European Stock Exchange Wooes Chinese Firms

Erik Wenngren, Euronext’s director of international listings, said Euronext views China as its key market, and has set up a special group to attract Chinese firms to list on its main board Eurolist or on the Alternext board for medium-sized and small fir…     

Stock market short-termism—an international perspective

This study uses a VAR approach with a time-varying risk premium to see if stock market investors are short-term oriented, placing too much weight on current and near cash flows. Using aggregate stock market data for Australia, Germany, Japan, USA and UK markets (1977–1999), we find the degree of persistent under-valuation of future cash flows is far higher in the UK relative to the other countries in our sample, and is market-wide. Also, over the period, US investors appear to have consistently underestimated long horizon cash flows in current stock market valuations relative to a rational valuation model.     

How Do Employees View Their Underwater Stock Options?: Evidence from the Stock Option Exchange Program

This paper examines the participation decisions of employees in a stock option exchange program aimed at restoring value to underwater options. The program invites employees to exchange their existing underwater options for new options, the value of which is determined by the company stock price in 6 months and 1 day. The participation turns out to vary cross-sectionally and, perhaps surprisingly, the employees do not surrender all their underwater options. We find that employees actively and rationally consider a variety of factors to make their participation decisions, rather than blindly surrendering their underwater options. The participation decisions of non-executive employees seem to be well anticipated by stock market investors, since no abnormal stock returns are related to the participation decisions.

Do Hedge Funds Manipulate Stock Prices?

We provide evidence suggesting that some hedge funds manipulate stock prices on critical reporting dates. Stocks in the top quartile of hedge fund holdings exhibit abnormal returns of 0.30% on the last day of the quarter and a reversal of 0.25% on the following day. A significant part of the return is earned during the last minutes of trading. Analysis of intraday volume and order imbalance provides further evidence consistent with manipulation. These patterns are stronger for funds that have higher incentives to improve their ranking relative to their peers.     

Who Gambles in the Stock Market?

This study shows that the propensity to gamble and investment decisions are correlated. At the aggregate level, individual investors prefer stocks with lottery features, and like lottery demand, the demand for lottery-type stocks increases during economic downturns. In the cross-section, socioeconomic factors that induce greater expenditure in lotteries are associated with greater investment in lottery-type stocks. Further, lottery investment levels are higher in regions with favorable lottery environments. Because lottery-type stocks underperform, gambling-related underperformance is greater among low-income investors who excessively overweight lottery-type stocks. These results indicate that state lotteries and lottery-type stocks attract very similar socioeconomic clienteles.     

Do Stock Mergers Create Value for Acquirers?

This paper finds support for the hypothesis that overvalued firms create value for long-term shareholders by using their equity as currency. Any approach centered on abnormal returns is complicated by the fact that the most overvalued firms have the greatest incentive to engage in stock acquisitions. We solve this endogeneity problem by creating a sample of mergers that fail for exogenous reasons. We find that unsuccessful stock bidders significantly underperform successful ones. Failure to consummate is costlier for richly priced firms, and the unrealized acquirer-target combination would have earned higher returns. None of these results hold for cash bids.     

Stock options and managers’ incentives to cheat

This paper develops a continuous-time real options’ pricing model to study managers’ incentives to cheat in the presence of equity-based compensation plans. It shows that managers’ incentives to cheat are strongly influenced by the efficiency of the justice. The model’s main result is that managers have greater incentives to commit fraudulent actions under stock options than under common stocks based compensation plans.     

Does Academic Research Destroy Stock Return Predictability?

We study the out‐of‐sample and post‐publication return predictability of 97 variables shown to predict cross‐sectional stock returns. Portfolio returns are 26% lower out‐of‐sample and 58% lower post‐publication. The out‐of‐sample decline is an upper bound estimate of data mining effects. We estimate a 32% (58%–26%) lower return from publication‐informed trading. Post‐publication declines are greater for predictors with higher in‐sample returns, and returns are higher for portfolios concentrated in stocks with high idiosyncratic risk and low liquidity. Predictor portfolios exhibit post‐publication increases in correlations with other published‐predictor portfolios. Our findings suggest that investors learn about mispricing from academic publications.     

How Does Information Quality Affect Stock Returns?

Using a simple dynamic asset pricing model, this paper investigates the relationship between the precision of public information about economic growth and stock market returns. After fully characterizing expected returns and conditional volatility, I show that (i) higher precision of signals tends to increase the risk premium, (ii) when signals are imprecise the equity premium is bounded above independently of investors' risk aversion, (iii) return volatility is U-shaped with respect to investors' risk aversion, and (iv) the relationship between conditional expected returns and conditional variance is ambiguous.     

What Determines Stock Price Synchronicity in REITs?

This paper studies the behavior of REIT stock price synchronicity for the years 1997 through 2006. Theory suggests that REIT stock prices should be largely independent of market changes; and, at the very least, REITs should have a low covariance with other assets, including other REIT stocks. The evidence presented below does not support this view. Instead, synchronicity appears to be quite high in the equity REIT market, especially among REITs that larger and more liquid. We also find that REIT stock price synchronicity is negatively related to hedge fund ownership, but positively related to pension fund and insurance company ownership. The evidence further suggests that synchronicity is the highest among industrial and regional mall REITs, and lower among apartment, health care, and mixed property REITs.     

Does Stock Liquidity Enhance or Impede Firm Innovation?

We aim to tackle the longstanding debate on whether stock liquidity enhances or impedes firm innovation. This topic is of interest because innovation is crucial for firm‐ and national‐level competitiveness and stock liquidity can be altered by financial market regulations. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach that relies on the exogenous variation in liquidity generated by regulatory changes, we find that an increase in liquidity causes a reduction in future innovation. We identify two possible mechanisms through which liquidity impedes innovation: increased exposure to hostile takeovers and higher presence of institutional investors who do not actively gather information or monitor.     

Stock dividends in China: signalling or liquidity explanations?

We test alternative hypotheses on a sample of Chinese stock dividends. The inverse Mills ratio, a signal about future performance, is positively related to announcement returns but does not predict higher future performance. Analysts do not revise their earnings forecasts after the announcement date. Our results are more consistent with liquidity‐based theories. We find that managers choose higher stock dividend ratios if share prices deviate more from the industry‐wide average. Increases in proportional spreads, depth, and the number of trades and decreases in average trade size, and price impact suggest greater participation of liquidity and small investors following stock dividends.     

Are Securitized Real Estate Returns more Predictable than Stock Returns?

This paper examines whether the predictability of securitized real estate returns differs from that of stock returns. It also provides a cross-country comparison of securitized real estate return predictability. In contrast to most of the literature on this issue, the analysis is not based on a multifactor asset pricing framework as such analyses may bias the results. We use a time series approach and thus create a level playing field to compare the predictability of the two asset classes. Forecasts are performed with ARMA and ARMA–EGARCH models and evaluated by comparing the entire empirical distributions of prediction errors, as well as with a trading strategy. The results, based on daily data for the 1990–2007 period, show that securitized real estate returns are generally more predictable than stock returns in countries with mature and well established REIT regimes. ARMA–EGARCH models are found to have portfolio outperformance potential even in the presence of transaction costs, with generally better results for securitized real estate than for stocks.     

Application of Heston’s Model to the Chinese Stock Market

This article applies Heston’s (1993) stochastic volatility model to the Chinese stock market indices and subsequently assesses its pricing performance. A two-step estimation procedure is adopted to calibrate Heston’s model. First, we find that the option price is affected by both the moneyness and the maturity. Second, Heston’s model is more likely to overprice options, whereas the BS model tends to underestimate options. Finally, Heston’s model, by employing volatility as a random process, significantly improves the pricing accuracy compared to the BS model. Therefore, Heston’s model is tractable to analyze the Chinese stock market indices, and there is volatility risk that must not be overlooked in the Chinese stock market.     

Do Decomposed Financial Ratios Predict Stock Returns and Fundamentals Better?

We investigate the prediction of excess returns and fundamentals by financial ratios, which include dividend‐price ratios, earnings‐price ratios, and book‐to‐market ratios, by decomposing financial ratios into a cyclical component and a stochastic trend component. We find both components predict excess returns and fundamentals. Cyclical components predict increases in future stock returns, while stochastic trend components predict declines in future stock returns in long horizons. This helps explain previous findings that financial ratios in the absence of decomposition find weak predictive power in short horizons and some predictive power in long horizons. We also find both components predict fundamentals.     

Return Performance Surrounding Reverse Stock Splits: Can Investors Profit?

We examine the long-run return performance of over 1,600 firms with reverse stock splits. These stocks record statistically significant negative abnormal returns over the three-year period following the month of the reverse split. The sample firms experience poor operating performances over the four years that include and follow the year of the reverse split, which suggests informational inefficiencies. Because these stocks have unique financial characteristics, we also show that they would be very difficult to sell short. Thus, arbitrageurs would be restricted in their ability to earn abnormal profits, even if they correctly anticipated a price decline.     

Stock Recommendations in Swedish Printed Media: Leading or Misleading?

Abstract

This paper analyses the initiated and changed recommendations published in six well-known Swedish newspapers and business magazines for the period 1996–2000 using a buy-and-hold abnormal returns (BHARs) approach. The results distinguish between recommendations from analysts and journalists. Buy recommendations were misleading investors, whereas sell recommendations were leading them correctly, overall yielding returns in line with the market. This asymmetry is due to positive information from the management of the company being more intricate to interpret than negative. Both good and bad information provided by the management is generally positively biased, a phenomenon influencing both analyst and journalist recommendations. Following buy and sell recommendations from analysts yielded BHARs in line with those from journalists, which in turn generates returns in line with their peers. Going short in the recommended stocks, irrespective of type and origin, would lead to a 24-month BHAR of 14%.     

Tracking Stock or Spin‐Off? Determinants of Choice

I examine the roles of valuable internal capital markets, cross-subsidization, and insider ownership as determinants of choice between tracking stock and spin-offs in corporate equity restructuring. I show that conglomerates are more likely to choose tracking stock if they want to obtain some of the benefits offered by a spin-off, without loosing the potential for valuable internal capital markets. My results suggest that the market rewards firms with valuable internal capital markets that opt for tracking stocks, and penalizes the possibility of consolidated tax treatments. The market also reacts more favorably to unanticipated tracking-stock announcements.     

How Did the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut Affect Stock Prices?

We test the hypothesis that the 2003 dividend tax cut boosted US stock prices and thereby lowered the cost of equity capital. Using an event‐study methodology, we attempt to identify an aggregate stock market effect by comparing the behavior of US common stock prices with that of foreign equities and the equities of real estate investment trusts (REITs). We also examine the relative cross‐sectional response of prices of high‐ and low‐dividend‐paying stocks. We do not find any imprint of the dividend tax cut news on the value of the aggregate US stock market. On the other hand, high‐dividend stocks outperformed low‐dividend stocks by a few percentage points over the event windows, suggesting that the tax cut may have induced asset reallocation within equity portfolios. Finally, the positive abnormal return on nondividend paying US stocks in 2003 does not appear to be tied to tax cut news.