Credit frictions and the comovement between durable and non-durable consumption

Frictions in lending between households have been proposed as a solution to the difficulties new-Keynesian models have in predicting a decline in both durable and non-durable consumption following a monetary tightening. By revisiting a standard new-Keynesian framework with collateral constraints, it is shown that the presence of such credit frictions in fact makes it more difficult to generate the joint decline. The intuitive reasons behind this result are provided, which should be helpful in developing models that are more successful in generating a positive comovement between durables and non-durables.     

The association between dividend payout and firm growth: Australian evidence

We report that whereas firms with high earnings distributions tend to have low‐to‐moderate growth (consistent with conventional theory), firms with low earnings distributions run the range between high and low performers. We interpret our findings for firm growth and payout policy in relation to the firm's location on the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix that combines high/low growth with high/low market share. Our findings suggest that the market has difficulty in distinguishing between these types of firms. A concern is that investor preferences as an outcome may be focussed on dividend‐paying firms at the expense of younger growing firms in need of retained earnings.     

Stock return,dividend growth and consumption growth predictability across markets and time: Implications for stock price movement

This paper links variation in the predictive regressions for stock returns, dividend growth and consumption growth to economic and market factors. The nature of these links can reveal whether movement in asset prices occurs primarily through the discount rate or cash flow channel, while they also help explain the reported mixed results for predictability. Variation is examined through cross-sectional regressions across 15 markets and over time using rolling regressions. The cross-sectional and time-varying parameters are regressed against output growth, interest rates and inflation as well as market variables using fixed effects panel as well as both OLS and logit approaches. The key implication for asset pricing is that although movement occurs through both channels, stock return predictability is more dominated by the discount rate channel and consumption growth predictability more so by the cash flow channel. Intuitively, such a difference may arise as investors and households rebalance their asset holdings and consumption at different speeds. There is also some evidence of money illusion through the inflation variable.     

Expected returns and expected dividend growth

We investigate a consumption-based present-value relation that is a function of future dividend growth and find that changing forecasts of dividend growth are an important feature of the post-war U.S. stock market, despite the failure of the dividend–price ratio to uncover such variation. In addition, dividend forecasts are found to covary with changing forecasts of excess stock returns over business cycle frequencies. This covariation is important because positively correlated fluctuations in expected dividend growth and expected returns have offsetting effects on the log dividend–price ratio. The market risk premium and expected dividend growth thus vary considerably more than is apparent using the log divided–price ratio alone as a predictive variable.     

Optimal dividend policy and growth option

We analyse the interaction between the dividend policy and the decision on investment in a growth opportunity of a liquidity constrained firm. This leads us to study a mixed singular control/optimal stopping problem for a diffusion that we solve quasi-explicitly by establishing a connection with an optimal stopping problem. We characterize situations where it is optimal to postpone the distribution of dividends in order to invest at a subsequent date in the growth opportunity. We show that uncertainty and liquidity shocks have an ambiguous effect on the investment decision.      

金融体系顺周期性与金融危机的发展演变关系研究

金融体系中的顺周期效应是导致金融体系内在不稳定性的重要原因,也是造成金融危机的根源之一.本文对金融体系中的顺周期现象进行了系统性的分析,认为不仅在信贷市场上存在顺周期效应,资本市场同样也存在顺周期效应,且两者之间存在紧密的相互促进作用,通过金融加速器、财富效应等传导至实体经济,放大经济波动周期.本文随后在顺周期的框架下探讨了金融危机的形成及发展、演变机制,并以美国次贷危机为实例加以验证.     

Regime switches between dividend and bond yields

The relation between bond and equity returns serves as a proxy for estimating the premia investors' demand on their equity portfolio holdings and assessing the substitution effects between the two markets. With this in mind, we examine empirically the co-movements and the underlying information between equities and bonds. Our approach relies on the comparison between bond and dividend yields — a relation better known as the gilt-equity yield ratio–GEYR — by examining the characteristics of the cointegration relation between the bond and equity yields. In this context, this paper's contribution is that it lifts the restrictions of linearity both in the long-run cointegration relations and in the underlying short-run relations presented in the VECM. Specifically, we apply the regime-switching framework of Gregory and Hansen (Gregory, A. W. & Hansen, B. E. (1996). Residual-based tests for cointegration in models with regime shifts. Journal of Econometrics 70, 99–126) for the long-run equilibriums and the Markov Switching VECM, established by Krolzig (Krolzig, H.M., 1997. Markov switching vector autoregressions. Modelling statistical inference and application to business cycle analysis. Springer, Verlag) for the short run ones. Our aim is to examine the allocation of capital among the UK bond (or else, gilt) and stock markets for the period of 01-1987 to 01-2007, in a fashion that better reflects the structural breaks and regime shifts of the underlying market conditions. Our findings confirm the substitution effects among stocks and bonds in the long run and highlight the importance of market conditions for the allocation of capital among stocks and bonds.     

Effective teaching and use of the constant growth dividend discount model

The appropriate application of the constant growth dividend discount model (DDM) requires an understanding of the fundamental nature of the model and its parameters. It is important that students not only be able to mechanically “plug and chug” the formula, but that they also understand the model’s assumptions, inputs, sensitivity to error and practical limitations. This paper demonstrates that the valuation measure derived from using the DDM is very sensitive to the relationship between the required return on investment (K_s) and the assumed growth rate (g) in earnings and dividends. Examples show that the valuation error increases at an increasing rate when the values of K_s and g converge in the formula. Classroom experience has indicated that students believe and strive to compute a single “correct” valuation of the share price. They should realize that the goal of valuation analysis is to estimate a reasonable range for the intrinsic value of a share price, rather than a single point estimate as often implied by end-of-chapter and exam-type problems using the DDM.     

The link between bank monitoring and corporate dividend policy: The case of dividend omissions

This study investigates whether bank monitoring influences investor response to a borrowing firm's decision to omit its dividend payments. We establish a new link between the theories of banking and dividend policy in an examination of how bank monitoring and firm dividend signals complement one another to resolve information asymmetries. Results indicate that, for small firms, investors interpret the dividend decision as a function of bank monitoring and the dividend signals taken together. Also reported are the results of tests examining the differences between the monitoring effects of banks versus public and private non-bank lenders.     

Location and excess comovement

Firms that switch from NASDAQ to the NYSE between 1988 and 2000 show an increase in the comovement of their order flows with aggregate NYSE order flow, and a decline in comovement with NASDAQ order flow. These changes in comovement are coincident with the switch, large relative to firms that remain on NASDAQ and the NYSE, and not explained by the growth in indexing over the sample period, a possible selection bias inherent in the decision to switch to the NYSE or a delayed response to cross-market information. Cross-sectional analysis shows that large, institutionally owned, value-oriented and dividend paying firms experience greater changes in comovement following the move to the NYSE. Our evidence is consistent with an important role for style investing in generating excess comovement, as in Barberis and Shleifer (2003).     

Illiquidity shocks and the comovement between stocks: New evidence using smooth transition

This paper extends the smooth transition conditional correlation model by studying for the first time the impact that illiquidity shocks have on stock market return comovement. We show that firms that experience shocks that increase illiquidity are less liquid than firms that experience shocks that decrease illiquidity. Shocks that increase illiquidity have no statistical impact on comovement. However, shocks that reduce illiquidity lead to a fall in comovement, a pattern that becomes stronger as the illiquidity of the firm increases. This discovery is consistent with increased transparency and an improvement in price efficiency. We find that a small number of firms experience a double illiquidity shock. For these firms, at the first shock, a rise in illiquidity reduces comovement while a fall in illiquidity raises comovement. The second shock partly reverses these changes as a rise in illiquidity is associated with a rise in comovement and a fall in illiquidity is associated with a fall in comovement. These results have important implications for portfolio construction and also for the measurement and evolution of market beta and the cost of capital as it suggests that investors can achieve higher returns for the same amount of market risk because of the greater diversification benefits that exist. We also find that illiquidity, friction, firm size and the pre-shock correlation are all associated with the magnitude of the correlation change.     

Multinationals and stock return comovement

We find that when a U.S. domestic firm becomes a multinational (MNC), its returns comove more with those of existing multinational firms and less with those of purely domestic firms in the following year. This result is robust to a propensity score matching method and an exogenous shock. Turnover comovement and changes in mutual funds' holdings of these MNC initiators further indicate that investors prefer multinationals as a style investment. Moreover, MNC initiators with larger foreign sales experience larger shifts in return comovement. Finally, the effect of MNC initiation on return comovement is relatively weaker for 2000–2016 than for 1979–1997.     

Opacity and the comovement in the stock prices of banks

We examine whether the stock prices of banks co-move more than the stock prices of non-banks, and whether that comovement is driven by informational opacity. Since the risks associated with the financial intermediation process are relatively opaque to outside investors, valuing banks can be difficult and information acquisition can be costly. We introduce a measure of comovement, denoted as beta dispersion, that identifies how closely a particular stock co-moves with the average industry CAPM beta. We find that bank stock prices generally co-move more than non-bank stock prices, and that opacity is driving the higher levels of comovement.     

Identifying the comovement of price between China's and international crude oil futures: A time-frequency perspective

Identifying the comovement of price between China's and international crude oil futures can help different market players gain a deeper understanding of the world crude oil market. This paper uses the wavelet (wavelet coherence and phase) methods to study the comovement characteristics at different time scales from three aspects (the strength of comovement, the direction of comovement and the lead-lag relationship of price fluctuation) and uses the complex network method to explore the evolutionary characteristics of the comovement with time. We use the daily closing prices of WTI, Brent and China's crude oil futures (INE) as sample data. The results show that the comovement between INE and international crude oil futures is extremely different from that between other international crude oil futures, and the comovement at different time scales is also different. Compared with the comovement between WTI and Brent crude oil futures, the comovement strength between INE and international crude oil futures is weak and the comovement direction is unstable. China's crude oil futures price fluctuation also tends to lag behind that of international crude oil futures. Compared with the long-term, the short-term comovement strength is weaker, the comovement states are more diverse and the transition between comovement states is more complex. Moreover, during the evolution of time, some comovement states have a higher probability of occurrence and they are also more stable than others. These findings are helpful for policy makers to design policies and for investors to make investment decisions.     

Intermediate inputs and sectoral comovement in the business cycle

The post-war US business cycle is characterized by positive comovement of employment and output across sectors. It has been argued that multi-sector growth models are inconsistent with this observation when changes in relative productivities are the main source of fluctuations. We suggest that the input-output structure of an economy, in particular the pervasive use of intermediate inputs, can induce positive comovement in sectoral employment and output following changes in relative productivities. We calibrate a model of the US economy for the durable and nondurable goods producing sectors, and show that sectoral employment and output move together if intermediate inputs are used in production. The model is also consistent with the observation that the relative price of nondurable goods is procyclical.     

On the reversal of return and dividend growth predictability: A tale of two periods

A disconcerting, albeit generally accepted, finding is that aggregate stock returns are predictable by dividend yield but dividend growth is unpredictable. I show that part of this lack of dividend growth predictability stems from how dividend growth is constructed. I then show a dramatic reversal of predictability in the 134 years during 1872–2005: stock returns are largely unpredictable in the first seven decades, but become predictable in the postwar period; dividend growth is strongly predictable in the prewar years but this predictability disappears in the postwar years. New evidence on the predictability of long-run returns and dividend growth is also shown.     

The comovement of option listed stocks

This study examines the changes in return comovement around the listing and delisting of stock option contracts. We show that newly option listed stocks experience an increase in comovement with a portfolio of option listed stocks and a decrease in comovement with the portfolio of non-optioned stocks. Similarly, stocks that undergo option delisting exhibit a decrease in comovement with option listed stocks and an increase in comovement with non-optioned stocks. We verify the reliability of our findings in several ways. A matched sample analysis suggests that our results are not driven by factors other than option listing and we find similar results using a calendar-time approach. Further analysis reveals that commonalities in option trading may induce the comovement in the option listed stocks. Overall, our evidence is consistent with the predictions of the category or habitat view of comovement.     

A simple examination of the empirical relationship between dividend yields and deviations from the CAPM

Several papers have been published in recent years dealing with both the theoretical and the empirical impact of dividend yields on security returns. Dividends have been postulated as affecting stock returns because of tax effects, agency costs and the Wealth Transfer Hypothesis. In this paper we perform a purely empirical examination of whether and to what extent deviations from the zero beta form of the CAPM are explained by divident yields. The paper demonstrates that dividend yield has a large and statistically significant impact on return above and beyond that explained by the zero beta form of the CAPM. This is consistent with the findings of Litzenberger and Ramaswamy. In addition our results are consistent with the findings of small firm effects.     

The comovement of US and German bond markets

We use a vector-autoregression, with parameter estimates corrected for small-sample bias, to decompose US and German unexpected bond returns into three ‘news’ components: news about future inflation, news about future real interest rates, and news about future excess bond returns (term premia). We then cross-country correlate these news components to see which component is responsible for the high degree of comovement of US and German bond markets. For the period 1975-2003 we find that inflation news is the main driving force behind this comovement. When news is coming to the US market that future US inflation will increase, there is a tendency that German inflation will also increase. This is regarded bad news for the bond market in both countries whereby bond prices are bid down leading to immediate negative return innovations and changing expectations of future excess bond returns. Thus, comovement in expected future inflation is the main reason for bond market comovement.