Is presidential cycle in security returns merely a reflection of business conditions?

We confirm previous findings that both large-cap and small-cap stock returns in the US exhibit a presidential cycle pattern, i.e. returns are significantly higher in the last 2 years than in the first 2 years of the presidential term. We attempt to examine if this presidential cycle pattern can be explained away by the traditional business cycle proxies, namely the term spread (TERM), dividend yield (D/P), and default spread (DEF). Our motivation arises from the political business cycle theory that monetary and fiscal measures undertaken by presidents are usually translated into the business cycle. We find that the presidential cycle has explanatory power beyond business conditions proxies shown to be important in explaining stock returns. Tests of slope parameters show that stock returns are less sensitive to only the D/P during the last 2 years of the presidential term. The presidential cycle effect prevails even after controlling for the party in power and the incumbent versus nonincumbent presidents.     

Testing and Aggressive Investment Strategy Using Value Line Ranks: A Reply

This paper answers the comments of readers of our earlier paper. Additional insight is gained by adding recent data to show the effect of following Value Line Investment Service recommendations in active stock market trading over the years 1974–81. We show that Value Line makes a statistically significant contribution, which cannot be explained by the Beta risk factor. We offer our results as an unexplained divergence from the Efficient Market Hypothesis, but with the tentative hypothesis that investment timing (i.e., the fact that the Efficient Market Hypothesis does not operate instantaneously) may explain much of the abnormality.     

Political geography and stock returns: The value and risk implications of proximity to political power

We show that political geography has a pervasive effect on the cross-section of stock returns. We collect election results over a 40-year period and use a political alignment index (PAI) of each state's leading politicians with the ruling (presidential) party to proxy for local firms’ proximity to political power. Firms whose headquarters are located in high PAI states outperform those located in low PAI states, both in terms of raw returns, and on a risk-adjusted basis. Overall, although we cannot rule out indirect political connectedness advantages as an explanation of the PAI effect, our results are consistent with the notion that proximity to political power has stock return implications because it reflects firms’ exposure to policy risk.     

Original-Issue Systematic and Default Risk Pricing Efficiency of Speculative-Grade Bonds

We investigate whether primary market, original‐issue risk premiums on speculative‐grade debt are justified solely by expected defaults or whether these risk premiums also include other orthogonal risk components. Studies of secondary‐market holding period risk and return have hypothesized that risk premiums on speculative‐grade debt may be explained by bond‐ and equity‐related systematic risk and possibly other types of risk. Using an actuarial approach that considers contemporaneous correlation between default frequency and severity and first‐order serial correlation, we cannot reject the hypothesis that the entire original‐issue risk premium can be explained by expected default losses. This suggests that speculative‐grade bond primary markets efficiently price default risk and that other types of risk are priced as coincident as opposed to orthogonal risks.     

Pushing the future back: The impact of policy uncertainty on the market pricing of future earnings

We examine whether policy uncertainty triggered by presidential elections pushes the future back by reducing the extent to which current prices reflect information about future earnings. We estimate future earnings response coefficients (FERCs) for the years 1975–2013, a period that covers ten presidential elections. We find that FERCs are significantly lower (by 11.8%) during presidential election years compared to other years. Additional analyses using pseudo election years, ex‐ante polls, contract prices from the Iowa Electronic Political Market, and cross‐sectional firm characteristics provide corroborating evidence that the lower FERCs during election years are related to policy uncertainty. We also investigate potential explanations for the lower FERCs during election years. We find that the lower FERCs relate to forecasting difficulty rather than to changes in the discount rate or in the amount of noise trading. Finally, we find that market prices move toward future earnings to a greater degree during presidential election years compared with other years once the policy uncertainty is resolved. A trading strategy based on this drift yields significant abnormal returns. Overall, we contribute to the literature by providing the first empirical evidence that shocks to policy uncertainty influence the pricing of earnings information.     

Resolving the Presidential Puzzle

Many financial economists are puzzled by the fact that stock returns are higher under Democratic than Republican presidencies. In this paper, we test whether this return differential is explained by risk using a conditional version of the Fama and French (1993) model that allows risk to vary across political cycles. We find that the presidential puzzle can be explained when risk is properly taken into account. Much of the return differential can be attributed to the fact that Democratic presidencies are associated with higher market and default risk premiums than their Republican counterparts.     

Do industries matter in explaining stock returns and asset-pricing anomalies?

Industry returns cannot be explained fully by well-known asset pricing models. This study reveals that common factors extracted from industry returns carry significant risk premiums that go beyond the explanatory power of size, book-to-market (BM) ratios, and momentum. In particular, this study shows that (1) the small-firm effect is significant only for firms whose market capitalization is below their industry average; (2) the BM effect is an intra-industry phenomenon; (3) a one-year momentum effect is significant only for firms whose BM ratio is smaller than the industry average and limited to non-January months; and (4) there is seasonality in all effects that cannot be explained by risk-based asset-pricing models. Neither rational nor behavioral theories alone can explain industry returns, and it is perhaps too hasty to attribute asset pricing anomalies to a single driving force.     

The information content of R&D reductions

An extensive literature shows that R&D intensities and increases are positively related to firm performance, but little research examines the valuation of R&D reductions. This paper fills the void by studying long-term performance following R&D reductions. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, large R&D cuts are associated with positive future stock returns. This return drift cannot be explained by asset pricing factors, including R&D intensities and R&D increases. We explore two potential economic motives behind R&D reductions: R&D spillover and firm life cycle. We show that operating performance deteriorates immediately before R&D reductions but exhibits no abnormal pattern afterward. While firm growth falls substantially and variability in profitability reduces, firms with low or declining investment opportunities and mature firms outperform. These findings are inconsistent with the spillover hypothesis, but support the life cycle story that firms attempt to resolve overinvestment in R&D that arises over the course of firm life cycle.     

Improved inference for fund alphas using high-dimensional cross-sectional tests

The traditional fund-by-fund alpha inference suffers from various econometric problems (e.g., cross-sectional independence assumption, lack of power, time-invariant coefficient assumption, multiple-hypothesis-testing). Recognizing the panel nature of fund industries, we tailor four high-dimensional cross-sectional tests to shed light into both the zero-alpha hypothesis and ratio of non-zero alphas. Particularly, we augment Gagliardini et al. (2016) with a time-varying alpha estimator. Our results reject the zero-alpha joint hypothesis as the statistical significance of alphas is too high to be explained by luck. After controlling for luck, our empirical studies show that the power enhancement helps to identify a large portion of significant fund alphas, which cannot be achieved using the usual Wald test. Meanwhile, the time-varying approach shows that fund alphas diverge during the late 2000s Global Financial Crisis, which cannot be observed using the time-invariant model. Overall, relative to the literature, we draw a more accurate and complete picture, and provide several powerful tools for future research.     

Do loan loss reserves behave like capital? Evidence from recent bank failures

Regulatory capital guidelines allow for loan loss reserves to be added back as capital. Our evidence suggests that the influence of loan loss reserves added back as regulatory capital (hereafter referred to as “add-backs”) on bank risk cannot be explained by either economic principles underlying the notion of capital or accounting principles underlying the recording of reserves. Specifically, we observe that, in sharp contrast to the economic notion of capital as a buffer against bank failure risk, add-backs are positively associated with the risk of bank failure during the recent economic crisis. Furthermore, the positive association of add-backs with bank failure risk is concentrated among cases in which the add-backs are highly likely to increase a bank’s total regulatory capital. The evidence cannot thus be fully explained by accounting principles either, since the role of loan loss reserves according to those principles does not depend on whether the reserves generate a regulatory capital increase. Additional analysis suggests that the observed influence of loan loss reserves on bank failure risk may be an unintended consequence of their regulatory treatment as capital.     

Cyclical Changes in Firm Volatility

We characterize trends and cycles in the volatility of U.S. firms using a measure that we argue more cleanly captures firm‐specific volatility in sales and earnings growth than standard measures do. While earlier literature has emphasized a trend increase in the volatility of publicly traded firms, we find that a typical publicly traded firm has become more stable. We find that the negative association between firm‐specific volatility and the business cycle is weaker than earlier research based on dispersion measures suggests. We find that during the Great Recession of 2007–2009, firm‐specific volatility increased moderately but never substantially exceeded its sample mean. Our results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that firm‐specific volatility is an important driver of the business cycle, as it theoretically could be through an effect of default risk on credit spreads.     

Strategic Default and Equity Risk Across Countries

We show that the prospect of a debt renegotiation favorable to shareholders reduces the firm's equity risk. Equity beta and return volatility are lower in countries where the bankruptcy code favors debt renegotiations and for firms with more shareholder bargaining power relative to debt holders. These relations weaken as the country's insolvency procedure favors liquidations over renegotiations. In the limit, when debt contracts cannot be renegotiated, equity risk is independent of shareholders' incentives to default strategically. We argue that these findings support the hypothesis that the threat of strategic default can reduce the firm's equity risk.     

Is the presidential premium spurious?

A hotly debated question in finance is whether the higher stock returns under Democratic presidencies relative to Republican presidencies represent abnormal return, risk premium, or mere statistical fluke. This paper investigates whether this presidential premium is due to spurious-regression bias, data mining, or economic policy uncertainty. Decomposing the presidential premium into expected and unexpected components, we find that over two-thirds of the premium is unexpected, which is inconsistent with the spurious regression bias explanation. The presidential premium is not explained by data mining given that it persists in the post-publication period, and remains robust even if we purge returns of their covariation with economic policy uncertainty.     

Idiosyncratic skewness and cross-section of stock returns: Evidence from Taiwan

In this study, we examine whether idiosyncratic skewness (IS) affects the returns of the Taiwan stock market. We find that speculative retail investors prefer positive skewness in stocks that leads them to overprice these stocks. As a result, the IS, that reflects gambling, has a negative relation with future returns. Gambling preferences vary with time, mainly occur during recessions and down markets. Moreover, the negative IS-return relation exists only among firms with prior capital gains. We use a difference-in-difference (DID) framework to mitigate the endogeneity concern and find that this IS effect is more significant among stocks with lower arbitrage limits. The IS effect remains significant even after controlling for the IS risk factor. Overall, the IS effect cannot be explained by either arbitrage limits or risk exposure.     

Presidential administrations and the day-of-the-week effect in stock returns

This study examines the presence of a day-of-the-week effect over different presidential administrations. The results indicate that the day-of-the-week effect prevails during the Democratic and Republican administrations. However, the pattern of the day-of-the-week effect differs between the two presidential administrations. Specifically, the negative returns on Monday are more pronounced during the Republican than during the Democratic administrations. Therefore, explanations for the day-of-the-week effect should take into account the changing pattern of the day-of-the-week effect across presidential administrations.     

Striking oil: Another puzzle?

Changes in oil prices predict stock market returns worldwide. We find significant predictability in both developed and emerging markets. These results cannot be explained by time-varying risk premia as oil price changes also significantly predict negative excess returns. Investors seem to underreact to information in the price of oil. A rise in oil prices drastically lowers future stock returns. Consistent with the hypothesis of a delayed reaction by investors, the relation between monthly stock returns and lagged monthly oil price changes strengthens once we introduce lags of several trading days between monthly stock returns and lagged monthly oil price changes.     

Effects of business diversification on asset risk-taking: Evidence from the U.S. property-liability insurance industry

We investigate the effect of line-of-business diversification on asset risk-taking in the U.S. property-liability industry. The coordinated risk management hypothesis (Schrand and Unal, 1998) implies a negative relation between underwriting risk and investment risk. Consistent with this hypothesis we find that diversified insurers take more asset risk than non-diversified insurers, and that the degree of asset risk-taking is positively related to diversification extent. Our results are robust to corrections for potential endogeneity bias, selectivity bias, and alternative diversification and asset risk measures. We also provide event study evidence that further supports the coordinated risk management hypothesis. Specifically, we find that when a focused firm diversifies, it increases its asset risk relative to firms that remain focused, and when a diversified firm refocuses, it reduces its asset risk relative to firms that remain diversified.     

Option Mispricing around Nontrading Periods

We find that option returns are significantly lower over nontrading periods, the vast majority of which are weekends. Our evidence suggests that nontrading returns cannot be explained by risk, but rather are the result of widespread and highly persistent option mispricing driven by the incorrect treatment of stock return variance during periods of market closure. The size of the effect implies that the broad spectrum of finance research involving option prices should account for nontrading effects. Our study further suggests how alternative industry practices could improve the efficiency of option markets in a meaningful way.     

The calming effects of conflict: The impact of partisan conflict on market volatility

In recent decades, an increasing divide in political ideologies between Republicans and Democrats has had a notable impact on financial markets. In this paper, we investigate the effect of political conflict, as measured by the partisan conflict index (PCI), on both market and industry-level volatility. We find that PCI has a significant negative impact on market volatility, robust to different regression models. We provide evidence that such impact is not driven by dramatic political events, namely wars and presidential elections, or by presidential party. When controlling for market cycles, we show that PCI reduces volatility during expansionary periods but increases volatility during recessions. Furthermore, at the industry level, we find that PCI decreases volatility overall. We also find that PCI decreases the volatility of politically-sensitive industries significantly more that it does with other industries. These results can inform government policy makers, analysts, investors, and academics alike.     

Higher moments and beta asymmetry: evidence from Australia

We examine whether systematic higher moments capture beta asymmetry in an asset pricing model whereby the conditional beta of a risky asset increases (decreases) during a bear (bull) market state. We first provide a simple conceptual outline from the microeconomic literature to show that beta asymmetry is driven by time‐varying higher‐order risk preferences (prudence and temperance) across different market states. We then empirically relate these higher‐order risk preferences to systematic skewness and systematic kurtosis. We find that beta asymmetry in Australian stock returns cannot be explained by Carhart (1997) 4‐factor model but is subsumed by systematic higher moments.