Review of Corporate Finance Studies

The video of Thomas Philippon’s keynote presentation at Cavalcade North America 2020 can now be viewed on the Cavalcade web site.

Camelia Kuhnen

We are pleased to announce that Camelia Kuhnen is joining RCFS as an editor. Camelia is a professor of finance and Sarah Graham Kenan distinguished scholar at UNC Kenan-Flagler and a faculty research associate at NBER. She is an expert in household finance, neuroeconomics, and corporate finance. She is currently an associate editor at the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, and Management Science. Camelia previously served as president of the Society for Neuroeconomics and as an associate editor of RCFS. Her first day will be October 15, 2020.

The Review of Corporate Financial Studies (RCFS) is enacting a Code Sharing Policy for papers accepted for publication, which will be effective on October 1, 2020. The policy is available here. This policy reflects the commitment of the RCFS to the highest standards of quality, as we believe that the policy will help improve the reproducibility and replicability of published research and by this will support the credibility and impact of this research. The policy does not impose much of a burden on authors. As the policy makes clear, at the moment, data sharing is encouraged but not required. We think that moving forward with a data sharing policy is more complicated and requires coordination with other leading journals. We are conducting conversations along these lines and will continue to do so under our commitment to the highest standards of quality for academic research in finance.

Michael Halling

Jin Yu

Josef Zechner

Sharp recessions and prolonged market stress periods are accompanied by drying up of equity and corporate bond issues, a big challenge for firms because the need for capital is very high during such periods. Disentangling supply-driven from demand-driven reasons is very problematic. In this paper, Michael Halling, Jin Yu, and Josef Zechner use the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a truly exogenous demand shock, to investigate the extent to which financial markets provide external debt and equity capital to the corporate sector. The paper starts with a surprising result: corporate bond issues increased substantially since the onset of the pandemic crisis both for bonds rated A or higher as well as for bonds rated BBB or lower. Another surprising result: firms chose longer maturities during the crisis, in contrast to earlier results reported in the literature that suggest a tendency to issue shorter-term debt during crises. The paper also identifies firm characteristics that determine the cross-sectional differences in firms’ access to financial markets, in terms of maturities, spreads, and ratings. This paper is coming soon to advance access.

Spotlight by Andrew Ellul
Photos courtesy of Michael Halling, Jin Yu, and Josef Zechner

Alexander F. Wagner

Stefano Ramelli

The market reactions to the 2019 novel Coronavirus event, a truly exogenous shock, can help our understanding of how real economic shocks and financial policies drive firm value. In “Feverish Stock Price Reactions to COVID-19,” Stefano Ramelli and Alexander F. Wagner find strong causal evidence for the role of international trade and global value chains for corporate value. Initially, internationally-oriented firms, especially those more exposed to China, underperformed. As the virus spread to Europe and the U.S., corporate debt and cash holdings emerged as important value drivers, relevant even after the Fed intervened in the bond market. Interestingly, the content and tone of analysts’ conference calls mirror these developments over time. Overall, the results illustrate how the anticipated real effects from the health crisis, a rare disaster, were amplified through financial channels. This paper is coming soon to advance access.

Spotlight by Andrew Ellul
Photos courtesy of Stefano Ramelli & Alexander F. Wagner