Governance Through Trading: Does Institutional Trading Discipline Empire Building and Earnings Management?

May 17, 2013 Leave a comment

Governance Through Trading: Does Institutional Trading Discipline Empire Building and Earnings Management?

Eric C. Chang University of Hong Kong – School of Business

Tse-Chun Lin University of Hong Kong – Faculty of Business and Economics

Xiaorong Ma University of Hong Kong – School of Business

May 12, 2013

Abstract: 
This paper empirically identifies an important external corporate governance mechanism through which the institutional trading improves firm values and disciplines managers from conducting value-destroying behaviors. We propose a reward-punishment intensity (RPI) measure based on institutional investors’ absolute position changes, and find it is positively associated with firm’s future risk-adjusted returns and Tobin’s Q. Importantly, we find that firms with higher RPI exhibit less subsequent empire building and earnings management. Our results suggest that the improved firm values can be attributed to the discipline effect of institutional trading on managers, which is in line with the argument of “Governance Through Trading”. Furthermore, we find that the exogenous liquidity shock of decimalization augments the governance effect of institutional trading. We also find that the discipline effect is more pronounced for firms with lower institutional ownership concentration, higher stock liquidity, and higher managers’ wealth-performance sensitivity, which further supports the governance role of the RPI.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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