Market liquidity, asset prices, and welfare

This paper represents an equilibrium model for the demand and supply of liquidity and its impact on asset prices and welfare. We show that, when constant market presence is costly, purely idiosyncratic shocks lead to endogenous demand of liquidity and large price deviations from fundamentals. Moreover, market forces fail to lead to efficient supply of liquidity, which calls for potential policy interventions. However, we demonstrate that different policy tools can yield different efficiency consequences. For example, lowering the cost of supplying liquidity on the spot (e.g., through direct injection of liquidity or relaxation of ex post margin constraints) can decrease welfare while forcing more liquidity supply (e.g., through coordination of market participants) can improve welfare.     

Monetary policy,doubts and asset prices

Asset prices and the equity premium might reflect doubts and pessimism. Introducing these features in an otherwise standard New-Keynesian model changes optimal policy in a substantial way. There are three main results: (i) asset-price movements improve the inflation-output trade-off so that average output can rise without much inflation costs; (ii) a “paternalistic” policymaker – maximizing the expected utility of the consumers under the true probability distribution – chooses a more accommodating policy towards productivity shocks and inflates the equity premium; (iii) a “benevolent” policymaker – maximizing the objective through which decisionmakers act in their ambiguous world – follows a policy of price stability.     

Leverage constraints and asset prices: Insights from mutual fund risk taking

Prior theory suggests that time variation in the degree to which leverage constraints bind affects the pricing kernel. We propose a measure for this leverage constraint tightness by inverting the argument that constrained investors tilt their portfolios to riskier assets. We show that the average market beta of actively managed mutual funds—intermediaries facing leverage restrictions—captures their desire for leverage and thus the tightness of constraints. Consistent with theory, it strongly predicts returns of the betting-against-beta portfolio, and is a priced risk factor in the cross-section of mutual funds and stocks. Funds with low exposure to the factor outperform high-exposure funds by 5% annually, and for stocks this difference reaches 7%. Our results show that the tightness of leverage constraints has important implications for asset prices.     

Heterogeneous time varying transaction costs and asset pricing in international equity markets

In this paper, we examine the time variation in transaction costs relative to excess returns, in a panel consisting of 10 international equity indices over the time period 1984–2005. This is undertaken by extending the consumption CAPM (CCAPM) model proposed by Campbell and Shiller (Rev. Financ. Stud. 1:195–228, 1988) to incorporate time varying proportional transaction costs. We rigorously address both the cross-country heterogeneity in the estimated model and endogeneity. We find strong evidence that suggests transaction costs should be included as an additional explanatory variable in the CCAPM. This leads to the conclusion that transaction costs should be included in asset pricing models as their stochastic process impacts directly on private consumption expenditure.

The role of house prices in the monetary policy transmission mechanism in small open economies

We analyse the role of house prices in the monetary policy transmission mechanism in Norway, Sweden and the UK, using structural VARs. A solution is proposed to the endogeneity problem of identifying shocks to interest rates and house prices by using a combination of short-run and long-run (neutrality) restrictions. By allowing the interest rate and house prices to react simultaneously to news, we find the role of house prices in the monetary transmission mechanism to increase considerably. In particular, house prices react immediately and strongly to a monetary policy shock. Furthermore, the fall in house prices enhances the negative response in output and consumer price inflation that has traditionally been found in the conventional literature. Moreover, we find that the interest rate responds systematically to a change in house prices. However, the strength and timing of response varies between the countries, suggesting that housing may play a different role in the monetary policy setting.     

Asset prices and banking distress: A macroeconomic approach

This paper links banking with asset prices in a dynamic macroeconomic model, to provide a simple characterization of financial instability. In contrast with historical bank runs, recent banking crises were driven by deteriorating bank assets. Hence, in contrast with bank run models, this paper focuses on the interaction of falling asset prices, bank losses, credit contraction and bankruptcies. This interaction can explain credit crunches, financial instability, and banking crises, either as fundamental or as self-fulfilling outcomes. The model distinguishes between macroeconomic and financial stability. Its simplicity helps understand balance sheet effects and delivers closed-form solutions without resorting to linearization. For instance, the critical threshold beyond which an asset price decline triggers financial instability can be related explicitly to the structural parameters of the economy.     

Dynamic liquidity in endowment economies

This paper analyzes endogenous variations in aggregate liquidity that arise in standard representative-agent endowment economies. I introduce a natural definition of liquidity, essentially a shadow elasticity, that characterizes the price impact function or bid/ask spread that a small trader would experience. I compute this quantity for some tractable examples and uncover a rich variety of predictions that, in some cases, appear consistent with levels and covariations observed in the data. The results have important implications for the pricing and hedging of liquidity risk.     

Risks for the long run: Estimation with time aggregation

The discrepancy between the decision and data-sampling intervals, known as time aggregation, confounds the identification of long-, short-run growth, and volatility risks in asset prices. This paper develops a method to simultaneously estimate the model parameters and the decision interval of the agent by exploiting identifying restrictions of the Long Run Risk (LRR) model that account for time aggregation. The LRR model finds considerable empirical support in the data; the estimated decision interval of the agents is 33 days. Our estimation results establish that long-run growth and volatility risks are important for asset prices.     

The characteristics of informed trading: Implications for asset pricing

This paper investigates the linkage of microstructure, accounting, and asset pricing. We determine the relationship between firm characteristics as captured by accounting and market data and a firm's probability of private information-based trade (PIN) as estimated from trade data. This allows us to determine what types of firms have high information risk. We then use these data to create an instrument for PIN, the PPIN, which we can estimate from firm-specific data. We show that PPINs have explanatory power for the cross-section of asset returns in long sample tests. We also investigate whether information risk vitiates the influence of other variables on asset returns. We develop a PPIN factor and show that it dominates the Amihud factor in asset returns. Our results provide strong support for information risk affecting asset returns in long sample tests.     

Loose coupling in asset management systems in the NHS

This paper aims to identify whether the components of a loose-coupled system were present in the asset management systems of the National Health Service (NHS) in Wales and, if so, whether this had a negative impact. By utilising a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with senior officials at two NHS Hospital Trusts together with the findings of a survey of all of the Hospital Trusts in Wales, we conclude that the asset management system of the NHS in Wales exhibits the features of a loosely coupled system with detrimental consequences. Where information on capital assets has been required below board level, lower management relies on local systems, while the information for senior managers and political leaders relies on the management accounting system and ad hoc enquiries. The result has been an impairment of the ability of lower management to reconfigure capital assets which leads to the nation's health service underperforming.     

A valuation algorithm for indifference prices in incomplete markets

A probabilistic iterative algorithm is constructed for indifference prices of claims in a multiperiod incomplete model. At each time step, a nonlinear pricing functional is applied that isolates and prices separately the two types of risk. It is represented solely in terms of risk aversion and the pricing measure, a martingale measure that preserves the conditional distribution of unhedged risks, given the hedgeable ones, from their historical counterparts.Received: 1 September 2003, Mathematics Subject Classification: 93E20, 60G40, 60J75JEL Classification: C61, G11, G13The second author acknowledges partial support from NSF Grants DMS 0102909 and DMS 0091946.     

Liquidity biases in asset pricing tests

Microstructure noise in security prices biases the results of empirical asset pricing specifications, particularly when security-level explanatory variables are cross-sectionally correlated with the amount of noise. We focus on tests of whether measures of illiquidity, which are likely to be correlated with the noise, are priced in the cross-section of stock returns, and show a significant upward bias in estimated return premiums for an array of illiquidity measures in Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) monthly return data. The upward bias is larger when illiquid securities are included in the sample, but persists even for NYSE/Amex stocks after decimalization. We introduce a methodological correction to eliminate the biases that simply involves weighted least squares (WLS) rather than ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation, and find evidence of smaller, but still significant, return premiums for illiquidity after implementing the correction.     

A tale of two prices: Liquidity and asset prices in multiple markets

This paper investigates the liquidity effect in asset pricing by studying the liquidity–premium relationship of an American depositary receipt (ADR) and its underlying share. Using the [Amihud, Yakov, 2002. Illiquidity and stock returns: cross-section and time series effects. Journal of Financial Markets 5, 31–56] measure, the turnover ratio and trading infrequency as proxies for liquidity, we show that a higher ADR premium is associated with higher ADR liquidity and lower home share liquidity, in terms of changes in these variables. We find that the liquidity effects remain strong after we control for firm size and a number of country characteristics, such as the expected change in the foreign exchange rate, the stock market performance, as well as several variables measuring the openness and transparency of the home market.     

The unintended consequences of grouping in tests of asset pricing models

We identify a number of unintended consequences of grouping when the capital asset pricing model is true and when it is false. When the model is true, grouping may cause fundamental problems with the most basic capital asset pricing and cross-sectional regression relationships. For example, with traditional grouping, the market portfolio is super-efficient––unless securities in each group are value weighted. Yet, when the model is grossly false, grouping may cause the model to appear to be absolutely correct. Ironically, the only way this can occur is when securities in each group are value weighted. To make matters worse, when the model is false, the slope of a cross-sectional regression of expected returns on betas fitted to grouped data may be either steeper or flatter than when the regression is fitted to ungrouped data. In other words, grouping may exacerbate the very problem it was meant to alleviate.     

Planetary boundaries: implications for asset impairment

Scientific findings support the existence of nine planetary boundaries which define a safe operating space for humanity and the conditions necessary to sustain human life. The declining state of the environment (4 of the 9 boundaries have been breached) creates significant risk factors for asset impairment. Risks result not only from environmental challenges and resulting resource constraints (e.g. limits to fossil fuel extraction and carbon constraints) but also changing technology landscapes and social expectations. This article is one of the first to discuss the implications of changes in planetary boundary conditions for asset impairment and recognising an impairment event and sets out an agenda for future research.     

Including commodity futures in asset allocation in China

In this paper, we investigate the role of eight commodity futures in asset allocation in China during the period January 2004–December 2015. The Chinese commodities and stocks are moderately correlated. We use quantile regressions based on a value-at-risk model to examine the relation between these two markets. We find no risk spillovers between the markets, suggesting that stocks and commodities in China are exposed to different risks. Using different asset allocation strategies, we show that including soymeal and soybeans in the Chinese stock index can offer some diversification gains. However, other Chinese commodities may not be useful for portfolio diversification.     

Static-arbitrage upper bounds for the prices of basket options

In this paper we investigate the possible values of basket options. Instead of postulating a model and pricing the basket option using that model, we consider the set of all models which are consistent with the observed prices of vanilla options, and, within this class, find the model for which the price of the basket option is largest. This price is an upper bound on the prices of the basket option which are consistent with no-arbitrage. In the absence of additional assumptions it is the lowest upper bound on the price of the basket option. Associated with the bound is a simple super-replicating strategy involving trading in the individual calls.     

A Markov model for valuing asset prices in a dynamic bargaining market

This paper proposes a Markov chain model for studying the impact on asset prices of illiquidity associated with search and bargaining in an economy. The economy consists of finitely many agents who can trade only when they find each other, and any trade between agents changes the population of the agent types which affects the asset price in the future. Assuming that the equilibrium utility as well as the trade price is proportional to the asset dividend, we obtain the asset prices in steady state. Through extensive numerical experiments, we observe that the equilibrium prices exhibit the cutoff phenomenon (i.e. crash) as the fraction of pessimistic agents becomes large. Models with a market maker as well as irrational agents are also considered.     

Do prices reflect market fundamentals in real estate markets?

The purpose of this article is to examine prices on land and REIT shares for possible evidence of deviations from market fundamentals, the underlying economic forces. Models of market fundamentals are developed from the intertemporal capital asset pricing model so that risk aversion and a stochastic investment opportunity set can be incorporated in the analysis. The approach in this article is to compare ex post values of actual discounted cash flows with prices and to test whether the price series are unbiased predictors of the future discounted cash flows. Several tests of the relationship are presented, and the results suggest that prices of real estate investment trusts and prices of farm land do not always reflect fundamental value.