Bitcoin Flash Crash on May 19, 2021: What Did Really Happen on Binance?
Tim Baumgartner, Andre Guettler
IWH Discussion Papers,
Nr. 25,
2022
Abstract
Bitcoin plunged by 30% on May 19, 2021. We examine the outage the largest crypto exchange Binance experienced during the crash, when it halted trading for retail clients and stopped providing transaction data. We find evidence that Binance back-filled these missing transactions with data that does not conform to Benford‘s Law. The Bitcoin futures price difference between Binance and other exchanges was seven times larger during the crash period compared to a prior reference period. Data manipulation is a plausible explanation for our findings. These actions are in line with Binance aiming to limit losses for its futures-related insurance fund.
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Productivity, Managers’ Social Connections and the Financial Crisis
Iftekhar Hasan, Stefano Manfredonia
Journal of Banking and Finance,
August
2022
Abstract
This paper investigates whether managers’ personal connections help corporate productivity to recover after a negative economic shock. Leveraging the heterogeneity in the severity of the financial crisis across different sectors, the paper reports that (i) the financial crisis had a negative effect on within-firm productivity, (ii) the effect was long-lasting and persistent, supporting a productivity-hysteresis hypothesis, and (iii) managers’ personal connections allowed corporations to recover from this productivity slowdown. Among the possible mechanisms, we show that connected managers operating in affected sectors foster productivity recovery through higher input cost efficiency and better access to the credit market, as well as more efficient use of labour and capital.
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The Impact of Overconfident Customers on Supplier Firm Risks
Yiwei Fang, Iftekhar Hasan, Chih-Yung Lin, Jiong Sun
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization,
May
2022
Abstract
Research has shown that firms with overconfident chief executive officers (CEOs) tend to overinvest and are exposed to high risks due to unrealistically optimistic estimates of their firms’ future performance. This study finds evidence that overconfident CEOs also affect suppliers’ risk taking. Specifically, serving overconfident customers can lead to high supplier risks, measured by stock volatility, idiosyncratic risk, and market risk. The effects are pronounced when customers aggressively invest in research and development (R&D). Our results are robust after addressing self-selection bias and using different CEO overconfidence measures. We also document some real effects of customer CEO overconfidence on suppliers.
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On Modeling IPO Failure Risk
Gonul Colak, Mengchuan Fu, Iftekhar Hasan
Economic Modelling,
April
2022
Abstract
This paper offers a novel framework, combining firm operational risk, IPO pricing risk, and market risk, to model IPO failure risk. By analyzing nearly a thousand variables, we observe that prior IPO failure risk models have suffered from a major missing-variable problem. Evidence reveals several key new firm-level determinants, e.g., the volatility operating performance, the size of its accounts payable, pretax income to common equity, total short-term debt, and a few macroeconomic variables such as treasury bill rate, and book-to-market of the DJIA index. These findings have major economic implications. The total value loss from not predicting the imminent failure of an IPO is significantly lower with this proposed model compared to other established models. The IPO investors could have saved around $18billion over the period between 1994 and 2016 by using this model.
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Global Syndicated Lending during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Iftekhar Hasan, Panagiotis Politsidis, Zenu Sharma
Journal of Banking and Finance,
December
2021
Abstract
This paper examines the pricing of global syndicated loans during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that loan spreads rise by over 11 basis points in response to a one standard deviation increase in the lender's exposure to COVID-19 and over 5 basis points for an equivalent increase in the borrower's exposure. This implies excess interestof about USD 5.16 million and USD 2.37 million respectively for a loan of average size and duration. The aggravating effect of the pandemic is exacerbated with the level of government restrictions to tackle the virus's spread, with firms’ financial constraints and reliance on debt financing, whereas it is mitigated for relationship borrowers, borrowers listed in multiple exchanges or headquartered in countries that can attract institutional investors.
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Labor in the Boardroom
Jörg Heining, Simon Jäger, Benjamin Schoefer
Quarterly Journal of Economics,
Nr. 2,
2021
Abstract
We estimate the wage effects of shared governance, or codetermination, in the form of a mandate of one-third of corporate board seats going to worker representatives. We study a reform in Germany that abruptly abolished this mandate for stock corporations incorporated after August 1994, while it locked the mandate for the slightly older cohorts. Our research design compares firm cohorts incorporated before the reform and after; in a robustness check we draw on the analogous difference in unaffected firm types (LLCs). We find no effects of board-level codetermination on wages and the wage structure, even in firms with particularly flexible wages. The degree of rent sharing and the labor share are also unaffected. We reject that disinvestment could have offset wage effects through the canonical hold-up channel, as shared governance, if anything, increases capital formation.
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Who Benefits from Mandatory CSR? Evidence from the Indian Companies Act 2013
Jitendra Aswani, N. K. Chidambaran, Iftekhar Hasan
Emerging Markets Review,
March
2021
Abstract
We examine the value impact of mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) spending required by the Indian Companies Act of 2013 for large and profitable Indian firms. We find that the external mandate is value decreasing, even after controlling for prior voluntary CSR activity by firms affected by the mandate. We also find that there is systematic crosssectional variation across firms. Firms that are profitable and firms in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods sector that voluntarily engaged in CSR, benefit from CSR. Industrial firms and firms with high capital expenditures are negatively impacted by the mandate. We conclude that a one-size-fits-all approach to CSR is sub-optimal and value decreasing.
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