Essays on Social Values in Finance

Essays on Social Values in Finance
Author: Jeremy Kenneth Page
Publisher:
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2011
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of three essays on the role of social values in financial markets. Chapter 1 uses geographic variation in religious concentration to identify the effect of people's gambling behavior in financial market settings. We argue that religious background predicts people's gambling propensity, and that gambling propensity carries over into their behavior in financial markets. We test this conjecture in various financial market settings and find that the predominant local religion predicts variation in investors' propensity to hold stocks with lottery features, in the prevalence of broad-based employee stock option plans, in first-day returns to initial public offerings, and in the magnitude of the negative lottery-stock return premium. Collectively, our findings indicate that religious beliefs regarding the acceptability of gambling impact investors' portfolio choices, corporate decisions, and stock returns. In Chapter 2 I examine the impact of social norms against holding certain types of stocks (e.g. "sin stocks", or stocks with lottery features) on trading decisions and portfolio performance. I argue that trades which deviate from social norms are likely to reflect stronger information. Consistent with this hypothesis, I find that the most gambling-averse institutions earn high abnormal returns on their holdings of lottery stocks, outperforming the holdings of the most gambling-tolerant institutions. An analysis of institutions' sin stock holdings provides complementary evidence using another dimension of social norms, supporting the hypothesis that trades which deviate from norms reflect stronger information. In the third essay, we conjecture that people feel more optimistic about the economy and stock market when their own political party is in power. We find supporting evidence from Gallup survey data and analyze brokerage account data to confirm the impact of time-varying optimism on investors' portfolio choices. When the political climate is aligned with their political preferences, investors maintain higher systematic risk exposure while trading less frequently. When the opposite party is in power, investors exhibit stronger behavioral biases and make worse investment decisions. Investors improve their raw portfolio performance when their own party is in power, but the risk-adjusted improvement is economically small.

Essays in Social Value Theory

Essays in Social Value Theory
Author: Marc R. Tool
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
Total Pages: 230
Release: 1986
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780873323826

This is a collection of Marc Tool's essays on instituitional econonics, written over the 1980s.

Social Finance

Social Finance
Author: Alex Nicholls
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 672
Release: 2015-11-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0191008699

Social Finance is a rapidly advancing area of practice, policy and research, with alot of unanswered questions. What does it amount to? What is it to be 'social' in finance? How do you value assets that offer a social as well as a financial return? This book provides a collection of authoritative essays on these and related topics. The essays embrace the different manifestations of social finance, collate existing research, set out the controversies, offer theoretical insights, and advances, and draw together the ideas of the leading thinkers in the field. Contributors to this volume are leading exponents and practitioners of social finance and leading academics from the main relevant disciplines and fields of study. This book is the first serious and comprehensive treatment of social finance and as such, will be of interest to academics with research and teaching interests in finance, social enterprise/entrepreneurship, public policy, business economics and international deveopement to name a few. If you want to understand and join in the academic and policy debates, or if you are working in one part of this field and want to understand how the landscape is being rapidly re-shaped, then this is an essential guidebook.

Three Essays on the Influence of National Culture on Corporate Finance

Three Essays on the Influence of National Culture on Corporate Finance
Author: Vipin Mogha
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:

The premises of this doctoral dissertation is investigating the role played by national culture on corporate financial choices and outcomes. The investigation is done through three empirical essays. The first essay analyzes the influence of national culture on firms' capital structure choices. The second essay is analyzing the role played by national culture on firms extending more or less trade credit from pre-to-post the mortgage financial crisis. The third essay analyzes the influence of national culture on firms' market value. Furthermore, a chapter of theoretical conceptualization is done to fit these empirical essays work into a mathematical topology framework. This doctoral dissertation work finds itself at the junction of three broad sets of research bodies. These are the literature around the New Institutional Economics (NIE), the finance literature, and the social economics literature. We glue these literature sets together through the general mathematical topology framework to structure our culture and finance research. Chapter 2 introduces these literature sets and describes the foundations of our three essays.Chapter 3 (essay one) presents the analysis of the links between national culture and firms financing choices leading to their capital structure. Chapter 4 (essay two) presents the analysis of culture's influence on firm's choice of extending higher or lower trade credit from pre-to-post the 2008 mortgage financial crisis. Chapter 5 (essay three) presents how firms' financial value maybe influenced national cultural values.National culture is defined as the firm's country-of-origin cultural values. We represent it by four of Hofstede (1980, 2001) six cultural dimensions of individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation. Hofstede national culture dimensions are largely applied in the growing culture and finance literature, thus providing strong empirically validity. Our choice of Hofstede dimensions are described in chapter 2.We apply these cultural dimensions in our three essays. Our empirical analysis is build following the New Institutional Economics framework (Williamson, 2000). This framework is the key structure around which we are able to build the theoretical bodies of our three essays. NIE has popularized the understanding and acceptance of the non-financial constraints -in macro-and-micro economics- of the social embeddedness level of culture. We empirically test the hypotheses in our three essays following Williamson NIE framework. The empirical tests are done on samples of listed firms from over 30 countries. These tests provide a broad applicability of our results to firms in the globalized economy. The results of our three essays meet our hypotheses expectations of culture's influence on firms' financial choices and outcomes.The results provide all stakeholders a lens to view and analyze corporate financial choices and outcomes through firms' national culture values. Indeed, the financial numbers one may read may have different meaning depending on firm's country-of-origin cultural values. This understanding would have multiple implications for investors, creditors, managers, shareholders, and policy makers. It may help them in their investing, lending, financing, returns expectations, and policy design to optimize their profits.

Value and Crisis: Essays on Labour, Money and Contemporary Capitalism

Value and Crisis: Essays on Labour, Money and Contemporary Capitalism
Author: Alfredo Saad Filho
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2019-02-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 900439320X

Value and Crisis brings together selected essays written by Alfredo Saad-Filho. This book examines the labour theory of value and its implications for the nature of neoliberalism, financialisation, inflation, monetary policy, and the crises of contemporary capitalism.

Why the World Economy Needs a Financial Crash and Other Critical Essays on Finance and Financial Economics

Why the World Economy Needs a Financial Crash and Other Critical Essays on Finance and Financial Economics
Author: Jan Toporowski
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2010-12-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0857286560

The essays in this volume explain the key structural features of financial inflation that give rise to financial crisis. These features include excessive reliance on finance to maintain economic activity through rising asset prices. Reliance on asset inflation induces a preoccupation with property values and a new social divide between the asset-rich and the asset-poor that undermines the culture of the welfare state. When debt can no longer be supported by cash flow from asset markets, excess debt plunges economies into economic depression.

Institutional Economics and the Theory of Social Value: Essays in Honor of Marc R. Tool

Institutional Economics and the Theory of Social Value: Essays in Honor of Marc R. Tool
Author: Charles M.A. Clark
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 940110655X

Marc R. Tool, both through his writings and his editorship of the Journal of Economic Issues, has had a profound influence on institutional economics. Tool's efforts, in his own words, "has been to keep values on the agenda of economic inquiry," which is another way of saying "keep economic inquiry relevant. " Tool's work on the theory of social value and instrumental valuation has helped to keep institutional economics focused on the core economic and social issues facing society, providing both a perspective from which to analyze the economy and a criteria for evaluating outcomes. This collection of essays is a testament to this legacy. Although these 15 chapters cover a wide and diverse range of topics, it is the common themes which are most striking: the inescapable necessity of values in economic discourse; the central role of valuation in economic activity; and most importantly, the requirement of democratic participation to achieve "efficient" solutions to the economic problem. These essays are offered to honor a body of work, a set of ideas, but mostly a man who, by directing economic inquiry to these core issues, has promoted "the continuity of human life and the noninvidious recreation of community through the instrumental use of knowledge.

Social Values and Social Indicators

Social Values and Social Indicators
Author: S. Subramanian
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2021-09-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9811604282

The book is a collection of essays written since 2010, and dealing, in one way or another, with the place of values in economic analysis. The centrality of values in the collection is not surprising, given that the thematic concerns informing the essays in the book relate principally to methodological issues in economic enquiry, to the normatively constrained aggregation of personal preferences into collective choice, and to problems of logical coherence and ethical appeal in the axiom systems underlying the measurement of economic and social phenomena such as poverty, inequality and literacy. While many of the essays are more or less technical in nature, they are all explicitly motivated by considerations that go beyond the formalisms of presentation to an involvement with the role of moral reasoning in economic analysis. In particular, the essays emphasize the importance of ‘ought propositions’ in a science which is all too often regarded as being wholly and exclusively ‘positive’ in its orientation. The book should be of particular interest to researchers, students, and public policy makers.

Social Value Of The Financial Sector, The: Too Big To Fail Or Just Too Big?

Social Value Of The Financial Sector, The: Too Big To Fail Or Just Too Big?
Author: Viral V Acharya
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2013-10-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9814520306

As a result of the recent financial crisis, there has been significant public debate on the role of the financial sector in bringing about the “Great Depression.” More generally, there has been debate about whether the current industry structure has enhanced social welfare or served a detrimental role.This book is a collection of papers presented at the conference held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, in November 2012 that examined the social value of the financial sector as currently structured. Issues evaluated include what are the perceived benefits and costs of the current financial system? How valuable have industry innovations been for society? Should regulation be used to “move” the industry in a direction thought to be more valuable for society? Should “big” banks be broken up? What are the welfare implications of the current industry structure? In the book, leading industry scholars debate these issues with a goal of influencing public policy toward the industry.