Equilibrium Portfolio Strategies in the Presence of Sentiment Risk and Excess Volatility

Our objective is to identify the trading strategy that would allow an investor to take advantage of "excessive" stock price volatility and "sentiment" fluctuations. We construct a general equilibrium "difference-of-opinion" model of sentiment in which there are two classes of agents, one of which is overconfident about a public signal, while still optimizing intertemporally. Overconfident investors overreact to the signal and introduce an additional risk factor causing stock prices to be excessively volatile. Consequently, rational investors choose a conservative portfolio; moreover, this portfolio depends not just on the current price divergence but also on their prediction about future sentiment and the speed of price convergence.     

The World Price of Foreign Exchange Risk

Departures from purchasing power parity imply that different countries have different prices for goods when a common numeraire is used. Stochastic changes in exchange rates are associated with changes in these prices and constitute additional sources of risk in asset pricing models. This article investigates whether exchange rate risks are priced in international asset markets using a conditional approach that allows for time variation in the rewards for exchange rate risk. The results for equities and currencies of the world's four largest equity markets support the existence of foreign exchange risk premia.     

Tests of Analysts' Overreaction/Underreaction to Earnings Information as an Explanation for Anomalous Stock Price Behavior

This study examines whether security analysts underreact or overreact to prior earnings information, and whether any such behavior could explain previously documented anomalous stock price movements. We present evidence that analysts' forecasts underreact to recent earnings. This feature of the forecasts is consistent with certain properties of the naive seasonal random walk forecast that Bernard and Thomas (1990) hypothesize underlie the well-known anomalous post-earnings-announcement drift. However, the underreactions in analysts' forecasts are at most only about half as large as necessary to explain the magnitude of the drift. We also document that the “extreme” analysts' forecasts studied by DeBondt and Thaler (1990) cannot be viewed as overreactions to earnings, and are not clearly linked to the stock price overreactions discussed in DeBondt and Thaler ( 1985 , 1987 ) and Chopra, Lakonishok, and Ritter (Forthcoming). We conclude that security analysts' behavior is at best only a partial explanation for stock price underreaction to earnings, and may be unrelated to stock price overreactions.     

Incomplete‐Market Equilibria Solved Recursively on an Event Tree

Because of non‐traded human capital, real‐world financial markets are massively incomplete, while the modeling of imperfect, dynamic financial markets remains a wide‐open and difficult field. Some 30 years after Cox, Ross, and Rubinstein (1979) taught us how to calculate the prices of derivative securities on an event tree by simple backward induction, we show how a similar formulation can be used in computing heterogeneous‐agents incomplete‐market equilibrium prices of primitive securities. Extant methods work forward and backward, requiring a guess of the way investors forecast the future. In our method, the future is part of the current solution of each backward time step.     

SOUTH AFRICAN DISINVESTMENT: CAUSES AND EFFECTS

Divestment pressure is one channel through which those interest groups opposing apartheid have attempted to induce U.S. firms to withdraw from South Africa. This paper investigates empirically the relationship between stockholder influence, disinvestment, and the behavior of South Africa-active firms. The paper finds that if institutional investors hold a large proportion of a firm's shares, then that firm will be induced to participate in fair employment and social programs to benefit its black labor force. However, the same "socially responsible" firm is also more likely to disinvest—leaving a less progressive employer in its place.     

Investor Behavior and the Benefits of Direct Stock Ownership

Using an experiment to rule out reverse causality, we examine whether a small investment in a company's stock leads investors to purchase more of the company's products and adopt other views and preferences that benefit the company. We preregister our research methods, hypotheses, and supplemental analyses via the Journal of Accounting Research’s registration‐based editorial process. We find little evidence consistent with these hypotheses for the average investor in our sample using our planned univariate hypothesis tests, and planned Bayesian parameter estimation shows substantial downward belief revision for more optimistic ex ante expectations of the treatment effects. In planned supplemental analyses, however, we do find that the effects of ownership on product purchase behavior and on regulatory preferences are intuitively stronger for certain subgroups of investors—namely, for investors who are most likely to purchase the types of products offered by the company and for investors who are most likely to vote on political matters. The results contribute to our understanding of the benefits of direct stock ownership and are informative to public company managers and directors.     

The Dynamic Properties of Financial‐Market Equilibrium with Trading Fees

We incorporate trading fees into a dynamic, multiagent general‐equilibrium model in which traders optimally decide when to trade. For that purpose, we propose an innovative algorithm that synchronizes the traders. Securities prices are not so much affected by the payment of the fees itself, but rather by the trade‐off that the traders face between smoothing consumption and smoothing holdings. In calibrated examples, the interest rate and welfare decline with trading fees, while risk premia and volatilities increase. Liquidity risk and expected liquidity are priced, leading to deviations from the consumption‐CAPM. With trading fees, capital is slow‐moving, generating slow price reversal.     

MAKING THE COLONIAL STATE: DEVELOPMENT,DEBT, AND WARFARE IN NEW ZEALAND, 1853–76

Warfare in New Zealand during the 1860s has recently been linked to the rise of the central state and growth of the national debt in that colony. This article argues that any parallel to the growth of the European fiscal‐military state is misguided. The fundamental cause of state centralisation and rising indebtedness was the same long‐run dynamic of colonial development active in all settler societies during the nineteenth century. The colonial state functioned, in part, to raise capital for development, and if necessary the colonial state would be remodelled in order to achieve this. New Zealand was no exception.     

Long‐term changes in sickness and health: further evidence from the Hampshire Friendly Society1

This article presents new evidence on long‐term trends in sickness rates in England and Wales using data from the Hampshire Friendly Society. In previous work, Edwards, Gorsky, Harris, and Hinde argued that this Society contained a uniquely detailed set of records for the study of individual sickness histories. However, their initial findings were based on the records of a relatively small number of men who joined the Society at different points in time between 1871 and 1912. The current article draws on a much larger body of evidence, based on the records of over 5,500 men who joined between 1824 and 1939. It examines trends in the seasonality of sickness episodes, changes in the relationship between sickness and age, and cause‐specific sickness rates. The results indicate that there was little change in age‐specific morbidity rates over time, but morbidity did increase with age, mainly because older men remained off work for longer, even when they succumbed to the same conditions as men in younger age groups.