The Effects of Inverted Yield Curves on Asset Returns

Between 1954 and 1991, U.S. stocks, long-term government bonds, and corporate bonds show negative risk premiums during periods preceded by inverted yield curves. Intermediate-term government bonds do not. Going from safer to riskier asset classes, the negative risk premiums increase in absolute value and statistical significance. The consumption CAPM offers a possible explanation for the negative risk premiums. A negative covariance between the growth rate of consumption and the premium on the risky assets will result in a negative risk premium. Empirical tests of the conditional covariance show that the consumption CAPM does not explain the phenomena.     

DIFFERENCES OF OPINION,OVERCONFIDENCE, AND THE HIGH‐VOLUME PREMIUM

We argue that both differences of opinion and overconfidence lead to high‐volume shocks. However, a high‐volume shock induced mainly by differences of opinion (overconfidence) will lead to superior (inferior) stock returns. Empirically, Asian financial markets, in contrast to U.S. markets, reveal weaker and inconsistent high‐volume premiums. The inconsistency may be attributable to investor's overconfidence. Additional evidence based on U.S. data supports this view, as a high‐volume shock accompanied by increased institutional ownership yields substantially higher high‐volume premiums than otherwise, and high‐volume premiums generally are much stronger in down‐market states than up‐market states.     

Tracking down distress risk

This paper shows that exposure to aggregate distress risk is the underlying source of the premiums for the Fama-French size (SMB) and value (HML) factors. Using a unique data set of aggregate business failures of both private and public firms from 1926 to 1997, I build portfolios that track news about future firm failures. These tracking portfolios optimally hedge aggregate distress risk and earn a Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) alpha of approximately −4% a year. Both HML and SMB predict changes in future failure rates. Small stocks have lower returns than large stocks and value stocks have lower returns than growth stocks when the market expects an increase in future failure rates. Finally, a two-factor model with the market and the tracking portfolio for aggregate distress as factors does as well as the Fama-French three-factor model in pricing the 25 size and book-to-market sorted portfolios.     

CORPORATE CAPITAL COSTS: A PRACTITIONER'S GUIDE

Central to modern finance theory is an understanding of the cost of capital—the minimum required rate of return that is used by companies and investors for both valuation and ongoing performance measurement. This paper provides new insights into the market risk premium for U.S. equities, as well as better methods for measuring and quantifying a company's systematic risk. In so doing, it furnishes evidence that stock market investors now expect a 5% return premium over 30-year government bonds—a decline from the 6–8% premiums suggested by the Ibbotson-Sinquefeld data that extends from 1926 to the present. The author argues that, because of structural changes in the global economy and capital markets, only the most recent 40 or 50 years of data are relevant for estimating current risk premiums. Like the article that precedes it, this article also notes that the 30-year Treasury bond has an increasing component of systematic risk, and the author provides a method of applying the CAPM that removes that risk component from the "risk-free" rate and shifts it to the market risk premium.     

Some Empirical Tests of the Theory of Arbitrage Pricing

We estimate the parameters of Ross's Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT). Using daily return data during the 1963–78 period, we compare the evidence on the APT and the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) as implemented by market indices and find that the APT performs well. The theory is further supported in that estimated expected returns depend on estimated factor loadings, and variables such as own variance and firm size do not contribute additional explanatory power to that of the factor loadings.     

A Macrofinance View of U.S. Sovereign CDS Premiums

Premiums on U.S. sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) have risen to persistently elevated levels since the financial crisis. We examine whether these premiums reflect the probability of a fiscal default—a state in which a balanced budget can no longer be restored by raising taxes or eroding the real value of debt by increasing inflation. We develop an equilibrium macrofinance model in which the fiscal and monetary policy stances jointly endogenously determine nominal debt, taxes, inflation, and growth. We show that the CDS premiums reflect the endogenous risk-adjusted probabilities of fiscal default. The calibrated model is consistent with elevated levels of CDS premiums but leaves dynamic implications quantitatively unresolved.     

Quantitative Easing in the 1930s

During the 1934–39 recovery from the U.S. Great Depression, overnight interest rates were usually at a lower bound. Meanwhile, American monetary authorities followed policies related to today's debates on quantitative easing: they tried to stabilize yields on Treasury bonds with open market operations; they created rapid growth in high‐powered money; and they allowed transitory factors to affect high‐powered money. Effects of these policies on bond yields reveal a portfolio effect of short‐duration asset supply on term premiums. This portfolio effect helps explain why high‐powered money growth was associated with recovery of real activity over 1934–39.     

GOLBALIZATION, CORPORATE FINANCE, AND THE COST OF CAPITAL

International financial markets are progressively becoming one huge, integrated, global capital market—a development that is contributing to higher stock prices in developed as well as developing economies. For companies that are large and visible enough to attract global investors, having a global shareholder base means having a lower cost of capital and hence a greater equity value for two main reasons: First, because the risks of equity are shared among more investors with different portfolio exposures and hence a different “appetite” for bearing certain risks, equity market risk premiums should fall for all companies in countries with access to global markets. Although the largest reductions in cost of capital resulting from globalization will be experienced by companies in liberalizing economies that are gaining access to the global markets for the first time, risk premiums can also be expected to fall for firms in long-integrated markets as well. Second, when firms in countries with less-developed capital markets raise capital in the public markets of countries (like the U.S.) with highly developed markets, they get more than lower-cost capital; they also import at least aspects of the corporate governance systems that prevail in those markets. For companies accustomed to less-developed markets, raising capital overseas is likely to mean that more sophisticated investors, armed with more advanced technologies, will participate in monitoring their performance and management. And, in a virtuous cycle, more effective monitoring increases investor confidence in the future performance of those companies and so improves the terms on which they raise capital. Besides reducing market risk premiums and improving corporate governance, globalization also affects the systematic risk, or “beta,” of individual companies. In global markets, the beta of a firm's equity depends on how the stock contributes to the volatility not of the home market portfolio, but of the world market portfolio. For companies with access to global capital markets whose profitability is tied more closely to the local than to the global economy, use of the traditional Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) will overstate the cost of capital because risks that are not diversifiable within a national economy can be diversified by holding a global portfolio. Thus, to reflect the new reality of a globally determined cost of capital, all companies with access to global markets should consider using a global CAPM that views a company as part of the global portfolio of stocks. In making this argument, the article reviews the growing body of academic studies that provide evidence of the predictive power of the global CAPM as well as the reduction in world risk premiums.     

The critical role of conditioning information in determining if value is really riskier than growth

Conditional asset pricing models have been used to determine whether the value premium and other CAPM anomalies are due to risk. We show that the conclusions on whether these anomalies are due to risk are very sensitive to the choice of the information variables used to define good and bad states of the world. We use a conditional CAPM framework allowing for alternative sets of plausible conditioning information and find that value appears to be riskier than growth in only about ten to twenty percent of specifications. We find even less evidence that size, issuance, momentum, and asset growth portfolio returns are due to risk. Overall, our results suggest that common CAPM anomalies are not due to risk.     

Two Paradigms and Nobel Prizes in Economics: a Contradiction or Coexistence?

Abstract Markowitz and Sharpe won the Nobel Prize in Economics for the development of Mean‐Variance (M‐V) analysis and the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for the development of Prospect Theory. In deriving the CAPM, Sharpe, Lintner and Mossin assume expected utility (EU) maximisation in the face of risk aversion. Kahneman and Tversky suggest Prospect Theory (PT) as an alternative paradigm to EU theory. They show that investors distort probabilities, make decisions based on change of wealth, exhibit loss aversion and maximise the expectation of an S‐shaped value function, which contains a risk‐seeking segment. Can these two apparently contradictory paradigms coexist? We show in this paper that although CPT (and PT) is in conflict to EUT, and violates some of the CAPM's underlying assumptions, the Security Market Line Theorem (SMLT) of the CAPM is intact in the CPT framework. Therefore, the CAPM is intact also in CPT framework.     

International Asset Pricing and Portfolio Diversification with Time-Varying Risk

We test the conditional capital asset pricing model (CAPM) for the world's eight largest equity markets using a parsimonious generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) parameterization. Our methodology can be applied simultaneously to many assets and, at the same time, accommodate general dynamics of the conditional moments. The evidence supports most of the pricing restrictions of the model, but some of the variation in risk-adjusted excess returns remains predictable during periods of high interest rates. Our estimates indicate that, although severe market declines are contagious, the expected gains from international diversification for a U.S. investor average 2.11 percent per year and have not significantly declined over the last two decades.     

The U.S. Property and Liability Insurance Industry: Firm Growth,Size, and Age

The relationship between firm size, age, and growth is tested for the U.S. property and liability (P‐L) insurance industry, and the determinants of firm characteristics on firm growth are analyzed. Using Heckman's two‐stage methodology, this article examines the relationship between corporate growth and firm size. The relationship between firm growth and firm age is also investigated. Furthermore, to determine time‐varying effects, the analysis is conducted for the different subperiods. The results of this article strongly support Gibrat's Law in the U.S. P‐L insurance market for the testing periods. The results are consistent for longer time periods and for shorter subperiods. It also finds that young firms grow faster than old firms during the sample periods. Related to the determinants of firm characteristics on firm growth, insurers using less input cost tend to grow fast. Economies of scope are positively related to firm growth as well.     

THE COUPON EFFECT ON TERM PREMIUMS

Monthly holding period returns for U.S. Treasury bills and notes of identical maturity indicate a significant coupon effect upon term premiums. Hotelling's T² test of the vectors of mean term premiums indicates that term premiums are not statistically significant for notes but are significant for bills. Mean-variance and stochastic dominance criteria indicate an investment preference for bills over notes on a pretax basis. Because the data set is Treasury bills and notes, which are identical except for coupon level, these results are evidence of a coupon effect on term premiums.     

Cashflow news,the value premium and an asset pricing view on European stock market integration

The decomposition of national CAPM market betas of European countries’ value and growth portfolio returns into cashflow and discount rate news driven components reveals that i) high average returns on value portfolios are associated with disproportionately high sensitivity to national cashflow news which corroborates recent evidence for the U.S. and ii) two-beta variants of national CAPMs capture the cross-sectional dispersion in European stock returns. The latter finding is suggestive of relatively well integrated stock markets among the core European countries and reflects basic asset pricing theory. One (national) discount factor should price any (international) asset.     

What Companies Need to Know About International Cross‐Listing

This article addresses four questions about cross‐listing by non‐U.S. companies on a U.S. stock exchange: Why do companies cross‐list? Does a U.S. listing increase firm value? If so, what are the sources of the increased valuation? And finally, how has the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX) affected the value of a U.S. listing? Both managerial surveys and academic research show that companies list in the U.S. to increase visibility and share liquidity, to broaden their shareholder base, to gain access to cheaper financing and reduce the cost of capital, and, in some cases, to implement a global business strategy. Foreign companies also typically cross‐list after periods of strong market performance and experience a positive valuation effect around the time of listing, but then underperform the market in the period after the cross‐listing. On average, cross‐listed companies exhibit higher valuations than their home‐market peers, but with significant variation based on firm characteristics: The valuation premiums are larger for smaller companies with higher past sales growth, higher ROAs, and lower financial leverage. In the long run, the companies that show a permanent increase in valuation are those that succeed in expanding their U.S. shareholder base and improving their levels of shareholder protection. Finally, the evidence suggests that SOX, while perhaps deterring some would‐be overseas listings, has not seriously eroded the net benefits of a U.S. listing.     

New estimates of the cost of capital for pharmaceutical firms

Academic researchers, as well as pharmaceutical firms themselves, often use the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) to estimate a firm's cost of capital. But the CAPM implicitly assumes that cash flows follow a random walk. This assumption is inconsistent with our finding that large U.S.-based pharmaceutical firms' cash flow growth rates display either momentum or mean-reversion. We show that growth rate momentum implies: (1) the systematic risk of a project increases monotonically with time to maturity of the cash flows; and (2) longer duration projects require a higher cost of capital. One of the practical implications of our results is that the traditional CAPM underestimates the cost of capital for some pharmaceutical firms by as much as 2.8%. These findings are quite relevant for the policy debate about the high rates of return earned by pharmaceutical companies, which some claim are pure rents and are not necessary to attract investors. Our theoretical and empirical analysis shows that high returns are often required to compensate for the higher systematic risk of long-duration pharmaceutical cash flows.     

Portfolio Selection and Asset Pricing Models

Finance theory can be used to form informative prior beliefs in financial decision making. This paper approaches portfolio selection in a Bayesian framework that incorporates a prior degree of belief in an asset pricing model. Sample evidence on home bias and value and size effects is evaluated from an asset-allocation perspective. U.S. investors' belief in the domestic CAPM must be very strong to justify the home bias observed in their equity holdings. The same strong prior belief results in large and stable optimal positions in the Fama–French book-to-market portfolio in combination with the market since the 1940s.     

Empirical investigation of changes in policy uncertainty on stock returns—Evidence from China’s market

This study finds evidence that a rise in economic policy uncertainty (EPU) leads to a decline in stock returns in Chinese market; however, a positive coefficient was observed in the lagged EPU as stock prices rebound. This phenomenon also holds true for a rise in uncertainty innovations in fiscal policy, monetary policy, trade policy and global policy. The evidence leads to conclude that policy uncertainty premiums should be priced into China’s stock prices. An escalation of U.S. policy uncertainty has a significantly harmful effect on Chinese stocks regardless of whether firms are stated own or listed on U.S. market.     

UK Evidence on the Characteristics versus Covariance Debate

We evaluate the Fama–French three‐factor model in the UK using the approach of Daniel and Titman (1997) to determine whether characteristics or covariance risk better explains the size and value premiums. Across all three factors, we find that return premiums bear little relationship to the corresponding loadings. We show that small and value stocks earn higher returns irrespective of their return covariance. Our study contributes to the existing literature by reporting original findings on the Fama–French three‐factor model in the UK and by reporting results that complement existing evidence from similar studies in the USA and Japan.     

What Cost of Capital Should You Use? The Market Has an Answer

The most widely used means of estimating a company's cost of equity capital is the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). But as a growing number of academics and practitioners have suggested, use of the CAPM produces estimates that often fail to reflect the risks of the companies as perceived by current and potential investors. The authors' work, together with other research, also suggests that the cost of equity produced by the CAPM is often too high. To the extent this is so, companies are discounting investment projects at rates of return that may be leading them to pass up value‐adding opportunities. The authors advocate the use of a simple and practical alternative to the CAPM that does not use either an assumed market risk premium or a beta. It uses instead an equity premium that is implied by the current market price of a company's stock and, as such, is implicitly derived from investors' assessments of the firm's risk that are reflected in that price. More specifically, the alternative approach solves for the internal rate of return that equates the present value of expected future cash flows to the current market price. In support of this approach, studies have shown that such market‐implied measures are better predictors than CAPM‐based estimates of future stock returns, both at the individual‐firm and aggregate market levels.