Agency Conflicts, Investment, and Asset Pricing

The separation of ownership and control allows controlling shareholders to pursue private benefits. We develop an analytically tractable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to study asset pricing and welfare implications of imperfect investor protection. Consistent with empirical evidence, the model predicts that countries with weaker investor protection have more incentives to overinvest, lower Tobin's q, higher return volatility, larger risk premia, and higher interest rate. Calibrating the model to the Korean economy reveals that perfecting investor protection increases the stock market's value by 22%, a gain for which outside shareholders are willing to pay 11% of their capital stock.     

Interest rates and risk premia in the stock market and in the foreign exchange market

This paper documents common empirical regularities in the foreign exchange market and in the US stock market. We find that increases in interest rates are associated with predictable increases in the volatility of returns in both markets, and that expected returns both in the stock market and in the foreign exchange market are negatively correlated with nominal interest rates.We show that not taking into account the time variation of second moments may seriously affect tests of asset pricing models. Using a numerical example based on the static capital asset pricing model, we are able to produce fluctuations in risk premia similar to those observed empirically. Finally we show that the overidentifying restrictions of the latent variable capital asset pricing model are not rejected when beats are assumed to be correlated with nominal interest rates.     

Time-varying risk premia and the cost of capital: An alternative implication of the Q theory of investment

Evidence suggests that expected excess stock market returns vary over time, and that this variation is much larger than that of expected real interest rates. It follows that a large fraction of the movement in the cost of capital in standard investment models must be attributable to movements in equity risk-premia. In this paper we emphasize that such movements in equity risk premia should have implications not merely for investment today, but also for future investment over long horizons. In this case, predictive variables for excess stock returns over long-horizons are also likely to forecast long-horizon fluctuations in the growth of marginal Q, and therefore investment. We test this implication directly by performing long-horizon forecasting regressions of aggregate investment growth using a variety of predictive variables shown elsewhere to have forecasting power for excess stock market returns.     

What drives portfolio investments of German banks in emerging capital markets?

After decades of steady liberalization and financial market development, emerging capital markets experienced unparalleled capital inflows in the aftermath of the emerging markets crisis of the 1990s. This paper studies portfolio investment decisions of German banks in emerging capital markets from 2002 to 2007. The use of a dynamic time-series cross-section framework and the micro database External Position Report provided by Deutsche Bundesbank permit insights into the various determinants of portfolio investments in ECMs. For example, there is evidence that German banks take into account the various dimensions of financial market development in their portfolio investment decisions and anticipate the special risks inherent in emerging markets. Proxies for the overall development and efficiency of capital markets have the highest economic significance of all variables. The introduction of depositary receipts programs has a positive impact on stock market investment. Moreover, there is evidence that global risk aversion exerts a significant influence in times of financial turmoil.     

Market integration and currency risk in Asian emerging markets

Most of the Asian emerging stock markets started to liberalize their markets in 1990s. In this paper, I examine whether those markets have become integrated with world stock market since the 1990s by estimating and testing a dynamic version of international CAPM (ICAPM) in the absence of purchasing power parity (PPP) using a parsimonious multivariate GARCH-in-Mean (MGARCH-M) approach. I also investigate to what extent the liberalization process has affected the cost of capital and price volatility for each market. The empirical results show that Philippines was segmented from the world stock market before its liberalization date, but no evidence of market segmentation is found for the other five markets (India, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Thailand) before their liberalization dates. However, all six markets have become integrated after opening up their markets to foreign investors. In addition, the estimated risk premia are lower after the liberalization, indicating that the liberalization process has reduced the cost of capital for their domestic firms. Moreover, there is no evidence of extra market volatility introduced by capital market liberalization, and on the contrary, the markets have become more stabilized through the liberalization process.     

The Impact of Business Groups on Investment Efficiency: Does Capital Allocation Matter?

Using data on internal capital markets in China, this paper examines the influence of internal capital markets on investment efficiency in business groups. The empirical results show that using internal capital markets can alleviate over invests within business groups. In addition, it can alleviate deficiencies in R&D investment in business groups effectively. The impact of internal capital markets on investment efficiency varies between state-owned enterprises and private enterprises. At private enterprises, internal capital market operations significantly alleviate overinvestment and promote R&D investment. However, at state-owned enterprises, internal capital market operations increase overinvestment and reduce investment in R&D.     

Stock Markets,Growth, and Tax Policy

An extensive literature documents the role of financial markets in economic development. To help explain this relationship, this paper constructs an endogenous growth model in which a stock market emerges to allocate risk and explores how the stock market alters investment incentives in ways that change steady state growth rates. The paper demonstrates that stock markets accelerate growth by (1) facilitating the ability to trade ownership of firms without disrupting the productive processes occurring within firms and (2) allowing agents to diversify portfolios. Tax policy affects growth directly by altering investment incentives and indirectly by changing the incentives underlying financial contracts.     

Distress risk premia in expected stock and bond returns

Prior studies find that shareholders’ strategic actions over debtholders are significant for stock prices but not for bond prices. I find that for firms with private and public debt, strategic default has no significant effect on distress risk premia in expected stock or bond returns, suggesting that the dispersion of bondholders greatly weakens the shareholder advantage effect. The shareholder advantage effect on stock prices is only significant for firms with only private debt and to some degree affected by the dispersion of stockholders and complexity in capital structure. Overall, renegotiation friction helps explain the cross-sectional implications of strategic default for stock and bond prices.     

Was Deng Xiaoping Right? An Overview of China's Equity Markets

In the western world, stock markets arose from the search by privately owned companies for capital to build their businesses. Over time, the markets became places where ownership interests and even entire companies were bought and sold. In China, the complete opposite has happened. The markets arose out of the need for capital by bankrupt state‐owned enterprises operating in an economy with no history of private property. Deng Xiaoping, China's last emperor, gave the green light for the stock market experiment in early 1992 more with the hope of encouraging reform and efficiency than from any conviction that stock markets were the next sure thing. Now, after more than 20 years of experimentation with domestic and international listings, it appears evident that stock markets whose primary function is to trade minority interests in government‐controlled companies have not achieved the goal of improving enterprise performance, as China's leaders originally hoped. Instead, the combination of state monopolies with Wall Street expertise and international capital has led to the creation of national companies that represent little more than the incorporation of China's old Soviet‐style industrial ministries. As for the markets, the government's determination to prevent real privatization has produced separate classes of shares that are defined almost entirely by one thing: the shareholder's relationship to the government. And with all aspects of stock market activity regulated, managed, and owned by various state agencies, it is not surprising that non‐state investors have become motivated more by speculative opportunities than by investment fundamentals. But a quarter of a century is a short time in any country's development and, for all their shortcomings, the markets in mainland China and Hong Kong have played a significant role raising capital for China. It may be too early, perhaps, to suggest that China's equity markets have failed to accomplish what they were intended to do.     

Revisiting the supply side effects of government spending

We revisit the macroeconomic effects of government consumption in the neoclassical growth model when agents face uninsured idiosyncratic investment risk. Under complete markets, a permanent increase in government consumption has no long-run effect on interest rates and capital intensity, while it increases work hours due to the negative wealth effect. These results are upset once we allow for incomplete markets. The same negative wealth effect now causes a reduction in risk taking and the demand for investment. This leads to a lower risk-free rate and, under certain conditions, also to a lower capital-labor ratio and lower productivity.     

Regional integration of the East Asian stock markets: An empirical assessment

The aim of this paper is to study the dynamics of regional financial integration in East Asia over the 1990:01–2012:08 period. To this end, we use the international capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) to assess the evolution of financial market integration through time and evaluate their risk premia. We also construct an Asian currency basket in order to obtain a reference currency in this area. Our empirical analysis is based on the multivariate GARCH-DCC approach with time-varying correlations. Our results show that the East Asian stock markets were partially segmented (except for Japan) within their region until approximately 2008. However, the last years are characterized by an upward trend in the regional integration of stock markets. Our findings also show that the risk premium related to regional stock markets is significant for all countries.     

The effects of asymmetric information between borrowers and lenders in an open economy

This paper assesses the effects of asymmetric information between borrowers and lenders in an open economy with access to international capital markets. Information asymmetry and agency costs arise because only borrowers can costlessly observe actual returns from production. Agency costs increase the cost of external finance and lower steady state investment, capital and output. They also affect the business cycle and the central bank’s response to shocks. The long-run effects of agency costs are exacerbated in an open economy and their impact is influenced by the degree of access to international capital markets. The results thus highlight the importance of incorporating credit market interactions into open economy macroeconomic models.     

The joint response of stock and foreign exchange markets to macroeconomic surprises: Using US and Japanese data

This paper investigates the joint response of stock and foreign exchange (FX) market returns to macroeconomic surprises, employing a system method of estimation that allows for the cross-country and cross-market interaction for asset returns and risk premia. Using US and Japanese data, we find that US stock markets are asymmetrically responsive to domestic developments in output growth and interest rates but are not influenced by macroeconomic surprises from Japan. The surprise in the FX market seems to affect stock markets in the US and Japan, respectively. In particular, we find that the interest rate surprise in the US and inflation surprise in Japan tend to overstate the impact that these surprises would have on the respective stock market. The impact of the surprises would appear smaller if macroeconomic developments induced by the FX market were incorporated into the model.     

基于有效需求视角的股票市场发展与经济增长

从有效需求的角度来看中国股票市场发展与居民消费支出和企业投资支出的关系表现如下:一方面,中国股票市场发展对居民消费支出的作用是极其微弱的;另一方面,股票筹资额与企业投资支出是负相关的。后者与主流观点——筹资额的不断上升直接为企业投资支出提供了资金供给,从而必然刺激企业投资支出的加大——是恰恰矛盾的。因此,中国股市的经济增长推动功能有待开发。     

Size,value, and momentum in developed country equity returns: Macroeconomic and liquidity exposures

The paper investigates value and momentum factors in 23 developed international stock markets. We find that typically value and momentum premia are smaller and more negatively correlated for large market capitalization stocks relative to small. Momentum factors are more highly correlated internationally relative to value. We provide international evidence on three sets of risk exposures of value and momentum returns: macroeconomic risk, funding liquidity risk, and stock market liquidity risk. We find that value returns are typically lower prior to a recession while momentum returns often exhibit little sensitivity. Value returns are typically lower in times of poor funding liquidity, whereas, with notable exceptions, momentum returns are typically unaffected. Lastly, for almost all countries, value returns are high in poor stock market liquidity conditions.     

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.     

The asset growth effect: Insights from international equity markets

Firms with higher asset growth rates subsequently experience lower stock returns in international equity markets, consistent with the U.S. evidence. This negative effect of asset growth on returns is stronger in more developed capital markets and markets where stocks are more efficiently priced, but is unrelated to country characteristics representing limits to arbitrage, investor protection, and accounting quality. The evidence suggests that the cross-sectional relation between asset growth and stock return is more likely due to an optimal investment effect than due to overinvestment, market timing, or other forms of mispricing.     

TIME VARIATIONS IN RISK PREMIA,VOLATILITY, AND REWARD-TO-VOLATILITY

In this paper I relate the risk premia in the stock and bond markets to the conditional volatility of returns and time-varying reward-to-volatility variables. I find that the relation between the expected returns on the stocks and bonds and the volatility of returns is time varying. I provide an approach for evaluating the relative importance of the time-varying volatility of returns and reward-to-volatility variables to explain the predictability of risk premia for stock and bond returns. I show that changing reward-to-volatility variables explain more predictable variation in the risk premia for stocks and bonds than changing volatility of returns.     

Are Open Markets Good for Foreign Investors and Emerging Nations?

Although policymakers of emerging nations routinely brand foreign capital as "hot money" and hold it responsible for the ills of their economies, this article suggests that the experience of opening up their markets to overseas investors has been largely beneficial for the host countries. Based on their own recent study, the authors report that when emerging economies open their markets, the level of stock prices tends to rise without an associated increase in volatility, and more capital becomes available for domestic investment at a lower cost. The stock markets also appear to become more efficient, thus resulting in a better allocation of resources. Furthermore, the inflow of foreign capital does not lead to higher inflation or stronger currencies, nor does the volatility of inflation or exchange rates increase. If some countries experience large capital outflows with damaging consequences, the culprit is not foreign investors, but rather policymakers' futile attempt to defy market forces and the failure of their economies to put the capital to productive uses.
The authors' analysis also suggests that, when the recent turmoil in emerging markets is set in the context of a longer-run historical perspective, nothing appears to have changed that would materially alter the prospects for investing in emerging markets. The recent market volatility and currency crises in emerging nations are by no means extraordinary—indeed, the currencies of many developing countries fall routinely. What distinguishes the Mexican and Thai currency crises from such run-of-the-mill devaluations is that both governments resisted the inevitable until market forces brought about a crash. The recent emerging market currency crises should accordingly be viewed as more or less predictable "road bumps" that can be expected when the policymakers of emerging economies gradually—and grudgingly—relinquish their power to the markets.     

Risk premia in international equity markets revisited

Recent evidence suggests that global equity markets are becoming more risky. We develop a model to explain risk premia in international equity markets. The model is then used to investigate the changing nature of conditional risk premia and their effect on unconditional global risk. Using this model we find that the increase in international variance and covariance of realized excess returns can be attributed to systematic variations in global risk premia correlated across markets as well. Understanding this additional source of increased global correlation is important. These results have interest both for practitioners and for those interested in modeling global asset prices.