In this paper, we examine the effect of shareholder rights on reducing the cost of equity and the impact of agency problems from free cash flow (FCF) on this effect. We find that firms with strong shareholder rights have a significantly lower implied cost of equity after controlling for risk...

This study examines the effect of firm-level corporate governance on the cost of equity capital in emerging markets and how the effect is influenced by country-level legal protection of investors. We find that firm-level corporate governance has a significantly negative effect on the cost of...

Firms that substantially increase capital investments subsequently achieve negative benchmark-adjusted returns. The negative abnormal capital investment/return relation is shown to be stronger for firms that have greater investment discretion, i.e., firms with higher cash flows and lower debt...

Using financial and ownership data from eight East Asian emerging markets before the Asian financial crisis, we document that while the sensitivity of a firm's capital investment to its cash flow decreases as the cash-flow rights of its largest shareholders increase, this sensitivity increases...

This paper examines how cultural differences influence the returns of momentum strategies. Cross-country cultural differences are measured with an individualism index developed by <link rid="b32">Hofstede (2001)</link>, which is related to overconfidence and self-attribution bias. We find that individualism is...

We examine the determinants of corporate cash management policies across a broad sample of international firms. We document that firms in countries with strong legal protection of minority investors are more likely to decrease their cash holdings in response to an increase in cash flow than are...

Using a sample of 279 upgrades and 310 downgrades from 1996 to 2004, we find that bond rating changes affect the information asymmetry of stock trading and other measures of information risk. Specifically, when a firm's bond rating is upgraded, its stock information asymmetry and its analysts'...