Who is the more overconfident trader? Individual vs. institutional investors

Guided by the Gervais and Odean (2001) overconfident trading hypothesis, we comprehensively investigate the trading behavior of individual vs. institutional investors in Taiwan in an attempt to identify who is the more overconfident trader. Conditional on the various states of the market, on market volatility, and on the risk level of the securities they trade, we find that both individual and institutional investors trade more aggressively following market gains in bull markets, in up-market states, in up-momentum market states, and in low-volatility market states and that only individual investors trade more in riskier securities following market gains. More importantly, we find that individual investors trade more aggressively following market gains in the three conditional states of the market and in high-volatility market states than institutional investors. Also, individual investors trade more in relatively riskier securities following gains than institutional investors. These findings provide evidence that individual investors are more overconfident traders than institutional investors.     

The shortage of safe assets in the US investment portfolio: Some international evidence

This paper develops a Bayesian Global VAR (GVAR) model to track the international transmission dynamics of two stylized shocks, namely a supply and demand shock to US-based safe assets. Our main findings can be summarized as follows. First, we find that (positive) supply-sided shocks lead to pronounced increases in economic activity which spills over to foreign countries. The impact of supply-sided shocks can also be seen for other quantities of interest, most notably equity prices and exchange rates in Europe. Second, a demand-sided shock leads to an appreciation of the US dollar and generally lower yields on US securities, forcing investors to shift their portfolios towards foreign fixed income securities. This yields sizable positive effects on US output, equity prices and a general decrease in financial market volatility.     

What is going on in the oil market?

Conclusion In this article, we propose a consistent view on the recent oil-price history based on fundamental data and economic theory. We sum up: After the turn of the century three major stylized shocks have hit market. First, the demand curve has shifted fight outwards, mainly driven, as extensively reported in the media, by sustained growth in China and other Asian Countries. Second, supply disruptions in countries with low extraction costs (Iraq and Venezuela) have shifted the supply curve to the left. Third, we show that speculators adjust their inventories in order to take advantage of predictable price fluctuations and play themselves a major role in the price formation. Optimal storage theory implies that aggregate inventories are negatively related to the oil price and positively to the volatility of supply and demand shocks. We provide evidence that the political events in the last years have increased volatility and induced the inventory curve to shift right outwards. We analyze in a graphical framework the interaction of all these shocks and conclude that speculators have caused the oil price to overshoot in the short run its long-run fundamental value. However, this is not at all attributable to market failure or the harmfulness of speculators. In fact, the opposite is true. Speculators have in general a dampening effect on the oil price. The record oil price in the very recent history is partly a consequence of speculators maintaining or building-up inventories to cope with the supply and demand shocks to come. Hence, high prices represent a short-term toll for future price stability. It follows from our analysis that the oil price is expected to fall towards its long-term mean, provided that no further shocks hit the economy and, critically, the oil supply. As we saw, this prediction is consistent with the observed prices in the futures markets. Also in terms of future price volatility, the outlook is rather upbeat. The increased inventory levels held by speculators will cushion the spot market against fluctuations in natural supply and demand and limit the degree to which the currently high underlying volatility will translate into higher price volatility. We would like to thank Manuel Ammann, Bernd Brommundt, Stephan Kessler, Ralf Seiz, Michael Verhofen, Hemrich von Wyss, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments We are particularly indebted to Sergej Peisotchenko at United Energy System (UES) of Russia and Jan Gjerde at Shell for clearing us up on technical aspects of oil production     

Noise traders, excess volatility, and a securities transactions tax

Proponents of a securities transactions tax have suggested that such a tax may reduce stock return volatility. The argument is that, to the extent that short-term speculative trading volume is the source of excess volatility, a tax that reduces such volume will reduce volatility. In the context of a simple general equilibrium model, it is shown that this partial equilibrium argument is misleading and in large part incorrect. In the absence of a tax, the model generates equilibria in which the risky asset's price exhibits excess volatility and agents engage in excess trading activity owing to the presence of destabilizing noise traders. Within the context of the model, it is shown that, although a transactions tax can reduce the volatility of the risky asset's price, the reduction in price volatility is accompanied by a fall in the asset's price as agents discount the future tax liability associated with risky asset ownership. Consequently, although price volatility may decrease slightly, the fall in equilibrium prices more than compensates, and the volatiltiy of risky asset returns unambiguously increases with the level of the transactions tax.Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve SystemThe conclusions herein are those of the author and do not represent the views of the Federal Reserve Board or any of the Federal Reserve Banks.     

Belief-free price formation

We analyze security price formation in a dynamic setting in which long-lived dealers repeatedly compete for the opportunity to trade with short-lived retail traders. We characterize equilibria in which dealers’ pricing strategies are optimal irrespective of the private information that each dealer may possess. Thus, our model’s predictions are robust to different specifications of the dealers’ information structure. These equilibria reconcile, in a unified and parsimonious framework, price dynamics that are reminiscent of well-known stylized facts: excess price volatility, price to trading flow correlation, stochastic volatility and inventory-related trading.     

Information Aggregation Bias and Samuelson's Dictum

Under the assumption of incomplete information, idiosyncratic shocks may not dissipate in the aggregate. An econometrician who incorrectly imposes complete information and applies the law of large numbers may be susceptible to information aggregation bias. Tests of aggregate economic theory will be misspecified even though tests of the same theory at the microlevel deliver the correct inference. A testable implication of information aggregation bias is “Samuelson's Dictum” or the idea that stock prices can simultaneously display “microefficiency” and “macroinefficiency;” an idea accredited to Paul Samuelson. Using firm-level data from the Center for Research in Security Prices, we present empirical evidence consistent with Samuelson's dictum. Specifically, we conduct two standard tests of the linear present value model of stock prices: a regression of future dividend changes on the dividend-price ratio and a test for excess volatility. We show that the dividend price ratio forecasts the future growth in dividends much more accurately at the firm level as predicted by the present value model, and that excess volatility can be rejected for most firms. When the same firms are aggregated into equal-weighted or cap-weighted portfolios, the estimated coefficients typically deviate from the present value model and “excess” volatility is observed; this is especially true for aggregates (e.g., S&P 500) that are used in most asset pricing studies. To investigate the source of our empirical findings, we propose a theory of aggregation bias based on incomplete information and segmented markets. Traders specializing in individual stocks conflate idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks to dividends. To an econometrician using aggregate data, these assumptions generate a rejection of the present value model even though individual traders are efficiently using their available information.     

Dividend taxes and stock volatility

How do dividend taxes affect stock volatility? If a risk-averse executive faces price risk through his incentive contract, changes in stock volatility due to dividend taxes may increase agency costs and therefore decrease overall welfare. In this paper, I use a decrease in dividend taxes as a natural experiment to identify their effect on the firm’s idiosyncratic stock return volatility. Stock volatility decreased after the tax cut for firms at which executives have larger sensitivity to stock price in their incentive compensation package relative to firms at which executives have a smaller sensitivity. Therefore, with risk-averse executives and risk-neutral shareholders, dividend taxes may exacerbate agency costs. The increase in agency costs will decrease shareholder welfare, which can be partially offset by the use of options in the employment contract.     

Price Volatility and Investor Behavior in an Overlapping Generations Model with Information Asymmetry

This paper studies an overlapping generations model with multiple securities and heterogeneously informed agents. The model produces multiple equilibria, including highly volatile equilibria that can exhibit strong or weak correlations between asset returns—even when asset supplies and future dividends are uncorrelated across assets. Less informed agents rationally behave like trend‐followers, while better informed agents follow contrarian strategies. Trading volume has a hump‐shaped relation with information precision and is positively correlated with absolute price changes. Finally, accurate information increases the volatility and correlation of stock returns in the highly volatile, strongly correlated equilibrium.     

Regime shift,speculation, and stock price

We investigate the impacts of speculation on stock price and return volatility in a framework with regime shifting. We find that greater difference in beliefs about the probability of bad state leads to higher stock prices. The intuition is that in periods of higher dispersion of beliefs, the investors perceive greater speculative opportunities, leading to increased demands and valuations of the stock. When investors agree with each other on the state of dividend growth, they have a stronger incentive to invest in the riskless bond, when becoming more pessimistic about the dividend growth. As a result, the demand and the valuations of stock decrease. Moreover, higher level of heterogeneity in beliefs gives rise to higher volatility of the stock returns, even in the absence of dividend shocks. Furthermore, with homogeneous beliefs, return volatility with respect to investors’ beliefs follows an inverted-U shape.     

Risks for the Long Run: A Potential Resolution of Asset Pricing Puzzles

We model consumption and dividend growth rates as containing (1) a small long‐run predictable component, and (2) fluctuating economic uncertainty (consumption volatility). These dynamics, for which we provide empirical support, in conjunction with Epstein and Zin's (1989) preferences, can explain key asset markets phenomena. In our economy, financial markets dislike economic uncertainty and better long‐run growth prospects raise equity prices. The model can justify the equity premium, the risk‐free rate, and the volatility of the market return, risk‐free rate, and the price–dividend ratio. As in the data, dividend yields predict returns and the volatility of returns is time‐varying.     

Trading frequency and the efficiency of price discovery in a non-dealer market

The increasing popularity of non-dealer security markets that offer automated, computer-based, continuous trading reflects a presumption that institutionally-set trading sessions are economically obsolete. This theoretical paper investigates the effect of the trading frequency, a key feature of the trading mechanism, on the efficiency of price discovery in a non-dealer market. By tracing the market pricing error to the correlation structures of arriving information and pricing errors of individual traders, the effect of diverging expectations on error-based and overall return volatility is isolated. The analysis reveals that, due to a portfolio effect, an increase in the trading time interval has contradictory effects on the portion of return volatility stemming from pricing errors. The greater accumulation of information increases error-based return volatility, but the greater volume and number of traders per session have the opposite effect. The net effect on overall return volatility can go either way. It is found that the return volatility of heavily traded securities is likely to be minimized under continuous trading, but that of thinly traded securities may be minimized under discrete trading at moderate time intervals. The latter is more likely to occur the greater is the divergence of expectations among traders. These findings challenge the presumption that automated continuous trading in a non-dealer market is more efficient than discrete trading for all securities, regardless of trading volume. The findings are applicable to all economies, but have special importance for developing countries where typically a single market is dominated by small issues and a low volume of trade. As a by-product of the analysis, it is shown how to correct the biased estimate of inter-session price volatility when observations are less frequent than the trading sessions themselves.     

Endogenous tradability and some macroeconomic implications

While nontraded goods play an important role in many open economy macroeconomic models, these models have difficulty explaining the low volatility in the relative price of nontraded goods. In contrast to macroeconomic convention, this paper argues that the share of nontraded goods is endogenous, a time-varying product of macroeconomic shocks and trade costs that are heterogeneous across goods. A simple open economy model demonstrates that trade cost heterogeneity and a time-varying margin of tradedness dramatically reduces the volatility of nontraded prices. This also reduces the ability of real exchange rate adjustments to dampen current account imbalances.     

Price dynamics in refined petroleum spot and futures markets

This article characterizes the spot and futures price dynamics of two important physical commodities, gasoline and heating oil. Using a non-linear error correction model with time-varying volatility, we demonstrate many new results. Specifically, the convergence of spot and futures prices is asymmetric, non-linear, and volatility inducing. Moreover, spreads between spot and futures prices explain virtually all spot return volatility innovations for these two commodities, and spot returns are more volatile when spot prices exceed futures prices than when the reverse is true. Furthermore, there are volatility spillovers from futures to spot markets (but not the reverse), futures volatility shocks are more persistent than spot volatility shocks, and the convergence of spot and futures prices is asymmetric and non-linear. These results have important implications. In particular, since the theory of storage implies that spreasd vary with fundamental supply and demand factors, the strong relation between spreads and volatility suggests that these fundamentals — rather than trading induced noise — are the primary determinants of spot price volatility. The volatility spillovers, differences in volatility persistence, and lead-lag relations are consistent with the view that the futures market is the primary locus of informed trading in refined petroleum product markets. Finally, our finding that error correction processes may be non-linear, asymmetric, and volatility inducing suggests that traditional approaches to the study of time series dynamics of variables that follow a common stochastic trend that ignore these complexities may be mis-specified.     

Implied Equity Duration: A New Measure of Equity Risk

Duration is an important and well-established risk characteristic for fixed income securities. We use recent developments in financial statement analysis research to construct a measure of duration for equity securities. We find that the standard empirical predictions and results for fixed income securities extend to equity securities. We show that stock price volatility and stock beta are both positively correlated with equity duration. Moreover, estimates of common shocks to expected equity returns extracted using our measure of equity duration capture a strong common factor in stock returns. Additional analysis shows that the book-to-market ratio provides a crude measure of equity duration and that our more refined measure of equity duration subsumes the Fama and French (1993) book-to-market factor in stock returns. Our research shows how structured financial statement analysis can be used to construct superior measures of equity security risk.     

Trading Behavior and the Unbiasedness of the Market Reaction to Dividend Announcements

This article examines the price formation process during dividend announcement day, using daily closing prices and transactions data. We find that the unconditional positive excess returns, first documented by Kalay and Loewenstein (1985) , are higher for small-firm and low-priced stocks. Price volatility and trading volume also increase during this period. Examination of trade prices relative to the bid-ask spread and volume of trades at bid and asked prices shows that the excess returns cannot be attributed to measurement errors or to spillover effects of tax-related ex-day trading. Rather, the price behavior is related to the absorption of dividend information.     

Word-of-mouth communication,noise-driven volatility,and public disclosure

This paper examines how a firm adjusts its disclosure quality in response to technological innovations that improve investors' private information. We show that more precise private information can endogenously amplify supply shocks and, hence, increase noise-driven (or non-fundamental) price volatility. We study how the firm reacts to such changes and derive a necessary and sufficient condition under which the firm improves its disclosure quality when investors are informed with better private signals. We then apply our model to study investors' private word-of-mouth communication. Our analysis highlights a “dark side” of word-of-mouth communication and a call for better public disclosure even if private communication is assumed to be unbiased and truthful. We provide empirical predictions regarding how price volatility, market depth, and firms’ disclosure qualities would change as technological innovations, such as social media, facilitate information sharing among investors.     

Information,market power,and price volatility

We consider demand function competition with a finite number of agents and private information. We show that any degree of market power can arise in the unique equilibrium under an information structure that is arbitrarily close to complete information. Regardless of the number of agents and the correlation of payoff shocks, market power may be arbitrarily close to zero (the competitive outcome) or arbitrarily large (so there is no trade). By contrast, price volatility is always lower than the variance of the aggregate shock across all information structures. Alternative trading mechanisms lead to very distinct bounds as a comparison with Cournot competition establishes.     

DETERMINANTS OF THE EXECUTION COSTS OF COMMON STOCK TRADES BY INDIVIDUAL INVESTORS

Data on a large sample of transactions in common stocks by individual investors over a nine-year period are examined to identify factors that influence the magnitude of the price concessions those investors experienced in trades executed on the New York and American Stock Exchanges. Among the factors that appear to have an influence on such “execution costs” are the exchange where the security involved is traded and the direction of the price movement in the security on the day of the trade. The size of the trade, the price of the stock, and the volatility of price, however, do not seem to have an effect. There is also little indication that execution costs have declined over time as the securities markets have become less subject to regulation.     

A structural analysis of price discovery measures

We analyze the structural determinants of two widely used measures of price discovery between multiple markets that trade closely related securities. Using a structural cointegration model, we show that both the information share (IS) and component share (CS) measures account for the relative avoidance of noise trading and liquidity shocks, but that only the IS can provide information on the relative informativeness of individual markets. In particular, the IS of one market is higher if it incorporates more new information and/or impounds less liquidity shocks. Use of the CS in conjunction with the IS can help sort out the confounding effects of the two types of shocks. Furthermore, we find that the IS only accounts for the immediate (one-period) responses of market prices to the news innovation, which implies that the IS estimates based on high sampling frequencies may be distorted by transitory frictions and may miss important price discovery dynamics.     

Do heterogeneous oil price shocks really have different effects on earnings management?

Under the modern corporate governance structure, there is a knowledge gap in how companies' financial reporting practices respond to oil price shocks in China. To fill this gap, we employ China's A-share listed companies and follow Kilian (2009) study to investigate how the three types of classical oil shocks affect corporate earnings management heterogeneously. We also consider the role of oil implied volatility in this relationship and further examine the possible heterogeneity between energy-related and non-energy-related subsamples. The empirical results show that there are variant effects among the heterogeneous oil price shocks on earnings management. Specifically, oil supply shocks stimulate firms to manipulate more accrual and real earnings, and firms are more likely to carry out accrual earnings management downward. Oil aggregate demand shocks weaken the degree of accrual earnings manipulation and mainly reduce the negative accrual earnings manipulation. Oil-specific demand shocks constrain the earnings management behavior of companies and improve their accounting quality. Besides, the increased uncertainty of oil price weakens the promotion effect of oil supply shocks on earnings manipulation, and the moderating effect occurs mainly in downward earnings management. Furthermore, the subsample estimated results reveal that oil price shocks do not affect the degree of accrual earnings management of energy-related companies. Instead, they impact the non-energy-related companies. Overall, our findings provide a series of targeted policy recommendations to mitigate the principal-agent problems and cope with energy price volatility risks.