Stock price informativeness,cross-listings,and investment decisions

We show that a cross-listing enables firms to obtain, from the stock market, more precise information about the value of their growth opportunities. Thus, cross-listed firms make better investment decisions and trade at a premium. This theory of cross-listings implies that the sensitivity of investment to stock prices is larger for cross-listed firms. Moreover, the cross-listing premium is positively related to the size of growth opportunities and negatively related to the quality of managerial information. The sensitivity of the premium to the size of growth opportunities increases with factors that strengthen the impact of the cross-listing on price informativeness.     

A theory of risk disclosure

In this paper, we consider the price effects of risk disclosure. We develop a model in which investors are uncertain about the variance of a firm’s cash flows and the firm releases an imperfect signal regarding this variance. In our model, uncertainty over the riskiness of a firm’s cash flows leads to a variance uncertainty premium in its price. We demonstrate that risk disclosure decreases the firm’s cost of capital by reducing this premium and that the market response to risk disclosure is small when the expected level of risk is high. Moreover, we find that firms acquire and disclose more risk information when their cash flow risk is greater than expected. Finally, we demonstrate that in a multi-asset setting, only risk disclosure concerning systematic risks will impact the cost of capital.     

Fire sale acquisitions: Myth vs. reality

We provide empirical evidence on the conjecture that in economic crises, firms could be forced to sell at deep discounts, or fire sale prices. Using the conventional stock price near the announcement date, we find instead distressed firms in crisis periods receive a 30% higher offer premium than distressed firms in normal periods; they also receive a 34% higher premium than non-distressed firms in crisis periods. Acquirers also do not gain, at announcement and over the long-term. Acquirers, however, may perceive they realize fire sale discounts if the reference is the targets’ highest price in the previous 52 weeks.     

中国A股市场存在品质溢价吗?

本文从价值投资的核心理念出发,基于盈利性、成长性、安全性、分红能力四个维度构建复合品质指标,并通过分析品质溢价在中国A股市场中的存在性来探讨价值投资的可行性和有效性。实证结果表明:(1)中国A股市场上存在显著为正的品质溢价,且品质溢价在控制其他相关变量后依然稳健存在;(2)高品质股票具有大市值、高成长特征,且品质溢价在大市值、高盈利的分组中更加显著;(3)品质溢价在不同时期下均能稳定存在;(4)中国A股市场上的品质溢价并非源于高风险承担,相反,由正向反馈偏好、博彩偏好、套利限制引起的错误定价有助于解释品质溢价。本文结论佐证了价值投资策略在中国A股市场的可行性和有效性,为培育良好投资理念、抑制过度投机、促进中国股市合理健康发展等提供了经验证据。     

Can security analyst forecasts predict gold returns?

This paper examines whether security analyst earnings forecasts for firms primarily operating in the gold market can be utilised to predict returns on the price of gold. We first demonstrate that analysts are at least in part basing their earnings forecasts for gold firms on the return expectations of the gold commodity market. We show this by providing evidence that analyst coverage impounds not only market-wide and industry information, but also gold price information for these firms — as measured via its impact on stock return synchronicity. We then examine if the difference between forecast and observed earnings for these firms has predictive value for changes in the price of gold whilst controlling for a number of macroeconomic factors. We find that this difference does hold predictive power, but also has some limitations. However, there is potential for it to be used as an additional variable within gold forecasting frameworks.     

Institutional Investor Participation and Stock Market Anomalies

This paper investigates the impact of institutional trading volume on stock market anomalies. The paper proposes a measure that evaluates the percentage of total trading volume of a stock accounted for by institutional trades. The empirical analyses using a large sample of firms from 1980–2005 provide strong evidence that the strength of stock market anomalies such as price momentum, post‐earnings announcement drift, the value premium, and the investment anomaly is decreasing in institutional trading volume. Additionally, the effects of institutional trading volume are stronger than those of institutional ownership, the major measure of institutional investor participation in the finance literature. These findings suggest that institutional trading significantly improves stock price efficiency.     

The market premium for the option to close: evidence from Australian gold mining firms

This study shows the market value of gold mining firms contains a premium for the option to close. The sample uses 41 gold mining producers listed on the Australian Stock Exchange from 1987 to 2013. The premium of the market price over the present value of cash flows is isolated and a pooled cross‐sectional regression tests the degree of association between that premium and theoretical option premiums. The results show market prices incorporate a premium reflecting the option to temporarily close operations. The magnitude of the option premium to close depends on whether firms are out or in the money options.     

Model Uncertainty, Limited Market Participation, and Asset Prices

We demonstrate that limited participation can arise endogenouslyin the presence of model uncertainty and heterogeneous uncertainty-averseinvestors. When uncertainty dispersion among investors is small,full participation prevails in equilibrium. Equity premium isrelated to the average uncertainty among investors and a conglomeratetrades at a price equal to the sum of its single-segment components.When uncertainty dispersion is large, investors with high uncertaintychoose not to participate in the stock market, resulting inlimited market participation. When limited participation occurs,participation rate and equity premium can decrease in uncertaintydispersion and a conglomerate trades at a discount.     

Long‐Run Risk and Its Implications for the Equity Premium Puzzle: New Evidence from a Multivariate Framework

This paper investigates the empirical evidence of long‐run risk and its implications for the equity premium puzzle. We find that the long‐run risk model is generally weakly identified and that standard inferences tend to underestimate the uncertainty of long‐run risk. We extend the LM‐type test of Ma and Nelson (2010) that remains valid under weak identification to the bivariate VARMA‐GARCH model of consumption and dividend growth. The results cast doubt on the validity of long‐run risk as an explanation for the equity premium puzzle. We also evaluate the approach of Bansal, Kiku, and Yaron (2007a), which extracts long‐run risk by regressing consumption growth and its volatility on predictive variables. The results using the Bonferroni Q‐test of Campbell and Yogo (2006) suggest that consumption and dividend growth are generally unpredictable by the price‐dividend ratio and risk‐free rate. This casts doubt on the validity of the BKY approach.     

Market Making Contracts,Firm Value,and the IPO Decision

We examine the effects of secondary market liquidity on firm value and the IPO decision. Competitive aftermarket liquidity provision is associated with reduced welfare and a discounted secondary market price that can dissuade IPOs. The competitive market fails in particular for firms or at times when uncertainty regarding fundamental value and asymmetric information are large in combination. In these cases, firm value and welfare are improved by a contract where the firm engages a designated market maker to enhance liquidity. Such contracts represent a market solution to a market imperfection, particularly for small, growth firms.     

How does investor relations disclosure affect analysts' forecasts?

We study the relationship between investor relations disclosure and analyst forecast properties in Australian firms, a setting dominated by small firms with limited analyst coverage and requiring continuous disclosure of price sensitive information. We find increasing disclosure in the time period investigated is associated with greater accuracy in firms disclosing fewer items. Disclosure was unrelated to forecast dispersion, possibly due to the low analyst following. In periods of uncertainty, the investor relations awards effectively discriminated quality from quantity of disclosure. These findings highlight the importance of active communication with analysts, particularly in firms providing less disclosure and during periods of uncertainty.     

The Pollution Premium

This paper studies the asset pricing implications of industrial pollution. A long-short portfolio constructed from firms with high versus low toxic emission intensity within an industry generates an average annual return of 4.42%, which remains significant after controlling for risk factors. This pollution premium cannot be explained by existing systematic risks, investor preferences, market sentiment, political connections, or corporate governance. We propose and model a new systematic risk related to environmental policy uncertainty. We use the growth in environmental litigation penalties to measure regime change risk and find that it helps price the cross section of emission portfolios' returns.     

Rare disaster risk and the expected equity risk premium

Consistent with the predictions of rare disaster models, we find that a proxy for the time‐varying probability of rare disasters helps to explain fluctuations in expectations of the equity risk premium. Our proxy for disaster risk is a recently developed measure of global political instability, and the expected market risk premium is from Value Line analysts' expected stock returns. Consistent with long‐run risk models, uncertainty about expected GDP growth and expected consumption growth is also significantly positively related to the expected market risk premium. We obtain similar results when we use the earnings–price ratio and the dividend–price ratio as proxies for the expected market risk premium.     

Did the value premium survive the subprime credit crisis?

We provide evidence that value stocks significantly underperformed growth stocks during the subprime credit crisis, despite a positive value premium before the crisis. The reversal in the value premium concentrates in financially constrained firms, suggesting it was due to the adverse influence of the crisis rather than confounding effects. These findings are robust to alternative financial constraint proxies and asset pricing models. The observation that value stocks are vulnerable to losses during extreme downturns like the crisis is consistent with them being riskier than growth stocks. Our findings have implications for the academic debate on the underlying cause of the value premium and for investors on the profitability of value investing strategies.     

The cyclical behavior of the risk of value strategy: Evidence from Taiwan

Using Taiwanese equity data, we find that value-minus-growth strategies (HML) earn significantly positive expected returns, and that the value spread in B/M is widened following a financial crisis. Value firms disinvest more than growth firms in bad times. The HML betas are higher for periods of higher expected equity premium, higher market volatility, and lower GDP growth. Furthermore, while the HML betas are negative and positive for the pre- and post-crisis sample, respectively, the value (growth) betas increase (decrease) from pre- to post-crisis period. Also, the beta-premium sensitivity is positive for HML and value stocks, and negative for growth stocks.     

Why Is Long‐Horizon Equity Less Risky? A Duration‐Based Explanation of the Value Premium

We propose a dynamic risk‐based model that captures the value premium. Firms are modeled as long‐lived assets distinguished by the timing of cash flows. The stochastic discount factor is specified so that shocks to aggregate dividends are priced, but shocks to the discount rate are not. The model implies that growth firms covary more with the discount rate than do value firms, which covary more with cash flows. When calibrated to explain aggregate stock market behavior, the model accounts for the observed value premium, the high Sharpe ratios on value firms, and the poor performance of the CAPM.     

Leaders,followers, and equity risk premiums in booms and busts

We study an investment problem in which two asymmetric firms face competition and the regime characterizing the economic condition follows a Markov switching process. We derive the value functions and investment thresholds of the leader and follower. The option value of regime uncertainty is found to be quite important for the investment decision of firms. We also show the relationship between the equity risk premium and the economic cycle that has not been done in previous studies, which proxy economic conditions by the level of demand or other state variables.     

Pricing deviation,misvaluation comovement,and macroeconomic conditions

We measure an individual stock’s misvaluation based on the deviation of its price from predicted intrinsic value. Both under- and overvalued stocks identified by this misvaluation measure exhibit greater valuation uncertainty and arbitrage difficulty, and the misvaluation measure strongly predicts stock returns incremental to size, book-to-market ratio, past returns, and various return anomalies. Based on the misvaluation measure, we form a misvaluation factor and find that stock return covariances with this factor possess significant and robust return predictive power. We further show that the misvaluation factor predicts future economic conditions, providing additional insight into the real effect of systematic misvaluation in the stock market.     

Dividend premium: Are dividend-paying stocks worth more?

This paper reports that the relation between dividend payout and firm value is positive. Panel data regressions suggest that the dividend premium for firms' equity is 17.4% and the dividend premium for firms' assets is 7.1%. The tests using propensity score matching methodology report a lower – but still positive and statistically significant – dividend premium: 12.5% for equity and 6.1% for assets. Thus, stock prices of dividend payers are greater by 12.5% or 17.4% on average (depending on methodology) compared to those of nonpayers. We find that policy-related economic uncertainty and the proportion of firms paying dividends explain more than half of the variation in dividend premium for assets.     

Price Differentials between Dual‐class Stocks: Voting Premium or Liquidity Discount?

A series of papers suggest that private benefits can explain the price differentials between stock classes carrying different voting rights. However, in Denmark the premium is negative for several firms over long periods. This indicates that in the absence of takeover contests, where the voting right becomes crucial in a transfer of corporate control, the price differential in stock classes with identical dividend rights is more likely to reflect investors’ liquidity risks. Whereas the existing literature tends to focus primarily on corporate control‐related explanations, this paper documents the impact of liquidity on price spreads between dual‐class shares.