Published Work
joint work with Prof. A. Ebrahimnejad. 2018
The Iranian pension system has faced multiple challenges and significant deficits over the past years. This has made the pension system reform a top priority and improving the governance of pension funds is increasingly recognized as an important element of such reform. This paper highlights the main differences between the effectiveness of internal and external corporate governance mechanisms in corporations and pension funds. We argue that the typical external governance mechanisms that help align the interests of managers and main stakeholders, namely shareholders, in corporations, are not applicable in the context of pension funds. As a result, the governance of pension funds mostly relies on internal governance mechanisms and, in particular, the board of trustees. We offer tentative thoughts and solutions about the structure of the board of trustees and other internal governance mechanisms.
Working Papers
Working Paper, 2023
In this work, I explore whether a firm looking for a takeover target can use a target firm’s non-executive information as a signal of the potential worthiness of the acquisition. Specifically, I use the stock purchased by rank-and-file employees in the employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) of the target firm as the signal. Utilizing a novel dataset of all public target firms’ ESPP purchases since 2000, I find that the acquirer’s abnormal return at merger and acquisition (M&A) announcements increases with the target firm’s non-executive ESPP purchase ratio. Furthermore, acquisition synergies, measured as the acquirer-target combined cumulative abnormal returns at M&A announcements, also increase with the target’s non-executive ESPP purchase ratio. However, I do not find a significant effect of the target’s ESPP purchase ratio on the deal premium. Overall, my findings suggest that valuable information held by non-executives of a target firm, prior to the M&A announcement, to some extent serves as a credible signal for acquisition outcomes.
Transmission of U.S. Monetary Shocks and Policy Trade-offs in Open Economies
Working paper, 2020
(The draft is available upon request.)
Klein and Shambaugh (2015) explore the impossible trinity by analyzing how interest rate transmission differs across countries with varying exchange rate systems and capital flow restrictions. They argue that the significant differences in transmission coefficients among these groups support the trilemma. However, the accuracy of their results depends on the equality of covariances between unobservable factors and interest rate changes across the compared groups. To address potential bias and the global influence of the U.S. economy, this study replaces base-country interest rate changes with exogenous U.S. shocks estimated around FOMC meetings. The findings reveal that mid-open capital control systems can effectively limit the transmission of U.S. monetary shocks, with countries using floating exchange rate systems being less impacted compared to those with fixed systems. Unlike Klein and Shambaugh, this study does not find evidence that semi-fixed exchange rate systems offer similar protection, but it confirms that long-term capital controls can shield countries from external shocks.