Is the Euro-zone on the Mend? Latin American examples to analyze the Euro question

Several European countries face challenges reminiscent of those faced by the emerging economies of Latin America. The economic booms in some peripheral Euro-zone countries financed by large capital inflows; the credit and asset price booms and then the busts including Sudden Stops in capital flows; the strong interaction between sovereign debt and domestic banking systems; the role of foreign banks and contagion; and all in the context of a fixed exchange rate, are familiar plotlines for Latin American audiences. For those Euro-zone countries that built up large Euro-denominated external liabilities, Latin America’s experience is particularly relevant and worrisome. Still, Europe may be in a better position to navigate a path out of the crisis given cooperative mechanisms that were absent in Latin America, particularly the availability of massive liquidity support. Nonetheless, while such support buys time, it does not guarantee success. This paper argues that reflecting on Latin America’s experience provides useful lessons for Europe to improve the chances for a successful resolution.     

Is fiscal consolidation self-defeating? A panel-VAR analysis for the Euro area countries

This paper studies the effects of fiscal consolidation on the debt-to-GDP ratio of 11 Euro area countries over the period 2000Q1-2012Q1. Using a quarterly Panel VAR allows us to trace out the dynamics of the debt-to-GDP ratio following a fiscal shock and to disentangle the main channels through which fiscal consolidation affects the debt ratio. We define a fiscal consolidation episode as self-defeating if the level of the debt-to-GDP ratio does not decrease compared to the pre-shock level. Our main finding is that when consolidation is implemented via a cut in government primary spending, the debt ratio, after an initial increase, falls to below its pre-shock level. When instead the consolidation is implemented via an increase in government revenues, the initial increase in the debt ratio is stronger and, eventually, the debt ratio reverts to its pre-shock level, resulting in what we call self-defeating consolidation.     

Is Investor Attention for Sale? The Role of Advertising in Financial Markets

Prior research documents capital market benefits of increased investor attention to accounting disclosures and media coverage; however, little is known about how investors and markets respond to attention‐grabbing events that reveal little nonpublic information. We use daily firm advertising data to test how advertisements, which are designed to attract consumers' attention, influence investors' attention and financial markets (i.e., spillover effects). Exploiting the fact that firms often advertise at weekly intervals, we use an instrumental variables approach to provide evidence that print ads, especially in business publications, trigger temporary spikes in investor attention. We further find that trading volume and quoted dollar depths increase on days with ads in a business publication. We contribute to research on how management choices influence firms' information environments, determinants and consequences of investor attention, and consequences of advertising for financial markets.     

Quo vadis Euro?

This paper calculates the equilibrium exchange rates for the Euro and the rest of the G-7 currencies. Building on the methodology of Alberola et al., it is shown that the stock of net foreign assets and the evolution of productivity are the fundamentals underlying the behaviour of the real exchange rate. Panel cointegration techniques allow for the extraction, using an unobserved components methodology, of a time-varying equilibrium real exchange rate, and deviations from this equilibrium provide an estimate of the degree of multilateral misalignment. Finally, an algebraic transformation converts these multilateral equilibrium real rates into bilateral equilibrium nominal rates. The results uncover that the Euro was slightly undervalued by the start of Stage III of EMU and that, despite a faint fall of its fundamentals since then, the slide during 1999 has widened the misalignment above 10% against other main currencies.     

Saving the Euro: Mitigating Financial or Trade Spillovers?

This paper analyzes through what channels the euro crisis affected firms and the efficacy of policies to mitigate the crisis. It analyzes stock price responses for 3,045 nonfinancial firms in 16 countries to four key policy events during 2010–11. Using precrisis benchmarks, it separates financial effects from trade effects and examines how bank and trade linkages propagated shocks. It finds that policy measures affected financially dependent firms more, particularly in creditor countries with greater bank exposure to peripheral euro countries, in statistically and economically significant ways. Trade linkages with peripheral countries played little role, although euro movements meant some differential effects.     

Is it the weather?

We show that results in the recent strand of the literature, which tries to explain stock returns by weather induced mood shifts of investors, might be data-driven inference. More specifically, we consider two recent studies [Kamstra, Mark J., Kramer, Lisa A., Levi, Maurice D., 2003a. Winter blues: A SAD stock market cycle. American Economic Review 93(1), 324–343; Cao, Melanie, Wei, Jason, 2005. Stock market returns: A note on temperature anomaly. Journal of Banking and Finance 29(6), 1559–1573] that claim that a seasonal anomaly in stock returns is caused by mood changes of investors due to lack of daylight and temperature variations, respectively. While we confirm earlier results in the literature that there is indeed a strong seasonal effect in stock returns in many countries: stock market returns tend to be significantly lower during summer and fall months than during winter and spring months as documented by Bouman and Jacobsen [Bouman, Sven, Jacobsen, Ben, 2002. The Halloween indicator, Sell in May and go away: Another puzzle. American Economic Review, 92(5), 1618–1635], there is little evidence in favor of a SAD or temperature explanation. In fact, we find that a simple winter/summer dummy best describes this seasonality. Our results suggest that without any further evidence the correlation between weather-related variables and stock returns might be spurious and the conclusion that weather affects stock returns through mood changes of investors is premature.     

Only the Best? Exploring Cross-Border Investor Preferences in US Gateway Cities

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - Despite heady growth in cross-border investment into commercial real estate over recent decades, there are few studies that examine differences in...     

Euro money market spreads during the 2007–? financial crisis

In the paper we investigate the empirical features of euro area money market turbulence during the recent financial crisis. By means of a novel Fractionally Integrated Heteroskedastic Factor Vector Autoregressive model, we find evidence of a deterministic level factor in the EURIBOR-OIS (OIS) spreads term structure, associated with the two waves of stress in the interbank market, following the BNP Paribas (9 August 2007) and Lehman Brothers (16 September 2008) “shocks”, and two additional factors, of the long memory type, bearing the interpretation of curvature and slope factors, respectively. The unfolding of the crisis yields a significant increase in their persistence and volatility. We also find evidence of a declining trend in the level and volatility of OIS spreads since December 2008, associated with ECB liquidity policies.     

Does Noninformative Text Affect Investor Behavior?

This article demonstrates that easily processed texts affect investor trading behavior even in the absence of any informational content. We examine the trading symbols of US firms and find that stocks with clever tickers (those that are actual words in the English language) are more liquid, as measured by higher turnover and trading volume, as well as lower spreads. Furthermore, clever ticker stocks are traded more by uninformed investors and have larger market reactions on earnings announcement days. These results suggest that ticker fluency facilitates trading by improving the firm's visibility among retail investors through attention grabbing and memorization.     

Does Investor Sentiment Affect Earnings Management?

I hypothesize and find that earnings management via accruals is driven partially by the prevailing market‐wide investor sentiment. Managers inflate earnings in periods of higher sentiment, but report more conservatively during periods of low sentiment. Moreover, the likelihood of income‐increasing earnings management to avoid negative earnings surprises is also positively associated with investor sentiment. These results are robust to: (i) controls for time‐varying firm characteristics such as growth, investment opportunity sets, future profitability, leverage and size; (ii) macroeconomic variables such as future inflation, GDP growth, and growth in industrial production; (iii) multiple proxies for investor sentiment; and (iv) discretionary revenues as alternative measure of earnings management. Cross‐sectional analyses reveal that firms whose stock returns co‐move more with investor sentiment are more (less) likely to manage earnings upward via abnormal accruals in quarters of higher (lower) sentiment. The findings of managers’ strategic use of abnormal accruals show the need for increased attention from boards of directors, auditors and regulators to heightened managerial incentives to overstate earnings and to report optimistic earnings numbers during periods of high investor sentiment.     

Investor sentiment and the mean–variance relation

This study shows the influence of investor sentiment on the market's mean–variance tradeoff. We find that the stock market's expected excess return is positively related to the market's conditional variance in low-sentiment periods but unrelated to variance in high-sentiment periods. These findings are consistent with sentiment traders who, during the high-sentiment periods, undermine an otherwise positive mean–variance tradeoff. We also find that the negative correlation between returns and contemporaneous volatility innovations is much stronger in the low-sentiment periods. The latter result is consistent with the stronger positive ex ante relation during such periods.     

Does Monetary Policy Affect Income Inequality in the Euro Area?

This paper examines how the ECB's expansionary monetary policy affects income inequality in 10 euro area countries over the period 1999–2014. We distinguish two channels—labor-market and financial—through which monetary policy can have distributional effects. The labor-market channel is captured by wages and employment and the financial channel by asset prices and returns. We find that expansionary monetary policy in the euro area reduces income inequality, especially in the periphery countries. The labor-market channel enhances the equalizing effect: monetary expansion reduces income inequality stronger by raising wages and employment. There is limited evidence for the financial channel.     

How Does the Change in Investor Sentiment over Time Affect Stock Returns?

We examine how the change in investor sentiment (IS) over time (the IS trend) affects stock returns. The turnover rates of trading shares, trading value, and transactions, three market measures of trading activity, have been demonstrated to meet the psychometric criteria for measuring the IS trend. The ratio of market price to book value and the short-selling turnover ratio are inappropriate proxies. The empirical results indicate that the influence of the IS trend on returns depends on the direction of the trend (optimistic or pessimistic) and stock characteristics of individual holdings and on arbitrage constraint. The effectiveness of arbitrage, sentiment-driven mispricing, and market intervention are discussed.     

Is the presidential premium spurious?

A hotly debated question in finance is whether the higher stock returns under Democratic presidencies relative to Republican presidencies represent abnormal return, risk premium, or mere statistical fluke. This paper investigates whether this presidential premium is due to spurious-regression bias, data mining, or economic policy uncertainty. Decomposing the presidential premium into expected and unexpected components, we find that over two-thirds of the premium is unexpected, which is inconsistent with the spurious regression bias explanation. The presidential premium is not explained by data mining given that it persists in the post-publication period, and remains robust even if we purge returns of their covariation with economic policy uncertainty.     

Is it the weather? Comment

This comment discusses some errors in a recent paper by Jacobsen and Marquering [Jacobsen, B., Marquering, W., 2008. Is it the weather? Journal of Banking and Finance 32 (4), 526–540], in which the authors challenge our previous finding that stock market returns exhibit seasonal patterns consistent with the influence of seasonal affective disorder on investor risk aversion. We find that we cannot replicate the authors’ findings, even after corresponding with them. Furthermore, we document several problems with their methodology, including misspecification of their economic model, misspecification of their econometric model, and use of inappropriate data. While we agree that seasonal affective disorder is not an explanation for all variation in equity markets, we do maintain that careful analysis leads to economically and statistically significant evidence of the effect we originally documented.     

Is liquidity the missing link?

Durand et al. (2006a ) argue that the Australian market is both internationally integrated and domestically segmented. They find that the US‐based three‐factor model captures returns of the largest stocks in Australia (evidence of international integration), but that it is unable to account for the returns of the smallest stocks (evidence of domestic segmentation). This study resolves the puzzle left by Durand et al. (2006a) . Incorporating a liquidity factor provides the missing link in their analysis: it results in a model that permits both the international integration of the largest stocks and the model can account for the returns of the smallest stocks. Our analysis highlights the important role of liquidity in Australian asset pricing.     

Is it the weather? Response

Kamstra, Kramer and Levi (KKL) in their comment seem to miss the main point of our paper. Many things are correlated with the seasons so it is difficult to distinguish between them when we try to explain the well-known summer winter pattern in stock returns. Finding an isolated seasonal affective disorder (SAD) effect without proper control variables does not disprove our point but strengthens it. To sidestep all of the issues they raise and take our point to the extreme, we show using plain vanilla regressions that the seasonal stock market pattern they attribute to SAD can also be “explained” by variables like ice cream consumption or airline travel. The new variations of SAD variables (“onset” and “incidence”) KKL propose in their recent work for North America are even more problematic than the original SAD variables. We find that these new SAD proxies are not significant in countries where according to KKL they should be: Canada and the United States.     

Who Believes the Hype? An Experimental Examination of How Language Affects Investor Judgments

This paper investigates the effect of vivid language on investor judgments. Recent research finds that investor judgments are significantly influenced by disclosure tone (positive versus negative). Holding tone constant, we investigate investors’ reactions to vivid versus pallid information. Drawing on theories from psychology, we predict that investors will be sensitive to the differences between vivid and pallid language when the underlying information is preference inconsistent, but not when the information is preference consistent. Results of two experiments support our prediction. Vivid language significantly influences the judgment of investors who hold contrarian positions (i.e., short investors in a bull market and long investors in a bear market). Interestingly, vivid language has limited influence on the judgment of investors who hold positions consistent with the general tenor of the market. Our results provide evidence regarding when vividness matters and when it does not in financial contexts, thereby contributing to both psychology and a growing literature on disclosure tone in financial reporting. In addition, our results also speak to concerns raised by regulators and academics asserting that vivid language can inflate bubbles and incite panics.