團隊

This paper explores whether investors’ personal experience with climate change affects their voting behavior on climate change–related proposals. We find that fund managers exposed to abnormally hot temperatures are significantly more likely to support climate proposals. We further show that the effect is persistent. We observe significant heterogeneity in the effect of hot temperatures, depending on firm-level climate risk, the quality of the proposals, fund investment strategy, and prior awareness of climate change. Fund managers’ personal experience with climate change matters for the outcome of climate proposals as it affects the aggregate support they receive. Fund managers exposed to abnormally hot temperatures are also more likely to divest from stocks with greater exposure to climate change.

We document an increase in market power for politically active firms during times of heightened policy uncertainty, when their information and influence advantage is greater. The effect is long-lasting and stronger for large politically active firms. We show that relatively large investments during high uncertainty periods serve as a potential mechanism for gains in market power. Industries populated with politically active firms experience lower business dynamism and import penetration, consistent with active firms leveraging investment timing to restrict competition. Results suggest that political activism is a likely contributing factor to the dominance of large firms over the last two decades.

We find that 43% of firms that make payouts also raise capital during the same year, resulting in 31% of aggregate payouts being externally financed, primarily with debt. Most financed payouts cannot be explained by payout smoothing in response to volatile earnings or investment (rather, they are the result of firms persistently setting payouts above free cash flow). In fact, 25% of aggregate payouts could not have been paid without the firms simultaneously raising capital. Profitable firms with moderate growth use debt-financed payouts to jointly manage their leverage and cash, thus highlighting the close relationship between payout and capital structure decisions.

Information production associated with derivatives markets is not a sideshow; rather, it has significantly positive spillover effects on an array of corporate decisions of underlying firms. Using a regression-discontinuity design based on exogenous variation in options availability as an instrument for changes in the information environment, we show that options introductions have causal effects on corporate policies on both sides of the balance sheet. Through improved information efficiency, options availability reduces the need for debt and payout, increases efficient investment, and yields superior innovation. We conduct two independent experiments demonstrating that our instrument’s impact is not derived from alternative channels.

環境和社會（ES）基金的投票行為真的與其公開聲明一致嗎？每年，這些基金經理會代表投資者，對旗下投資組合企業的提案進行投票。投資者期望自己投資的企業會大力支持ES倡議，然而，筆者Roni Michaely教授聯同Guillem Calafi-Ordonez教授和Silvina Rubio教授最近發表的一項研究揭示，若果一些提案很大機會被通過或否決，這些基金通常會投票支持，然而，在票數相近的關鍵時刻，他們往往會投下反對票。

Environmental and social (ES) funds in non-ES families must balance incorporating the stakeholders’ interests they advertise and maximizing shareholder value favored by their families. We find that these funds support ES proposals that are far from the majority threshold, while opposing them when their vote is more likely to be pivotal. This strategy results in a high average support for ES proposals, seemingly consistent with their fiduciary responsibilities, while opposing contested ES proposals. This greenwashing strategy is driven by ES funds in non-ES families who cater to institutional investors. Indeed, these funds experience lower inflows when providing low average support for ES proposals. This strategic voting is not exhibited in governance proposals, nor by ES funds in ES families or by non-ES funds in non-ES families, reinforcing the notion of strategic voting to accommodate family preferences while appearing to meet the fiduciary responsibilities of the funds.

Washington policy research analysts (WAs) monitor political developments and produce research to interpret the impact of these events. We find institutional clients channel more commissions to brokerages providing policy research and commission-allocating institutional clients generate superior returns on their politically sensitive trades. We find that WA policy research reports are associated with significant price and volume reactions. Finally, we find sell-side analysts with access to WA issue superior stock recommendations on politically sensitive stocks. These effects are particularly acute during periods of high political uncertainty. Overall, we uncover a unique and an important conduit through which political information filters into asset prices.

WSJ talked about the current trend of corporate dictatorships, where companies are run by founder-chief executives who hold on to special voting shares or run boards as their own personal fief. The article highlights a study by Prof. Roni Michaely of the University of Hong Kong, Hyunseob Kim of the Chicago Federal Reserve, and Doron Levit of University of Washington, which found that the benefits of a benign corporate dictatorship wane over time. The research, which examined 920 companies with both voting and non-voting shares, revealed an intriguing pattern. During the initial years following an IPO, companies with founder control tended to perform on par with their more democratically governed counterparts. However, after a decade or so, a significant premium emerged for shares with full voting rights. The article argues that granting full voting rights to all stakeholders is still the best form of governance for companies in the long run.

This study investigates whether investors can reap economic benefits from analyzing differences in analyst quality. Although high-quality analysts’ average forecast is more accurate than the consensus forecast for firms with a large analyst following, the benefits of using high-quality analysts’ average forecasts are not economically significant. In contrast, the value of analyst quality differentiation exists in the second moment of forecasts. High-quality analysts’ forecast dispersion gives investors an advantage in dealing with uncertainty by predicting return volatility and providing opportunities for economically significant returns using option straddle and post-earnings announcement drift investment strategies.