Literature Review向来都是学术英语写作最重要的组成部分之一,应该没有一个留学生没有写过Literature Review。很多同学都曾经为如何写一篇到位的Literature Review犯过愁。它不仅是普通essay的重要组成部分,更是毕业论文中最考验同学们学术分析能力的章节。可以这么说,写不好Literature Review,你的论文就没有打好学术基础,结局必然堪忧。
今天我们就来展示一篇专门的Literature Review范文,本文针对三篇金融article进行一对一的分析,这三篇文章都是讨论各个国家负债体系的论文。并且,我们还会在最后展示一段对三篇article进行对比的分析,以便大家可以熟悉如何对同一主题,不同观点的论文进行分析。希望本篇范文能够为大家提供更多的思路,以便更好地完成相类似的assignment。
接下来就先来介绍一下这三篇学术论文的标题和作者:
1. Three Articles
The following are the recent and typical articles in law and finance literature.
A. Paper 1, ‘Indirect costs of financial distress and bankruptcy law: Evidence from trade credit and sales’ (Sautner and Vladimirov, 2017).
B. Paper 2, ‘Debt enforcement, investment, and risk taking across countries’ (Favara et al, 2018).
C. Paper3, ‘Creditor rights, financial health, and corporate investment efficiency’ (González, 2018).
This seminar paper will mainly focus on these three papers about their empirical designs to investigate the effects of debt enforcement of financial distressed firms. The target of our research is to clarify that whether a strong or a weak debt enforcement benefits the distressed firms, or neither of them.
2. Literature Review of the Paper 1
2.1. Introduction
This paper is written by Zacharias Sautner and Vladimir Vladimirov, who are from Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and University of Amsterdam, respectively.
The empirical result of the paper shows that the stricter debt enforcement can help finance-distress firms to reduce the indirect cost of financial distress by increasing access to trade credit and promoting the customer sales in firms.This paper contributes to the recent debate for regulators and academics about benefits of creditors’ friendly debt enforcement.
2.2. Summary
The writers document that stronger debt enforcement reducing the indirect distress cost through two empirical approaches. The first one is to employ massive panel data of firms from 40 countries, and the debt enforcement index including multiple dimensions of bankruptcy laws. This cross-country analysis indicates that the trade credit is 1.6% higher when firms with the same level of default probability are from a country with stronger debt enforcement.
Also find that sales to assets are 6.3% higher when finance-distress firms with the same levelof default probability in a strong debt enforcement country. The further finding is that firms are more likely to achieve out-of-court restructuring and access alternative choice of funding during the distressed period in such strong debt enforcement countries.
The second approach, which is in order to mitigate the potential bias of unobserved country effects, applies a difference-in-difference (DID) model that investigates the changes in the firms’ performance after the debt enforcement becoming stronger by the US bankruptcy reform in 2005. This approach finds that the changes in bankruptcy reform reduce the probability of firms’ bankruptcy filing.
These results are consistent with the cross-country analysis and show that the high default probability firm gain more trade credit and sales after the reform in 2005 compared to the period before 2005. Furthermore, this DID model is used for a robustness check that analysis the effects of bankruptcy reform in Brazil in 2005 and in Germany in 2012, respectively. The robustness check design will be discussed later in the following section.
2.3. Discussion
The identical design of this paper is to employ the different fixed effects in the empirical approaches, since the data consist of firms from 40 countries for 20 years period. This design takes the different fixed effects including firm-fixed effects, country-industry effects and country-year effects in order to eliminate the potential endogeneity bias, which may affect the debt enforcement level and the indirect distress costs.
There are two potential arguments in this paper. The first one is about the accuracy of debt enforcement index which is exploited in the empirical approaches. For example, the value of debt enforcement of India is 0 (range between 0 to 1, 0 for weak and 1 for strong). One reason why we argue the accuracy of the index is that it is less likely for India has no protection to creditors, as India published Enterprise Bankruptcy Law in 1986 and had the reform in 2006.
Further, the debt enforcement is high related to the bankruptcy law shaped by economic, political, cultural and legal characters, and it varies overtime. As a consequence, the mean of 0 of debt enforcement for India from year 2002 to 2016 seems less likely. By contrast, the value of 0 for India, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore have perfect debt enforcement with the value of 1 of debt enforcement.
However, firms have much lower default probability of 0.05 in Indonesia comparing to Singapore of 0.104. These figures might reject an assumption that the strong debt enforcement reduces the default probability of firms. My suggestion for solving the potential accuracy issue is that running robust checks using an empirical DID model for the countries of Indonesia and Singapore, alternatively, taking an easy way just to tick off these figures in the cross-country regression. Similarly, González(2018) exclude the country of Singapore in cross-section regression due to a lack of data to some firms.
The second potential argument is that it is not a sufficient for authors to choose reforms in Germany and Brazil to run the robust test. On the one hand, one event window which Sautner and Vladimirov choose for their DID empirical model cover the period from 2010 to 2014. Then the robust check of Germany shows that the reform in Germany affects positively on both trade credit and customer sales.
Coincidentally, Germany has weakened the legal protection of creditor rights in 2008 (González, 2018). As a consequence, it is ambiguous that the increase in both trade credit and customer sales is caused by either strengthening debt enforcement in 2012, or weakening debt enforcement in 2008, or both of them.
On the other hand, the results of the robust check in Brazil are ambiguous and cannot find corresponding results with the DID model of US bankruptcy reform. In Brazil, firms located in municipalities with less court congestion obtain a larger increase of secured loans, and a larger increase in investment and output after the reform compared with the years before (Ponticelliand Alencar, 2016).
Since Sautner and Vladimirov have not included this endogenous variable of court congestion in the DID model, the rotationally biased and ambiguous results are not a sufficient robust test. Remember the last argument about the extreme values of debt enforcement for some countries, we recommend that choosing these countries for the robust test using DIDmodel.
3. Literature Review ofthe Paper 2
3.1. Introduction
The article is written by Giovanni Favara, Erwan Morellec, Enrique Schroth and Philip Valta. And the argument focuses on the prospect of the effect of the imperfect debt enforcement contracts in default on conflicts between debtholders and shareholders, investment and risk when a leveraged firm has high distress probability. Finally, they find that firms’ default probability determines the relation of investment and risk on debt enforcement.
3.2. Summary
To prove the authors’ prediction on the argument, this article make a prediction that the shareholders’ payoffs are affected by the imperfect debt enforcement which leads the corporate decisions close to default and the authors design a model with the dependent variables which are investment, asset growth and risks.
There are three main results refers to the empirical analysis. First, the investment has the negative relation with the perfect debt enforcement procedures. Second, the asset grows slower in strict debt enforcement countries. Finally, the risk would be higher in strict debt enforcement countries.
To strengthen the results from the last regression, the authors introduce the bankruptcy code reforms and employ a DID regression to compare the changes on firms’ behaviour before and after reform. Furthermore, a change on debt renegotiability in the U.S. 1978Bankruptcy Reform Act (BRA) is used to test the sample period. As a result,after BRA, both shareholders and creditors are more attracted by debt renegotiation.
Generally speaking, the paper analysis the effect that the imperfect debt enforcement on conflicts of debtholder and shareholder, investment and risk taking in firms. The authors find that there is a firm-specific probability that lead the relation between debt enforcement, investment and risk stronger. And results show that when debt enforcement is weaker, it decreases the debtholder-shareholder conflicts, stimulate firms invest more, and have less risk compare with a strict debt enforcement environment.
3.3. Discussion
The first strength of the article is the design of the cross-country model. This model that includes the factors of investment, asset sales and risk taking is based on the effect of the debt enforcement to the shareholders’ payoff in default. In addition, this model cites three former theses about underinvestment theories, risk-shifting and the debt enforcement in default.
Additionally, the article collects a wide range of data, which includes 18,602 firms in 41 countries to test their predictions. Moreover, to proof their test, the authors use the debt enforcement index, which is the survey conducted by Djankov, Hart, McLiesh, and Shleifer (DHMS, 2008). This index is the professional in its domain and cited 860 times.
Another benefit is that this article uses fixed effects to mitigate the empirical challenges which are that the firms do not select the bankruptcy processes randomly. Moreover, there are other observable or unobservable channels that may be correlated with investment and risk.
Firm effects and the effects related to the characteristics of the country control the confounding and fixed endogeneity of the firms’ sample selection. These effects include country fixed effects (ICFE) and firm fixed effects (FFE) in the regression.
There are two potential arguments when explaining. First one is that the authors measure the risk by computing the EBITDA-to-asset ratio. Since the EBITDA-to-asset ratio is backward-looking, it may neglect some risks related to the shareholders’ operation and their investment decisions. In other words, the risk results may contain less risk than reality, and because of the positive coefficient, the real beta may be higher than the beta in these results.
As a consequence, the empirical results in column 4 of panel B in table 6 might be significant, instead of all insignificant in the article. Therefore, to fix this bias, we can introduce a variable which captures the risk in shareholders’ operations and investment decisions and has no correlation with other variables. To solve this potential argument, we suggest adding another volatility of net income to debt ratio to the risk.
As the net income can capture the effect of firms’ investment decision and the ratio may reflect the operation. The further advice is that it may be better to weight these four volatilities. For instance, the asset volatility may be more important in the total risk and should take higher weigh, while the idiosyncratic volatility may be less important and take lower weight.
The second one is about the research questions. The authors want to figure out that the imperfect debt enforcement has impacts on shareholder-debtholder conflicts, investment and risk. However, they focus on the relationship for the debt enforcement to investment, asset growth and risk-shifting. Also, the authors have not shown any evidence that the imperfect debt enforcement reduces shareholder-debtholders conflicts.
4. Comparison of Paper3 to Paper 1 and Paper 2
4.1 Introduction
Paper3 investigates the influence of debt enforcement on investment efficiency interms of financially healthy firms and financially distressed firms by using difference to difference analysis and cross-sectional model. The results suggest that the investment efficiency is positively affected by the debt enforcement level, particularly in finance-healthy firms.
Whereas theinvestment efficiency for firms in default is improved less, and even worse. Furthermore, the finding also explains that the effect of debt enforcement on investment efficiency is more in overinvestment than in underinvestment in finance-heath firms and distressed firms.
4.2 Comparison
One of the empirical thinking of paper 3 is it excludes crisis years of 2008 and 2009 from the regressions to control the large decrease in investment opportunities over this period. Otherwise, this effect may rise up a concern of simultaneity bias, since the financial crisis affects greatly both the amount of corporate investment and the firms’ level of financial distress.
By contrast, paper 1 and paper 2 employ the year fixed effect in the regression to absorb time effects, instead of excluding the crisis period. Paper 1 selects the sample period from 2002 to 2016, and includes year fixed effects to absorb the time specific effects, e.g. global economic conditions. While paper 2 includes the years of 2000 to 2010, and applies the year fixed effects to control for time varying factors.
It needs to be emphasized that the time fixed effect captures the constant effects over time, yet the financial crisis may be effective only for a couple of years after 2007 rather than the whole sample period. As a consequence, excluding the crisis period probably is more practical and accurate, comparing to the time fixed effect applied in the first two papers.
Another characteristic design is that paper 3 take a concern about the changes increditors’ rights during the sample period. In total eleven countries had reforms in creditors’ protection over the period of 2003 to 2007, eight of them started before the onset of the financial shock and three after it. The fact is that the three reforms in creditors’ rights after the crisis increase a concern on the bias about changes in creditors’ protection and its dependence on the financial shock.
As a consequence, these three countries which are Chile, Sweden and Germany are excluded from the regression in paper 3. While paper 1 and paper 2 construct the debt enforcement index according to 16 individual indicators and concern without the changes in the creditors’ rights during theperiod.
The fact is that paper 1 chooses the German reform to run the DID regression for the robust test and both paper 1 and 2 employ these three in the cross-country regression. Since Chile and Sweden have an enhancement in the creditors’ protection, it may lead a positive bias of coefficient. By contrast, weakening the creditors’ rights in Germany is more likely to have a negative bias for empirical results.
今天为大家介绍了一篇非典型性的Literature Review,区别于通常Dissertation中的review of literatures,本文对于三篇专注于研究各个国家债务政策的empirical analysis进行了深度的分析。我们写这篇范文的目的就是希望给同学们提供一个深入分析一篇article或者一个观点的范本,这样大家就能以此为基础写好自己的literature review了。