controlling firm characteristics, we find that corporations with controlling shareholder who owns a larger proportion (even under the 30% regulatory cumulative voting cut-off) of the shares are more likely to adopt accumulative voting but the ownership concentration of other block shareholders tend to be uncorrelated or even negatively correlated with cumulative voting. In addition, both directors and supervisors elected by cumulative voting are (a) more likely to have professional titles, (b) own more stocks on average than those elected by straight voting, and (c) are more likely to be shareholder- rather than management-affiliated or controlling shareholder (typically the largest shareholder-affiliated). Such evidence indicates that they are more capable of fulfilling their duties and suggests that their personal interests may be more compatible with those of the listed corporations. In addition, we extend the existing literature by showing a positive correlation between the percentage of cumulative voting-elected directors sitting in the board of directors and firm performance. However, we did not find a significant relationship between the increase of proportion of CV supervisors and firm performance. In summary, these results demonstrate that cumulative voting, to some extent, improves corporate governance in China’s listed corporations. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Qian, Jinghui. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-69). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / ABSTRACT(ENGLISH) --- p.i / ABSTRACT(CHINESE) --- p.ii / ACKNOWLEDGEMENT --- p.iii / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.iv / LIST OF TABLES --- p.v / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- The notion of cumulative voting --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- The situations in China --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Issues to be investigated in the paper --- p.5 / Chapter 2 --- Literature Review --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1 --- Theoretical effects of cumulative voting --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2 --- Empirical findings --- p.10 / Chapter 2.3 --- Cumulative voting in China --- p.14 / Chapter 3 --- Theory and Hypothesis --- p.16 / Chapter 4 --- Data and Methodology --- p.23 / Chapter 4.1 --- Data --- p.23 / Chapter 4.2 --- Methodology --- p.25 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Propensity score matching --- p.26 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Barber and Lyon matching --- p.32 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Comparison between directory and supervisory members --- p.34 / Chapter 4.2.4 --- OLS and difference-in-differences regressions --- p.35 / Chapter 5 --- Empirical Results --- p.38 / Chapter 5.1 --- Sample characteristics of cumulative voting elections (CVEs) --- p.38 / Chapter 5.2 --- Comparison between cumulative voting and non-cumulative voting --- p.40 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- PSM statistical description and regression results --- p.40 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Barber and Lyon matching --- p.49 / Chapter 5.2.3 --- Differences between CV members and NCV members --- p.50 / Chapter 5.3 --- Effects of Proportion of CV directors and CV supervisors on firm performance --- p.54 / Chapter 5.4 --- Robutness analysis --- p.59 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusions and Discussions --- p.61 / Chapter 6.1 --- Summary of findings --- p.61 / Chapter 6.2 --- Theoretical contributions and limitations --- p.63 / REFERENCES --- p.65 / Chapter Appendix I --- Variables and Descriptions --- p.70 / Chapter Appendix II --- Supplementary PSM Regression --- p.73 / Chapter Appendix III --- Supplementary Comparison CV members vs. NCV members --- p.75 / Chapter Appendix IV --- Robustness of the Regression --- p.79 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.82

Chapter 2 provides the literature survey on investor protection and liquidity provision. Work in related studies and the latest developments in these areas are reviewed. / Chapter 3 coven the institutional details of the Hong Kong stock market and the specification of datasets. The descriptive statistics of the trading activities of the sample companies are also presented. An understanding of these descriptive statistics is useful in choosing the appropriate theoretical model and econometric techniques in the analysis. Apart form using regression analysis to investigate the impacts of transitory volatility on market depth and order-flow composition; additional control measures are also implemented. For instance, matched samples based on market depth, transitory volatility, daily trading volume, etc. are constructed. Statistical Tests are employed to investigate the influence of investor protection. / Chapter 4 presents the results of the regression models. Apart form investigating the impacts of transitory volatility on market depth and order-flow composition, this chapter also contributes to the literature by examining the distinction (of this interaction) between companies under different regulatory environment. It is found that the liquidity replenishments for Hong Kong-based companies are more rapid than their Chinese counterparts. The results show that companies ruled by strict governance regulations provide more liquidity when liquidity is most needed. Additional test results also suggest that this difference is robust to various control criteria. / Chapter 5 gives the summary and conclusions. / In this dissertation, data on the Hong Kong Exchange (HKEx) are employed. The Hong Kong equity market lists companies from distinct investor protection environments. These companies are traded under the same market mechanism even though they have different levels of legal protection for investors e.g. Hang Seng Index (HSI) Constituents versus H-shares/red chips. The HKEx is also a very good example of pure order driven markets. Stock prices are determined by the buy and sell orders submitted by traders without liquidity providers of the last resort. Therefore, the Hong Kong equity market provides a unique opportunity to compare the liquidity replenishment process across diverse regulatory environments, but still under one pure order driven market trading with the same mechanism and currency. The choice of Hong Kong data is also justified on the grounds of the size of the Hong Kong market and the increasing importance of Hong Kong in worldwide financial market. / The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the importance of investor protection for the dynamics between liquidity provision and transitory volatility in a pure order-driven market. I posit that environments with better investor protection lead to a more stable ecological system of the supply and the demand of liquidity. / This dissertation has five chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction that covers the motivation and major findings of the dissertation. / Leung Chung Ho. / "June 2007." / Adviser: Raymond So. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-01, Section: A, page: 0320. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-308). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest dissertations and theses, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.