Durations,volume and the prediction of financial returns in transaction time

Traditional microstructural theories of asset pricing emphasize the role of volume as a trend indicator. With the availability of large transaction data sets, one has started recently to incorporate more information of the trades, such as the time between trades, to describe the multivariate dynamics of transactions. Without knowing a priori the relation between the observed components of a trade—price, duration between trades, and volume—one may follow the principle of ‘letting the data speak for themselves’. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the informational content of both volume and durations to predict transaction returns using explorative non-parametric methods. The empirical results for transaction data of IBM stock prices confirm the role of volume as a trend indicator. After a sell (buy) expected returns are decreasing (increasing) with volume and increasing (decreasing) with durations. A.forecasting exercise shows that the superiority of the non-parametric model over simple parameterizations carries over to out-of-sample prediction.     

The Impacts of Surrender Options on Reserve Durations

Estimating the interest rate risk of life insurance reserves is essential for insurers, and surrender options are critical to the estimation. This article advances our understanding of how surrender options affect the durations of reserves. We identify a pattern of the reserve duration with respect to the interest rate that is important in explaining how surrender rate levels and the interest-rate sensitivity of surrenders affect reserve durations. We further found that the surrender behavior that is more positively related to the interest rate produces larger/smaller effective dollar durations when the interest rate is low/high.     

The Term Structure of Reserve Durations and the Duration of Aggregate Reserves

Estimating the duration gap of a life insurer demands the knowledge on the durations of liabilities and assets. The literature analyzed the durations of assets extensively but rendered limited analyses on the durations of insurance liabilities. This article calculated the reserve durations for individual policies and estimated the duration of the aggregate reserves. The results showed that the duration of the policy reserve might be negative and/or have a large figure. They further revealed an interesting pattern of the reserve duration with respect to the policy's time to maturity. A term structure with abnormal durations, however, does not result in an abnormal duration of the aggregate reserves.     

Wealth,Composition, Housing,Income and Consumption

The present research covering the latest residential boom and bust cycle highlights the lack of uniform or constant time invariant wealth, housing and income relations. More important, wealth composition is shown to be a significant determinant of consumption. The marginal effects of housing equity, financial wealth and income differ substantially based on the composition of household wealth. Households with the highest percentage of net worth in financial assets have much lower income effects, have substantially higher marginal effects associated with stock holdings and have housing equity effects that differ noticeably from other households. Income effects for groups with the smallest amounts of relative financial wealth are dramatically higher than for households with greater financial wealth. Wealth and its composition affect consumption.     

JRI, JF, and the Internet: Coauthors, New Authors, and Empirical Research

This article examines how the Internet has changed the work of academic researchers and addresses the question of how expanded Internet usage has affected Journal of Risk and Insurance (JRI) and Journal of Finance (JF) articles, including the shift to empirical research, joint authorship, and new authorship. Internet availability significantly increased joint authorship overall (more for JF than for JRI), shifting upwards a strong secular trend toward working with other researchers. Another big impact of the Internet has been to increase the number of new authors (more for JRI than for JF).     

Capital taxation,investment, growth,and welfare

This paper formulates a model of economic growth to study the effects of broad capital taxation (of profits, dividends, and capital gains) on macroeconomic outcomes in small open economies. A framework of exogenous growth permits modeling countries in transition to a country-specific steady state and to discern steady-state and transitory effects of shocks on economic outcomes. The chosen framework is amenable to structural estimation and, in view of the parsimony of the model, fits data on 79 countries over the period 1996–2011 well. The counterfactual analysis based on the estimated model suggests that capital-tax reductions induce positive effects on output and the capital stock (per unit of effective labor) that are economically significant and are accommodated within time windows of 5 years without much further economic response after that. The responses of economic aggregates are found to be relatively strongest to changes in corporate-profit-tax rates and weaker for dividend and capital-gains taxes.     

Overaccumulation,Interest, and Prices

I use a financial accelerator model to study interest and prices under boom–busts driven by changes in expectations about total factor productivity (TFP) and credit. I show that inflation falls in the boom phase of the TFP episode and then recovers during the bust, yet rises in the boom phase of the credit episode and then falls during the bust. Furthermore, for both episodes, the overaccumulation of debt relative to capital during the boom is critical for the busts since it implies a fall in credit worthiness. Finally, I show that stricter inflation targeting reduces inefficiencies in all instances but the boom phase of the TFP episode.     

Meet,beat, and pollute

Review of Accounting Studies - We investigate two related questions about the trade-off between the short-term pressures on managers to meet earnings targets and the long-term environmental...     

Wages,productivity, and retirement

Pensions, both state provided and privately provided, affect incentives to retire. But private pensions are part of the long term compensation package, and altering pensions not only affects retirement incentives, but also wages. A key factor in determining whether retirement occurs at the appropriate age is the relation of productivity to alternatives. When wages, coupled with public and private pension accrual, deviate from worker productivity, private retirement incentives are distorted. Sometimes this results in too much early retirement, creating fiscal difficulties. Sometimes, it results in a desire for delayed retirement, which argues for mandatory retirement rules. Pay compression, where wages do not vary across individuals as much as productivity, exacerbate distortions. Defined benefit pension plans tend to create incentives to retire after a certain number of years of work. Defined contribution plans do not have this feature. Public plans should be designed noting their interaction with incentives that are already inherent in the private wage and pension schemes.     

Culture, openness, and finance

Differences in culture, proxied by differences in religion and language, cannot be ignored when examining why investor protection differs across countries. We show that a country's principal religion predicts the cross-sectional variation in creditor rights better than a country's natural openness to international trade, its language, its income per capita, or the origin of its legal system. Catholic countries protect the rights of creditors less well than Protestant countries. A country's natural openness to international trade mitigates the influence of religion on creditor rights. Culture proxies are also helpful in understanding how investor rights are enforced across countries.     

Debt,Taxes, and Banks

Understanding the impact on banks’ capital structures of tax biases toward debt finance is critical to assessing policy responses to socially excessive bank leverage—but there is no empirical evidence of its extent. Guided by some simple theory, this paper explores this impact for a large panel of banks in 82 countries. On average, the tax sensitivity of banks’ leverage proves significant and about as large as for nonfinancial firms. Somewhat counterintuitively, but as the theory suggests, taxation has little impact on the use of hybrids. Banks holding smaller equity buffers and larger banks are noticeably less sensitive to tax.     

Nuptiality,fertility, and reproductivity

Abstract

During the last few years quite a number of investigations – private as well as official– have been devoted to the study, by numerical methods, of the effect of a given mortality, and fertility (or nativity) on population growth. Considerable progress has also been made – above all by the researches of A. J. LOTKA – with the abstract mathematical treatment of this problem which leads to certain integral equations with interesting asymptotic properties. Until quite recently, however, no account has been taken of the effect of different marriage rates, or rates of nuptiality. For the sake of simplicity the fertility has, in fact, been assumed to have a certain value for each age-group of women as a whole, without any distinction whatever between married and unmarried women. This is of course only a first approach to the more general and more important problem of studying the combined effect of a given mortality, a given nuptiality, and a given fertility of married as well as of unmarried women.     

Housing,Illiquidity, and Wealth

This article develops a model of asset allocation relevant for the representative consumer. Consumption is composed of two items: housing, and other goods and services. The representative household's balance sheet consists largely of a house and a mortgage. Its income statement is dominated by labor earnings, constraining cash expenditures. Housing-market behavior thus underlies intertemporal wealth and consumption allocation. With a housing-dominated portfolio and a maximizing plan, a plausible bound on the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution in consumption can be estimated for a typical household. The model takes account of idiosyncratic characteristics of housing returns and finance. Underwriting standards oblige borrowers to secure mortgage debt with a housing asset and with cash flow, usually from labor income. Access to the mortgage market depends on the loan-to-value ratio, or leverage and debt size, and the debt-coverage ratio, or cash solvency. If there are seasonals or predictable patterns in house returns, their magnitude is amplified for the typical liquidity-constrained household. Empirical results for the aggregate U.S. market confirm predictability and serial correlation in house capital gains. There are seasonals in housing returns. While there is no January effect, above-average returns are obtained during the summer months.     

Uncertainty,Inflation, and Welfare

This paper studies the welfare costs and the redistributive effects of inflation in the presence of idiosyncratic liquidity risk, in a microfounded search‐theoretical monetary model. We calibrate the model to match the empirical aggregate money demand and the distribution of money holdings across households and study the effects of inflation under the implied degree of market incompleteness. We show that in the presence of imperfect insurance the estimated long‐run welfare costs of inflation are on average 40% to 55% smaller compared to a complete markets, representative agent economy, and that inflation induces important redistributive effects across households.     

Money, intermediation, and banking

The business of money creation is conceptually distinct from that of intermediation. Yet, these two activities are frequently—but not always—combined together in the form of a banking system. We develop a simple model to examine the question: When is banking essential? There is a role for money due to a lack of record-keeping and a role for intermediation due to the existence of private information: both money and intermediation are essential. When monitoring costs associated with intermediation are sufficiently low, the two activities can be separated from one another. However, when monitoring costs are sufficiently high, a banking system that combines these two activities is essential.