Person:

Yu, Gwen Gwen

We examine the determinants and capital market consequences of linguistic complexity in conference calls held in English by non-U.S. firms. We find that linguistic complexity is positively associated with the language barrier in the firms’ home country. Also, linguistic complexity in firms’ conference calls affects the extent to which the capital market reacts to the information releases. Firms with more linguistic complexity in their conference calls show less trading volume and price movement following the information releases, after controlling for the actual earnings news. Further, the capital market’s response to linguistic complexity is more pronounced when there is greater implicit (as captured by the presence of foreign investors) or explicit (as captured by how actively analysts ask questions) demand for the English conference calls. This suggests that the form in which financial information is presented can impose additional processing costs by limiting investors’ ability to interpret the reported financials.

We study securities litigation risk faced by foreign firms listed on U.S. exchanges. We find that U.S. listed foreign companies experience securities class action lawsuits at about half the rate as do U.S. firms with similar levels of ex ante litigation risk. The lower rate appears to be driven partly by higher transaction costs in uncovering and pursuing litigation against foreign firms. However, once a lawsuit triggering event like an accounting restatement, missing management guidance, or a sharp stock price decline occurs, there is no difference in the litigation rates between a foreign and comparable U.S. firm. This suggests that effective enforcement of securities laws is constrained by transaction costs, and the availability of high quality information that reveals potential misconduct is an important determinant of a well-functioning litigation market for foreign firms listed in the U.S.

We study the frequency of restatements by foreign firms listed on U.S. exchanges. We find that the restatement rate of U.S. listed foreign firms is significantly lower than that of comparable U.S. firms and that the difference depends on the firm's home country characteristics. Foreign firms from countries with a weak rule of law are less likely to restate than are firms from strong rule of law countries. While the lower rate of restatements can represent an absence of errors, it can also indicate a lack of detection and disclosure of errors and irregularities. We infer the magnitude of detection and disclosure by associating the frequency of restatements with the quality of the firm's internal reporting system. We find that only U.S. firms and foreign firms from strong rule of law countries show a positive association between restatement frequency and internal control weaknesses. Firms from weak rule of law countries show no significant association. We interpret these findings as home country enforcement affecting firms' likelihood of detecting and reporting existing accounting irregularities. This suggests that for U.S. listed foreign firms, less frequent restatements can be a signal of opportunistic reporting rather than a lack of accounting errors and irregularities.

Do differences in countries' accounting standards affect global investment decisions? We explore this question by examining how accounting distance, the difference in the accounting standards used in the investor's and the investee's countries, affects the asset allocation decisions of global mutual funds. We find that investors tend to underweight investees with greater accounting distance. Using the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as an event that changed the accounting standards of various country-pairs, we examine how two sources of changes in accounting distance—(i) change due to IFRS adoption of the investee and (ii) change due to IFRS adoption in the investor's country—affect global portfolio allocation decisions. We find that the tendency to underinvest in investees with greater accounting distance significantly weakens when accounting distance is reduced either from an investee's IFRS adoption or from IFRS adoption in the investor's country. The latter finding holds despite the fact that IFRS adoption in the investor's country had no impact on the accounting standards under which the investee firms present their financial information; the only change is in the investor's familiarity with these standards. This suggests that differences in accounting standards affect investor demand by imposing greater information-processing cost on those less familiar with the reporting standards.

We examine how cross-country differences in product, capital, and labor market competition, and earnings management affect mean reversion in accounting return on assets. Using a sample of 48,465 unique firms from 49 countries, we find that accounting returns mean revert faster in countries where there is more product and capital market competition, as predicted by economic theory. Country differences in labor market competition and earnings management are also related to mean reversion in accounting returns—but the relation varies with firm performance. Country labor competition increases mean reversion when unexpected returns are positive, but dampens it when unexpected returns are negative. Accounting returns in countries with higher earnings management mean revert more slowly for profitable firms and more rapidly for loss firms. Thus, earnings management incentives to slow or speed up mean reversion in accounting returns are accentuated in countries where there is a high propensity for earnings management. Overall, these findings suggest that country factors explain mean reversion in accounting returns and are therefore relevant for firm valuation.

This paper examines how the external information environment in which foreign subsidiaries operate affects the investment decisions of multinational corporations (MNCs). We hypothesize and find that the investment decisions of foreign subsidiaries in country-industries with more transparent information environments are more responsive to local growth opportunities than are those of foreign subsidiaries in country-industries with less transparent information environments. Further, this effect is larger when (i) there are greater cross-border frictions between the parent and subsidiary, and (ii) the parents are relatively more involved in their subsidiaries' investment decision-making process. Our results suggest that the external information environment helps mitigate the agency problems that arise when firms expand their operations across borders. This paper contributes to the literature by showing that the external information environment helps MNCs mitigate information frictions within the firm.

We examine how a manager’s ethnic cultural background affects managers’ communication with investors. Using a sample of earnings conference calls transcripts with 26,430 executives from 42 countries, we find that managers from ethnic groups that have a more individualistic culture (i) use a more optimistic tone, (ii) exhibit greater self-reference, and (iii) make fewer apologies in their disclosure narratives. Managers’ ethnic culture has a lasting effect on their narratives—the effects persist even for executives who are later exposed to different ethnic cultures through work experience. The effect of ethnic heritage is observed in dialogues that reflect real time interactions (i.e., Q&As) and less pronounced in the scripted, less spontaneous portion of the calls (i.e., management discussion). The capital market responds positively to optimistic tone yet does not distinguish between the optimism in tone of managers from different ethnic backgrounds. The findings suggest that managers’ ethnic backgrounds have a significant effect on how they communicate with the capital markets and how the markets respond to the disclosure event.

We provide among the first empirical evidence consistent with recent macro global-game crisis models, which show that the precision of public signals can coordinate crises (e.g., Angeletos and Werning, 2006; Morris and Shin, 2002, 2003). In these models, self-fulfilling crises (independent of poor fundamentals) can occur only when publicly disclosed signals of fundamentals have high precision; poor fundamentals are the sole driver of crises only in low precision settings. We find evidence consistent with this proposition for 68 currency and systemic banking crises in 17 countries from 1983 to 2005. We exploit a key publicly disclosed signal of fundamentals that drives financial markets, namely accounting data, and find that pre-crisis accounting signals of fundamentals are significantly lower only in low precision countries.

We study how the availability of domestic credit influences the contribution that financing activities make to a firm’s return on equity (ROE). Using a sample of 51,866 firms from 69 countries, we find that financing activities contribute more to a firm’s ROE in countries with higher domestic credit. The higher contribution of financing activities is not driven by firms taking greater leverage in these countries, but by firms realizing a higher spread (i.e., a greater difference in operating performance and borrowing cost) when more domestic credit is available. Also, we find that firms partially substitute trade credit for financial credit, with large firms exhibiting the greatest rate of substitution. For small firms, the rate of substitution improves with the country’s available domestic credit, while large firms are insensitive to this friction. The findings suggest that both country and firm-level factors have a significant impact on how financing activities contribute to corporate performance.