Hugh Hoikwang Kim  Email: hugh.kim 'at' moore.sc.edu Research Interests: CurriculumVitae (updated: January 2018) Affiliations: Assistant Professor of Finance, SKK Graduate School of Business, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, 2013 ~ 2016 Education: Refereed Publications: 1. "It Pays to Write Well" (with Byoung-Hyoun Hwang), Journal of Financial Economics 124(2): 373-394, May 2017 2. "Time is Money: Rational Life Cycle Inertia and the Delegation of Investment Management", (with Raimond Maurer and Olivia S. Mitchell), Journal of Financial Economics 121(2): 424-447, August 2016. 3. "The Impact of Shrouded Fees: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in the Indian Mutual Funds Market" (with Santosh Anagol), American Economic Review 102(1):576-93, February 2012. 4. “Choosing a Financial Advisor: When and How to Delegate” (with Raimond Maurer, Olivia S. Mitchell) in Financial Decision Making and Retirement Security in Aging World. Eds. P. Brett Hammond, O. S. Mitchell, and S. Utkus. Oxford University Press, 2017 Working Papers: 1. "Economic Policy Uncertainty and Bank Liquidity Creation"(with Allen Berger, Omrane Guedhami, Xinming Li) Abstract: We investigate an important channel through which economic policy uncertainty (EPU) affects real economy – bank liquidity creation. Using almost one million U.S. bank-quarter observations from 1985:Q2 to 2014:Q4, we find that EPU decreases bank liquidity creation through reductions in asset- and off-balance sheet-side liquidity creation, partially offset by increased liability-side liquidity creation. Findings suggest that EPU likely harms the economy at least in part through disrupting the bank liquidity creation process. Results hold across bank size classes, but are somewhat weaker during financial crises, possibly because banks sometimes receive favorable government treatment during crises that helps shield them from uncertainty. 2. "Insurer Underwriting Performance and the Cost of Capital"(with Chia-Chun Chiang, Greg Niehaus) Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of insurers’ underwriting and investment performance on the cost of equity capital. We find insurers’ cost of equity capital increases after they report poor underwriting performance. However, we do not find a negative relation between the cost of equity capital and investment performance. We attribute the difference to investor learning regarding the relatively opaque underlying insurance operations compared to the relatively transparent investment management. 3. "Form and Function in the Social Sciences"(with Byoung-Hyoun Hwang, Kai Wu) Abstract: Ideas proposed in scientific journal articles have the potential to touch many areas of our lives in significant ways. It is thus important that these ideas reach their intended audiences. Here we provide evidence that a lack of clear writing can substantially hamper an article from reaching its intended audience. We use journal articles in the field of financial economics as our setting and we utilize a copy-editing software application that counts the pervasiveness of the most important “writing faults” that make a document harder to read. Our analysis reveals that articles with one more writing fault per one hundred words receive 7% fewer citations. 4. "Pessimistic Fund Managers"(with Yongqiang Chu) Abstract: This paper examines managers’ sentiment revealed in their letters to shareholders and its relation with their future performance, focusing on closed-end funds (CEFs). The result shows that the pessimistic tone in managers’ letters to shareholders predicts superior future risk-adjusted returns and narrows CEFs’ discount. The result is robust to controlling for potential mean-reversion pattern of investment performance. An increase of pessimistic tone by one standard deviation leads to a 3.6% ~ 5.0% increase of risk-adjusted NAV return per annum. The predictive power is more pronounced when the stock market is expected to be less volatile in the future. Analyzing CEFs-held stocks’ return in subsequent earnings announcement dates, we find that CEFs with pessimistic tone are more likely to initiate profitable stock trades. Our result suggests that investment managers’ sentiment revealed in disclosure documents might contain useful information for future performance.5. "Information Spillover of Bailouts" Abstract: This paper examines an information spillover effect of financial institutions’ enrollment in a government bailout program. Analyzing money market funds’ dynamic enrollment status in the U.S. Treasury Temporary Guarantee Program in 2008, this paper finds that funds’ disclosure of enrollment in the bailout program lead to significantly reduced outflows from other non-enrolled funds. Enrolled funds had positive inflows due to stability provided by the government, dominating the negative spillover effect. I address the endogeneity issue of funds’ enrollment status based on survival analysis and an instrumental variable approach. This finding is consistent with the information spillover effect of bailouts; investors extract useful information about financial institution’s underlying stability from their demand for government bailouts.
6. "Inertia of Institutional Investors, Stock Returns, and Performance" (with Mohammad Irani) Abstract: This paper examines a group of stocks not frequently traded by institutional investors, termed as “inertia stocks.” Studying over 28 million institutional investor-stock-quarter level observations, we find that institutional investors do not trade any shares for one out of four companies in their portfolio for at least three months. These stocks are small and illiquid, but size and illiquidity do not fully explain their non-trading tendency. Inertia stocks are likely to underperform in the future, hence undermining the overall performance of institutional investors. Institutional investors make some profit from actively trading other stocks, but the additional profit does not surpass the loss from inertia stocks. The results suggest that institutional investors can increase their overall performance by understanding the adverse effect of inertia stocks. Teaching: Investment Management (Undergrad. Honor/MBA/PMBA), University of South Carolina (2016, 2017, 2018) Dataset and codes:
Revised in January 2018 |