Anomalies and stock returns: Australian evidence

Prior research has identified the existence of several cross‐sectional patterns in equity returns, commonly referred to as effects. This paper tests for the existence of a number of well‐known effects using data from the Australian equities market. Specifically, we investigate the size effect, book‐to‐market effect, earnings‐to‐price effect, cashflow‐to‐price effect, leverage effect and the liquidity effect. An additional aim of this paper is to investigate the capability of the Fama–French model in explaining any observed effects. We document a size, book‐to‐market, earnings‐to‐price and cashflow‐to‐price effect but fail to find evidence of a leverage or liquidity effect. Although our findings indicate that the Fama–French model can partially explain some of the observed effects, we conclude that its performance is less than satisfactory in Australia.     

Liquidity and stock returns in pure order-driven markets: evidence from the Australian stock market

This paper examines the relationship between liquidity and stock returns in the pure order-driven stock market of Australia. The bid-ask spread, turnover rate, and amortized spread are used as proxies for liquidity. In addition to liquidity, other factors that have been found to influence stock returns, such as beta and size, are also considered. Seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) and the cross-sectionally correlated timewise autoregressive (CSCTA) model form the methodological basis for this research. A small liquidity premium is found in the Australian market, which persists for the entire year. There is also strong evidence of a negative size effect.     

Innovative efficiency and stock returns

We find that innovative efficiency (IE), patents or citations scaled by research and development expenditures, is a strong positive predictor of future returns after controlling for firm characteristics and risk. The IE-return relation is associated with the loading on a mispricing factor, and the high Sharpe ratio of the Efficient Minus Inefficient (EMI) portfolio suggests that mispricing plays an important role. Further tests based upon attention and uncertainty proxies suggest that limited attention contributes to the effect. The high weight of the EMI portfolio return in the tangency portfolio suggests that IE captures incremental pricing effects relative to well-known factors.     

Investor sentiment and stock returns: Global evidence

We assess the impact of investor sentiment on future stock returns in 50 global stock markets. Using the consumer confidence index (CCI) as the sentiment proxy, we document a negative relationship between investor sentiment and future stock returns at the global level. While the separation between developed and emerging markets does not disrupt the negative pattern, investor sentiment has a more instant impact in emerging markets, but a more enduring impact in developed markets. Individual stock markets reveal heterogeneity in the sentiment-return relationship. This heterogeneity can be explained by cross-market differences in culture and institutions, along with intelligence and education, to varying degrees influenced by the extent of individual investor market participation.     

Momentum strategies and stock returns: Chinese evidence

This paper investigates the profitability of momentum investment strategies for equities listed in the Shanghai Stock Exchange. We also investigate the role of trading volume to examine whether there is any relationship between stock returns and past trading volume for Chinese equities. We find evidence of substantial momentum profits during the period 1995 to 2005 and that momentum is a pervasive feature of stock returns for the market investigated in this paper.Our findings suggest that investors can generate superior returns by investing in strategies unrelated to market movements. We also investigate the potential of past volume to explain momentum profits, and find no strong link between past volume and momentum profits. Our findings also show a strong momentum effect around earnings announcements but the magnitude of these returns is small in relation to the average monthly returns earned in the early months following portfolio formation.     

Firm characteristics and long-run stock returns after corporate events

The well-documented abnormal long-run buy-and-hold returns to firms issuing equity in initial public offerings and seasoned equity offerings, firms bidding in mergers, and firms initiating dividends can be attributed to imperfect control-firm matching. In addition to firm size and market-to-book ratio, event firms on average differ from control firms in terms of idiosyncratic volatility, liquidity, return momentum, and capital investment, each of which also explains returns. We propose a simple regression-based approach to control for differences in firm characteristics across event and control firms, and we show that long-run abnormal returns do not differ significantly from zero for event firms in the 1980 to 2005 period. The returns to event firms are, therefore, consistent with patterns known to exist for the broad stock market and do not require event-specific explanations.     

Firm profitability and expected stock returns: Evidence from Latin America

Despite their higher valuation ratios, larger size, and higher investment needs, profitable firms outperform, in both raw and risk-adjusted returns, unprofitable firms in Latin America. The positive effect of firm profitability on stock returns is pervasive in univariate and bivariate sorts, panel regressions, across sub-regional markets, and among small and large stocks. A five-factor model that includes market, size, distress, profitability, and investment factors prices profitability portfolios better than other popular factor models. Five-factor alphas of profitability portfolios tend to be lower and less statistically significant, both individually and collectively, than alphas from other three widely-used pricing models.     

Default risk and equity returns: Australian evidence

We test whether default risk is related to equity returns using the Fama and MacBeth [Fama, E.F., MacBeth, J., 1973. Risk, return, and equilibrium: empirical tests. Journal of Political Economy 81, 607–636.] regression framework. The proxy we use for default risk is the default probability obtained from option-based models. Our findings show that default probability is negatively related to returns. While we find that size and book-to-market are related to default risk, the ability of these variables to explain cross-sectional variation in returns is not because they are proxying default risk. Further, our evidence suggests that the negative relationship between default probability and returns is not due to a leverage, volatility or momentum effect.     

Price and earnings momentum in Australian stock returns

There is no prior published Australian research on earnings momentum and only one prior unpublished work of limited depth and scope. We provide some of the first Australian evidence on earnings momentum and revisit price momentum with the first Australian evidence of the behaviour of returns beyond 12 months. Price momentum is found to be a feature of this market, but there is some reversal of returns during the second year after portfolio formation, suggesting trend chasing behaviour. Earnings momentum is also present, but with weak continuation into the second year. Price momentum and earnings momentum are shown to provide independent explanatory power over future returns.     

Investor sentiment and stock returns: Some international evidence

We examine whether consumer confidence – as a proxy for individual investor sentiment – affects expected stock returns internationally in 18 industrialized countries. In line with recent evidence for the U.S., we find that sentiment negatively forecasts aggregate stock market returns on average across countries. When sentiment is high, future stock returns tend to be lower and vice versa. This relation also holds for returns of value stocks, growth stocks, small stocks, and for different forecasting horizons. Finally, we employ a cross-sectional perspective and provide evidence that the impact of sentiment on stock returns is higher for countries which have less market integrity and which are culturally more prone to herd-like behavior and overreaction.     

Liquidity and stock returns in Japan: New evidence

The liquidity/stock returns linkage was studied using data from the First Section, the Second Section, and the Mothers Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). In our overall tests, we found a significantly negative (positive) relationship between liquidity (illiquidity) proxies and returns. Upon exploring this further for the impact of business cycles, we found that while the expansionary phases largely confirm the overall finding, contractionary phases do not. When we controlled for liquidity variability in the cross-sectional regressions, the role of the liquidity level showed strong significance across business cycles, different subperiods and all Sections of the TSE. With regard to liquidity variability, we observed a strongly significant and negative association with stock returns.     

Momentum in stock returns: evidence from an emerging stock market

This study examines the presence and sources of momentum profits in the Dhaka stock exchange (DSE). Although the short-term reversal and intermediate-term momentum are found to be evident, short-term reversal is not as consistent and significant as intermediate-term momentum. Further examination shows that momentum profits in the DSE cannot be explained by the rational source like market factor but can be explained by the size factor. We argue that presence of large number of small stocks and lack of arbitrage opportunity could be the possible causes of momentum effect in the DSE.     

Excess stock returns and news: evidence from European markets

This paper aims at decomposing the forecast error variance of excess returns in five major European stock markets into the variance of news about future excess returns, dividends and real interest rates. Special emphasis is given on the issue of stationarity and structural breaks in the unconditional mean of dividend yields and their implications for variance decompositions. Empirical results indicate that in some markets the dividend yield is subject to structural breaks in the mean. Evidence from Monte Carlo simulations suggests that this kind of structural breaks cause small-sample bias in variance decompositions of a magnitude comparable to bias introduced by unit roots. Our results constitute a warning about return decompositions that, in particular, use variables in the forecasting equations that may be nonstationary or contain a structural break.     

Reversal and momentum patterns in weekly stock returns: European evidence

We analyze short‐term reversal and medium‐term momentum patterns in weekly stock returns in Europe. Focusing on raw and stock‐specific returns, our empirical results show for both return specifications (a) a negative relation between weekly past returns and future returns in the short run and (b) a positive relation in the medium run. However, returns from reversal and momentum strategies based on stock‐specific returns are less volatile. In further analyses, we find short‐term reversal and medium‐term momentum patterns to be connected to stock characteristics. Looking at the potential causes of these effects, our results do not support the idea that short‐term reversal in weekly stock returns is due to an over‐ or underreaction to firm‐specific news nor that it is mainly driven by illiquidity. Medium‐term momentum in weekly stock returns, on the other hand, can be connected to behavioral biases. Our concluding tests confirm that our findings are robust among industries, in subperiods, for the January effect and in varying market states. Finally, while medium‐term momentum strategies remain profitable after accounting for transaction costs, short‐term reversal strategies can be mainly explained by transaction costs due to their high turnover.     

Effect of credit rating changes on Australian stock returns

We study the impact credit rating revisions have on stock returns of Australian firms rated by Standard & Poor's and Moody's. Our evidence is consistent with that documented in the USA showing that only downgrades contain price‐relevant information. The reaction is most significant when the downgrade: (i) is unanticipated; (ii) is for an unregulated firm; and (iii) reduces the firm's rating by more than one category.     

Asymmetric reverting behavior of short-horizon stock returns: An evidence of stock market overreaction

This paper investigates the uneven mean reverting pattern of monthly return indexes of the NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ, using asymmetric non-linear smooth-transition (ANST) GARCH models. It also evaluates the extent to which time-varying volatility in the index returns support the stock market overreaction hypothesis. The models illuminate patterns of asymmetric mean reversion and risk decimation. Between 1926:01 and l997:12, not only did negative returns reverse to positive returns quicker than positive returns reverted to negative ones, but negative returns, in fact, reduced risk premiums from predictable high volatility. The findings support the market overreaction hypotheses. The asymmetry is due to the mispricing behavior on the part of investors who overreact to certain market news. The findings also corroborate arguments for the “contrarian” portfolio strategy.     

Firm fundamentals and stock prices in emerging Asian stock markets: some panel data evidence

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the direct link between firm fundamentals and stock prices in a set of emerging Asian stock markets using firm-level panel data. In doing so, we explore the relationship between firm-specific variations in stock returns and firm fundamentals in the context of a simple present value framework. We find that alternative proxies of variation in firm fundamentals—albeit at differing degrees—explain a significant part of firm-specific return variation in a majority of emerging markets in Asia. Findings are robust to the influence of other factors known to affect stock return volatility (e.g. firm size, stock turnover, and leverage). Overall results suggest that stock prices in a majority of the Asian emerging markets contain a significant amount of firm-specific fundamental information and are, therefore, not as murky as commonly thought.     

UK stock returns and robust tests of mean variance efficiency

We test both the unconditional and conditional Mean Variance Efficiency of the UK stockmarket, paying particular attention to choosing a suitable set of instruments for the conditional version of the model. By considering more carefully than previous authors the pricing of economic risk within the mean-variance framework we show that certain instruments can enhance the basic model structure. Given the tendency for financial market data to display non-constancy in variance and non-normality we employ the GMM procedure described in Hansen (1982), which requires much weaker distributional assumptions than the more traditional OLS techniques. We discuss forming portfolios of stocks using both size and dividend yield as a criterion to achieve a suitable spread of risk and return, and find that our conclusions are sensitive both to the method of portfolio formation and to the choice of estimator. This is an important finding given the problem of thin trading associated with the size ordering of UK stocks. We find some support for both the unconditional and conditional version of the CAPM, though we are cautious about our conclusions given the instability of the parameter estimates.     

Alternative profitability measures and cross-section of expected stock returns: international evidence

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - This paper provides an extensive international analysis of the cross-sectional return predictive power of a variety of firm-level profitability...     

Size,value and momentum in stock returns: evidence from India

This paper examines the effects of size, value and momentum on the cross-sectional relation between expected returns and risk in the Indian stock market. We find that the conditional Carhart four-factor model empirically describes the variation of cross-section of return better than the unconditional model. When size, book-to-market and momentum effects are controlled in the conditional model, the positive relation of market beta, book-to-market and momentum with expected returns remains economically and statistically significant. However, this evidence is found to be subject to characteristics of test portfolios. The expected returns are sensitive to changes in predictive macroeconomic variables.