Risk and value in labour and capital markets: The UK corporate economy, 1980-2005

The paper sets out a theoretical model linking stock market financial risk to labour market conditions, including labour intensity and the risk arising from the specification of labour contracts. A value added analysis is conducted combining national and firm level accounts data to examine the relationship between the share of value and the share of risk, contrasting manufacturing and service industries. In conjunction with a firm level analysis, empirical support for the model is established showing rational trade-offs between the risk and value appropriations of investors and employees and a less rational accumulation of structured debt finance as the UK economy has shifted from manufacturing to services in the last 30 years. The shift to services, flexibility and deregulation has tended to promote labour intensity, inflexibility of cost structures, and, as a consequence greater financial risk.

Does Community and Environmental Responsibility Affect Firm Risk? Evidence from UK Panel Data 1994-2006

The question of how an individual firm’s environmental performance impacts its firm risk has not been examined in any empirical UK research. Does a company that strives to attain good environmental performance decreases its market risk or is environmental performance just a disadvantageous cost that increases such risk levels for these firms? Answers to this question have important implications for the management of companies and the investment decisions of individuals and institutions. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between corporate environmental performance and firm risk in the British context. Using the largest dataset so far assembled, with Community and Environmental Responsibility (CER) rankings for all rated UK companies between 1994 and 2006, we show that a company’s environmental performance is inversely related to its systematic financial risk. However, an increase of 1.0 in the CER score is associated with only a 0.02 reduction in firm’s risk and cost of capital.

The association between accounting and market-based risk measures

The paper derives operating and financial measures of leverage and tests their association with market based measures of equity risk. It is the first such study to use purely accounting-based data to derive the leverage measures. In line with previous literature it conducts a new test on the relative importance of operating and financial leverage. The results suggest that operating costs have a greater impact.Systematic risk; Operating Leverage; Financial Leverage; Beta; Risk Premium; United Kingdom

Differential market valuations of board busyness across alternative banking models

This study comparatively assesses the influence of board busyness (i.e., multiple directorships of outside directors) on stock market valuations of both Islamic and conventional banks. For a sample of listed banks from 11 countries for the period 2010-2015, results show that board busyness is differentially priced by investors depending on the bank type. In conventional banks, board busyness is significantly and positively valued by the stock market. This result suggests that investors perceive some reputational benefits arising from a busy board (e.g., extended industry knowledge, established external networks or facilitation of external market sources). In contrast, we find no supporting evidence on the market valuations of board busyness in Islamic banks. This result might be attributed to, both, the complex governance structure and the uniqueness of the business model which require additional effective monitoring, relative to that employed in conventional banking. Our results also show that investors provide significantly low market valuations for busy Shari’ah advisory board which acts as an additional layer of governance in Islamic banks. Findings in this study offer important policy implications to international banking studies and regulations governing countries with dual-banking systems.N/

The effect of twitter dissemination on cost of equity: A big data approach

Reducing information asymmetry between investors and a firm can have an impact on the cost of equity, especially in an environment or times of uncertainty. New technologies can potentially help disseminate corporate financial information, reducing such asymmetries. In this paper we analyse firms’ dissemination decisions using Twitter, developing a comprehensive measure of the amount of financial information that a company makes available to investors (iDisc) from a big data of firms’ tweets (1,197,208 tweets). Using a sample of 4131 firm-year observations for 791 non-financial firms listed on the US NASDAQ stock exchange over the period 2009–2015, we find evidence that iDisc significantly reduces the cost of equity. These results are pronounced for less visible firms which are relatively small in size, have a low analyst following and a small number of investors. Highly visible firms are less likely to benefit from iDisc in influencing their cost of equity as other communication channels may have widely disseminated their financial information. Our investigations encourage managers to consider the benefits of directly spreading a firm’s financial information to stakeholders and potential investors using social media in order to reduce firm equity premium (COE)

Corporate Governance, Shari’ah Governance and Financial Flexibility: Evidence from the MENA region

This article investigates the relationship between corporate governance structures and financial flexibility for conventional and Islamic banks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. We construct a novel financial flexibility index (FFI) for the banking sector and examine the impact of the Shari'ah supervisory board (SSB), board size, and risk governance on financial flexibility. We find that board size and risk governance significantly affect banks' financial flexibility for Islamic and conventional banks. However, Shari'ah governance rules determine how that relationship is manifested in Islamic banks. We show that SSB size and busy SSBs enhance Islamic banks' financial flexibility. Our results show that Western corporate governance structures may lead to suboptimal financial flexibility. Banking policies should re-evaluate the impact of one-size-fits-all approaches to corporate governance while promoting ‘soft policies’ to banking regulation that are value-enhancing for the banking sector

Market responses to firms’ voluntary carbon disclosure: Empirical evidence from the United Kingdom

In corporate boardrooms around the world, climate change has quickly risen to become a major issue, matching public concern. Recently, corporate management has encountered stakeholder pressure to disclose more information about their carbon profile and their plans to improve it. They have also been challenged to find the appropriate strategy for carbon disclosures, requiring an understanding of the costs and benefits of both carbon improvement initiatives and the reporting of them. Using a unique data set that contains firms listed on the FTSE 350 index on the London Stock Exchange market from 2009 to 2015, we apply the event study method to examine market reaction to carbon disclosures. The results show that investors respond significantly negatively to carbon disclosure announcements via Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) of FTSE 350 firms. Moreover, for firms working in carbon-intensive industries, investors react to carbon disclosure announcements in a more significantly negative way compared with the main sample. We also find that the study’s main findings are driven by the smaller FTSE 350 firms. Furthermore, a subsample of observations for the financial crisis period of 2007–2008 was analyzed to explore the examined relationship during the crisis. In contrast, a significant positive market reaction to carbon disclosure was found for the 2007–2008 crisis period. Our study’s findings offer fresh insight and updated policy implications for investors, management and sustainability institutions. We recommend management accompanies their carbon disclosures with more explicit statements of reasons for carbon initiatives and the benefits arising from them

Firm valuations and board compensation: Evidence from alternative banking models

The Enron debacle and the Global Crossing bankruptcy have raised particular concerns of investors about the effectiveness of directors' scrutiny and their compensations. This study, therefore, examines whether the board of directors' compensation schemes affect stock market valuations for banks within an international context. We employ a sample of 386 bank-year observations from 2010 to 2015. Our results show that for the whole sample, director compensation has a significant positive impact on stock market valuations. By conditioning our analyses on the bank type, we find that the positive effect of the board of directors' compensation on market valuations holds only for conventional banks, with no evidence for their Islamic counterparts. We, additionally, examine the stock market valuations of Shari'ah supervisory board's compensation on Islamic banks value. Results show investors positively price information related to such board compensation