Controls and Income Shares

macroeconomics, controls, income shares

Shares in the EMCA : the time is ripe for true no par value shares in the EU, and the 2nd directive is not an obstacle

The most interesting proposal in the draft European Model Companies Act ( EMCA) concerning shares and the focus of this Article is the recommendation to introduce true no par value shares, as they have been in use in the US for many years and were introduced in Australia, New Zealand but also Finland more recently. Contrary to what has often been assumed, the 2nd EU Company Law Directive does not preclude no par value shares. There is nothing in the wording of the Directive to suggest otherwise, and the reference in the Directive to shares without a nominal value is a reference to Belgian law, which has allowed true no par value shares in all but name since at least 1913. EU member states could therefore introduce such shares even for public companies. True no par value shares offer a far more flexible framework in case of capital increases or mergers, but since under a no par value system there is no link between par value and shareholder rights, additional disclosure about these rights might be warranted under a no par value system. Traditional par value shares offer no protection to creditors, shareholders or other stakeholders, so that their abolition should not be mourned. The threat of new share issues at an unacceptably high discount is more efficiently countered by disclosure and shareholder decision rights

The China A shares follow random walk but the B shares do not

The China A-Share stocks and the China B-Share stocks are common stocks issued by companies incorporated in China. These two classes of common stocks differ in the nationality of the investors each is restricted to by law. For the most part, the A shares, quoted in the Chinese yuan, or renminbi, are for Chinese nationals while the B shares, quoted in foreign currencies, are for non-Chinese nationals and residents of Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan. This paper identified eighty-six companies issuing both the A and B shares and tested if these shares weekly returns follow a random walk. Employing the Lo and MacKinlay variance ratio test statistics, it is discovered that five times more B shares rejected the random walk as did the A shares. Moreover, both the Shenzhen and Shanghai B-Share indexes reject the random walk while neither the Shenzhen nor Shanghai A-Share index reject the random walk.

Shifting shares

Banks and banking - West ; Bank deposits

What Do Institutional Investors Know and Act on Before Almost Everyone Else: Evidence from Corporate Bankruptcies

We analyze investment behavior of institutional managers who hold and trade shares of firms that file for bankruptcy. We find that during the five-year period preceding a bankruptcy filing, institutional investors (except those managing investment companies) are net buyers with a positive abnormal net number of shares traded during the period. Institutional managers start to sell shares of bankrupt firms sooner in some firms than in others; these earlier sales are of smaller firms with weaker operating performance, and lower equity risk. We do not find evidence that institutional stockholders trade strategically and avoid material price declines before they occur

Institutions, Bargaining Power and Labor Shares

We use a static framework characterized by both moral hazard and holdup problems. In the model the optimal allocation of bargaining power balances these frictions. We examine the impact of improved monitoring on that optimal allocation and its impact upon effort, investment, profits and rents. The model’s predictions are consistent with the recent evolution of labor shares, wages per efficiency units and the ratio of labor in efficiency units to capital in several OECD countries. The model suggests further that improvement in monitoring may also play a key role in understanding opposition to institutional reforms in the labor market.moral hazard, hold up, bargaining, labor share

Block Trading, Ownership Structure, and the Value of Corporate Votes

This paper shows that open market block trading can provide a link between private benefits of control enjoyed by large shareholders and the ?voting premium?, i.e. the price difference between voting and non-voting shares. We first demonstrate in a microstructure model with informed traders and short-selling constraint that the trading activity of blockholders translates into a spread between the prices of voting and non-voting shares. In contrast to the extant theory, this model can explain the voting premium in the absence of corporate takeovers. In the empirical part of the paper, we show for a comprehensive sample of German dual-class companies that large trades occur more often in voting shares than in non-voting shares, and that the block trading activity in voting shares is strongly correlated with the voting premium. Moreover, the effect of the ownership structure on the voting premium becomes insignificant once we control for the block trading activity in voting shares. --