Improved Mutual Fund Investment Choice Architecture

Two choice architecture interventions were explored to debias investors' irrational preference for mutual funds with high past returns rather than funds with low fees. A simple choice task was used involving a direct trade-off between maximizing past returns and minimizing fees. In the first intervention, warning investors that “Some people invest based on past performance, but funds with low fees have the highest future results” was more effective than 3 other disclosure statements, including the U.S. financial regulator's, “Past performance does not guarantee future results.” The second intervention involved converting mutual fund annual percentage fees into a 10-year dollar cost equivalent. This intervention also improved investors' fee sensitivity, and remained effective even as past returns increased. Financially literate participants were surprisingly more likely to irrationally maximize past returns in their investment choices.     

The Elephant In The Ground: Managing Oil And Sovereign Wealth

One of the most important developments in international finance and resource economics in the past twenty years is the rapid and widespread emergence of the $6 trillion sovereign wealth fund industry. Oil exporters typically ignore below-ground assets when allocating these funds, and ignore above-ground assets when extracting oil. We present a unified stylized framework for considering both. Subsoil oil should alter a fund’s portfolio through additional leverage and hedging. First-best spending should be a share of total wealth, and any unhedgeable volatility must be managed by precautionary savings. If oil prices are pro-cyclical, oil should be extracted faster than the Hotelling rule to generate a risk premium on oil wealth. Finally, we discuss how our analysis could improve the management of Norway’s fund in practice.     

Covered Call Investing in a Loss Aversion Framework

In a mean-variance framework, the covered call investment strategy has been seen as an inefficient method of allocating wealth. Covered calls reduce the riskiness of the portfolio and therefore lead to lower portfolio returns. Recent debate has focused on the shortcomings of mean-variance efficiency as an accurate depiction of investor utility. Using alternative utility functions, we find mixed support for the use of the covered call investing strategy. Using loss aversion, however, we reexamine the covered call investment decision and find it significantly enhances investor utility relative to an index portfolio investment strategy. We conclude that loss aversion's more accurate depiction of investor preferences and behavior helps to explain the popularity of the covered call investment strategy.     

Precautionary Saving,Financial Risk,and Portfolio Choice

Relying on a direct question about the desired amount of precautionary wealth from the 2002 wave of the Italian “Survey of Household Income and Wealth,” I assess the main determinants of the precautionary motive for saving, focusing on the role played by financial risk on households' saving decisions. Households that invest mainly in safe assets do not need to protect themselves against future and unexpected financial losses. Consequently, once we control for households' sources of risk beside financial ones, the amount of precautionary savings of a household investing exclusively in safe assets should be lower compared to households who detain a non‐negligible share of risky assets in their portfolio. Results show that, as expected, a strong and negative correlation exists between the desired amount of precautionary wealth and the ownership of a portfolio made exclusively of safe assets.     

The relation between asset growth and the cross-section of stock returns: Evidence from the Chinese stock market

This study examines the effect of firm investment on stock returns by using data on the Chinese stock market. We find that stocks with higher investment experience lower future returns and there is an obvious investment effect in the Chinese stock market. The investment effect is stronger for firms that have higher cash flows, lower debt or for state-owned firms. We further explore the relation between investment and returns over the 3 years around portfolio formation. The results show that the high investment firms earn higher returns than low investment firms before portfolio formation; however the high investment firms earn lower returns than low investment firms after portfolio formation, such evidence is supportive of investor's overreaction explanation. Additionally, the stock returns don't necessarily decrease after investment, and the stock returns don't significantly positively correlate with firm profitability or book-to-market, so the result don't support risk-based explanation. Overall, both our portfolio sort and two-stage cross-sectional regression analysis show that behavioral finance theories are better than risk-based theories in explaining the investment anomaly. Evidence from the Chinese stock market provides a useful perspective to understand the debate on the investment anomaly.     

Sovereign Dilemmas: Saudi Arabia and Sovereign Wealth Funds

While the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) can claim over half of SWF assets globally, the largest and most strategically important state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has heretofore lacked a dedicated investment fund. This paper challenges some of the conventional wisdom on SWFs in explaining the Saudi government's reticence to launch an SWF and its recent decision to cautiously move in this direction. First, while Washington policy makers raise fears of enemies using SWFs against US interests, Saudi foreign assets have been used in support of its continuing alliance with the United States. And second, while critics decry the lack of transparency of SWFs, the Saudi launch of a new SWF could represent a move toward greater transparency, by working to separate “private” sovereign funds from “public” ones. Indeed, the launch of a SWF fits into a broad pattern of reforms rationalising Saudi governing institutions as King Abdullah has moved to control spendthrift princes, to streamline decision making, and to attract more foreign investment.     

The impact of sovereign risk on bond duration: Evidence from Asian sovereign bond markets

This paper examines the effect of sovereign risk on bond duration. We compare the sovereign risk-adjusted duration for U.S. dollar-denominated Asian sovereign bonds with their Macaulay duration for both investment grade bonds and speculative grade bonds. We find that the sovereign risk-adjusted duration is significantly shorter than its Macaulay counterpart for all bonds, regardless of their bond rating and their maturity. Further, the “shortening” effect of sovereign risk on duration gets stronger as bond rating deteriorates and in recessionary conditions. Our findings provide strong support for the importance of adjusting for sovereign risk when bond portfolio managers apply the popular duration measure to hedge interest rate risk.     

行为金融视角下中国证券市场投资策略研究

本文根据我国证券投资基金发展的实际情况,运用代理关系下的有限套利模型和行为资产组合理论,建立面板数据模型,对影响我国基金投资收益的因素进行了实证研究。得出以下结论:代理关系和心理账户对证券投资基金的收益影响显著;对于基金的代理人——基金经理而言,建立有效的基金经理人信用评级制度有利于培养优秀的机构投资者,同时可促进我国证券市场的健康发展。     

Can foreign equity funds outperform their benchmarks? New evidence from fund-holding data for China

We investigate whether foreign institutional investors can outperform domestic benchmarks. Using portfolio holding-based approaches for the Chinese Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (QFIIs), we identify fund’s active manager opinions and information on the future value of stocks. We find stocks actively traded by QFIIs, and stocks with higher deviation from benchmarks (DFB) outperform their benchmarks in the subsequent one to three quarters. Such “hot hand” phenomenon is driven by foreign institutions’ investment skill in incorporating stale information rather than fresh information into asset pricing. Our findings shed new light on the roles of foreign equity funds in eliminating mispricing in emerging markets, and provide evidence on rethinking the role of financial intermediation in a capital-controlled economy.     

State‐Society Synergy and Export Sophistication

This paper contributes to the recent research on “export sophistication,” or the composition of a country's export portfolio. The central question of the current study is what determines a country's level of export sophistication. I argue that a synergetic relationship between state and society positively contributes to the level of export sophistication. The logic behind the argument is that the socially optimal level of investment in new products can only be realized if both the firm and the government find it individually profitable to carry out the investment. In cases whereby either or both lacks private incentive to invest, higher synergy between public and private sectors makes such joint investments more likely to occur. This logic is formally illustrated using a simultaneous game with incomplete information. The central hypothesis is tested using time series cross‐sectional data. The key empirical novelty of this paper is the construction of a “synergy index” based on Peter Evans' conceptualization of the term. Overall, the data give good support to the hypothesis. This relationship is particularly robust for the subsample of countries with intermediate levels of synergy. Furthermore, there is evidence suggesting that state‐society synergy is subject to diminishing returns as its values get higher.     

A semiparametric approach to value-at-risk,expected shortfall and optimum asset allocation in stock–bond portfolios

This paper investigates stock–bond portfolios' tail risks such as value-at-risk (VaR) and expected shortfall (ES), and the way in which these measures have been affected by the global financial crisis. The semiparametric t-copulas adequately model stock–bond returns joint distributions of G7 countries and Australia. Empirical results show that the (negative) weak stock–bond returns dependence has increased significantly for seven countries after the crisis, except for Italy. However, both VaR and ES have increased for all eight countries. Before the crisis, the minimum portfolio VaR and ES were achieved at an interior solution only for the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and Italy. After the crisis, the corner solution was found for all eight countries. Evidence of “flight to quality” and “safety first” investor behaviour was strong, after the global financial crisis. The semiparametric t-copula adequately forecasts the outer-sample VaR. These findings have implications for global financial regulators and the Basel Committee, whose central focus is currently on increasing the capital requirements as a consequence of the recent global financial crisis.     

Assessing Recent Determinants of Borrowing Costs in Sub‐Saharan Africa

This study explores macroeconomic implications of the sovereign bond rush that has been taking place in sub‐Saharan Africa since 2006. The focus is on the sub‐Saharan sovereign bond yields as proxies for the region's ability to raise new funds on international markets. Despite the subcontinent's tour‐de‐force entrance to the international bond market, this paper reveals that recent (since early 2000s) borrowing in foreign currency is not without macroeconomic risk. Empirically this paper finds that sovereign bond yields are significantly influenced by global volatility, commodity prices and global liquidity—all factors that are out of the control of the sub‐Saharan economies in question. These findings suggest that portfolio repositioning by institutional investors prompted by improved growth prospects and implicit monetary policy tightening in the advanced economies or heightened risk perceptions, are likely to result in increased borrowing costs for the sub‐Saharan bond issuers and affect their ability to raise funds in international markets. Furthermore, a change in borrowing costs might lead to higher debt‐service costs and policy uncertainty, which in turn could lead to suboptimal investment levels and, ultimately, hinder economic development.     

中国资本市场对绿色投资认可吗?——基于绿色基金的分析

在可持续发展思想的指导下,人们对绿色投资的生态价值已达成共识.而绿色投资能否兼顾环境绩效和财务收益的双重目标,无论是在理论上还是实证上都还没有得到统一的结论.文章以绿色基金的绩效评估为切入点,研究了我国绿色投资的收益与风险.文章首先从环境金融、社会责任投资和金融创新视角系统梳理了绿色投资研究的发展脉络,然后选取22只绿色基金,在选定市场基准和匹配非绿色传统基金对照组的基础上,评价了绿色基金的直接收益和风险以及基于单因素和多因素模型(Carhart四因素模型)的风险调整收益,并进一步分析了基金投资者(绿色投资者)的收益敏感性.基于单因素模型的绩效评价显示,现阶段我国绿色基金的风险调整收益要低于市场基准和传统基金,投资策略差异和成立时间长短对基金收益和风险有影响.基于Carhart四因素模型的分析结果显示,我国绿色基金的投资表现要显著低于市场平均水平,市场风险因子、价值因子和动量因子可以较为客观地解释绿色基金的收益.另外,绿色基金投资者的收益敏感性不高.文章为尚有限的我国绿色投资研究提供了新的直接的证据.     

Optimal portfolio choices using financial leverage

This paper investigates the role of leverage in determining the investor's optimal asset allocation over multiperiod investment horizons. To do this, we allow investors to lever their financial position by borrowing from credit markets. GMM methods are used to estimate and test the optimal portfolio weights and individual's optimal choice of financial leverage. These optimal choices are assumed to be parametric functions of a set of state variables describing the evolution of the economy. The empirical application of this methodology to a portfolio of cash, bonds and stocks reveals that a) financial leverage limits the reaction of investors to changes in the investment opportunity set; b) individuals increase leverage during recessions and deleverage in expansionary periods; c) optimal portfolio weights and financial leverage are negatively related to the degree of investor's risk aversion and positively related to the investment horizon.     

An Alternative Post-Keynesian Framework for Understanding Capital Flows to Emerging Markets

This article contributes to the establishment of a framework for the analysis of international capital flows, with a specific focus on emerging markets. It is based on a “monetary” analysis of the economy, as well as on the works of Hyman Minsky and Jan Toporowski in particular. The key aspects of such an approach are the following. First, in a monetary economy, capital flows need to be understood as “flows of funds” that pertain to the realm of financial choices, as opposed to the traditional understanding of capital flows as based on “real” variables, such as saving and investment. A consequence of this is the need to focus on gross flows rather than capital flows. Second, liquidity preference considerations also apply at the international level, particularly in relation to the liquidity of emerging-market currencies that, in turn, depends on context-specific “Keynesian fundamentals.” Third, the rise of institutional investors is the key historical development in the financial system, shaping the current reality of cross-border capital flows, including to emerging markets. I argue that institutional investors’ liabilities, in light of the theories of Minsky and Toporowski, are one of the most important variables in determining these investors’ portfolio choices. I synthesize these elements by defining capital flows to emerging markets as the demand for emerging-market assets by institutional investors. I propose a framework to categorize the various channels that guide this demand.     

China's liberalizing stock market,crude oil,and safe-haven assets: A linkage study based on a novel multivariate wavelet-vine copula approach

China is the world's largest oil importer, and therefore the correlations between stock indices and highly volatile oil prices deserve close examination when investing in China's gradually liberalizing stock market. Another concern for international investors is whether safe-haven assets can reduce portfolio risks for investment in China. The paper makes two main contributions. First, we develop a novel method of examining a multivariate dependence structure by combining wavelet analysis with the vine copula model. Second, we apply the proposed methodology to study the correlations between China's liberalizing stock market, petroleum, and safe-haven assets at different frequencies. We find that the multidimensional dependence of these assets has been altered as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis. Moreover, the vine structures exhibit dependence patterns that vary over time horizons, indicating that the multidimensional dependence is sensitive to time scales.     

中国资本账户开放进程中跨境证券投资对国内金融市场的影响*

随着中国资本项目开放进程的推进,跨境证券投资对国内金融市场的冲击日益增强。在此背景下,本文首先通过构建考虑了资本市场收益率以及有管理浮动汇率制度的IS LM BP模型对跨境证券投资与中国国内金融市场的相互影响机理进行了理论探究,并基于中国2005年7月—2016年8月的月度数据,运用马尔科夫区制转移向量自回归模型对中国资本账户开放进程中跨境证券投资与人民币汇率、股票市场收益率、短期利率的联动关系进行了实证分析。研究结果表明：第一,四者的关联性存在明显的区制特征,区制1主要包括次贷危机时期（2007—2008年）、欧债危机时期（2010—2012年）以及后金融危机时期（2015—2016年）,经济呈现“股票市场收益率较低、跨境证券投资较少、短期利率较高、金融市场波动性大”的状态;区制2主要包括次贷危机前夕（2005—2006年）、次贷危机后的量化宽松时期（2009—2010年）以及欧债危机后的调整期（2013—2014年）,经济呈现“股票市场收益率较高、跨境证券投资较多、短期利率较低、金融市场波动性小”的状态。第二,当处于资本市场化进程较快、金融市场波动性较大的区制阶段（区制1）时,跨境证券投资与国内金融市场的联动关系更加明显。本文研究结论对于我国进一步开放资本市场具有借鉴价值和政策启示。     

The relations among accounting conservatism,institutional investors and earnings manipulation

Most scholars have indicated corporations using accounting conservatism to reduce earnings manipulation, although certain scholars believe that firms have more incentive to increase earnings manipulation. Institutional investors play an important external monitoring role, and affect firm's earnings manipulation. Previous studies adopted accruals as an earnings manipulation proxy to detect the relationship among accounting conservatism, institutional investor shareholdings, and earnings manipulation. We further investigate the relationship among accounting conservatism, institutional investor shareholdings, and earnings manipulation by using Benford's law. Our results indicate that firms with more conservative financial reporting have less probability of engaging in earnings-manipulative activities. We also find the negative association between earnings management and institutional investor shareholdings. However, if corporate financial statements tend toward conservatism, institutional investor shareholdings could increase managers' incentive to manage earnings. Our findings have important implications for investors to make investment decisions.     

The world's greatest debtor nation?

The widely repeated assertion that the United States has become “the world's greatest debtor nation” is based on reports of its “net international investment position.” This position relates not exclusively to debt but rather to the difference between net United States claims to foreign assets and net foreign claims to United States assets. Major portions are equities and direct investment, the latter valued at “book” or original cost.Estimates of the current value of direct investment, either market value on the basis of share prices or replacement cost, effect huge asymmetric adjustments. As United States direct investment abroad is generally much older, it has appreciated much more than foreign direct investment in the United States. With adjustments as well for the market value of gold and for bad debts, it is estimated that the United States net international investment position was more or less in balance at the end of 1987 and in only relatively small deficit at the end of 1988.     

The composition of foreign capital stocks in South Africa: The role of institutions,domestic risk and neighbourhood effects

Foreign capital inflows are an important source of funds to finance investment in developing economies. International finance literature is therefore concerned with how institutional factors like property rights and corruption affect foreign capital inflows. We investigate the determinants of the absolute volumes and composition of foreign capital stocks in South Africa, focusing on the role played by institutional quality (property rights), domestic default risk and neighbourhood effects as potential determinants. The empirical results show that secure property rights and low default risk in the host country positively affect the absolute volumes of both long-term foreign capital and short-term foreign capital, but tilt the composition in favour of long-term foreign capital. Empirical results also demonstrate the existence of neighbourhood effects where the institutional environment in Zimbabwe significantly impacts on South Africa's foreign capital inflows. In this regard, weak property rights in Zimbabwe lead to an increase in South Africa's foreign direct investment (FDI), but a reduction in South Africa's portfolio investment. This suggests that Zimbabwe and South Africa compete for foreign direct investment in similar sectors, and present two alternative investment destinations to foreign investors. By contrast, weak property rights in Zimbabwe appear to raise the perceived risk for portfolio investment in South Africa.