Essays on corporate governance and asset pricing

This dissertation consists of three articles striding topics from corporate governance to asset pricing. It seeks to understand the costs and benefits of better corporate governance, and how assets such as real estate are priced. My ultimate focus is on corporate governance on both sides of the equations – as causes and effects, which culminates in my third article investigating the causality of legal revisions on investors through independent directors. My apparent detour in the second piece results from that my finance background has lectured me on the importance of how asset prices are determined. Through this detour, I have recognized that I should rather combine the topics of intrigue into my topics of pursuit. Hence my blending of my learnings from the first two articles into my final piece of this dissertation. Article 1, Corporate Transparency and Bond Liquidity, investigates how firm accounting transparency affects the liquidity of bonds issued by such firms. The dataset consists of firm- and bond- level data for US listed firms across multiple years. We find a positive relationship between firm transparency and bond liquidity, which becomes stronger in times of financial distress. Further, we find a negative relationship between firm transparency and liquidity risk. Economically speaking, bond liquidity is less (more) information-sensitive when the probability of default is lower (higher). Article 2, Pricing the Location of Commercial Properties, proposes a pricing framework for cash flow datasets, using US commercial properties as a case. We adapt the netpresent- value-approach of Korteweg and Nagel (2016) from a performance-evaluation context to a pricing context. As an example to test this proposed framework, We use the hedonic regression models of Clapp- Giaccotto (1998) to generate commercial real estate specific location risk factors. Our results show that a one-factor stock market model works rather well for commercial property pricing in comparison to multi-factor models including the factors of Fama and French (1996) and a physical-distancebased location risk factor. Article 3, Does Investor Protection Laws Benefit Investors? Evidence from a Natural Experiment on Cross-Listed Firms, studies the causal effects of investor protection laws on investors from a governance and financial perspective. I exploit a natural experimental setting where firms cross-listed on both China’s mainland and Hong Kong are subject to the legal revisions. First, I find that more independent directors turn over amongst the cross-listed firms. Second, my results show that the directors appointed to succeed the resigned directors tend to be younger and include more female. The above combined, I argue that my findings suggest that firms have taken the opportunity to appoint directors more befitting to the new environment, hence increased board turnover might be conducive to the firm in the long run. Third, I find no evidence of significant changes in board independence in the short run. Combined with increased director turnovers, my findings reconcile the arguments advanced by the finance and the strategy literature on the effects of strengthened institutions in that strengthened shareholder-friendly corporate governance at the firm level and symbolic adoption of certain governance practices could take place jointly.