Henk von Eije Visited the School of Finance

Professor Henk von Eije from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, visited the School of Finance in November 2014.

Henk von Eije, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, the Netherlands, conducted a research seminar on 'Does the information content of payout initiations and omissions inuence firm risks?' for students of the Strategic Corporate Finance (SCF) master's programme.

Abstact: We study the influence on firm risks of NASDAQ and NYSE firm payout initiations and omissions. These pay out events can be interpreted as managerial signals of firm financial life-cycle maturation resulting in concomitant changes in firm risks. We remove confounding payout types and we match on the propensity to initiate or omit informed by determinants of pay out known to investors in advance. For payout event and matched firms, we apply the difference-in-differences method to estimate the effect of the information content of actual initiations and omissions on firm risks. We find consistent significant declines in total, aggregate systematic, and idiosyncratic firm risks after cash dividend initiations and increases after dividend omissions, but only incidentally after share repurchase initiations and omissions.

 download the presentation (PPTX, 2.56 Мб)

 

Henk von Eije also took part in a research seminar in Finance with the School's researchers.

Title: Does Cash Contribute to Value? A Comparison of Constrained and Unconstrained Firms in China and Germany

Abstract: A fundamental characteristic of emerging markets is the underdevelopment of legal institutions and financial markets. Therefore, the marginal value of a firm’s cash holdings in emerging countries can be lower than 1, due to high agency costs resulting from poor external corporate governance. However, the marginal value of cash may also be high in emerging markets because the information asymmetry between current and new providers of funds is high, which means that it is difficult to access the (low quality) capital markets. We study for the industrialized countries of China and Germany whether corporate cash holdings contribute to shareholder value in both constrained and unconstrained firms. In contradiction to previous literature on emerging markets, we find that the marginal value of cash is not smaller than 1 in China, so that agency costs do not dominate. We, however, find marginal values of cash lower than 1 for unconstrained firms in both countries, so that in these firms agency costs of cash holdings exist. For constrained firms we find marginal values significantly larger than 1 in both countries. This implies difficulties in accessing the financial markets for these firms. These difficulties prove to be larger in China than in Germany for small and service firms, but not for high growth firms.

 download the presentation (PPTX, 823 Кб)

This event became the first in the series of scientific research seminars organized by Corporate Finance Centre

Thank you for all the assistance. I really enjoyed being at the HSE and meeting nice colleagues and students

DR. J.H. (HENK) VON EIJE
Associate Professor, Faculty of Economics and Business, Groningen, The Netherlands