1. Introduction and Overview. 2. Detecting Influential Observations and Outliers. 3. Detecting and Assessing Collinearity. 4. Applications and Remedies. 5. Research Issues and Directions for Extensions. Bibliography. Author Index. Subject Index.

Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity

Individualism and collectivism

Earnings Management and Investor Protection: An International Comparison

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

We investigate whether superior performance on corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies leads to better access to finance. We hypothesize that better access to finance can be attributed to (1) reduced agency costs due to enhanced stakeholder engagement and (2) reduced informational asymmetry due to increased transparency. Using a large cross-section of firms, we find that firms with better CSR performance face significantly lower capital constraints. We provide evidence that both better stakeholder engagement and transparency around CSR performance are important in reducing capital constraints. The results are further confirmed using several alternative measures of capital constraints, a paired analysis based on a ratings shock to CSR performance, an instrumental variables approach, and a simultaneous equations approach. Finally, we show that the relation is driven by both the social and environmental dimension of CSR. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Corporate social responsibility and access to finance

We examine the equity market reaction to events associated with the passage of a directive in the European Union (EU) mandating increased nonfinancial disclosure. These disclosures relate to firms’...

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Market Reaction to Mandatory Nonfinancial Disclosure

We use price pressure resulting from purchases by mutual funds with large capital inflows to identify overvalued equity. This is a relatively exogenous overvaluation indicator as it is associated with who is buying – buyers with excess liquidity – rather than what is being purchased. We document substantial stock price impact associated with purchases by high-inflow mutual funds, and find the probability of an SEO, insider sales, and the probability of a stock-based acquisition increase significantly in the four quarters following the mutual fund buying pressure. These results provide new evidence that firm managers are able to identify and exploit overvalued equity. *Khan is at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. Kogan is at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Serafeim is at Harvard Business School. We thank Gordon Alexander, Jeff Callen, John Core, John DeTore, Campbell Harvey (Editor), Hai Lu, Krishna Palepu, Ricardo Reis, Jay Ritter, Sugata Roychowdhury, Ross Watts, Jeffrey Wurgler (AFA discussant), an anonymous referee and associate editor, and seminar participants at the Harvard Business School, London School of Economics, MIT, University of Minnesota, and the AFA Atlanta 2010 meetings for valuable comments.

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Mutual Fund Trading Pressure: Firm-Level Stock Price Impact and Timing of SEOs

As the ESG finance field and the use of ESG data in investment decision‐making continue to grow, the authors seek to shed light on several important aspects of ESG measurement and data. This article is intended to provide a useful guide for the rapidly rising number of people entering the field. The authors focus on the following: The sheer variety, and inconsistency, of the data and measures, and of how companies report them. Listing more than 20 different ways companies report their employee health and safety data, the authors show how such inconsistencies lead to significantly different results when looking at the same group of companies. ‘Benchmarking,’ or how data providers define companies' peer groups, can be crucial in determining the performance ranking of a company. The lack of transparency among data providers about peer group components and observed ranges for ESG metrics creates market‐wide inconsistencies and undermines their reliability. The differences in the imputation methods used by ESG researchers and analysts to deal with vast ‘data gaps’ that span ranges of companies and time periods for different ESG metrics can cause large ‘disagreements’ among the providers, with different gap‐filling approaches leading to big discrepancies. The disagreements among ESG data providers are not only large, but actually increase with the quantity of publicly available information. Citing a recent study showing that companies that provide more ESG disclosure tend to have more variation in their ESG ratings, the authors interpret this finding as clear evidence of the need for ‘a clearer understanding of what different ESG metrics might tell us and how they might best be institutionalized for assessing corporate performance.’ What can be done to address these problems with ESG data? Companies should ‘take control of the ESG data narrative’ by proactively shaping disclosure instead of being overwhelmed by survey requests. To that end, companies should ‘customize’ their metrics to some extent, while at the same time seeking to self‐regulate by reaching agreement with industry peers on a ‘reasonable baseline’ of standardized ESG metrics designed to achieve comparability. Investors are urged to push for more meaningful ESG disclosure by narrowing the demand for ESG data into somewhat more standardized, but still manageable metrics. Stock exchanges should consider issuing—and perhaps even mandating—guidelines for ESG disclosures designed in collaboration with companies, investors, and regulators. And data providers should come to agreement on best practices and become as transparent as possible about their methodologies and the reliability of their data.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/JACF_JACF12346.pdf?abstractid=3604415&mirid=1

Four Things No One Will Tell You About ESG Data

We use price pressure resulting from purchases by mutual funds with large capital inflows to identify overvalued equity. This is a relatively exogenous overvaluation indicator as it is associated with who is buying – buyers with excess liquidity – rather than what is being purchased. We document substantial stock price impact associated with purchases by high-inflow mutual funds, and find the probability of an SEO, insider sales, and the probability of a stock-based acquisition increase significantly in the four quarters following the mutual fund buying pressure. These results provide new evidence that firm managers are able to identify and exploit overvalued equity.

/pdf/mutual-fund-trading-pressure-firm-level-stock-price-impact-2mgaf35neu.pdf

Shareholder activism on sustainability issues has become increasingly prevalent over the years, with the number of proposals filed doubling from 1999 to 2013. We use recent innovations in accounting standard setting to classify 2,665 shareholder proposals that address environmental and social issues as financially material or immaterial, and we analyze how proposals on material versus immaterial issues are related to firms’ subsequent environmental or social performance and market valuation. We find that 42 percent of the shareholder proposals in our sample are filed on financially material issues. We document that filing shareholder proposals are related to subsequent improvements in the performance of the company on the focal environmental or social issue, even though such proposals nearly never received majority support. Improvements occur across both material and immaterial issues. Proposals on immaterial issues are associated with subsequent declines in firm valuation while proposals on material issues are associated with subsequent increases in firm value. We show that managers increase performance on immaterial issues in companies with agency problems, low awareness of the materiality of sustainability issues, and poor performance on material issues.

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Georgios Serafeim

Papers

Market Reaction to Mandatory Nonfinancial Disclosure

Mutual Fund Trading Pressure: Firm-Level Stock Price Impact and Timing of SEOs

Four Things No One Will Tell You About ESG Data

Mutual Fund Trading Pressure: Firm-Level Stock Price Impact and Timing of SEOs

Shareholder Activism on Sustainability Issues