{"title":"Divine dividends: How religious traditions shape corporate payout policies","authors":"Shixian Ling , Mengdi Jia , Zhangxin (Frank) Liu","doi":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103357","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103357","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We examine the impact of religious traditions on corporate dividend policies using Chinese A-share firms from 2009 to 2023. Firms in regions with stronger Buddhist and Taoist influence are more likely to pay dividends and exhibit higher payout ratios, particularly non-state-owned enterprises, where religion serves as an alternative governance mechanism. Buddhism has a stronger effect than Taoism, reflecting doctrinal differences in ethical and financial outlooks. Mechanism tests suggest that religious traditions enhance corporate social responsibility and investor protection, reinforcing dividend commitments. Additional analyses show that religiosity fosters dividend smoothing. Our results, robust to alternative measures and instrumental variable analyses, highlight the role of informal institutions in shaping corporate financial decisions in transitional economies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48331,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Money and Finance","volume":"156 ","pages":"Article 103357"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143947137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Economic policy uncertainty and foreign exchange market implied volatility: A complex partial wavelet coherence approach","authors":"Lu Yang","doi":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103356","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103356","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper explores the interdependence between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and foreign exchange implied volatility (FXV) across advanced, European, and emerging (BRICS) markets since 2000 by using a complex partial wavelet coherence approach. The findings indicate that both domestic and US EPUs directly enhance the implied volatility of several currencies across different timescales. In general, the interdependence between EPU and FXV is weak at short-term scales but strengthens over longer timescales. In developed and European markets, substantial evidence indicates that both domestic and US EPUs elevate currency implied volatility, particularly at long-term scales and during periods of extreme market conditions. Among BRICS countries, China alone shows similar patterns. These results imply that EPU can adversely impact the economic performance of more financially integrated developed economies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48331,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Money and Finance","volume":"156 ","pages":"Article 103356"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143935754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The trend effect of foreign exchange intervention","authors":"Rasmus Fatum , Yohei Yamamoto , Binwei Chen","doi":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103355","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103355","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The 2022 and the 2010–2011 Bank of Japan interventions provide an opportunity for investigating whether unusually large-scale and infrequent interventions are capable of generating trend effects. To this end, we estimate the counterfactual exchange rate and analyze structural changes in the level and the trend of the gap sequence between actual and counterfactual exchange rates. Our results show that the trend of the gap sequence reversed in the desired direction around the intervention dates, indicating that the intervention policy instrument is potentially powerful enough to generate long-term trend effects. This is an important insight not previously found in the intervention literature.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48331,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Money and Finance","volume":"156 ","pages":"Article 103355"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143942715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ilias Filippou , Arie E. Gozluklu , My T. Nguyen , Ganesh Viswanath-Natraj
{"title":"Signal in the noise: Trump tweets and the currency market","authors":"Ilias Filippou , Arie E. Gozluklu , My T. Nguyen , Ganesh Viswanath-Natraj","doi":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103343","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103343","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, we conduct a textual analysis of Trump tweets. Our method extracts the signal from the noise, by identifying the subset of tweets that contain information on macroeconomic policy or trade content. Informative tweets result in a USD appreciation and a decline in intraday volatility, reflecting Trump’s optimistic views on the U.S. economy. These effects are robust to controlling for macroeconomic announcements. We rationalize our findings within a model of Bayesian traders that interpret Trump tweets as a public signal in the FX market. Currency returns are driven by a bias between the public signal and speculators’ expectations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48331,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Money and Finance","volume":"156 ","pages":"Article 103343"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143924365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Concentrated customers: A blessing or a curse for tunneling prevention?","authors":"Xianhang Qian, Yewei Liu, Xinyu Li","doi":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103354","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103354","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using a sample of Chinese listed firms, this paper investigates the impact of customer concentration on controlling shareholders’ tunneling. Our findings reveal that firms with concentrated customer bases engage in high levels of tunneling activities. Further analysis indicates that customer concentration increases firms’ excess cash holdings and information opacity, thereby facilitating tunneling. This effect is more pronounced in firms with limited market power, firms operating in durable goods industries, firms located in cities with weak legal environments, and firms with less exposure to Confucian culture. Additionally, we observe that the heightened tunneling accompanied by customer concentration leads to abnormal executive compensation, exacerbated financial distress, and ultimately, a reduction in firm value. Overall, our study suggests that, contrary to serving as a monitoring force, concentrated customers actually facilitate controlling shareholders’ tunneling practices.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48331,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Money and Finance","volume":"156 ","pages":"Article 103354"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143903473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Monetary policy surprise shocks under different fiscal regimes: A panel analysis of the Euro Area","authors":"Antonio Afonso , José Alves , Serena Ionta","doi":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103341","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103341","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We examine the impact of surprise shocks on real output and price levels, conditioned on different fiscal stances, using quarterly data from 2001Q4 to 2021Q4 for 19 Euro Area countries. Employing local projection methods, we find that the influence of monetary shocks depends on each country’s fiscal position. Specifically, while high debt amplifies monetary policy’s contractionary effect on output, the “Ricardian\" nature of fiscal policy plays a pivotal role in price responses. Notably, in the high-debt and low-sustainability regime, we observe “fiscal inflation\" where monetary tightening raises prices instead of containing them. Consistent with the Fiscal Theory of Price Level, this occurs when agents anticipate insufficient fiscal adjustments to offset the debt burden, creating inflationary pressures. Our study introduces a novel approach by integrating Bohn’s fiscal reaction function within a time-varying framework and analyzing interactions between fiscal stances and monetary shocks in the Euro Area. These findings carry significant policy implications, suggesting monetary authorities should consider fiscal conditions when implementing policy measures.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48331,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Money and Finance","volume":"156 ","pages":"Article 103341"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143899730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oussama Houari , Hamza Bennani , Quentin Bro de Comères
{"title":"Climate risks and economic activity in France: Evidence from media coverage","authors":"Oussama Houari , Hamza Bennani , Quentin Bro de Comères","doi":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103340","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103340","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates the impact of climate risks on economic activity in France. Using natural language processing methods on three major French newspapers (<em>Le Monde</em>, <em>Les Echos</em>, and <em>Le Figaro</em>) from 2000 to 2023, we construct a measure of climate risks that we disentangle into physical and transition-risk components. Our findings highlight several transmission channels through which climate risks affect the economy: the business cycle channel, the precautionary savings channel, the inflation channel, and the banking/credit channel. Moreover, while we document the existence of heterogeneous responses to our measures of physical and transition risks, we find that the tone of media coverage of climate risks matters beyond the frequency of published articles. These results remain robust to newspapers’ political slant and ruling political parties’ orientation. Finally, the impact of climate risks also depends on the stringency of environmental policies, with more lenient policies leading to a stronger sensitivity of our economic and financial variables to the media-related climate risk index.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48331,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Money and Finance","volume":"155 ","pages":"Article 103340"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143859876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The global financial cycle and macroeconomic tail risks","authors":"Johannes Beutel , Lorenz Emter , Norbert Metiu , Esteban Prieto , Yves Schüler","doi":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103342","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103342","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study the link between the global financial cycle and macroeconomic tail risks using quantile vector autoregressions. Contractionary shocks to financial conditions and monetary policy in the United States cause elevated downside risks to growth around the world. By tightening financial conditions globally, these shocks affect the left tail of the conditional output growth distribution more strongly than the center of the distribution. This effect is particularly pronounced for countries with less flexible exchange rate arrangements, higher foreign currency exposures, and higher levels of private sector leverage, suggesting that exchange rate policies and macroprudential policies can mitigate downside risks to growth.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48331,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Money and Finance","volume":"156 ","pages":"Article 103342"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143869168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From depegs to jumps: The role of stablecoin instabilities in crypto market dynamics","authors":"Baptiste Perez Riaza, Jean-Yves Gnabo","doi":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103339","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103339","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study shows that, contrary to their intended purpose of stabilizing the crypto-asset ecosystem, stablecoins can become a significant source of market destabilization. While stablecoins like Tether (USDT) were designed to facilitate stable digital transactions and mitigate volatility in crypto portfolios, instances of depegging, where the stablecoin’s value deviates from its target, have introduced new risks. Using high-frequency 5-min price data across 70 non-stable crypto-assets, we show that stablecoin depegging events significantly increase the likelihood of abrupt price jumps in non-stable crypto-assets. Within the first 5 min following a depegging event, the probability of price jumps in the BTC/USD pair increases nearly fivefold compared to normal conditions under our most conservative estimates, while the probability of cojumps rises by a factor of 6.5. Our results also reveal that these jumps tend to be of greater magnitude than those typically observed. These findings underscore the destabilizing role stablecoin depegging can play in the broader crypto market, challenging the assumption that stablecoins inherently contribute to market stability.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48331,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Money and Finance","volume":"155 ","pages":"Article 103339"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143854729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Doubling down: The synergy of CCyB release and monetary policy easing","authors":"Cristina Jude , Grégory Levieuge","doi":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103330","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103330","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>At the height of the COVID-19 crisis, many countries have reduced their countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB) and cut key policy rates. We exploit this quasi-natural experiment to gauge the combined effects of these two policies on bank lending rates (BLRs). First, we theoretically show that the joint action of CCyB release and monetary policy easing lowers BLRs by more than the sum of their individual effects. We then empirically confirm this synergy by a difference-in-difference analysis. Notably, for one percentage point release of the CCyB, corporate BLRs decreased by around 11 basis points more compared to countries without CCyB relief. The lower the policy rate, the greater this effect, suggesting that the CCyB provided additional room for maneuver to monetary policy. In addition, releasing the CCyB has acted as a catalyst for a better transmission of policy rate cuts.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48331,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Money and Finance","volume":"155 ","pages":"Article 103330"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143817063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}