We analyze the impact of COVID-19 vaccine announcements by leading vaccine companies on the financial and commodity markets from January to December 2020. We show that the vaccine announcements had varied and economically significant impacts on asset prices. The announcements moved interest rates, stock markets in the U.S. and numerous other countries as well as commodities used in transportation and some agricultural commodities. We show that the stock and commodity markets that experienced larger declines at the beginning of the pandemic receive a larger boost from good vaccine news. We also find that the vaccine news affects stock returns through changes in the expectations of the corporate cash flows and the expected equity risk premium.
The continuously increasing bank sizes have received much attention from both policymakers and researchers. We present new estimates of returns to scale in cost, revenue, and profit for European banks over 2000-2020 based on nonparametric, local-linear methods. We find that most banks faced increasing returns to scale in cost and decreasing returns to scale in revenue and profit across years, across European countries, and across bank size quartiles. Our results suggest that restricting the size of banks may not bring too much loss of revenue and profit, but could prevent European banks from exploiting increasing returns to scale in cost.
We examine the impact of board cultural diversity, based on directors' ancestry, on firm performance conditional on product market competition. We argue that culturally diverse boards foster critical thinking and offer creative solutions that help firms thrive in competitive environments. We document that culturally diverse boards are associated with superior performance for firms operating in highly competitive industries. To address potential endogeneity issues, we use a quasi‐natural experiment of the U.S. import tariff cuts. The positive impact of board cultural diversity on firm performance in competitive markets manifests itself in firms that innovate more, require creative inputs, and face heightened predation risk due to their high interdependence with industry rivals, in line with culturally diverse boards effectively performing their advisory role. Lastly, we find no evidence that board cultural diversity is associated with enhanced monitoring as its benefits fade in the presence of powerful CEOs.
We investigate the effect of limited liability on firm investment. We find firms that intend to borrow but have higher risk have a greater probability of changing to limited liability. With propensity score matching, difference-in-differences analysis, and switching regressions with an endogenous switching model, we find that, after the liability regime change, firm investment aggressiveness decreases but on a lesser level than the over-time change for firms using unlimited liability. We also find there is improvement in investment efficiency and return on invested capital. These results suggest that limited liability encourages firm investment and leads to more effective investment policies.
Using positions data for 18 commodity futures during 2001-2020, we examine systematic and idiosyncratic determinants of Amihud price impact and microstructure noise proxying for permanent and transitory components of commodity futures liquidity. Idiosyncratic factors have the largest economic impact: while excess hedging demand increases price impact and noise, active position taking (by market-makers) in excess of the hedging demand reduces noise. Systematic factors, including the lack of competition among liquidity providers, adversely impact liquidity, but this effect is mitigated if liquidity providers are well capitalized. Supplementary leverage ratio (SLR) makes holding inventory costlier and is associated with lower liquidity.
