Market response of US equities to domestic natural disasters: industry-based evidence

This study investigates US industry-based price response to domestic natural disasters over the period 1960–2015. Using an event study methodology, we estimate pre-, during and post-disaster impacts. We document a slower response in the pre-disaster period than in the post-disaster period. We further find that industries react differently to the same disaster and that reactions are not always negative. For example, meteorological disasters have a positive (negative) market impact on Gold (Banking). Moreover, we provide evidence that not every industry responds similarly to different disasters, e.g., Gold reacts positively (negatively) to meteorological (geophysical) disasters.     

An analysis of asymmetry in foreign currency exposure of the Australian equities market

Using both daily and monthly data, the authors: (a) analyse the extra-market component of foreign exchange exposure of the Australian equities market using the Australian/US exchange rate factor return in an augmented market model; and (b) use a dummy variable specification to model the potential asymmetric effect induced by non-linear hedging strategies, such as using currency options, for the period 1988–1996. Overall, the results are mixed. The following are found: (i) stronger evidence of foreign exchange exposure in the analysis employing daily data; (ii) when using daily data, a stronger lagged response than a contemporaneous response is observed; (iii) some evidence of asymmetry; and (iv) evidence of significant exchange rate exposures of the predicted sign in several industries. Further, the findings using monthly data are less significant than those using daily data.     

Foreign uncertainty and domestic exporter dynamics

This paper analyzes the impact of foreign uncertainty on exporter dynamics. Country-industry level exporter data from the Exporter Dynamics Database allows us to exploit the effects of uncertainty on heterogeneous groups of exporters. Our findings show that high levels of uncertainty are negatively associated with exports in both extensive and intensive margins, but the effects vary across different exporters. An increase in uncertainty is also associated with a more concentrated market of exporters and larger market shares of big exporters. Finally, we show that firm exit rates increase with uncertainty.     

Long-term international diversification of equities

Equity investors exhibit home bias although they can reduce risk with diversified global portfolios. We studied 118 years of data for 21 developed markets to investigate international diversification benefits for long-horizon equity investors. Investing equal proportions in all the markets would have increased Sharpe ratios only for investors in countries with low domestic ratios. Optimal global portfolios would have significantly increased Sharpe ratios for investors in all the countries. Allocating equal proportions to five optimal countries would have provided most of the maximum potential benefits of international diversification. Investors in countries with lower domestic Sharpe ratios would have benefited more from international diversification, primarily through risk reduction.     

中国股票市场流动性研究

股票市场的流动性是一个整体的概念，我们必须从不同的角度进行综合思考，才能得到对一个市场流动性的全面认识。从比较的视角考察中国股票市场，我们发现其流动性远远无法与发达国家相比。中国股票市场在提升流动性方面还任重而道远。     

Foreign exchange exposure and multinationality

We examine the relation between firms’ foreign exchange exposure and the extent of their multinationality as a proxy for operational hedging. Using a sample of 953 US firms over the period 1999–2006, we show that there is a nonlinear relation between operational and financial hedging, confirming anecdotal evidence that many highly multinational firms do not hedge with derivatives. We find that operational hedging and financial hedging are significantly inversely related to firms’ foreign exchange exposure, providing evidence that the two hedging techniques are complementary for all but the most highly operationally hedged firms. By comparing our findings for 1999–2006 with 1999–2009, we show that this complementarity breaks down when exchange rate volatility is high – as the effectiveness of financial hedging diminishes. An important message for firms is that operational hedges work, and they potentially provide better protection than financial hedging during times of stress.     

The implied liquidity premium for equities

Over the long term, the returns on smaller stocks are likely to be higher than the returns on larger stocks. This phenomenon has been called size effect, and a number of explanations have been proposed to account for it. Here we show that the difference in return between the larger and the smaller stocks can be accounted for by a liquidity premium for the smaller stocks, and we estimate the value of this premium using structural parameters for the capital distribution of the U.S. stock market during the 1990s The authors wish to express their gratitude to an anonymous referee for a very thorough and incisive reading, as well as for many constructive suggestions that have significantly improved this paper. The authors wish to express their gratitude to an anonymous referee for a very thorough and incisive reading, as well as for many constructive suggestions that have significantly improved this paper.     

Statistical arbitrage in the US equities market

We study model-driven statistical arbitrage in US equities. Trading signals are generated in two ways: using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) or regressing stock returns on sector Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). In both cases, the idiosyncratic returns are modelled as mean-reverting processes, which leads naturally to ‘contrarian’ strategies. We construct, back-test and compare market-neutral PCA- and ETF-based strategies applied to the broad universe of US equities. After accounting for transaction costs, PCA-based strategies have an average annual Sharpe ratio of 1.44 over the period 1997 to 2007, with stronger performances prior to 2003. During 2003–2007, the average Sharpe ratio of PCA-based strategies was only 0.9. ETF-based strategies had a Sharpe ratio of 1.1 from 1997 to 2007, experiencing a similar degradation since 2002. We also propose signals that account for trading volume, observing significant improvement in performance in the case of ETF-based signals. ETF-strategies with volume information achieved a Sharpe ratio of 1.51 from 2003 to 2007. The paper also relates the performance of mean-reversion statistical arbitrage strategies with the stock market cycle. In particular, we study in detail the performance of the strategies during the liquidity crisis of the summer of 2007, following Khandani and Lo [Social Science Research Network (SSRN) working paper, 2007].     

Risk sharing across generations without publicly owned equities

The U.S. Social Security trust fund currently invests in government bonds. Investing some of it instead in equities while continuing to pay Social Security benefits under existing rules would alter—potentially improve—the sharing of financial risks across non-trading generations. This paper shows that the same risk sharing can be achieved without direct government ownership of equities if instead the government places a linear and symmetric tax on risky private capital returns. This equivalence is very robust and holds even if some agents are endogenously borrowing constrained.     

Economic significance of predictability in Australian equities

This paper examines evidence of predictability in Australian equities using both statistical and economic metrics of significance. A probit‐based predictive model is used to forecast the probability that the 1 month ahead excess market return will be positive. Funds under management are then switched between equities and fixed income on the basis of this forecast. Although the statistical evidence of the model's predictive ability is mixed, the results suggest convincing evidence of an economically significant degree of return predictability. A $A1 investment in the switching strategy (market) in January 1980 grows to over $A55 ($A39) by June 2007. Although the economic significance of the switching strategy remains even in the presence of high transaction costs, robustness checks suggest that the seemingly impressive full‐sample results might be sample specific. The apparent superiority of the portfolio‐switching strategy can be traced to a handful of observations early in the study during which the predictive model provides a timely signal to exit equities. There is little evidence that the predictive model has forecasting ability across the entire sample. As such, this paper serves both to illustrate how alternate metrics of return predictability can lead to divergent conclusions, and to emphasize the importance of subjecting apparent findings of predictability to robustness checks.     

Foreign exchange exposure of exporting and importing firms

The existing literature reports insignificant `total' exposure for multinational or exporting firms, where total exposure incorporates both firm-specific and macroeconomic effects. We propose a dual-effect hypothesis to explain this result which seemingly contradicts conventional wisdom. According to our proposed hypothesis, firms are affected by both the domestic economy and foreign markets. These effects are at least partially offsetting for exporters and additive for importers. The resulting predictions of insignificant total exposure for exporters and positive total exposure for importers are borne out in our tests. The literature also reports insignificant `residual' exposure for multinationals or exporting firms, where residual exposure estimates the firm-specific exposure. This result is explained by biases in the residual exposure estimates introduced by the choice of the value-weighted market index as the control portfolio. We propose an equally-weighted portfolio of purely domestic firms as an alternative portfolio to reduce such biases and report significantly negative exposure for exporters and significantly positive exposure for importers, as predicted by theory.     

Foreign exchange risk exposure: Survey and suggestions

Assessing the sensitivity of firm value to exchange rate changes has been one of the most challenging issues in international financial management over the last two decades. This paper reviews the rapidly growing exchange exposure literature, with particular reference to recent developments. The studies reviewed focus on two primary areas of inquiry: the theoretical foundations of exchange risk exposure and the empirical evidence on the link between stock returns and currency fluctuations. Although much has been learned in each field, this survey highlights the areas of research in which our understanding of the mechanism of exchange exposure is still incomplete.     

Foreign exchange rate exposure: Evidence from Canada

Using weekly data from 2003 to 2011, this paper examines the presence of exchange rate exposure in thirteen Canadian industry sectors. This study contributes to the literature in a number of ways: (i) it considers the presence of exposure not only in the full sample but also in the pre and post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) periods, (ii) it considers both linear and nonlinear exposure and (iii) it makes use of the sign and size bias tests to investigate the presence of asymmetric exposure. In general, we find some evidence of linear and nonlinear exposure in the full sample as well as in the pre and post-GFC sub-samples. We also find weak evidence of an asymmetric exposure sign effect on stock returns in the full and pre-GFC sample periods. Stock returns are found to respond asymmetrically to the positive magnitude of exposure in both the-pre and post-GFC sample periods. In overall terms, the GFC appears to have weakly contributed to the overall strength of the exposure.     

Efficiency of the Polish banking industry: Foreign versus domestic banks

The present paper investigates the efficiency of the Polish banking industry between 1997 and 2001. Our preferred methodology is Data Envelopment Analysis, which allows us to distinguish between cost, allocative, technical, pure technical, and scale efficiency. Additionally, we perform a number of tests to investigate whether domestic and foreign banks come from the same population. Finally, we attempt to shed light on the determinants of efficiency. Our results indicate that bank efficiency has not improved during the years analyzed. Whereas greenfield banks have achieved higher levels of efficiency than domestic banks, foreign banks that acquired domestic institutions have not succeeded in enhancing their efficiency.     

Social Security reform: the effect of investing in equities

Several proposals have been developed to reform the Social Security System to ensure that it is fully funded. The investment of a portion of Social Security funds in equities has often been proposed as a means to avoid increasing payroll taxes. This paper develops a general equilibrium model to demonstrate that investing Social Security funds in equities will decrease the return on equities and increase interest rates on bonds, which also leads to an increase in general income taxes. Thus, investing Social Security funds in equities simply shifts a potential increase in payroll taxes to an increase in income taxes.     

Impact of futures on comovements for UK cross-listed equities

This paper uses La Porta et al.'s [La Porta, R., De Silanes, F.L., Shleifer, A., Vishny, R.W., 1998. Law and finance. Journal of Political Economy 106 (6), 1113–1155] capital markets regulatory classification to analyse the impact of information contained in various futures contracts on the magnitude and persistence of volatility spillovers between markets. The focus here is to examine the impact of futures contracts on comovement between markets. We examine the behavior of foreign cross-listed shares that have listed in different regulatory environments. In particular, the paper analyses spillover effects between foreign cross-listings in tougher, similar and more lax regulatory environments with respect to the relevant domestic indices (FTSE100) and also with the home portfolios of cross-listed equities in the UK. We find that futures variables have a significant impact on the magnitude and persistence of volatility spillovers between markets.     

Foreign booms,domestic busts: The global dimension of banking crises

This paper provides novel empirical evidence showing that foreign financial developments are a powerful predictor of domestic banking crises. Using a new data set for 38 advanced and emerging economies over 1970–2011, we show that credit growth in the rest of the world has a large positive effect on the probability of banking crises taking place at home, even when controlling for domestic credit growth. Our results suggest that this effect is larger for financially open economies, and is consistent with transmission via cross-border capital flows and market sentiment. Direct contagion from foreign crises plays an important role, but does not account for the whole effect.     

Transition to Islamic equities: Systematic risk and Shari'ah compliance

This study examines the systematic risk exposure of a sample of equities, domiciled in the United States that have transitioned to ethically screened, Shari'ah compliant, Islamic equities. The conjecture is that the anterior and posterior risk exposures will be different. Our empirical results indicate that Shari'ah compliance initially creates a shock in systematic risk, but transitional behaviors subsequently diverge. Particular screening ratios also behave similarly. In effect, the capital market reinforces the risk position and increases systematic risk. However, this is essentially a transition effect. Over the entire period, we find a downward trend in systematic risk. Shari'ah compliance makes the adopted equities less risky over the long-term with improved market information. Our results hold even after controlling the screening ratios and conducting a number of robustness checks.     

Foreign capital raising by Indian firms: An examination of domestic stock price response

We examine the domestic stock price response to foreign capital issuance by Indian firms. Firms have extensively used foreign equity and convertible foreign debt sources since 1994. The role of foreign investment bankers, size of the issue, firm's growth opportunities, and other factors are examined in the cross-sectional analysis of domestic stock price response. We find that firms experience positive stock price response to both equity and debt issues abroad, with greater response to issuance of American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), and financing high corporate growth.