Out of the blue: mood maintenance hypothesis and seasonal effects on investors’ reaction to news

Contemporary research documents various psychological aspects of economic decision-making. The main goal of our study is to analyse the role of the Mood Maintenance Hypothesis (MMH) in financial markets. MMH refers to people’s tendency to maintain positive mood states, and implies that positive mood is associated with less critical thinking and reduced information processing, yielding three behavioral effects: (i) out of the blue, resulting in stronger negative reactions to bad news during good mood periods, (ii) sunray on a cloudy day, leading to stronger positive reactions to good news during bad mood periods, and (iii) shallow thinking, producing stronger reactions to all kinds of news during good mood periods. Employing daylight duration changes and a measure of onset and recovery from symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) as proxies for contemporaneous investors’ mood, we test the role of mood in investors’ reactions to analyst recommendation revisions. We find corroborative results, most notably that negative stock price reactions to recommendation downgrades are significantly stronger during daylight increasing periods, and, alternatively, during the periods characterized by low rates of onset and high rates of recovery from SAD. The magnitude of the effect increases in longer event windows.     

Hedge funds,managerial skill,and macroeconomic variables

This paper evaluates hedge fund performance through portfolio strategies that incorporate predictability based on macroeconomic variables. Incorporating predictability substantially improves out-of-sample performance for the entire universe of hedge funds as well as for various investment styles. While we also allow for predictability in fund risk loadings and benchmark returns, the major source of investment profitability is predictability in managerial skills. In particular, long-only strategies that incorporate predictability in managerial skills outperform their Fung and Hsieh (2004) benchmarks by over 17% per year. The economic value of predictability obtains for different rebalancing horizons and alternative benchmark models. It is also robust to adjustments for backfill bias, incubation bias, illiquidity, fund termination, and style composition.     

Investing in mutual funds when returns are predictable

This paper forms investment strategies in US domestic equity mutual funds, incorporating predictability in (i) manager skills, (ii) fund risk loadings, and (iii) benchmark returns. We find predictability in manager skills to be the dominant source of investment profitability—long-only strategies that incorporate such predictability outperform their Fama-French and momentum benchmarks by 2 to 4%/year by timing industries over the business cycle, and by an additional 3 to 6%/year by choosing funds that outperform their industry benchmarks. Our findings indicate that active management adds significant value, and that industries are important in locating outperforming mutual funds.     

Risk Preferences Heterogeneity: Evidence from Asset Markets

Using asset market data, as well as theoretical relations between investors' preferences,option-implied, risk-neutral, probability distribution functions (PDFs,) and index-implied,actual, PDFs, this paper extracts a time-series of investors' relative risk aversion (RRA)functions. Based on results recently derived by Benninga and Mayshar (2000), thesefunctions are used to recover the evolution of risk preferences heterogeneity. Applyingnon-parametric estimation on European call options written on the S & P500 index, wefind that: (i) the RRA functions are decreasing; and (ii) the constructed risk preferencesheterogeneity series is positively correlated in a static, as well as a dynamic, setup witha prevalent proxy for investors heterogeneity, namely, the spread between auction- andmarket-yields of Treasury bills.     

Is there a dark side to exchange traded funds? An information perspective

We examine whether an increase in ETF ownership is accompanied by a decline in pricing efficiency for the underlying component securities. Our tests show an increase in ETF ownership is associated with (1) higher trading costs (bid-ask spreads and market liquidity), (2) an increase in “stock return synchronicity,” (3) a decline in “future earnings response coefficients,” and (4) a decline in the number of analysts covering the firm. Collectively, our findings support the view that increased ETF ownership can lead to higher trading costs and lower benefits from information acquisition. This combination results in less informative security prices for the underlying firms.     

Reliability of Banks' Fair Value Disclosure for Loans

This study investigates whether banks manage the disclosed fair value of their major asset, the loan portfolio. Using two cross-section samples, I find evidence that suggests banks manage the fair value of loans. The estimated extent of overstatement of loans' fair value is negatively related to regulatory capital, asset growth, liquidity and the gross book value of loans, and positively related to the change in the rate of credit losses. These relations imply that some banks overstate the disclosed fair value of loans in an attempt to favorably affect the market assessment of their risk and performance.     

How to examine construct validity of item banks

In this study data is brought to support an approach for assuring the content validity of item banks and for examining their construct validity. The method is an application of Guttman's concept of using mapping sentences for theory construction in the domain of “simple fraction’. The construct validity of the theory used for the creation of the item bank was tested by selecting two samples of items which are referenced in the same structuple (criterion). The Yule weak monotonicity coefficients of the items' connections were calculated and represented in two different matrices and in two different space diagrams. The results show clearly a similarity in both the structure of the space diagrams of any two parallel samples and in the partition of the points into regions, i.e., regions according to the classification of the items represented by them on the basis of the facets defined by the mapping sentences. Consequently, it may be concluded that the results support the construct validity of the theory on the basis of which the bank has been created.     

Financial Statement Analysis of Leverage and How It Informs About Profitability and Price-to-Book Ratios

This paper presents a financial statement analysis that distinguishes leverage that arises in financing activities from leverage that arises in operations. The analysis yields two leveraging equations, one for borrowing to finance operations and one for borrowing in the course of operations. These leveraging equations describe how the two types of leverage affect book rates of return on equity. An empirical analysis shows that the financial statement analysis explains cross-sectional differences in current and future rates of return as well as price-to-book ratios, which are based on expected rates of return on equity. The paper therefore concludes that balance sheet line items for operating liabilities are priced differently than those dealing with financing liabilities. Accordingly, financial statement analysis that distinguishes the two types of liabilities informs on future profitability and aids in the evaluation of appropriate price-to-book ratios.     

Ranking Investments Using the Lorenz Curve

Journal of Quantitative Economics - Ranking investments is important for measuring the performance of financial assets over a period of time. The Mean-Variance Model (MV Model) suggests the...