Predicting fraud by investment managers

We test the predictability of investment fraud using a panel of mandatory disclosures filed with the SEC. We find that disclosures related to past regulatory and legal violations, conflicts of interest, and monitoring have significant power to predict fraud. Avoiding the 5% of firms with the highest ex ante predicted fraud risk would allow an investor to avoid 29% of fraud cases and over 40% of the total dollar losses from fraud. We find no evidence that investors receive compensation for fraud risk through superior performance or lower fees. We examine the barriers to implementing fraud prediction models and suggest changes to the SEC's data access policies that could benefit investors.     

Perceived risk and the interplay of expert endorsement,corporate image and investment knowledge in mutual fund advertising

This study aims at examining the effects of expert endorsement, corporate image and investment knowledge on individuals’ perceived risk in mutual fund advertising. Based on the results from a content analysis of 341 print advertisements of mutual funds in Hong Kong, a 3 (advertising texts about corporate image: corporate management, financial performance, corporate responsibility)?×?2 (visual of expert endorser: presence, absence) between-subjects online experiment was subsequently conducted. The content analysis showed that visuals of experts had a significant relationship with corporate attributes in the advertisements. Results from the experimental study revealed that the participants reading the expert-endorsed advertisement about corporate management were more favorable toward the advertiser’s corporate image. The participants’ investment confidence posed a significant effect to their favorability toward the advertiser’s corporate image and subsequently their willingness to invest. When formulating communication strategies for financial products and services, practitioners should pay attention to the effect of expert endorsement in enhancing individuals’ favorability of the corporate image, as well as the effect of individuals’ investment confidence on individuals’ willingness to invest.     

Information manipulation and rational investment booms and busts

A model of endogenous investment booms and busts with rational agents is presented where outside investors are uncertain about both industry (aggregate) and firm-specific capital productivity, and insiders manipulate information through strategic productivity disclosures. For intermediate and high levels of agency conflict, there are aggregate investment distortions along the equilibrium path, investment dynamics are history-dependent, and depict patterns of persistent investment booms or investment busts even though investors design optimal incentive contracts based on Bayes-rational beliefs. Moreover, the aggregate uncertainty may not be resolved in the limit, as the number of firms and disclosures gets arbitrarily large.     

An individual level analysis of the mutual fund investment decision

This study investigates the manner in which consumers make investment decisions for mutual funds. Investors report that they consider many nonperformance related variables. When investors are grouped by similarity of investment decision process, a single small group appears to be highly knowledgeable about its investments. However, most investors appear to be naive, having little knowledge of the investment strategies or financial details of their investments. Implications for mutual fund companies are discussed.     

投资者教育发挥作用了吗?——来自公募基金个人投资者调查数据的证据

投资者教育是保障资本市场平稳运行、良性发展的重要举措,也是我国资本市场重要的基础性制度建设。本文利用20000多份全国公募基金个人投资者调查数据,分析了投资者教育对基金投资收益的影响,并基于行为金融学框架探究了其背后的作用机制。以往文献研究表明,金融知识水平对投资收益会产生显著影响,本文研究发现,获取金融知识的渠道也会影响投资收益。相对于自己学习金融知识、相关工作经验累积金融知识、向亲戚朋友学习金融知识,投资者教育(如参加金融机构的投资教育活动、接受金融经济类课程或培训)更有助于投资者缓解趋势追逐、频繁交易、处置效应等交易行为偏差,从而获得更高的投资收益。进一步分析表明,投资者教育通过提高“理性程度”来提升基金投资盈利概率、投资总收益率和年均收益率的中介效应分别为19.41%、17.09%和12.75%。此外,不同群体参与投资者教育的积极性和受教育效果存在显著差异,投资者教育要更多采取“分类教育”的形式。本文研究对进一步加强投资者教育、更好地推动资本市场发展具有一定的参考意义。     

Reactions of dissatisfied investors: exit,voice or loyalty

This study examines the reactions of individual investors that have invested in the stocks of companies that have been eventually delisted from the stock market due to bankruptcy and/or bad governance. Data to determine reaction styles of investors are collected through a well-established questionnaire to a sample of 67 investors of Borsa Istanbul. Multinomial logistic regression analysis concludes that investors’ perceived knowledge about the stock market is the most important factor affecting how investors react. More specifically, the higher the knowledge perceived, the higher the tendency of the investors to keep investing (loyalty) as the reaction. Further, more experienced investors are found to complain/ask for their rights (voice) more.     

The role of investors’ objective financial knowledge on the assessment of risk disclosures in mutual fund advertisements

This study examined the role of investors’ objective financial knowledge in processing risk disclosures in mutual-fund advertisements. Investors were exposed to a mutual fund advertisement containing either a disclaimer mandated by regulatory bodies or a strongly worded warning label. Overall, the results showed that mandated disclaimers were ineffective in reducing investors’ return expectations and attitudes toward the advertised fund, regardless of the investors’ level of financial knowledge. However, strongly worded warning labels effectively impacted the return expectations and attitudes of low-knowledge investors, but not high-knowledge investors. That is, the impact of warning labels was dependent on the level of an investors’ financial knowledge; specifically, high-knowledge investors failed to discount past performance as a heuristic cue in their judgments. Importantly, this behavior of high-knowledge investors was not due to a familiarity effect; the risk disclosures were properly encoded and processed by knowledgeable investors. These results suggest that high-knowledge investors either possessed strongly held beliefs (for example, the ‘hot hand’ effect) that persevered even when exposed to the strongly worded warning, or they were overconfident in their judgments.     

Socialization and processing effects on comprehension of credit card advertisement disclosures

This study examines how college students comprehend the disclosures in a credit card advertisement through two main perspectives: socialization and processing. The results reveal that socialization and processing influence college students’ comprehension of the disclosures differently. In general, message involvement with the disclosures may enhance comprehension of the disclosures positively. However, college students’ experiences in using a credit card, enhanced by information search and number of credit cards owned, may have an inverse and negative effect on comprehension of the disclosures. While female students tend to exhibit more experiences in using a credit card, male and female students comprehend the disclosures to the same degree. This also suggests that female students may be more susceptible to ignore the disclosures, whereas an attended and informed card user provides the best defense against costly mistakes in neglecting important disclosures in credit card solicitations.     

Dynamic Effects of Information Disclosure on Investment Efficiency

This paper studies how information disclosure affects investment efficiency and investor welfare in a dynamic setting in which a firm makes sequential investments to adjust its capital stock over time. We show that the effects of accounting disclosures on investment efficiency and investor welfare crucially depend on whether such disclosures convey information about the firm's future capital stock (i.e., balance sheet) or about its future operating cash flows (i.e., earnings). Specifically, investment efficiency and investor welfare unambiguously increase in the precision of disclosures that convey information about the future capital stock, since such disclosures mitigate the current owners' incentives to underinvest. In contrast, when accounting reports provide information about future cash flows, the firm can have incentives to either under‐ or overinvest depending on the precision of accounting reports and the expected growth in demand. For such disclosures, investment efficiency and investor welfare are maximized by an intermediate level of precision. The two types of accounting disclosures act as substitutes in that the precision of capital stock disclosures that maximizes investment efficiency (and investor welfare) decreases as cash flow disclosures become more informative and vice versa.     

Voluntary fair value disclosures beyond SFAS 157’s three-level estimates

Some firms voluntarily make disclosures about the controls and processes in place to ensure the reliability of fair value estimates. Consistent with these disclosures being driven by investors’ concerns about the reliability of their SFAS 157 estimates, we find that firms with more opaque estimates are more likely to provide such disclosures. We then examine whether these disclosures improve investors’ perception about the reliability of fair value estimates. We find that they are associated with higher market pricing and lower information risk for Level 3 estimates. Further analyses of the disclosures reveal that the following types of information are particularly important to investors: discussion of the external and independent pricing of fair value estimates and their proper classification according to the SFAS 157 hierarchy. Overall, our results suggest that the voluntary reliability disclosures that firms provide beyond SFAS 157’s three-level estimates help reduce investors’ uncertainty toward the more opaque fair value estimates.     

Investigation of investors' overconfidence, familiarity and socialization

This study, using a sample of New Zealand investors, investigates three behavioural finance theories: investor overconfidence, socialization and the familiarity effect. We find support for the investor overconfidence theory, using characteristics such as past success, optimism, confidence in one's abilities, investment experience and investment‐related knowledge. Concerning the socialization theory, we observe that the investors actively sought information regarding the stock market, 75 per cent doing this on a weekly basis. Those investors that kept themselves informed daily outperformed other investors by 8 per cent. The familiarity effect was confirmed, showing investors to hold a far too high proportion of local stocks, although the majority of investors believed international equity markets would provide returns that were either better or equal to New Zealand stocks.     

Auditors’ Liability,Investments, and Capital Markets: A Potential Unintended Consequence of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act

To restore investors’ confidence in the reliability of corporate financial disclosures, the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002 mandated stricter regulations and arguably increased auditors’ liability. In this paper, we analyze the effects of increased auditor liability on the audit failure rate, the cost of capital, and the level of new investment. We focus on a setting in which, with imperfect auditing, a firm has better information than investors about its prospects and seeks to raise capital for new investments in a lemons market. The equilibrium analysis derives corporate reporting and investing choices by the firm, attestation opinions by the auditor, and valuation by rational investors. Three empirically testable predictions emerge: although increasing auditor liability decreases the audit failure rate and the cost of capital for new projects, it also decreases the level of new profitable investments.     

投资者教育能提高投资者理性水平吗?

本文以投资者对公允价值的认知偏差程度作为理性水平的替代指标,在进行调查研究的基础上,使用李克量表对投资者的理性水平进行了分析。根据关于对投资者理性水平调查结果,本文对投资者进行了关于公允价值信息的教育和模拟投资实验;通过对比投资者接受教育前后的理性水平,并以之为解释变量,对实验过程中的股价信息含量进行了检验。实证研究发现,投资者对公允价值的认知水平的变化能够显著影响股价信息含量,说明加强投资者对于市场环境的认识有助于提高投资者的理性水平,从而有助于增强我国证券市场的有效性。     

Do investors show an attentional bias toward past performance? An eye-tracking experiment on visual attention to mutual fund disclosures in simplified fund prospectuses

This study examines the cognitive processes underlying investors’ extrapolations of past fund performance and whether investors’ attention patterns may explain their return-chasing behaviors. We measured the attention that investors paid to mutual fund disclosures in a simplified fund prospectus using unobtrusive infrared eye tracking. Results suggest that prior fund performance, which is normatively irrelevant information and not useful in predicting future performance, received considerable attention from investors. More interestingly, the impact of prior fund performance on investors’ purchasing intentions was fully mediated through expected returns and attention paid to past performance information. The results indicate that investors apparently believe in performance persistence or in a ‘hot hand’ effect, and that mutual fund purchases are driven by salient information such as superior performance. Moreover, we tested the disclaimer mandated by regulatory bodies, which warns that past performance does not guarantee future results. We found that the disclaimer was ineffective in reducing investors’ extrapolation biases, despite the fact that the disclaimer was attended to and properly encoded by investors.     

The networking function of investment banks: Evidence from private investments in public equity

We examine investment banks' networking function in capital markets, using a sample of Private Investments in Public Equity (PIPEs). We argue that investment banks develop relationships with investors through repeat dealings, and that investment banks' networks of relationship investors form the basis of their networking function. We find that investment banks, especially those with larger investor networks, help issuers attract investors. Correspondingly, an issuer that desires more investors is more likely to hire an investment bank than place the shares directly. We also find that issuers pay higher fees to hire investment banks with larger investor networks. Our empirical findings suggest that the networking function of investment banks is important in securities offerings.     

Beliefs affecting additional investment intentions of mutual fund clients

In this article, we aim to examine mutual fund investors’ behaviour in decision-making situations and to analyse future investment decisions via a path model approach. Investors were divided into different groups based on the risk and distribution channel used, and the differences in their investment intentions were examined. The study used empirical survey data collected from the clients of a mutual fund company owned by a Finnish banking group. Loyalty to the common banking group dominated the explanation in the whole model. The safety of the investment was important for branch office investors, whereas obtaining a good return was important for internet investors. Ultimately, explanatory power was highest for the branch office investors and lowest for the internet investors with equity funds. Most investors intended to invest more, and thus there was little variance to be explained. The results indicate that branch office investors with money market funds require more information about the investment business, although it is difficult to see who would be responsible for providing that information. This study has implications for both the theory and management of financial services.     

Decomposing the persistence of international equity flows

The portfolio flows of institutional investors are widely known to be persistent. What is less well-known, however, is the source of this persistence. One possibility is the ‘informed trading hypothesis:’ that persistence arises from autocorrelated trades of individual investors who believe they have information about value and who face an imperfectly liquid market. Another possibility is that there are asynchroneities with respect to investment decisions across funds, across investments, or both. These asynchroneities could be due to wealth effects (across investments for a single fund), investor herding (across funds for a single investment), or generalized contagion (across funds and across investments). We use daily data on institutional flows into 21 developed countries by 471 funds to measure and decompose aggregate flow persistence. We find that the informed trading hypothesis explains about 75% of total persistence, and that the remaining amount is attributable entirely to cross-fund own-country persistence. While asynchroneities across funds investing in the same country are important, asynchroneities across countries, either within a given fund, or across funds, are not important. The cross-fund flow lags we identify might result from different fund investment processes, or from some funds mimicking others' decisions. We reject the hypothesis that wealth effects explain persistence.     

Implications for brokerage firms’ financial disclosures: From CSR perspectives

Given the importance of transparency in today's financial environment, it is surprising that limited research has examined investors’ attitudes toward brokerage firms’ financial disclosures and how their attitudes toward brokerage firms’ financial disclosures influence subsequent responses such as perceived trust and attitude toward brokerage firms. Research on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices and the Social Contract Theory suggests that investors may put a relatively high value on brokerage firms that practice financial disclosures responsibly. This research probed the relevance of this assumption by testing the relations among investors’ attitudes toward brokerage firms’ financial disclosures, attitudes toward CSR practices, perceived trust toward brokerage firms, attitudes toward brokerage firms and behavioral intentions toward brokerage firms with a survey study. The study used brokerage firms’ financial disclosures in general as the focus of this study's survey questions and a convenience sample consisting of investors. The results suggested that investors’ positive attitudes toward brokerage firms’ financial disclosures positively enhanced their attitudes toward brokerage firms’ CSR practices and perceived trust toward brokerage firms, whereas investors’ attitudes toward brokerage firms’ CSR practices mediated their attitudes toward financial disclosures to enhancing their perceived trust toward brokerage firms. Moreover, investors’ attitudes toward brokerage firms mediated their perceived trust toward brokerage firms on enhancing their behavioral intentions toward brokerage firms.     

The characteristics of infrastructure as an investment class

There is an enormous need for infrastructure investment. Although institutional savings has shown strong growth in the OECD countries since the mid-2000s, only a small proportion of institutional assets is allocated to infrastructure. Relatively little is known about the characteristics and risk–return profiles of infrastructure assets, making institutional investors reluctant to step up investing in this type of asset. There is a wide heterogeneity in risk–return characteristics across sectors, regions, and stage of development, creating an uncertainty that explains why the flow of funds from institutional investors toward infrastructure does not reach its full potential. However, infrastructure provides significant diversification benefits that justify increased investment. Moreover, the financial crisis led to a growing interest in infrastructure as a tool for portfolio diversification among various asset classes. The goal of this paper is to review the characteristics of infrastructure as an investment class. The paper will be useful for academics looking for topics of research in the field, and will be of practical use to institutional investors considering infrastructure investment opportunities.     

The impact of energy-exporting countries’ EPUs on China’s energy futures investors: Risk preference,investment position and investment horizon

This study brings some new insights into EPU risk management. By categorizing China’s energy futures (CEF) investors by risk preference, investment position and investment horizon, we identify how EPU in four energy-exporting countries affects CEF investors. The Russian EPU mainly produces influence on short-run investors and risk-seeking investors. The Australian EPU affects risk-seeking investors heavily, while the Brazilian EPU acts on risk-seeking investors with short positions. In terms of China’s coking coal futures, changes in Russian EPU generate the weakest impact on various types of investors, while the US EPU affects medium-run risk-averse and long-run investors. The Australian EPU’s impact on investor types covers a wide range, while the Brazilian EPU affects short-run risk-averse and long-run investors. Moreover, for medium-run CEF investors, energy-exporting countries’ EPU risk characteristics is most dynamic. Changes in the EPU risk impact type mainly occurred during the US-China trade war and the outbreak of COVID-19.