Selected papers from the annual meeting of the Eastern Finance Association in 2011

Citation

Yu, S. (2012), "Selected papers from the annual meeting of the Eastern Finance Association in 2011", Managerial Finance, Vol. 38 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/mf.2012.00938caa.001

Selected papers from the annual meeting of the Eastern Finance Association in 2011

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Managerial Finance, Volume 38, Issue 3

About the Guest Editor

Dr Susana Yu Professor of Finance at Montclair State University. She earned a BA at Queens College/CUNY, MBA from Baruch College/CUNY and PhD from Baruch College/CUNY. Susana has written more than 25 refereed publications in peer-reviewed journals. Her research interests focus on market efficiency, trading strategies, market micro-structure, risk management, and analysts’ forecasts. Susana is an active member of the Financial Management Association (FMA), Eastern Finance Association (EFA), Southern Finance Association (SFA) and Southwestern Finance Association (SWFA). In particular, she has served extensively on conference program committees for these associations. She is the former board of director at the SWFA, former vice president (program) for the 2010 Northeast Business and Economics Association (NBEA)Meeting, former track chair in special topics for the 2009 SFA Meeting, and 2010 EFA Meeting and the former track chair in investments for the 2011 EFA Meeting. She is currently the vice president in special events for the 2012 SWFA Meeting. In addition, she is an editorial board member of Managerial Finance and Financial Decisions. She is also the Associate Editor of the American Economist. Susana is also an active member in the university community.

Dear Readers,

The 2011 Annual Meeting of the Eastern Finance Association program was organized by Dr Brain Barrett. The meeting was held between April 13 and April 16 in Savannah, Georgia. Several awards were offered, including the Outstanding Paper in Corporate Finance, Outstanding Paper in Investments, Outstanding Paper in Financial Institutions, Outstanding Paper in Derivates, Outstanding Paper in Special Topics and Outstanding Graduate Student Papers.

Over 240 papers were presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Eastern Finance Association. Of these, 20 finalists were selected for consideration for this publication. Out of these 20 papers, six were selected for publication in this special issue of Managerial Finance. The final selection was made in a double-blind peer-review process, and each paper was reviewed by at least one referee.

The first article in this issue, which earned the designation of Outstanding Paper in Corporate Finance, is by Dror Parnes. He asserts the possibility that moderate economic cycles could discourage corporate default and concludes that economic waves can change the order of competitive advantages among rival firms in a perfectly competitive market.

Buttimer, Chen and Chiang received the Outstanding Paper Award in Special Topics. By using two existing frameworks in the literature, they find that equity REIT managers have positive housing market timing ability. However, they discover that various equity REIT subcategories perform differently.

Next, Tudor and Cao examine the relationship between hedge fund characteristics, hedge fund strategies and absolute return profiles. They show that emerging markets, fixed income-MBS and global macro strategies exhibit statistical significance in various regression models. Furthermore, they claim that single strategy funds are likely to have the absolute return profile in multinomial probit and multinomial logit regressions.

Yu explores the relationship between creditor rights, employee rights and capital structure among different countries. He finds a positive relationship between employee rights and firm’s use of debt; and a negative relationship between creditor rights and firm’s debt ratio. His results reconfirm the impacts of bargaining powers of creditors and employees on capital structure.

Chen, Yang and Lin reveal the evidence that foreign institutional investors herd towards stocks within the same industry in Taiwan. They further explore the underlying elements that drive foreign institutional industrial herding.

I conclude this issue with Morgan and Murtagh’s study on the effect of market characteristics and global financial crises on the credit spreads in the primary issue bond and bank loan markets.

They present evidence that US and international loan borrowers are in lower quality than their bond counterparts. In addition, they provide support that credit spreads are related to market liquidity.

I hope that these articles contribute significantly to research in their respective areas, and that they lead to the formulation of productive new avenues of research. Last but not least, I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to the referees who not only made this issue possible, but whose in-depth, unbiased reviews greatly enhanced its quality.

Susana YuGuest Editor