Does institutional ownership matter for international stock return comovement?

We study the link between international stock return comovements and institutional investment. We test whether the rise of institutional ownership has increased cross-country correlations and decreased cross-industry correlations. Using stock-level institutional holdings across 45 countries during the 2001–2010 period, we find that industry and global factors are relatively more important the country factors in explaining stock return variation among stocks with higher institutional ownership. Industry diversification strategies are more beneficial than country diversification strategies for stocks with high institutional ownership. We show that cross-border portfolio investment is a powerful force of international capital market integration and convergence of asset prices.     

International portfolio diversification: Currency,industry and country effects revisited

We examine the relative importance of country, industry, world market and currency risk factors for international stock returns. Our approach focuses on testing the mean-variance efficiency of the various factor portfolios. An unconditional analysis does not show significant differences between country, industry and world portfolios, nor any role for currency risk factors. However, when we allow expected returns, volatilities and correlations to vary over time, we find that equity returns are mainly driven by global industry and currency risk factors. We propose a novel test to evaluate the relative benefits of alternative investment strategies and find that including currencies is critical to take full advantage of the diversification benefits afforded by international markets.     

国际原油价格对我国新能源行业股票价格的波动溢出效应研究

在大气污染日益严峻的情况下,新能源行业受政府大力支持和投资者青睐。新能源与原油一定程度上互为替代品,理论上国际原油价格必然对我国新能源行业股票价格有显著的波动溢出效应,但有些学者却持反对态度,认为我国股票市场对外还没有完全开放,新能源行业发展又很不成熟,所以该溢出效应很难显著。文章运用VAR- Asymmetric- BEKK模型进行比较研究得出：在未去除我国整体股市行情因素时,国际原油价格波动对我国新能源行业股票价格波动溢出效应不显著;而在去除我国整体股行情因素时,国际原油价格波动对我国新能源行业股票价格波动溢出效应在1%显著性水平下显著。表明存在从国际原油价格向我国新能源行业股票价格的波动溢出效应,只是该溢出效应被我国股市总体行情掩盖了。     

Market segmentation and international diversification across country and industry portfolios

We conjecture that partially segmented stock indexes that are characterized by low correlation with the world market are mainly priced by local factors and should produce abnormal returns relative to a global asset-pricing model. This implies a negative relation between correlation and future index returns in the presence of segmented indexes. Empirical evidence confirms such a relationship for the sample of industry indexes, suggesting a heterogeneous segmentation. However, we do not observe a similar pattern for country indexes. In addition, the international diversification potential of industries does not vanish during volatile periods. The hypothesis that the negative relationship should be stronger for the more segmented subsamples that are characterized by small market size and emerging country origin is verified for the industry sample. Thus, cross-industry diversification is superior to mere cross-country diversification.     

Cash Flows and Discount Rates,Industry and Country Effects and Co‐Movement in Stock Returns

We apply the Campbell decomposition to industry‐by‐country, national, global industry, and world stock index returns using 1995–2003 data. World, global industry, and country factors are all important for each of the two key components of stock returns: news about future dividends and news about future discount rates. Furthermore, the world component of future discount rates is more important than the idiosyncratic component, while the reverse is true for news about future dividends. Our results are broadly consistent with co‐movement in future discount rates arising from perceptions of common elements of risk in international equity markets.     

Momentum Strategies: Evidence from Pacific Basin Stock Markets

We investigate the profitability of momentum investment strategy in six Asian stock markets. Unrestricted momentum investment strategies do not yield significant momentum profits. Although we find that a diversified country‐neutral strategy generates small but statistically significant returns during 1981–1994, when we control for size and turnover effects we find that the country‐neutral profits dissipate. Our evidence suggests that the factors that contribute to the momentum phenomenon in the United States are not prevalent in the Asian markets.     

International Stock Return Comovements

We examine international stock return comovements using country‐industry and country‐style portfolios as the base portfolios. We first establish that parsimonious risk‐based factor models capture the data covariance structure better than the popular Heston–Rouwenhorst (1994) model. We then establish the following stylized facts regarding stock return comovements. First, there is no evidence for an upward trend in return correlations, except for the European stock markets. Second, the increasing importance of industry factors relative to country factors was a short‐lived phenomenon. Third, large growth stocks are more correlated across countries than are small value stocks, and the difference has increased over time.     

Using Bayesian variable selection methods to choose style factors in global stock return models

This paper investigates the presence of global style factors in global equity investment. To this end, we apply Bayesian variable selection methods from the statistics literature to give guidance in the decision to include/omit factors in a global (linear factor) stock return model. Once we have accounted for country and sector, it is possible to see which style or styles best explains current asset returns. This study does not find compelling evidence for global styles as useful explanatory factors in a fixed parameter regression model, once country and sector have been accounted for.     

The Importance of Industry and Country Effects in the EMU Equity Markets

Most empirical studies find that country effects are larger than industry effects in stock returns, although industry effects have gained in importance recently. Our results support the dominance of country effects relative to industry and common effects in the EMU equity markets in the 1975–2001 period. However, there is an increasing importance of industry effect relative to country effect in the 1990s. In fact, industry effects is similar in magnitude to country effect in the post‐euro period. The evolution of the ratio of country to industry effect is explained by the decrease in the cross‐sectional variance of interest rate movements across EMU countries. Thus, there is evidence that nominal convergence has reduced the differences between national equity markets.     

Is Country Diversification better than Industry Diversification?

In this paper, we develop a framework in which one can examine the source of industry and country diversification by examining their underlying return components. We find that the global cash flow factor explains on average 39% of the variation of country cash flows and global discount rates explain 55% of the variation of country discount rates. These are much less than the explanatory power of the two factors over industry cash flow and discount rate variations, which are 72% and 78% respectively. This suggests that global factors are much less important for return components at country level than at the industry level. As a result, both better diversification of expected returns and cash flows across countries determine the larger benefits of country diversification versus industry diversification. Moreover, emerging markets tend to have much smaller co‐movements of both dividends and expected returns with those of the world, suggesting a lower degree of integration with the world goods and financial markets. Our results cast doubt on the prevailing wisdom that country diversification should be replaced by industry diversification.     

Do foreign investors insulate firms from local shocks? Evidence from the response of investable firms to monetary policy

Extant research shows that stock returns of investable firms are highly sensitive to foreign market and global information shocks, suggesting that having foreign investors might insulate investable firms from shocks to local fundamentals. Examining 24 emerging markets, we find that both investable and non-investable firms are sensitive to local monetary policy shocks. This allays the concern that emerging-market opening reduces the efficacy of local monetary policy. We also find that in 11 countries (46% of our country-sample), investable firms are more sensitive to local shocks than non-investable firms. Differences in leverage, stock liquidity, size, domestic product-market exposure, or industry cyclicality do not drive this finding.     

The effect of tick size on managerial learning from stock prices

We investigate the effect of tick size, a key feature of market microstructure, on managerial learning from stock prices. Using a randomized controlled tick-size experiment, the 2016 Tick Size Pilot Program, we find that a larger tick size increases a firm's investment sensitivity to stock prices, suggesting that managers glean more new information from stock prices to guide their investment decisions as the tick size increases. Consistently, we also find that changes in managerial beliefs, as reflected in adjustments of forecasted capital expenditures, respond more strongly to market feedback under a larger tick size. Additional evidence suggests the following mechanism through which tick size affects managerial learning: a larger tick size reduces algorithmic trading, in turn encouraging fundamental information acquisition. Increased fundamental information acquisition generates incremental information about growth opportunities, macroeconomic factors, and industry factors, with respect to which the market has a comparative information advantage over management.     

How smart is money? An investigation into investor behaviour in the Australian managed fund industry

Gruber [Gruber, M., 1996. Another puzzle: the growth in actively managed mutual funds. Journal of Finance 51, 783–810] and Zheng [Zheng, L., 1999. Is money smart? A study of mutual fund investors’ fund selection ability. Journal of Finance 54, 901–933] document that managed fund investors demonstrate fund selection ability as they invest in funds whose subsequent performance is greater than that of funds from which they divest. This phenomenon has been since been termed the ‘smart money effect’. In contrast, Sapp and Tiwari [Sapp, T., Tiwari, A., 2004. Does stock return momentum explain the ‘smart money’ effect? Journal of Finance 59, 2605–2622] find that after controlling for stock return momentum, there is no evidence of a smart money effect. In this paper, we investigate whether a smart money effect exists in the Australian managed funds industry. The key findings of our paper are that there is a smart money effect in Australia and that stock return momentum does not explain this effect. We also find that the effect is not conditional on fund size. Our cross-sectional analysis indicates that investors are chasing funds that have performed well in the past and that cash flows to funds are persistent. However, we do not find any evidence that investors are pursuing funds that employ momentum trading strategies.     

What are the risks when investing in thin emerging equity markets: Evidence from the Arab world

This study attempts to identify the risks involved when investing in five emerging Arab capital markets. We first find that a constant beta is not a good proxy for risk in these thinly traded emerging markets. However, firms’ fundamentals and country risk rating factors prove significant in explaining the cross-sections of stock returns. The paper provides three important contributions to the literature on asset pricing in emerging capital markets: (i) we show how country risk ratings can be aggregated into a country risk factor; (ii) we add to a growing literature suggesting that, in markets other than the US, it is possible to find large and growth stocks to be riskier than small and value stocks; (iii) we determine that despite economic, financial and political reforms, issues related to financial transparency and political instability are still powerful obstacles to investments in these nascent emerging markets.     

Explaining Size Effect for Indian Stock Market

Using data for BSE 500 companies from October 2003 to January 2015, we confirm the presence of strong size effect in Indian stock market. Controlling for penny stocks, we find that returns decrease almost monotonically with firm size. The findings are robust for alternative size measures, i.e. market capitalization, total assets, net fixed assets, net working capital, net sales and enterprise value. We find the presence of non-synchronous trading bias and reverse seasonality effect. It is observed that market, size, value and business cycle factors explain size effect while liquidity and momentum factors have little role in this process. Thus, rational sources explain the size anomaly in the Indian context.     

Pricing assets with higher moments: Evidence from the Australian and us stock markets

This paper investigates the importance of higher moments of return distributions in capturing the variation of average stock returns for companies listed in the leading S&P US and Australian indices. We find that Australian stocks are more negatively skewed but less leptokurtic than US stocks. As a result, we find that co-skewness plays a more important role in explaining Australian returns while co-kurtosis is consistently influential for US stock returns. We postulate that the differences in results are related to the underlying firm characteristics of the companies in the two indices, where principally the Australian firms are noticeably smaller than their US counterparts and concentrated in a smaller number industry sectors. This implies that for many smaller exchanges around the world higher moment characteristics displayed by the US market may not be applicable. We also show our results are robust to partly explaining average stock returns in the presence of size, value, and momentum effects.     

Country versus sector factors in equity returns: The roles of non-unit exposures

In this paper we disentangle, analytically and empirically, the roles of the unit-exposure restriction in Heston and Rouwenhorst (1994). We show that if the purpose is to construct factors, the unit-exposure variance-analysis model can be viewed as just an algorithm that does not really assume a return-generating process; and in practice the effect of relaxing the restriction is immaterial. The restriction is more important if one wants to estimate whether, for a typical stock, the country factor generates more variance than the sector factor: exposure estimation becomes more important (i) the further the average exposures are from unity; or (ii) the higher the dispersion of the exposures. With respect to (i), the more important the corrections for sector (or geographical) structure in country (or sector) factors are, the more the average exposure falls below unity. Thus, the average exposure provides an alternative indicator of the importance of country versus sector effects. We empirically find that the average sector exposure is low (0.3) compared to the average country exposure (0.9). With respect to (ii) we correct the dispersion of exposures for estimation error in the exposures. We find that in our sample these estimation error corrections are more important for sector factors than for country factors, and that country factors are generating far more variance, in a typical stock's return, than do sector factors.     

Is the M&A announcement effect different across Europe? More evidences from continental Europe and the UK

The United Kingdom (UK) and Continental Europe are two of the most dynamic markets for mergers and acquisitions in the world. Using a sample of 2823 European acquisitions announced between 2002 and 2010, we investigate the effect of M&A announcements on stock returns of acquiring companies located in Continental Europe and the UK. The analysis is based on characteristics of takeover transactions such as method of payment, listing status of the target company, geographic scope (cross-border vs. domestic), industry relatedness of the bidding and the target company, amongst other factors. We find that European bidders earn positive abnormal returns both in cross-border and domestic acquisitions, and there is a significant difference between the abnormal returns of stock and cash deals, and between acquisitions of listed and unlisted target companies. However, the cross-border wealth effects are not significantly different between the UK and Continental Europe. We find that bidding firm’s shareholders gain more in equity than in cash offers if they are located in the UK and if they acquire unlisted targets. Cash bids for listed targets are associated with higher abnormal returns for bidders located in Continental Europe. We do not find supportive evidence that industry diversification destroys value for shareholders of both Continental European and the UK bidders.     

The sources of country and industry variations in ASEAN

This paper examines the possible determinants for the sources of country and industry variations in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) stock returns across financial crises. Using 4043 firms from 6 ASEAN countries and 40 industries, from 1990 to 2010, we found that lagged country return and concentration are among the determinants that explain the country factors in the region, while size proved to be the determinant of industry factors for both tradable and non-tradable industries. In general, a higher previous return and lower industrial concentration would increase the country factor. We documented the loss of explanatory power of these determinants in the presence of crisis effects.     

Oil price shocks,investor sentiment,and asset pricing anomalies in the oil and gas industry

This paper documents that stocks are not efficiently priced in the oil and gas industry. We find significant cross-sectional effects on stock returns from various firm characteristics in the oil and gas industry. Specifically, 13 out of 15 prominent capital market anomalies are robust in the oil and gas industry. Investor sentiment has significantly positive impact on 4 anomalies: composite equity issues, investment to assets, net stock issues, and value effect. Among the three oil shocks, we find that aggregate demand shocks have significantly impact on 6 anomalies: composite equity issues, financial distress, net stock issues, O-SCORE, return on assets, and idiosyncratic volatility. Our results are consistent with the view that high arbitrage costs and risks have significant deterring effects on arbitrage in the oil and gas industry. Our findings also have practical investment and policy implications for investors, firm managers, and policy makers alike.