HEC Paris

About: HEC Paris is a education organization based out in Jouy-en-Josas, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Market liquidity & Entrepreneurship. The organization has 584 authors who have published 2756 publications receiving 104467 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales & HEC School of Management Paris.

Learning from Prices, Liquidity Spillovers, and Market Segmentation

Abstract: We describe a new mechanism that explains the transmission of liquidity shocks from one security to another ("liquidity spillovers"). Dealers use prices of other securities as a source of information. As prices of less liquid securities convey less precise information, a drop in liquidity for one security raises the uncertainty for dealers in other securities, thereby affecting their liquidity. The direction of liquidity spillovers is positive if the fraction of dealers with price information on other securities is high enough. Otherwise liquidity spillovers can be negative. For some parameters, the value of price information increases with the number of dealers obtaining this information. In this case, related securities can appear segmented, even if the cost of price information is small.

Blockholder Exit Threats in the Presence of Private Benefits of Control

Abstract: Exit theory predicts a governance role of non-managerial blockholders’ exit threats; but this role could be ineffective if the managers’ potential private benefits exceed their loss in stock-price declines caused by non-managerial blockholders’ exit. We test this prediction using the Split-Share Structure Reform (SSSR) in China, which provided a large, exogenous, and permanent shock to the cost for non-managerial blockholders to exit. Using a difference-in-differences design combined with propensity-score matching, we find that firms whose non-managerial blockholders experience an increase in exit threat have a greater improvement in performance than those whose non-managerial blockholders experience no increase. The improvement is as much as 37.2% of the average pre-SSSR treatment sample operating performance. Moreover, the governance effect of exit threats becomes ineffective in the group of firms with the highest concern for private benefits of control. Finally, a battery of theory-motivated tests show that the documented effects are unlikely explained by non-managerial blockholder intervention or some well-known intended effects of SSSR.

Instituting a transnational accountability regime: The case of Sovereign Wealth Funds and “GAPP”

Abstract: This paper analyses the development of a transnational accountability regime, – the Generally Accepted Principles and Practices (GAPP), introduced in 2008 for sovereign wealth funds. Facilitated by the International Monetary Fund, the regime aimed to improve the transparency, governance and accountability of these government-owned investment funds that originate primarily from the Middle East and Asia. I focus here on the struggles leading to the establishment of the boundaries of the GAPP accountability regime by diagnosing the accountability problem, determining the providers and the imagined users of the accounts and defining the appropriate course of action. I then analyse the struggles involved in negotiating the process and technologies used to establish the accountability relationship including the role of standards in accounting, audit and risk management, as well as transparency and compliance pressures. In each case I identify the different ideas or templates that emerged during the negotiations and how consensus was achieved through careful steering by a core coalition comprising the US Treasury and the largest, most legitimate funds. I highlight the need to go beyond typical fault lines in debates surrounding the origins of global governance regimes (e.g. local vs. global, western vs. non-western, core vs. peripheral) by focusing on emerging coalitions of local/global and western/non-western actors that increasingly drive such regimes. I show how the disproportionate representation of financial actors in such coalitions leads to less attention to questions of public accountability, and instead focusing such regimes on financial accountability. I further elaborate on the implications of the fall-back to transparency in transnational accountability regimes as a last resort and the types of resistance emerging against it.