Asia-Pacific Journal of Financial Studies最新文献

This study investigates the effect of a hybrid board structure that combines Anglo-American principles with traditional Japanese practices on stock price crash risk. The 2015 amendment to Japan's Companies Act introduced the Audit and Supervisory Committee (ASC) structure, designed to strengthen outside directors' effectiveness through enhanced statutory authority, improved information access, and greater influence over board decisions. Using panel data from Japanese listed firms from 2013 to 2019 and employing a difference-in-differences approach, this study finds that ASC adoption significantly reduces future crash risk. This effect is more pronounced in firms with higher board independence and those with female outside directors, which benefit more from the institutional advantages of ASC adoption. However, the “unnatural selection” of outside directors weakens this relationship, indicating that formal compliance alone is insufficient to improve governance outcomes. Overall, the findings suggest that hybrid board structures can achieve broad acceptance while enhancing the effectiveness of outside directors when tailored to local institutional contexts, offering practical guidance for reforms in insider-dominated economies.

This study develops an explainable machine learning model to predict cryptocurrency delistings using Binance data. It combines quantitative indicators (price, volume) with qualitative data from real-time news and Reddit. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is used to extract topic trends and community reactions, which are transformed into time-series features. XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost are compared, with SHAP applied for model interpretability. Results show that sharp price drops, repeated risk-topic exposure, and Reddit responses strongly predict delisting. XGBoost achieves the best performance, offering practical insights for early warning systems and investor protection.

This study analyzes the temporal duality of insider share pledging in Korea using a regulation-based definition of insiders. We show that short-term pledging firms exhibit superior performance, higher value, and lower volatility, coincident with upward earnings management for price support. In the long term, enhanced external monitoring disciplines this opportunism, reducing earnings management and volatility. Consequently, pledging functions as a dynamic process—evolving from a short-term incentive mechanism into a long-term disciplinary force—rather than a static tool, highlighting the importance of considering time-varying effects when evaluating the governance implications of pledging.

Based on the data information disclosure practices in recent years, data assets emerged as a critical economic resource in China. This study employs textual analysis of bond prospectuses to develop a measure for data assets disclosure and investigates its influence on bond pricing. Empirical results demonstrate data assets disclosure significantly reduces bond credit spreads. Mechanism tests confirm that corporate data assets disclosure reduces bond credit spreads by mitigating information asymmetry. Further analysis shows that the effect of transactional data assets is significantly stronger than that of operational data assets. Text readability analysis reveals that poor text readability weakens the mitigating effect of data assets disclosure on credit spreads. The initial disclosure of data assets led to a greater reduction in credit spreads than that of time series variation. This study advances the credit spreads literature by quantifying the informational value of data assets in bond markets.

This paper examines whether Korea's COVID-19 credit support programs generated spillover effects on bank lending to riskier firms. While banks extended relatively more credit to riskier eligible SMEs during the policy period (2020), lending to riskier non-eligible firms also increased in the post-policy period (2021–2022), indicating a spillover beyond directly targeted firms. This post-policy increase is concentrated among banks with limited regulatory capital headroom and high exposure to policy-eligible lending. The evidence is strongest for Z-score and Leverage and is supported by pre-policy trend tests, firm fixed effects, and additional post-policy interactions of firm characteristics.

We study repurchase agreement contracting in the Korean market, where the post-2020 minimum-margin framework and associated market practice make haircut adjustment relatively constrained. We develop a two-period model with strategic default, costly information acquisition, and an effective lower bound on haircut adjustment. The model yields three regimes that differ in whether debt remains information insensitive. Haircut rigidity does not eliminate risk; it reallocates risk adjustment toward repo rates, funding quantities, and, when information acquisition is cheap, screening. Extending the model to central clearing, we show that a weaker collateral constraint may be welfare-improving if a central counterparty reduces effective default exposure through novation, multilateral netting, centralized margining, and default-management arrangements. This policy implication is conditional on exposure reduction being large relative to implementation and participation costs.

This paper examines the impact of the establishment of bankruptcy courts on firms' investment efficiency in China. The results show that the establishment of bankruptcy courts significantly enhances the investment efficiency of local firms. We identify the trust effect and the deterrence effect as the key mechanisms through which bankruptcy courts improve investment efficiency. The impact is particularly pronounced in firms located in better legal environments, among privately owned firms, and within firms characterized by lower internal control quality. These findings provide novel evidence on the economic consequences of judicial reform.

Bankruptcy law design has important implications for financial markets and economic growth. As bankruptcy law design interacts with local economic and political conditions, it is important to consider these factors when designing optimal bankruptcy law. This paper first describes major credit market frictions and how they interact with bankruptcy law design. After introducing important aspects of the Korean bankruptcy system, the paper discusses how economic, political, and cultural factors in Korea interact with bankruptcy law design. Based on this analysis, the paper derives implications for optimal bankruptcy design in Korea.

We use the implied cost of capital as a proxy for future expected returns and investigate the existence of an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) premium in China's A-share market. Our results show that high ESG stocks yield lower expected returns than low ESG stocks, with risk compensation being the primary driver of this negative ESG premium. Furthermore, we provide an explanation from a risk compensation mechanism of why ESG investment continues to grow despite the presence of a negative ESG premium.

The study examines how independent directors’ (IDs’) participation in earnings communication conferences (ECCs) influences the quality of investor-management interactions. Using question-and-answer transcripts from Chinese ECCs, we construct a multidimensional measure of interaction quality that incorporates semantic relevance (via Sentence-BERT embeddings), response readability, and information content. We find that IDs' participation significantly enhances interaction quality. Mechanism analyses suggest that this effect operates through diligence signaling, real-time oversight, and reputational incentives. The enhancement is more pronounced when IDs are female, younger, have longer tenure, or hold fewer concurrent directorships. Moreover, the marginal benefit is greater when multiple IDs attend the ECC. Finally, we show that IDs' participation amplifies the positive capital market reaction to high-quality interactions. These findings highlight the critical role of IDs in promoting effective interactive information exchange.