The information search process of socially responsible investors

Largely fuelled by an increasing social and ethical concern among private investors, socially responsible investment (SRI) has, in many ways, gone from having a marginal role to becoming a ‘mainstream’ financial service in recent years. SRI is an investment process that, in addition to the ‘traditional’ financial objective of investment, also uses social, ethical or environmental (SEE) criteria when making investment decisions. However, despite the growth of the market for SRI profiled mutual funds, very little research has been carried out with the objective of understanding the decision-making process of private SR-investors. In order to address this gap in the literature, this article addresses one stage in the SR-investor decision-making process: consumer pre-purchase information search. Using a sample of 369 SR-investors, the results of the study indicate that SR-investors search more for SEE information, such as the criteria used for exclusion of stocks than for ‘regular’ financial information such as past financial return and level of risk. Moreover, the study also indicates that involvement and perceived knowledge with regard to both financial and SEE issues impact the nature of the information search process of private SR mutual fund investors.     

Local institutional investors,information asymmetries,and equity returns

We examine the informational role of geographically proximate institutions in stock markets. We find that both the level of and change in local institutional ownership predict future stock returns, particularly for firms with high information asymmetry; in contrast, such predictive abilities are relatively weak for nonlocal institutional ownership. The local advantage is especially evident for local investment advisors, high local ownership institutions, and high local turnover institutions. We also find that the stocks that local institutional investors hold (trade) earn higher excess returns around future earnings announcements than those that nonlocal institutional investors hold (trade).     

Institutional investors,intangible information,and the book-to-market effect

This paper establishes a robust link between the trading behavior of institutions and the book-to-market effect. Building on work by Daniel and Titman (2006), who argue that the book-to-market effect is driven by the reversal of intangible returns, I find that institutions tend to buy (sell) shares in response to positive (negative) intangible information and that the reversal of the intangible return is most pronounced among stocks for which a large proportion of active institutions trade in the direction of intangible information. Furthermore, the book-to-market effect is large and significant in stocks with intense past institutional trading but nonexistent in stocks with moderate institutional trading. This influence of institutional trading on the book-to-market effect is distinct from that of firm size. These results are consistent with the view that the tendency of institutions to trade in the direction of intangible information exacerbates price overreaction, thereby contributing to the value premium.     

Risk-neutral compatibility with option prices

A common problem is to choose a “risk-neutral” measure in an incomplete market in asset pricing models. We show in this paper that in some circumstances it is possible to choose a unique “equivalent local martingale measure” by completing the market with option prices. We do this by modeling the behavior of the stock price X, together with the behavior of the option prices for a relevant family of options which are (or can theoretically be) effectively traded. In doing so, we need to ensure a kind of “compatibility” between X and the prices of our options, and this poses some significant mathematical difficulties.     

ICO investors

Financial Markets and Portfolio Management - We conduct a detailed analysis of investors in successful initial coin offerings (ICOs). The average ICO has 4700 contributors. The median participant...     

A comprehensive model of information search and processing behaviour of mutual fund investors

Understanding the investment behaviour, specifically information search and processing behaviour of mutual fund (MF) investors is a key to the effective marketing of MF schemes, and yet we have only limited understanding of it. This study proposes and validates a model of information search and processing of MF investors. The proposed model is arrived at by combining the limited insights from the existing studies dispersed across multiple domains of literature, viz., Traditional Finance, Behavioural Finance and Consumer Behaviour. The model suggests that: (i) MF investors’ subjective knowledge (SK) negatively impacts their perceived purchase risk (PPR); (ii) MF investors’ SK positively impacts their purchase decision involvement (PDI); (iii) PPR negatively impacts their PDI; (iv) PDI positively impacts their depth of information search (DIS) and information processing behaviour (DIP); and (v) DIS positively impacts their DIP. The model is empirically validated through structural equation modelling of data collected from a survey of 268 MF investors. The implications of the model, as are relevant for the MF marketers and the policymakers, are also discussed.     

An examination of the effect of international investors on accounting information quality in Russia

This paper investigates the impact of international investors on the quality of financial accounting information in Russia. I hypothesize that international stock ownership leads to enhanced quality and adoptions or intentions to adopt IFRS by Russian firms. Data was gathered through face-to-face interviews with 100 Saint-Petersburg firms randomly selected from the INFOWAVE data base. The results are consistent with the hypotheses.     

Country and currency diversification of bond investments: do they really make sense for Swiss investors?

The inclusion of hedged or unhedged foreign currency bonds within a strategic asset allocation is a crucial decision which should be analyzed carefully. The goal of this paper is to provide a contribution to this analysis by focusing particularly on the time horizon of the investment. Results are analyzed from the perspective of a Swiss investor. We find that over the last 21 years, investing in bonds denominated in Swiss Francs has been clearly less efficient in terms of risk-adjusted returns than investing in a hedged global bond portfolio. For short-term investors, we find robust evidence against the hypothesis of investing in unhedged foreign currency bonds. The picture changes dramatically, however, when we consider an investment horizon of 6 years and the normal case of balanced portfolios including also equities and domestic bonds. In this case, the optimal strategy for the period we analyzed would have been to hedge only the exposure to US dollar bonds.      

投资与合作 投资人高尔夫

2006年9月9日，北京，秋高气爽，风清云淡，正是初磋高尔夫球艺的好时节。《投资与合作》邀请数十位投次人齐聚北京天竺乡村高尔夫俱乐部，举办了一场高尔夫球赛。 上午十二时三十分球赛开始。在球场上，投资人在进退取舍，动静结合之间，为高尔夫球诠释出了完美的艺术内涵。汉能投资董事总经理陈宏以88杆的成绩勇夺第一名，华安信合有限公司董事长胡航、赛尔网络首席运营官陆凡则以94杆的成绩一同摘走了第二名的桂冠。[编者按]     

The intraday behavior of information misreaction across various categories of investors in the Taiwan options market

This study adopts a unique dataset that includes the complete history of transactions in the Taiwan options market to investigate the misreaction patterns for marketwise observations and the transactions of four different categories of investors in the high-frequency framework. Using the results from model-free tests as benchmarks, we find that model-based tests incorrectly indicate the existence of investor misreaction and show the differences of misreaction degree among investor categories. Our findings are robust to alternative observation frequencies and duration definitions.     

Inexperienced investors and bubbles

We use mutual fund manager data from the technology bubble to examine the hypothesis that inexperienced investors play a role in the formation of asset price bubbles. Using age as a proxy for managers’ investment experience, we find that around the peak of the technology bubble, mutual funds run by younger managers are more heavily invested in technology stocks, relative to their style benchmarks, than their older colleagues. Furthermore, young managers, but not old managers, exhibit trend-chasing behavior in their technology stock investments. As a result, young managers increase their technology holdings during the run-up, and decrease them during the downturn. Both results are in line with the behavior of inexperienced investors in experimental asset markets. The economic significance of young managers’ actions is amplified by large inflows into their funds prior to the peak in technology stock prices.     

Rules to acquire by

When Bruce Nolop was an investment banker, he saw only the glamorous side of acquisitions. Since becoming executive vice president and chief financial officer of Pitney Bowes, however, he's learned how hard it is to pull them off. In this article, he shares the lessons his organization has learned throughout its successful six-year acquisition campaign, which comprised more than 70 deals: Stick to adjacent spaces, take a portfolio approach, have a business sponsor, know how to judge an acquisition, and don't shop when you're hungry. Pitney Bowes's management and board of directors now use these five basic rules to chart the company's growth course. For example, when evaluating a potential acquisition, Pitney Bowes distinguishes between "platform" and "bolt-on" acquisitions to set expectations and guide integration efforts; the company applies different criteria, depending on the type. According to Nolop, any company can improve its acquisition track record if it is able to learn from experience, and he suspects that Pitney Bowes's rules apply just as well to other organizations. Buying a company should be treated like any other business process, he maintains. It should be approached deliberately and reviewed and improved constantly. That means mapping a complex chain of actions; paying attention to what can go right or wrong at different stages; and using standard, constantly honed, approaches and tools.     

Foreign versus domestic institutional investors in emerging markets: Who contributes more to firm-specific information flow?

Using a large sample of firms listed on the Korea Stock Exchange over 1998–2007, this study investigates whether and how trading by foreign and domestic institu...     

Short-horizon regulation for long-term investors

We study the effects of imposing repeated short-horizon regulatory constraints on long-term investors. We show that Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall constraints, when imposed dynamically, lead to similar optimal portfolios and wealth distributions. We also show that, in utility terms, the costs of imposing these constraints can be sizeable. For a 96% funded pension plan, both an annual Value-at-Risk constraint and an annual Expected Shortfall constraint can lead to an economic cost of about 2.5–3.8% of initial wealth over a 15-year horizon.     

和海外投资者有效沟通--新华美通董事总经理John M.Williams谈"投资者专线"

随着中国经济的发展,越来越多的公司已经不满足于国内市场的融资能力,如何与亚洲其他国家乃至西方的投资者进行有效沟通,以获得最终资金的支持,已经引起了国内公司与各类金融机构的关注.     

Lucky lots and unlucky investors

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - The number 8 is considered lucky under the Chinese culture. This paper tries to examine whether investors hold such superstitious belief in the Hong...     

Risk-neutral and actual default probabilities with an endogenous bankruptcy jump-diffusion model

This paper focuses on historical and risk-neutral default probabilities in a structural model, when the firm assets dynamics are modeled by a double exponential jump diffusion process. Relying on the Leland [(1994a) Journal of Finance, 49, 1213–1252; (1994b) Bond prices, yield spreads, and optimal capital structure with default risk. Working paper no. 240, IBER, University of California, Berkeley] or Leland and Toft [(1996) Journal of Finance, 51(3), 987–1019] endogenous structural approaches, as formalized by Hilberink and Rogers [(2002) Finance and Stochastics, 6(2), 237–263], this article gives a coherent construction of historical default probabilities. The risk-neutral world where evolve the firm assets, modeled by a class of geometric Lévy processes, is constructed based on the Esscher measure, yielding useful and new analytical relations between historical and risk-neutral probabilities. We do a complete numerical analysis of the predictions of our framework, and compare these predictions with actual data. In particular, this new framework displays an enhanced predictive power w.r.t. current Gaussian endogenous structural models.      

Why do public firms go private in the UK? The impact of private equity investors,incentive realignment and undervaluation

This paper examines the magnitude and the sources of the expected shareholder gains in UK public to private transactions (PTPs) in the second wave from 1997 to 2003. Pre-transaction shareholders on average receive a premium of 40% and the share price reaction to the PTP announcement is about 30%. We test the sources of the anticipated value creation of the delisting and distinguish between: tax benefits, incentive realignment, control reasons, free cash flow reduction, transactions cost reduction, takeover defences, undervaluation and wealth transfers, The main sources of the shareholder wealth gains are undervaluation of the pre-transaction target firm, increased interest tax shields and incentive realignment. An expected reduction of free cash flows does not determine the premiums, nor are PTPs a defensive reaction against a takeover.     

Preferred risk habitat of individual investors

The preferred risk habitat hypothesis, introduced here, is that individual investors select stocks whose volatilities are commensurate with their risk aversion. The data, 1995–2000 holdings of over 20,000 clients at a large German broker, are consistent with the predictions of the hypothesis: the returns of stocks within each portfolio have remarkably similar volatilities, when stocks are sold they are replaced by stocks of similar volatilities, and the more risk-averse customers indeed hold less volatile stocks. Greater volatility specialization is associated with lower Sharpe ratios, primarily because more specialized investors hold fewer stocks and thereby expose themselves to more unsystematic risk.