Garel Alexandre

Audencia Business School | AUDENCIA · Department of Finance

This article examines the relationship between employee demographic diversity and firm performance measured by future stock returns for a large sample of US public companies. We use novel demographic data extracted from employees' online profiles and resumes and focus on three key aspects of employee demographic diversity: age, gender, and ethnicit...

This paper introduces a new measure of a firm’s negative impact on biodiversity, the corporate biodiversity footprint, and studies whether it is priced in an international sample of stocks. On average, the corporate biodiversity footprint does not explain the cross-section of returns between 2019 and 2022. However, a biodiversity footprint premium...

We explore the effects of online customer ratings on financial policy. Using a large sample of Parisian restaurants, we find a positive and economically significant relationship between customer ratings and restaurant debt. We use the locally exogenous variations in customer ratings resulting from the rounding of scores in regression discontinuity...

We construct a distraction measure based on extreme industry returns to gauge whether analysts’ attention is away from certain stocks under coverage. We find that temporarily distracted analysts make less accurate forecasts, revise forecasts less frequently, and publish less informative forecast revisions, relative to undistracted analysts. Further...

We examine the relationship between national culture and a country's Bitcoin activity. Given that Bitcoin is a high-risk currency/investment that is frequently used for illegal purposes and whose market is relatively opaque, we focus on the cultural dimension of individualism, which has been related to financial market participation, risk-taking be...

This paper examines the voting behavior of women-led mutual funds. We document four main stylized facts. First, women-led mutual funds are more likely to support environmental and social (ES) proposals, consistent with stronger pro-social preferences. Their voting support is even more pronounced for ES proposals explicitly related to ES risks, cons...

We examine the relationship between board diversity and a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in a novel way. The relation between visible forms of board diversity (gender, ethnic, age diversity) and CSR may arise endogenously due to visible diversity management. In contrast, we focus on cultural diversity (based on directors'...

This study seeks to disentangle the human capital and the social capital of directors to improve our understanding of the value that directors bring to their boardroom. Employing social network analysis (SNA) to measure the social capital of directors and using a unique and comprehensive sample of New Zealand publicly listed firms over the period o...

We examine the relationship between investor mood and the demand for sustainable investments, proxied by inflows to sustainable mutual funds. We find that a worse mood is associated with greater inflows to sustainable funds. This finding is consistent with greater risk aversion pushing investors to favor sustainable funds that they perceive as less...

This study investigates whether who a director knows is more important than what they know when it comes to gaining additional board seats. Specifically, we investigate the relative impact of human capital (a director's experiences, skills, and knowledge) and social capital (a director's connections to other directors) in gaining additional directo...

We examine the consequences of a regulatory intervention aimed at generalizing tenure voting in French public companies. The 2014 Florange Act departs from the ‘one share one vote’ principle by automatically granting double-voting rights (DVR) to shares held for at least two years. However, firms can opt out through an annual meeting vote. We docum...

L’ISR est aujourd’hui bien implanté auprès des professionnels de la finance (gestionnaires de fonds ou investisseurs institutionnels) chez lesquels il rencontre un large succès. Toutefois, il peine à susciter le même engouement auprès du grand public, mis à part quelques particuliers au profil bien précis. Dans cet article, les auteurs essaient de...

We examine the relationship between institutional ownership and bank capital. Using a large sample of U.S. banks, we show that banks with greater institutional ownership operate with substantially higher capital ratios. The results are robust to controlling for standard determinants of bank capital structure, including market- and accounting-based...

This paper explores the resilience of French listed companies to the COVID-19 shock. We examine the effect of numerous firm characteristics related to financial flexibility, ownership structure, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility on the stock returns during the COVID-19 shock. Our results show that French companies with more...

This article explores whether and how long-term investors influence non-executive employees’ incentives. While long-term investors benefit from long-term investments that create value over time, employees tend to be averse to long-term investments. We conjecture that long-term investors foster employee-related CSR to motivate employees to engage in...

This paper examines whether CEOs react to personal experience with global warming. Using a difference-in-differences setting, we find that CEOs’ exposure to abnormally hot temperature leads to a decrease in corporate carbon emissions intensity. Our results shed light on the role played by CEOs’ perception of the reality of climate change in reducin...

This paper introduces a real-time, continuous measure of national sentiment that is language-free and thus comparable globally: the positivity of songs that individuals choose to listen to. This is a direct measure of mood that does not pre-specify certain mood-affecting events nor assume the extent of their impact on investors. We validate our mus...

The COVID-19 shock and its unprecedented financial consequences have brought about vast uncertainty concerning the future of climate actions. We study the cross-section of stock returns during the COVID-19 shock to explore investors' views and expectations about environmental issues. The results show that firms with responsible strategies on enviro...

We examine how cultural distance between an analyst and a CEO is associated with earnings forecast performance. Using a sample of 283,062 analyst-firm-year earnings forecasts over the period 1992–2016, we find that greater cultural distance is associated with greater forecast error. This finding is robust to the use of alternative culture framework...

This paper studies the linkage between analyst coverage and Health and Safety (H&S) programs, which have started to emerge in U.S. firms to improve employee health and control healthcare expenditures. Given their homogeneity across firms, their well-documented profitability and long-term payoffs, H&S programs provide an interesting setting to revis...

This article investigates the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on electoral participation. We study the French municipal elections that took place at the very beginning of the ongoing pandemic and held in over 9,000 municipalities on March 15, 2020. In addition to the simple note that turnout rates decreased to a historically low level, we establis...

This paper introduces a real-time, continuous measure of national sentiment that is language-free and thus comparable globally: the positivity of songs that individuals choose to listen to. This is a direct measure of mood that does not require us to pre-specify certain mood-affecting events, nor assume the extent of their impact on investors. We v...

In this study, we explore the implications of institutional investor distraction for earnings management. Our identification approach relies on a firm-level measure of institutional investor distraction that exploits exogenous attention-grabbing shocks to unrelated parts of institutional investors' portfolios. We find that firms with distracted ins...

This paper examines the usefulness of crowdsourced relative to professional forecasts for natural gas storage changes. We find that crowdsourced forecasts are less accurate than professional forecasts on average. We investigate possible reasons for this inferior performance and find evidence of a greater divergence of opinions and a lower incorpora...

We construct a measure of analyst-level distraction based on analysts' exposure to exogenous attention-grabbing events affecting firms under coverage. We find that temporarily distracted analysts achieve lower forecast accuracy, revise forecasts less frequently, and publish less informative forecast revisions relative to non-distracted analysts. Fu...

The COVID-19 shock and its unprecedented financial consequences have brought about vast uncertainty concerning the future of climate actions. We study the cross-section of stock returns during the COVID-19 shock to explore investors' views and expectations about environmental issues. The results show that firms with responsible strategies on enviro...

The COVID-19 shock and its unprecedented financial consequences have brought about vast uncertainty concerning the future of climate actions. We study the cross-section of stock returns during the COVID-19 shock to explore investors' views and expectations about environmental issues. The results show that firms with responsible strategies on enviro...

This paper explores the resilience of French listed companies to the COVID-19 shock. We examine the effect of numerous firm characteristics related to financial flexibility, ownership structure, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility on the stock returns during the COVID-19 shock. Our results show that French companies with more...

This paper explores the resilience of French listed companies to the COVID-19 shock. We examine the effect of numerous firm characteristics related to financial flexibility, ownership structure, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility on the stock returns during the COVID-19 shock. Our results show that French companies with more...

This paper examines whether stock market listing influences the persistence of bank performance across crises. We find that for both publicly and privately held banks, bank performance during the 1998 crisis is a strong predictor of bank performance during the 2007–2008 crisis. While for publicly held banks, the persistence is uniquely driven by bo...

We develop a novel measure of investor sentiment based on the valence of songs that individuals listen to. Our measure of music sentiment captures seasonal and weather-induced mood swings and is associated with a systematic pattern of mispricing correction.

We develop a novel measure of investor sentiment based on the valence of songs that individuals listen to. We show that our measure of music sentiment captures seasonal mood swings. We further document that music sentiment is associated with a systematic pattern of mispricing correction. This relation is stronger for stocks with greater limits to a...

This paper explores the effects of online customer ratings on debt capacity. Using a large sample of Parisian restaurants, we find a positive and economically significant relation between customer ratings and bank debt. We use the locally exogenous variation in customer ratings resulting from the rounding of scores in regression discontinuity tests...

This paper explores the effects of online customer ratings on debt capacity. Using a large sample of Parisian restaurants, we find a positive and economically significant relationship between customer ratings and bank debt. We use the locally exogenous variation in customer ratings resulting from the rounding of scores in regression discontinuity t...

The real effects of long-term investors in listed companies To review the academic literature in finance on long-term investors, the role shareholders alone, in particular institutional investors, is highlighted. Three points are broached: What is a long-term investor? What are the theoretically possible relations between an investor’s investment h...

In this paper, we use academic independent director resignations induced by the introduction of the Regulation 11 prohibiting academics from holding positions in Chinese public companies to examine their contribution to firm value. We document a negative market reaction to the issuance of the Regulation 11 and to the academic director resignations....

While numerous studies investigate the impact of directors' social capital on firm outcomes, it is not clear whether director connectivity has a marginal effect over and above the human capital of directors. Directors connections may be driven by human capital attributes such that high social capital is simply an attribute of high human capital. Th...

In this study, we examine the importance of social capital, the connectivity of directors, while controlling for their human capital. We employ social network analysis to measure a director's connectivity and investigate the relationship between social capital and director appointments to new boards. Results show a positive and significant relation...

The authors find that financial markets have real effects on corporate decisions but that, unfortunately, some temporary market enthusiasm, unrelated to firm intrinsic value, may cause management to make value‐destroying decisions as the result of random and uninformed stock market volatility. In particular, they are prone to making bad decisions a...

This paper develops a firm-level measure of myopic market pricing, which captures the extent to which the market overvalues short-term expected abnormal earnings relative to longer-term ones. The empirical analysis shows that myopically priced firms manage earnings more actively and invest less in R&D. The impact of myopic market pricing is concent...

Bank capital is the cornerstone of bank regulation and is considered a key determinant of a bank's ability to withstand economic shocks. In the area of bank capital regulation, the general view is that more bank capital is better, irrespective of who provides it. In this paper, we investigate whether the investment horizon of bank capital providers...

This paper surveys the literature on the impact of investor horizon on corporate policies. While the desire to encourage long-term investor ownership is shared among managers, boards and policy makers, how greater long-term investor ownership benefits corporate decisions and ultimately firm performance is still under academic investigation. The con...