Professor Tse-Chun LIN received his Bachelor degree in Economics from National Taiwan University and MBA degree from National Chengchi University. He graduated with an M.Phil. in Economics from Tinbergen Institute in 2006. In 2009, he graduated from the Ph.D. program at the University of Amsterdam and joined The University of Hong Kong as Assistant Professor at HKU Business School. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2015 and Professor in 2018.
Professor Tse-Chun LIN has been publishing his research in leading academic journals such as American Economic Review, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Management Science, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Review of Finance, etc. His research has also been featured in The Economist, WSJ, Bloomberg, and Investopedia, etc.
本文就市场对于经济关联公司的新闻所出现延迟价格反应提出了一个基于心理学的新解释。我们发现经济关联公司的股价收益预测，取决于其目前股价与52周最高股价之间有多接近。经济关联公司的新闻与公司股价是否接近其52周高位，部份解释了为何市场对于消费者、地理邻居、同业或外国行业的新闻反应较为迟缓。研究亦发现股票分析师会因公司股价接近52周高位，亦对关经济关联公司的新闻产生了延迟反应。这些发现直接证明了公司股价接近52周高位对于投资者信念更新过程的影响。
What could be the result if some compelling opportunities, like lottery jackpots, were potentially lucrative enough to distract the investors' attention from monitoring the stock market?
We identify an important channel, acquisitions of public targets, via which the governance through trading (GTT) improves firm values. The disciplinary effect of GTT is more pronounced for firms with higher managerial wealth-performance sensitivity and moderate institutional ownership concentration. Firms with higher GTT also have higher subsequent ROA, ROE, Tobin's Q, analysts forecasted EPS growth rate, and lower expected default risk. The effect is stronger after Decimalization and robust to using two instrumental variables. We conduct several exercises to rule out alternative explanations, such as institutional superior information, investor activism, and momentum. Additional tests show that the disciplinary effect of GTT only exists for less financially-constrained firms and non-all-cash M&As where the agency problem is more likely to be prevalent.
We explore the governance effect of short-selling threat on mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We use equity lending supply (LS) to proxy for the threat, as short sellers incentives to scrutinize a firm depend on the availability of borrowing shares. Our results show that acquirers with higher LS have higher announcement returns. The effect is stronger when acquirers are more likely to be targets of subsequent hostile takeovers and when their managers wealth is more linked to stock prices. We conduct four sets of tests to mitigate endogeneity concerns. Finally, the governance effect exists only for deals prone to agency problems.
We study the effect of financial market frictions on managerial compensation. We embed a market microstructure model into an otherwise standard contracting framework, and analyze optimal pay-for-performance when managers use information they learn from the market in their investment decisions. In a less frictional market, the improved information content of stock prices helps guide managerial decisions and thereby necessitates lower-powered compensation. Exploiting a randomized experiment, we document evidence that pay-for-performance is lowered in response to reduced market frictions. Firm investment also becomes more sensitive to stock prices during the experiment, consistent with increased managerial learning from the market.
We hypothesize that when investors pay less attention to financial markets, they rationally allocate relatively more attention to market-level information than to firm-specific information, leading to increases in stock return co-movements. Using large jackpot lotteries as exogenous shocks that attract investors’ attention away from the stock market, we find supportive evidence that stock returns co-move more with the market on large jackpot days. This effect is stronger for stocks preferred by retail investors and is not driven by gambling sentiment. We also find that stock returns are less sensitive to earnings surprises and co-move more with industries on large jackpot days.
The research study by Professor Tse-Chun Lin, Professor of Finance and his Ph.D. student Vesa Pursiainen is covered by a number of regional and international media.
We offer a new anchoring explanation for the ex-day abnormal returns of stock distributions, including stock dividend distributions, splits, and reverse splits. We propose that investors tend to anchor on cum-day prices in valuating ex-distribution stocks, resulting in a positive association between ex-day returns and adjustment factors. We find that this positive return-factor relation exists for all three types of stock distributions and in both the pre- and post-decimalization periods. Furthermore, we find that this positive return-factor relation is more pronounced among events that are more subject to investors’ anchoring propensity, featured by less investor attention, greater arbitrage difficulty, greater valuation uncertainty, less investor sophistication, and higher market sentiment. Last, using brokerage account data, we show that stocks that are traded by investors with more investment experience demonstrate a weaker return-factor relation.
