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My dissertation comprises of three essays: 1) Accounting information and financial derivatives: a literature review 2) The Effect of Option Transaction Costs on Informed Trading in the Option Market around Earnings Announcements; and 3) The Effects of Credit Default Swaps trading on Analyst Forecast Properties. The first essay surveys the previous researches on accounting information and financial derivatives. The financial derivate instruments we mainly focus on are stock option and credit default swaps. Then we also identify some research gaps for future research. The second essay investigates the effect of transaction costs related to trading options on the directional and volatility informed trading in the option market. We find that both forms of informed trading are significantly stronger among firms with lower option bid-ask spread. Importantly, the effect of transaction costs is significant around earnings announcements, but not significant (on average) around randomly chosen dates with no events of consequence. This suggests that transaction costs play a particularly important role during information intensive periods. Trading strategies based on directional informed trading and option transaction costs earn monthly abnormal returns of 1.39% to 1.91%. The third essay investigates whether the initiation of credit default swaps (CDSs) trading can affect analysts' forecast properties. Using a difference-in-difference research design, we find that the onset of CDS trading help analysts to increase forecast accuracy, which is consistent with notion that a new financial market facilitate information discovery and dissemination. This effect is more pronounced for firms with greater information asymmetry and higher leverage. We also find that CDS initiation can depress analysts' strategic forecast optimism. Relying on several proxies for analysts' strategic optimism, we find that the depressing effect is more pronounced for subsamples with higher optimism level. In addition, we find that the depressing effect is stronger when bad news is realized ex post in the earnings announcement date.
Do financial derivatives enhance or impede innovation? We aim to answer this question by examining the relationship between equity options markets and standard measures of firm innovation. Our baseline results show that firms with more options trading activity generate more patents and patent citations per dollar of R&D invested. We then investigate how more active options markets affect firms' innovation strategy. Our results suggest that firms with greater trading activity pursue a more creative, diverse and risky innovation strategy. We discuss potential underlying mechanisms and show that options appear to mitigate managerial career concerns that would induce managers to take actions that boost short-term performance measures. Finally, using several econometric specifications that try to account for the potential endogeneity of options trading, we argue that the positive effect of options trading on firm innovation is causal.
This dissertation research comprises three essays in finance. The first and second essays study the effect of religion on corporate decision making and financial reporting. The first essay shows that contingent payment in mergers and acquisitions not only violates Islamic law but also results in several agency issues by creating an incentive for managers to participate in long-term value-destroying behavior during earnout periods. Our empirical results, using regression as well as difference-in-difference estimation, show that target managers significantly manage earnings upward by cutting discretionary expenses during earnout periods. As compared to a sample of matched non-earnout M&A, acquisitions with earnout clauses are followed by significantly lower long-term abnormal returns. Our arguments and results have significant economic and legal consequences on cross-border M&A and could be used to facilitate worldwide economic integration. The second essay argues that financial statement analytical tools could violate several commands of the Islamic law. Specifically, traditional liquidity ratios imply undervaluation, uncertainty, and interest bearing aspects that are strictly prohibited in the Islamic law. We propose an Islamic-compliant measure of corporate liquidity. In order to validate our proposed ratio as a measure of corporate liquidity, we incorporate it in the traditional corporate bankruptcy prediction models. Our measure significantly improves the accuracy of the corporate bankruptcy prediction models of Altman (1968) Z-score and Ohlson (1980). The third essay conjectures that strong brands reduce the propensity of firms to engage in activities that lead to earnings restatements and accounting fraud. Our empirical results show that firms with valuable brands are less likely to announce (1) accounting restatements, (2) income-decreasing restatements, and (3) restatements that involve an SEC investigation. Our findings establish another channel through which valuable brands enhance firm value.