Organized labor and information asymmetry in the financial markets

Prior results from the labor relations literature suggest that revealing information weakens management’s position in collective bargaining. Thus, when facing organized labor, management has an incentive to preserve the information asymmetry with outsiders. This study uses a sample from a large cross-section of the economy over several years to test this relation. Results are consistent with this prediction. Strong organized labor is associated with higher bid-ask spreads, higher probability of informed trading, lower trading volume and lower analyst coverage. These relations hold after controlling for numerous factors such as growth opportunities or risk.

Public information arrival and volatility persistence in financial markets

This paper explores the relationship between daily market volatility and the arrival of public information in four different financial markets. Public information is measured as the daily number of economic news headlines, divided in six categories of news. Statistical analysis of the news data suggests the presence of particular seasonality effects, as well as a strong degree of autocorrelation. Over the period 1994–1998, significant effects of specific news categories on the volatility of US stocks, treasury bills, bonds and dollar were detected. However, the effects – in size and duration – vary by news category and by financial market. It is demonstrated that most of the volatility persistence, as observed by GARCH models, tends to disappear when news is included in the conditional variance equation.     

Credit evaluation,information production,and financial intermediation

Financial intermediaries such as banks, saving and loan institutions, and insurance companies play a large and important role in highly developed economies. The economic significance of financial intermediaries results from their making arrangements between borrowers and lenders more efficiently than if these agents had to trade directly. The intent of this article is to provide a better understanding of the advantage that a financial institution has over an individual lender. This research treats intermediaries as producers of information in the credit evaluation process. The lender produces borrower information that revises the expected profit of the credit decision. Though the production of credit itself holds no economic advantage for institutions over individuals. The opportunity to produce information will provide economies of scale in lending and will help to explain the existence of financial intermediaries.     

No-arbitrage criteria for financial markets with transaction costs and incomplete information

This note deals with criteria of absence of arbitrage opportunities for an investor acting in a market with frictions and having a limited access to the information flow. We develop a mathematical scheme covering major models of financial markets with transaction costs and prove several results including a criterion for the robust no-arbitrage property and a hedging theorem.      

Strategic complementarity of information in financial markets with large shocks

In a simple model of a frictionless financial market with rational agents, the value of private information increases when large discrete shocks independently affect the fundamental value of the asset and the exogenous trading. The complementarity in information gathering generates multiple equilibria.     

The role of information acquisition and financial markets in international macroeconomic adjustment

International macroeconomic adjustment to money supply, aggregate expenditure, and relative demand disturbances is analyzed within a framework which emphasizes the role of information. Agents are unable to directly observe disturbances and may become fully informed about disturbances only by purchasing information. We analyze how relative price and exchange rate adjustment depends on the variances of the underlying disturbances while taking into account the incentive to acquire information. We also discuss the conditions which are necessary to preclude a free-rider problem whereby uninformed agents are able to extract from observation of financial market conditions the exact information of the information buyers.     

Economic evaluation of asymmetric and price range information in gold and general financial markets

Gold is widely perceived as a good diversification or safe haven tool for general financial markets, especially in market turmoil. To fully understand the potential, this study constructs an asymmetric multivariate range-based volatility model to investigate the dependence and volatility structures of gold, stock, and bond markets and further to compare the difference between the financial crisis and post-financial crisis periods. We find a striking explanatory ability to volatility structures provided by the price range information and significant evidence of asymmetric dependence across gold, stock, and bond markets. We implement an asset-allocation strategy incorporating asymmetric dependence and price range information to explore their economic importance. The out-of-sample results show that between 35 and 517 basis points and between 90 and 1111 basis points are earned annually when acknowledging asymmetric dependence and price range information, respectively. These economic benefits are inversely related to the level of investors’ risk aversion and are particularly significant in the period of the global financial crisis.     

Cross-boundary information sharing in regulatory contexts: The case of financial markets

Most studies about cross-boundary information sharing (CBIS) focus on private or public sector organizations only. There is limited research within regulated environments, which often requires information to be shared among multiple public, private and nonprofit organizations. This paper explores CBIS in different regulatory contexts, with a focus on financial markets in the USA, and finds some unique characteristics in terms of information asymmetries, incentive and governance structures, and structural complexity.     

Diversification in financial and crypto markets

This article investigates the conditional value at risk (CVaR) of two portfolio optimiza- tion approaches containing assets from the financial and crypto markets. We first catch the conditional interdependence structure among each variable through the vine-copula-GARCH model before merging it with the Mean-CVaR model. We then optimize each portfolio and find out the optimal allocation while evaluating the precise risk. The results indicate that the D-Vine copula is more suitable for both portfolios and that, when different conditional stock indices information are being taken into consideration, the crypto-market components can act as a weak hedge/safe haven against financial market indices. Furthermore, as CVaR is found to outperform the mean-variance of Markowitz in both portfolios, both risk measures similarly show that when including cryptocurrencies in a portfolio, the S&P 500 shall not be included. Additionally, the inclusion of Ethereum in a portfolio already containing Bitcoin does not boost the return.     

Investor climate sentiment and financial markets

We propose to measure investor climate sentiment by performing sentiment analysis on StockTwits posts on climate change and global warming. In financial markets, stocks of emission (carbon-intensive) firms underperform clean (low-emission) stocks when investor climate sentiment is more positive. We document investors overreaction to climate change risk and reversal in longer horizons. Salient but uninformative climate change events, such as the release of a report on climate change and abnormal weather events, facilitate the investor learning process and correction of the mispricing.     

Credit distortion and financial crisis

A simple and consistent theory based on credit distortion is developed to understand the origin of financial crises in the emerging markets. We prove that without the guarantee of various government agencies on the credit risk of foreign loans, the interest rate on foreign loans would be the same as the domestic loans, which would eliminate the incentive to borrow foreign loans on a great scale. We demonstrate that the common phenomena preluding the crisis, such as heavy foreign borrowing and overinvestment in real estate, are rational choices when a particular currency is overvalued and cheap credit is available.     

Money and liquidity in financial markets

We argue that there is a connection between the interbank market for liquidity and the broader financial markets, which has its basis in demand for liquidity by banks. Tightness in the market for liquidity leads banks to engage in what we term “liquidity pull-back,” which involves selling financial assets either by banks directly or by levered investors. Empirical tests on the stock market are supportive. Tighter interbank markets are associated with relatively more volume in more liquid stocks; selling pressure, especially in more liquid stocks; and transitory negative returns. We control for market-wide uncertainty and in the process also contribute to the literature on portfolio rebalancing. Our general point is that money matters in financial markets.     

沪深两市公司简介中的财务信息含量分析

公司简介是公司自愿披露信息的一种方式。目前,不同公司的公司简介中披露的信息情况存在很大差异,其影响因素主要有公司的财务状况、运营状况和所属行业等。不同公司的简介中财务信息含量大不相同,同时总体的水平也不高。事实上,公司简介中的财务信息含量可以从一个侧面反映公司的经营业绩,经营者通过有选择的信息披露以期获取更大收益。     

Adaptive learning in financial markets

We investigate adaptive or evolutionary learning in a repeatedversion of the Grossman and Stiglit (1980) model. We demonstratethat any process that is a monotonic selection dynamic willconverge to the rational expectations asset demands if the proportionof informed traders is fixed. We also show that these learningprocesses have a unique asymptotically stable fixed point atthe Grossman-Stiglitz (GS) equilibrium. The robustness of learningto noisy experimentation is studied using Binmore and Samuelson's(1999) deterministic drift approximation. Conditions on economicand learning process parameters for adaptive learning to leadto the GS rational expectations equilibrium are presented.     

Optimal liberalization of financial markets

As financial markets become completely liberalized, countries gain from improved risk sharing, but less wealthy countries can no longer profit from borrowing abroad at the lower rate and reinvesting at home at the higher rate. With decreasing rather than constant returns to capital, the gain from risk sharing is more likely to dominate the loss of the difference between the borrowing rate abroad and the decreasing reinvestment rate at home. Complete liberalization is likely to be optimal for less wealthy countries unless their labor endowment is large, their productivity is large, or holdings by foreigners are small, as in China.     

Information provision in financial markets

We set up a rational expectations model in which investors trade a risky asset based on a private signal they receive about the quality of the asset, and a public signal that represents a noisy aggregation of the private signals of all investors. Our model allows us to examine what happens to market performance (market depth, price efficiency, volume of trade, and expected welfare) when regulators can induce improved information provision in one of two ways. Regulations can be designed that either provide investors with more accurate information by improving the quality of prior information, or that enhance the transparency of the market by improving the quality of the public signal. In our rational expectations equilibrium, improving the quality of the public signal can be interpreted as a way of providing information about the anticipations and trading motives of all market participants. We find that both alternatives improve market depth. However, in the limit, we show that improving the precision of prior information is a more efficient way to do so. More accurate prior information decreases asymmetric information problems and consequently reduces the informativeness of prices, while a more accurate public signal increases price informativeness. The volume of trade is independent of the quality of prior information and is increasing in the quality of the public signal. Finally, expected welfare can sometimes fall as prior information or the public signal become more precise.     

The no-arbitrage condition and financial markets with transaction costs and heterogeneous information: The bid-ask spread

This paper investigates the implications of the no-arbitrage (NA) condition in markets with transaction costs and heterogeneous information. Dermody and Prisman (1993) showed that, in financial markets with increasing marginal transaction costs, the NA condition is equivalent to the existence of a valuation operator. They explore the exact dependence of this operator on the structure of transaction costs. They show that equilibrium prices in the “corresponding” perfect markets plus a certain factor determine the valuation operator in markets with increasing marginal transaction costs. This paper emphasizes that their result is applicable to financial markets with decreasing marginal transaction costs. Furthermore, this paper shows that, in financial markets with transaction costs and heterogeneous information, the NA condition imposes a constraint on the bid-ask spread.