A Bibliometric Analysis of Behavioral Finance and Behavioral Accounting

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of relevant publications in the field of behavioral finance and behavioral accounting. The analysis shows that the emerging themes of research in recent years in behavioral finance is on investors’ sentiment, social media, investors’ attention, and financial literacy. In the field of behavioral accounting, biases such as  overconfidence, framing effects or cognitive constraints on information processing, have been explored in greater detail. Other than cognitive biases, this field includes studies such as behavioral tax, organizational ecology, and performance evaluative style of organization, among others. Interestingly, our analysis suggests that research in behavioral accounting is comparatively underdeveloped than research in behavioral finance. This bibliometric analysis has been extended by network analysis using, “Visualization of similarities, (VOS) viewer” software. Using the themes generated here the direction for future scope of research work has been discussed.

Change in Illiquidity of Family Firms with Institutional Pressure: Evidence from India

This paper investigates the impact of the family business on illiquidity in an emerging market and how it evolves with regulatory changes. The study uses panel data multiple regression on a sample of 25,418 observations on 3,606 firms from India within nine years from 2006 to 2014. The study finds that family firms have significantly higher illiquidity compared to non-family firms. Moreover, family businesses have successfully resisted the institutional pressure to decrease illiquidity and have also defied these coercive pressures to increase the illiquidity of family businesses finally. The study also found heterogeneity in the behaviour of family businesses based on their ownership characteristics.

Exchange Rate Pass-Through into Japanese Import Prices: Evidence at Both Bilateral and Product Levels

This study investigates the degree of the exchange rate pass-through to Japanese bilateral import prices at the product level for major Japan's trading partners (US, EU, and Asian NIEs) for a period (1998:1-2010:12) dubbed as Japan's lost decade and marked by a gradual the exchange rate appreciation against the US dollar. By considering both country and product dimensions in a unified framework, this study makes one of the first attempts to analyze the responsiveness of Japanese import prices to exchange rate movement. The empirical analysis suggests a declining exchange rate pass-through to Japanese import prices at the bilateral level in some product categories but increasing in others. However, we find no evidence of the changes in exchange rate pass-through for manufacturing, machinery, and overall product level for each of these partners. Our finding sheds light on the recent decline in exchange rate pass-through to Japanese multilateral import prices and helps calibrate its trade relationship with its partner countries.

Does Innovation Explain the Skewness of Stock Returns?

This paper investigates the impact of firm-level innovation on the skewness of stock returns. Using data on a broad sample of equities from the major US stock exchanges, we find that innovative companies exhibit strong positive skewness. Our results are robust to both input and output measures of innovation as we find that increases in both firm-level research and development expenditure (R&D), as well as the number of patents, are positively associated with future stock return skewness. Our results hold using both systematic and idiosyncratic measures of skewness while controlling for various stock characteristics, time, and industry-fixed effects.

The Trilemma of 2020: Understanding Higher Education’s Fall 2020 Reopening Decision Amidst the COVID Crisis

In the summer of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to spread around the world, institutions of higher education were faced with three options in terms of their teaching modality for fall 2020: resume in-person education, switch to online delivery, or adopt a hybrid approach. This observational research study aims to tease out the variables that explain the decisions announced in summer 2020 by various colleges and universities in the United States for their planned instruction for fall 2020. We propose and test eight hypotheses related to the decision. The study found statistical confirmation that universities with higher financial stability and/or prestige tended to select the online delivery option, while lower financial stability/prestige showed a preference to stay with in-person delivery. We also found public institutions were more likely to go online than private ones. Additionally, we found statistical support for our hypotheses that universities located in Republican leaning states and also those with a religious affiliation would prefer the in-person modality. The results also confirmed our hypothesis that universities offering a higher percentage of humanities degrees would have a greater probability of choosing the in-person modality. Interestingly, we did not find statistical support for our hypothesis that the level of COVID spread in the geographical area of a university’s location would affect its decision.

Financial Frictions and Macroeconomy During Financial Crises: A Bayesian DSGE Assessment

The recent global financial crisis and the Eurozone sovereign default have rekindled the debate on the interactions between the real sector and the financial sphere. The present paper provides an assessment of the role of financial frictions on business cycles in Canada, the Euro Area, the U.K., and the U.S. during these recent financial crises using an extension of the DSGE methodology described by Merola (2015). The main goal is to examine whether and the extent to which those crises enhanced the contribution of financial frictions in driving macroeconomic fluctuations. The models’ properties are examined with posteriors distributions, variance decomposition, and historical decomposition. Posteriors distributions show that the role of real shocks in driving macroeconomic fluctuations decrease with the incorporation of financial frictions in the core DSGE model. Variance decomposition shows that financial frictions and financial shocks affect the business cycle through investment. The empirical estimates also suggest that the contribution of financial frictions and financial shocks in driving investment increases during the global financial crisis.

Do Black-Owned Banks Substitute for Payday Lenders? An Exploratory Study

The annualized interest rate charged on payday loans can reach 1,950 percent, whereas similar rates charged by banks are typically less than 25 percent. Also, persons borrowing from payday lenders and paying the higher interest rates are disproportionately lower-income Blacks. This provides an incentive for Blacks seeking loans to turn to banks rather than payday lenders. This may be more likely to happen when there are Black-owned banks in communities with greater percentages of Blacks. Indeed, offices of such banks may substitute for payday loan stores, providing a greater opportunity for Blacks to avoid the higher interest rates associated with payday lenders. We hypothesize that to the extent Black-owned banks substitute for payday there is a greater opportunity for lower-income Blacks to substitute/switch firms and thereby seek lower-cost loans. We do find that there are significantly fewer payday loan stores in counties where there are more Black bank offices.

The Co-Evolution of Global Legitimation and Technology Upgrading: The Case of Huawei

This study explores the underlying relationship between acquisition of global legitimacy and the search for technology upgrading by Chinese multinational enterprises (MNEs). Using Huawei’s investment in Russia, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Canada as an in-depth case study, we observe that through corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in foreign markets and engaging with local community, Chinese MNEs can acquire global legitimacy and gradually catch up with industry leaders. However, the process of global legitimation and innovation continues to evolve. We find that, together with engaging in CSR activities, acquisition of sophisticated knowledge and creation of innovation bring more legitimacy challenges to these firms. Thus, we suggest that Chinese MNEs’ global legitimation and innovation processes are closely coupled and mutually influential, resulting in co-evolution.

Antecedents and Outcomes of Duty Orientation Among Salespeople

This study analyzed the relationship among ethical leadership, duty orientation, perceived organizational support (PSS), organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and job performance among a sample of 45 sales managers and 203 salespeople. Duty orientation and perceived organizational support were found to mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and performance outcomes. Ethical leadership was a direct predictor of OCBs but not job performance. This study shows the importance of analyzing ethical leadership, duty orientation, and PSS and their relationship with OCBs and job performance in the salesforce.

Post-Great-Recession Human Migration Patterns in the U.S.: The Overlooked Impacts of Entrepreneurial Activity and Personal Freedom

Effectively no scholarly research has been published in peer-reviewed journals on the potential migration impacts of environments that are more conducive to entrepreneurship. Similarly, the potential migration impact of personal freedom also is essentially ignored in the literature. This study seeks to add to the literature by investigating the impacts of both entrepreneurial activity and personal freedom on state in-migration patterns. Using a panel dataset for the post-Great Recession period 2010-2017, the empirical analysis reveals that all three of the Kauffman indices of entrepreneurial activity are found to exercise a positive and statistically significant impact on both net in-migration and gross in-migration. In addition, the index of overall personal freedom is found to exercise a positive and statistically significant impact on both of these in-migration measures. Thus, it appears that there may be good reason for future migration studies to take such variables into account when seeking to explain, understand, and predict migration patterns in the U.S..