Can energy predict the regional prices of carbon emission allowances in China?

The carbon emission trading is an important market-oriented tool in the process of China's carbon neutrality, which makes companies face tremendous pressure to reduce emissions while having strong energy demands. In order to evaluate whether energy prices can be robust predictors of the prices of emission allowances, this study perform extreme bounds analysis (EBA) in four representative markets. The empirical results reveal that energy prices can indeed predict the prices of emission allowances, but the robustly predictive capabilities of different energy prices vary with regions. Among them, thermal coal is the robustly positive predictor for Guangdong, Hubei and Shanghai market; natural gas is the robustly negative predictor for all the four chosen regions; and crude oil can only positively predict Hubei market with robustness. Meanwhile, the horizons that predictions from energy to emission allowance can be performed as well as the predictive coefficients also vary with energy types and regions. And some trading implications are also provided alongside.     

Can the traditional Asian US dollar peg exchange rate regime be extended to include the Japanese yen?

Using daily data for a select set of four Asian exchange rates, namely the Hong Kong dollar, the Singapore dollar, the Taiwan dollar and the Thailand baht, from October 1985 to October 2002, we apply principal components analysis and the O-GARCH model to describe the evolution and persistence in the correlations over time. We also estimate 2-, 3- and 4-variable multivariate GARCH models, without imposing the assumption of constant correlations, to investigate volatility interaction amongst the currencies. To allow for fat tails in the distributions of exchange rate changes, we use the multivariate student-t distribution in maximising our log-likelihood functions. Our results indicate the possibility of designing an Asian exchange rate system involving a number of the region's currencies.     

Does low-carbon pilot city program reduce carbon intensity? Evidence from Chinese cities

Low-carbon pilot city (LCPC) programs have been implemented in China to facilitate low carbon production and consumption for combating climate change. The two rounds of low-carbon pilot regions covered six provinces and 36 cities in China. Governments have invested considerable funds and resources to develop LCPCs. Based on panel data from 49 cities for 2005–2018, we employ a matched difference-in-differences approach to explore the effects of the LCPC program on carbon intensity at the city level. Results show that in contrast to the program’s goals and expectations, LCPCs significantly increased carbon intensity in both rounds by 15 %–20 % compared with control groups. The growth effect on carbon intensity gradually weakened in the third year following the adoption of the LCPC program. An influential factor analysis indicates that the effects are stronger in eastern coastal cities with improved economic conditions and a reduced proportion of secondary industry production. A series of robustness and placebo tests indicate that the results are robust. We identify possible reasons for this unexpected result, such as preliminary infrastructure construction and development of economic circles. These measures show that the process of decarbonization may result in higher carbon intensity in the short term.     

Does the currency regime shape unhedged currency exposure?

This paper examines how unhedged currency exposure of firms varies with changes in currency flexibility. A sequence of four time periods with alternating high and low currency volatility in India provides a natural experiment in which changes in currency exposure of a panel of firms is measured, and the moral hazard versus incomplete markets hypotheses tested. We find that firms carried higher currency exposure in periods when the currency was less flexible. Our results support the moral hazard hypothesis: that low currency flexibility encourages firms to hold unhedged exposure in response to implicit government guarantees.     

Can China reduce the carbon emissions of its manufacturing exports by moving up the global value chain?

This study analyses whether embedding in the global value chain has an impact on the carbon emissions of China’s exports. We develop a carbon decomposition model and use panel data for 14 manufacturing industries in China from 1995 to 2009 to empirically analyse the impact of China’s exports on carbon emissions. Our results show that the GVC effect on China’s carbon emissions embodied in manufacturing exports outweighs the scale, composition and technique effects.     

Can mispricing explain the value premium?

Empirical research finds that stocks with low market-to-book (MTB) ratios outperform stocks with high MTB ratios. Rhodes-Kropf, Robinson, and Viswanathan separate the MTB ratio into mispricing and growth options components. We report that the mispricing component, but not the growth options component, predicts abnormal returns for up to 5 years. We also find that the mispricing component, but not the growth options component, provides incremental information relative to existing asset pricing models. Moreover, after controlling for mispricing, value no longer beats growth. Overall, our evidence is consistent with a behavioral explanation of the value premium.     

Does investor protection regime affect the effectiveness of outside directorship on the board?

Since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted in U.S., there has been a general tendency to globally harmonize regulations and practices of board governance. The purpose of this study is to compare among countries how well the board of directors constrains earnings management. Using a sample of firms from 23 countries, we document some evidence that higher outside directorship on the board is associated with lower earnings management in the international context. We also find that there is no significant difference in the effectiveness of board outside directorship in constraining earnings management between high and low investor protection countries. Our findings mitigate a concern that harmonized corporate governance in low investor protection countries may not work.     

Can the earnings fixation hypothesis explain the accrual anomaly?

This paper provides empirical evidence on whether the earnings fixation hypothesis can explain the accrual anomaly originally documented in Sloan (1996). Our analytical model yields the prediction that, if investors fixate on reported earnings, the effectiveness of the accrual strategy will increase in the responsiveness of the stock price to earnings and the differential persistence of cash flows relative to accruals. Our empirical evidence confirms our prediction and lends support to the earnings fixation hypothesis.     

Can rating agencies look through the cycle?

Rating agencies claim to look through the cycle when assigning corporate credit ratings, which entails that they are able to separate trend components of default risk from transitory ones. To test whether agencies possess this competence, I take market-based estimates of 1-year default probabilities of corporate bond issuers and estimate their long-run trend using the Hodrick-Prescott filter, local regression, or centered moving averages. I find that ratings help identify the current split into trend and cycle. In addition, rating stability is similar to the one of hypothetical ratings based on long-term trends. The results are robust to the use of different filter techniques. They are confirmed by a model-free analysis, which shows that ratings predict future changes in market-based default probability estimates. Since the examined trends are forward-looking in the sense that the trend filtering algorithms use future data, agency ratings exhibit important characteristics one would expect from ratings that see through the cycle.     

Can aggregation explain the persistence of inflation?

An aggregation exercise is proposed that aims at investigating whether the fast average adjustments of the disaggregate inflation series of the euro area CPI is coherent with the slow adjustment of euro area aggregate inflation. Estimating a dynamic factor model for 404 inflation sub-indices of the euro area CPI allows to decompose the dynamics of inflation sub-indices into a part due to a common macroeconomic shock and to sector specific idiosyncratic shocks. Although idiosyncratic shocks dominate the variance of sectoral prices, one common factor appears to be the main driver of aggregate dynamics. In addition, the heterogenous propagation of this common shock across sectoral inflation rates, and in particular its slow propagation to inflation rates of services, generates the persistence of aggregate inflation. We conclude that the aggregation mechanism explains a significant amount of aggregate inflation persistence.     

Does the social security fund help non-financial enterprises to transform from the virtual to the real?

At its 19th National Congress, the Communist Party of China vowed to “strengthen the financial sector’s ability to serve the real economy.” However, many studies provide evidence of the opposite trend, a problematic “transition from the real to the virtual,” among Chinese enterprises. Meanwhile, the investment efficiency of China’s Social Security Fund (SSF), a public fund, attracts much attention. In this context, we use A-share listed companies in China from 2009 to 2018 to study the relationship between holding by the SSF and enterprise financialization. We find that SSF holding significantly inhibits financialization and that this effect is non-linear. Mechanism analysis indicates that SSF holding suppresses enterprises’ financialization mainly by improving their governance. Moreover, SSF holding more strongly inhibits small-scale (vs. large-scale), state-owned (vs. non-state-owned), and non-eastern (vs. eastern) enterprises in China. Furthermore, SSF holding can alleviate corporate value impairment caused by financialization. The conclusions enrich theoretical research and provide empirical evidence that may help regulatory authorities to guide investment by enterprises and prevent financial risks.     

Can small investors exploit the momentum effect?

This study uses UK data and investigates whether small investors can exploit the continuation effect in share prices. Individual traders are not in a financial position to buy and sell short hundreds of firms, as suggested by existing academic research, and thus this study uses extreme performance companies to implement the strategy. We find that strong momentum gains appear when extreme winners and losers are employed. These returns remain strong even after considering the transaction costs of implementing such strategies, including commissions, stamp duty, selling-short costs, and bid-ask spread. Overall, we show that a relatively large number of small investors can enjoy momentum gains, providing some evidence against stock market efficiency.     

Can VAR models capture regime shifts in asset returns? A long-horizon strategic asset allocation perspective

It is often suggested that through a judicious choice of predictors that track business cycles and market sentiment, simple vector autoregressive (VAR) models could produce optimal strategic portfolio allocations that hedge against the bull and bear dynamics typical of financial markets. However, a distinct literature exists that shows that nonlinear econometric frameworks, such as Markov switching (MS), are also natural tools to compute optimal portfolios in the presence of stochastic good and bad market states. In this paper we examine whether simple VARs can produce portfolio rules similar to those obtained under MS, by studying the effects of expanding both the order of the VAR and the number/selection of predictor variables included. In a typical stock-bond strategic asset allocation problem, we compute the out-of-sample certainty equivalent returns for a wide range of VARs and compare these measures of performance with those typical of nonlinear models for a long-horizon investor with constant relative risk aversion. We conclude that most VARs cannot produce portfolio rules, hedging demands, or (net of transaction costs) out-of-sample performances that approximate those obtained from equally simple nonlinear frameworks. We also compute the improvement in realized performance that may be achieved adopting more complex MS models and report this may be substantial in the case of regime switching ARCH.     

Can European electric utilities manage asset impairments arising from net zero carbon targets?

This paper develops a framework to assess the ability of electric utilities to sustain the forced impairment of carbon emitting power plants and applies it to the European market. We present a new method to measure asset impairment, for both the company and the industry, based on a database of power plants. We develop a novel framework to analyse a utility's ability to transition by investing in green technology assets through the impact on its credit rating metrics. Finally, we apply our framework to European utilities under scenarios set out by the European Commission to limit global warming by imposing net zero carbon emissions constraints on companies. We conclude that most European utilities have the financial capacity to meet the requirements of net zero carbon emissions under the scenarios with timely action. However, a delay of as little as five years could cause serious financial problems across the sector.     

Can Operating Leverage Be the Cause of the Value Premium?

Recent theoretical models (Carlson, Fisher, and Giammarino, 2004) predict an association between the book-to-market equity ratio (BE/ME) and operating leverage in the cross-section. Consistent with these models, we find a positive association between BE/ME and the degree of operating leverage (DOL), between DOL and stock returns, and between DOL and systematic risk. Overall, our findings provide support for a risk-based explanation for the value premium that is consistent with existing theoretical models. The evolution of systematic risk associated with firm-level investment activity, rather than financial distress, seems to be the main determinant of the value premium.     

Can patients drive the future of health care?

As the traditional system of health care in the United States gives way to a regime run increasingly by the private sector, a powerful force is emerging: the patient. According to Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger, health care is much like other service industries. Providers that hope to survive must cater to increasingly demanding and well-educated consumers. In a review of Herzlinger's book Market-Driven Health Care: Who Wins, Who Loses in the Transformation of America's Largest Service Industry, Alexandra Wyke, managing editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit, argues that the path to consumerism in medicine will be longer and bumpier than Herzlinger suggests. Consumers of medicine don't simply want health care to be more convenient; they want cures for all ills. How can providers gratify this appetite for ever better medicine? Furthermore, patients are not always capable of making sound decisions about their medical care. And health care professionals, who emphasize the complex nature of decision making in medicine, are doing their best to keep patients from holding the health care steering wheel. Herzlinger has written a bullish book on the virtues of market-driven health care, but, Wyke contends, she has overlooked the far-reaching effects that emerging technology could have in shaping medicine--especially in reducing the need for specialists. She also has given short shrift to the young managed-care industry, which has succeeded in controlling costs and is now under competitive pressure to meet patients' needs better.     

Can the Chinese volatility index reflect investor sentiment?

The volatility index is the implied volatility calculated inversely from the option prices. This study investigates whether the official Chinese volatility index, iVX, can represent investor sentiment. In order to describe investor sentiment comprehensively, we build a three-dimensional investor sentiment measurement system composed of macro, meso and micro level, and decompose iVX into three components to obtain short-term, medium-term fluctuations and long-term trend by EEMD method. The relationships between iVX, its components and sentiment indexes at each level have been analyzed separately, and the empirical results reveal all components of iVX can reflect the investor sentiment at the corresponding level but to which extent they can reflect are not the same. Further we introduce the mixed-frequency dynamic factor analysis to extract the common sentiment factor, which shows stronger correlation with contemporaneous iVX, compared with the sentiment indexes at each level. The ADL model in robustness check also demonstrates the results. Our findings confirm iVX can represent the common sentiment and expectations of Chinese investors in different time scales.     

Pension fund taxation and risk-taking: should we switch from the EET to the TEE regime?

Most countries tax retirement savings according to the EET (exempt contributions, exempt accumulations, taxable withdrawals) regime. Relevant literature recommends the use of TEE (taxable contributions, exempt accumulations, exempt withdrawals) or EET systems and emphasizes their near equivalence. We show that this near equivalence breaks down when considering the tax effects on risk-taking. This paper proves that the TEE regime is risk-taking neutral, while the EET regime does not, in general, respect this property. The argument of risk-taking neutrality thus calls for broadening the use of the TEE configuration.