Information Opacity in Biopharmaceutical Innovation Through the Lens of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed myriad and complex challenges for our national health care system spanning preparedness, response, access, costs, infrastructure, coordination, and medical innovation. These challenges implicate federal, state, and local agencies and actors, as well as international collaborative bodies. One constant throughout the pandemic has been the pressing need for safe and effective diagnostics, prophylactic vaccines, and drug treatments to counter the virus.1 Inarguably, significant problems with the multi-faceted system of drug and vaccine innovation and regulation manifested long before the COVID-19 pandemic.2 The pandemic, however, has laid bare the inextricable connections among federal funding, patents, product review and approval mechanisms, and the eventual medical products and resulting costs.

Informational efficiency and governance in restricted share settings: boosting family business leaders' financing decisions

PurposeVolume-based liquidity ratios suffer from potential measurement bias due to share restriction and may misrepresent actual liquidity. To address this issue, the authors develop two modified metrics, the free-float liquidity and the alternative free-float illiquidity ratios. These measures are well suited to estimate liquidity in the presence of trading constraints, as can be found in closely held/state-owned entities, IPOs/SEOs with lockup restrictions, dual-class share structures and family-owned businesses.Design/methodology/approachThe authors modify the turnover illiquidity ratio, where the number of outstanding shares is scaled by the public free float, and use natural log transformation to normalize free-float liquidity. Our dataset is composed of daily observations for US stocks included in the S&P 500 index over the 2015–2018 period. To test the validity of free-float (il)liquidity ratios, the authors perform a correlation analysis for various liquidity metrics. To examine their empirical efficiency, the authors employ pooled OLS regression models for family firms as a subsample of liquidity-constrained entities, relying on five different identifiers of family-owned businesses.FindingsThe authors’ empirical testing indicates that the proposed free-float (il)liquidity ratios compare favorably with other volume-based methods, such as Amihud's ratio, liquidity ratio and turnover ratio. For the subsample of family organizations as a restricted-share setting, the authors report significant coefficients for our free-float measures across all the family firm identifiers used. In particular, as free-float decreases with progressive family influence, the advanced ratios capture an increase (decrease) in perceived liquidity (illiquidity) that is absent in the other benchmarks.Originality/valueThis study allows the authors to inform the ongoing debate on the management and governance of publicly listed companies with various impediments to trade. Traditional measures understate illiquidity (overstate liquidity) as the fraction of free trading shares is limited by design or circumstances. The authors’ proposed free-float metrics offer informational gains for family leaders to aid in their financing decisions and for non-family outsiders to guide their investment choice. As a constrained free float inhibits price discovery processes, the authors discuss how restricted stock issuers may alleviate the attendant negative effects on governance and information opacity.

Does Risk Disclosure Matter for Trade Credit?

In this paper, we examine the impact of risk disclosure practices on trade credit. We hypothesize that risk information could reduce information opacity that arises between companies and their suppliers. We collected annual reports for Tunisian listed companies for the period 2008–2013. This gives us 146 firm-year observations. We find that risk disclosure has a positive impact on the level of trade credit. Our paper offers a new empirical evidence on the role of risk disclosure in reducing information asymmetry and increase companies’ access to short-term external funds. Our study provides managerial implications for firms, suppliers, and regulatory authorities.

Startups in Russia: Ownership and performance

During two decades the Russian government has invested heavily in support of high-tech startups. However, considering high level of information opacity of startups, we focus on equity as the primary source of their financing, and on owners as the main source of support for such firms. This paper examines how ownership characteristics affect the performance of high-tech performance of startups in nuclear and space industries. We focus on how different types of owners (founders, state, and venture capital) contribute to performance of startups in nuclear and space industries. Using an unbalanced panel of startups from Skolkovo, the largest Russian innovation cluster, from 2010 to 2016, we found evidence of a negative relationship between a support from government-related organizations and chosen indicators of startup performance. Our findings confirmed the significant impact of private venture capital on startup performance, however the effect is industry-specific. While family equity contributions were not found to have a significant impact on startup performance, we identified a positive relationship between owner or CEO change and future startup performance. We discuss potential interpretations of the findings and provide strategic management insights for startup owners and investors.

The Influence of Long-Term and Short-Term Institutional Investors on Complicated Mispricing of Stocks

Taking Chinese listed companies from 2009 to 2017 as the research objects, this paper aims at exploring the heterogeneous effect of short-term and long-term institutional investors on stock mispricing. The empirical study finds that long-term institutional investors have an inhibiting effect on stock mispricing, while short-term institutional investors have an opposite effect. When the company information opacity is high, long-term institutional investors have a more obvious inhibiting effect on stock mispricing while short-term institutional investors have a more obvious promoting effect on stock mispricing. When the attention of analysts is enhanced, long-term institutional investors further restrain the stock mispricing while short-term institutional investors further promote the stock mispricing.

Do corporate insiders trade on future stock price crash risk?

We explore whether firm managers trade on future stock price crash risk. This depends on managers’ ability to assess future crash risk, and on whether the expected payoff is greater than the expected costs associated with potential reputation loss and litigation risk. We find that insider sales are positively associated with future crash risk, which is consistent with managers’ trading on crash risk for personal gain. We also find that managers take advantage of high information opacity to pursue crash-risk-based insider sales more aggressively, but are less able to capitalize on this in the case of financial constraints or post-SOX.