Foundation Award for Research

I. Focus of Research

My research focuses on empirical corporate finance, disclosure, market efficiency, and commodity markets. A few recent publications highlight my work in these areas. The first essay, a co-authored manuscript, provides new evidence on the relationship between voluntary sustainability reporting and firm value. Sustainability reporting initially hurts firm value. However, this effect becomes positive over time as the valuation of reporting firms increases relative to non-reporting firms. The fact that the relationship between reporting and firm value is increasingly positive over time, regardless of industry, suggests that sustainability reporting is becoming a business norm. The second article, a co-authored manuscript, provides new evidence on the role of private information in determining corporate derivatives use by studying how markets respond to announcements of changes in derivatives positions by gold-mining firms. By examining dynamic risk management in an asymmetric information setting, our study provides new insights into (a) the relation between hedging policy and the firm's value and (b) the practice of selective hedging. A third article, a co-authored project, examines how a firm's dividend initiation announcement (i.e., positive news) influences stock prices of seemingly unrelated firms within the same metropolitan statistical area (MSA). We find that dividend-paying firms located in areas with a higher percentage of dividend clientele experience a positive co-movement reaction when a seemingly unrelated firm within the same MSA announces a dividend initiation, consistent with the positive-investor-attention hypothesis. Finally, in a sole-authored work titled "Discretionary Hedging Disclosures and Corporate Governance," I examine the governance implications of a firm's information environment in the context of discretionary hedging disclosures made by oil and gas companies. Firms with poor governance relative to industry peers are more likely to disclose hedging changes voluntarily and do so more frequently.

II. Title and year of major projects

Menkveld, A.J., …, Hoelscher, S.A., et al. (2024, forthcoming). Non-standard Errors. Journal of Finance.

Fišar et al. (2024). Reproducibility in Management Science. Management Science, 70(3), 1343-1356, https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03556.

Friske, W., Hoelscher, S.A., & Nikolov A. (2023). The impact of voluntary sustainability reporting on firm value: Insights from signaling theory. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 51, 372-392, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-022-00879-2.

Meek, A.C., & Hoelscher, S.A. (2023). Day-of-the-Week Effect: Petroleum and Petroleum Products. Cogent Economics & Finance, 11(1), 1-19, DOI:10.1080/23322039.2023.2213876.

Crain, S.J., Hoelscher, S.A., & Jones, J.S. (2020). Fixing the fix for silver and gold. ACRN Journal of Finance and Risk Perspectives, 9, 177-197, DOI: https://doi.org/10.35944/jofrp.2020.9.1.013.

Fernando, C.S., Hoelscher, S.A., & Raman, V. (2020). The informativeness of derivatives use: Evidence from corporate disclosure through public announcements. Journal of Banking & Finance, 114, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbankfin.2019.105731.

Hoelscher, S.A. (2020). Voluntary Hedging Disclosure and Corporate Governance. Review of Accounting and Finance, 19(1), 5-29, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/RAF-01-2018-0001.

Ederington, L.H., Fernando, C.S., Hoelscher, S.A., Lee, T.K., & Linn, S.C. (2019). Characteristics of petroleum product prices: A survey. Journal of Commodity Markets, 14, 1-15, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomm.2018.09.001.

Ederington, L.H., Fernando, C.S., Hoelscher, S.A., Lee, T.K., & Linn, S.C. (2019). A review of the evidence on the relation between crude oil prices and petroleum product prices. Journal of Commodity Markets, 13, 1-15, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomm.2018.09.002.

Hoelscher, S.A., Friske, W.M., & Friske, K.B. (2019). Do Managers Really Mean What They Say? An Analysis of Voluntary Oil and Gas Hedging Announcements. Oil, Gas & Energy Quarterly, 67(3), 403-416.

Black, J.R., Hoelscher, S.A., & Stock, D. (2018). How a Credit Enhancement Affects Bond Liquidity and Default Risk of the Firm. The Journal of Fixed Income, 28(3), 24-37, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3905/jfi.2018.28.3.024.

Uysal, V., & Hoelscher, S. (2018). Local Clientele: Geography and Comovement of Stock Returns. Review of Behavioral Finance, 10(3), 231-251, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/RBF-07-2017-0071.

III. Future directions of research

I plan to further my research in corporate finance, commodity markets, and disclosures. I strive to maintain a pipeline of working papers and manuscripts in progress that address important and topical research questions related to these areas. These manuscripts include projects on sustainability reporting, dynamic market efficiency, changes to the platinum and palladium price fix regime, and the use of social network analysis to analyze research influence across several areas of the academy. Specific to sustainability disclosures, we are using textual analysis techniques to examine the content of sustainability reports using GRI Standards and the relationship between this information and firm value (or performance). The informational content of sustainability reports compared to the information provided is a relatively under-studied area, and one could argue that it is more important to understand. Therefore, this study will follow up on Friske, Hoelscher, and Nikolov (2023) by analyzing the sustainability report’s relationship with firm value (or performance) at a much more granular level. Ultimately, the findings of this research should provide a unique insight into sustainability reports and their impact on an organization’s operations, which is of value to all stakeholders, including the businesses themselves.

IV. Topics related to your research and of interest to the broad University Community, for which you are available for presentations and/or consultations. 

• General finance
• Energy markets
• Commodity markets
• Investments.