Arbitrage Bounds and UK Unit Trust Performance

Abstract:  We use the arbitrage performance bounds of Ahn, Cao and Chretien (2003) to evaluate UK unit trust performance between January 1988 and December 2002. We find that trust performance is sensitive to the admissible stochastic discount factor used for both the average trust and the majority of individual trusts. The investment style, size, load charge, and annual charge of the trust all have an impact on trust performance. We find for some trusts, the Jensen (1968) and Ferson and Schadt (1996) measures do not satisfy arbitrage bounds by the base assets.     

An Empirical Examination of U.K. International Unit Trust Performance

We examine the performance of U.K. unit trusts with international equity objectives between January 1985 and December 2000 using four international factor models. The international version of the Carhart (1997) model performs the best in explaining the cross-section of international stock returns. There is little evidence of superior performance by international trusts relative to the global models. We also find that the choice between a local and global version of the Carhart model has a significant impact on the relation between the investment sector of the trust and performance.JEL classification: G10, G12     

The Performance of UK International Unit Trusts

We evaluate the performance of UK unit trusts with international equity objectives between January 1985 and December 2000 relative to domestic benchmark strategies. We use performance measures based on Jensen (1968) , Ferson and Schadt (1996) , and the Chen and Knez (1996) law of one price (LOP). We find more favourable trust performance using the Jensen and Ferson and Schadt measures relative to the LOP measure. There is evidence of inferior performance by some international trusts using the unconditional LOP measure. The charges and investment sector of the trust also has an impact on the performance of the trusts using the LOP measure.     

Exploring the Conditional Performance of U.K. Unit Trusts

We evaluate the conditional performance of U.K. equity unit trusts using the approach of Lynch and Wachter (2007, 2008) relative to three conditional linear factor models. We find significant time variation in the conditional performance of some trust portfolios and individual trusts using the lag term spread as the information variable. The conditional performance of the trusts is countercyclical and larger trusts have more countercyclical performance than smaller trusts within certain investment sectors. These patterns in conditional trust performance cannot be fully explained by the underlying securities that the trusts hold.

Changes to Income Trust Taxation in Canada: Investor Reaction and Dividend Clientele Theory

Abstract:  This paper explores the relationship between tax-induced dividend clientele theory and the recent changes to the taxation of income trusts in Canada. On October 31, 2006, the Canadian government announced the Tax Fairness Plan ( TFP ) calling for the elimination of the considerable tax advantage enjoyed by income trusts. Generally, distributions from income trusts are now taxed at rates comparable to those imposed on corporate dividends. We examine market reaction to the  TFP  to address three issues: first, whether the valuation effect of a dividend tax increase is consistent with the traditional or the new view of dividend taxation; secondly, whether the market reaction to tax increases has a differential impact on firm value that is related to the tax preferences of taxable, tax-exempt, and foreign investor tax clienteles; and thirdly, whether firms change their dividend policies in response to the preference of institutional investors (tax-based dividend policy effect) or whether institutional investors are sorting themselves across firms based on their dividend policies (investor sorting effect). Our results provide strong evidence as follows. First, the valuation effect in reaction to the  TFP  announcement is consistent with the traditional view of dividend taxation – i.e. that taxes on dividends reduce the net return to investors, increase the firm's cost of capital and lower the firm's ability to access capital markets, thereby discouraging investment and savings. Secondly, we saw that trusts with a larger percentage of their units held by tax-exempt, low-tax, and foreign investors had a higher decline in value when compared with trusts held mostly by ordinary taxable investors. These results support dividend tax clientele theory. Finally, we observed changes in institutional investor clienteles consistent with the investor sorting effect.     

Is international trust performance predictable over time? A note

We examine whether past return measures have any significant predictive ability for future returns of UK unit trusts with international equity objectives. We find significant positive persistence between the past return performance of the trust relative to its investment sector and future trust returns relative to its sector. This result holds at short‐run and long‐run return horizons. The persistence is stronger in trusts that perform well relative to their sector. Our findings suggest that the past return performance of the trust relative to their sector provides a useful guide to future return performance relative to their sector.     

Underwriter Reputation and Initial Public Offers: The Detrimental Effects of Flippers

In this research, we examine the relationship between the reputation of investment banks and the investor clientele to whom they market initial public offers. We hypothesize that the most reputable investment banks have considerable distribution power but confine initial public offer sales to investors with long-term horizons in an effort to maintain prestige. Using the level of relative after-market trading volume to proxy for investor type, we find that as underwriter reputation increases investors with short-term trading horizons (“flippers”) tend to dominate the offerings over the lower prestige levels. For underwriters in the upper reputation tier, however, this dominance begins to decline with increasing reputation. In addition, we find a negative relation between the after-market price performance of the initial public offer firm and the first week's trading volume. The results suggest that flippers can be detrimental to the performance of initial public offer firms. While distributing power may be essential for the maintenance of the reputation of investment banks, the type of investor clientele also appears to be of major importance.     

U.K. Unit Trust Performance: Does it Matter Which Benchmark or Measure is Used?

We explore the validity of different benchmark specifications used to evaluate U.K. fund performance, and we examine the sensitivity of U.K. unit trust performance to the factor benchmark specification and two performance measures. Our findings suggest that the different benchmark specifications create some bias when we evaluate U.K. fund performance with either performance measure. We find that the performance of the trusts is sensitive to the factor benchmark specification used, but not to the performance measure. We also find significant time-series variations in the abnormal performance of the trusts.     

Connecting two markets: An equilibrium framework for shorts,longs, and stock loans

We analyze a reduced-form framework for understanding the equity loan market's impact on share prices. We show that hard-to-borrow stocks will have distinct return patterns, responding more to shocks in the supply of shares available, and to changes in the heterogeneity of investor beliefs, than other stocks. We conduct two empirical tests in which we find strong support for these equilibrium predictions. In our first test, we take advantage of a tax-driven exogenous shock to share loan supply and find that when supply is reduced around dividend record dates, prices of hard-to-borrow stocks increase 1.1% while prices of easy-to-borrow stocks are unaffected. In our second test, we find that hard-to-borrow stocks have 4.8% lower three-month returns than other stocks, with negative returns concentrated in stocks with high heterogeneity in investor beliefs. Thus, we extend the Diether, Malloy, and Scherbina (2002) result that stocks with a greater dispersion of investor beliefs have lower returns.     

Performance Evaluation Of U.K. Unit Trusts Within The Stochastic Discount Factor Framework

We examine the performance of U.K. unit trusts between January 1982 and December 1996 within the stochastic discount factor approach across a wide class of models. No one model dominates the others in correctly pricing passive portfolios or detecting superior performance for hypothetical trading strategies. We find no evidence of significant superior performance by the unit trusts for any model of the stochastic discount factor. Also, the charges of the trust have a mixed effect on trust performance.     

How can firms repair their reputations when they discover information technology control material weaknesses?

We examine the effects of information technology material weaknesses on a firm’s reputation by examining how management’s actions before and after disclosure influence investors’ trust in management and perceptions of investment risk. Specifically, we look at the influence of: 1) management taking responsibility for an information technology material weakness, and 2) replacing the CFO with someone with technology expertise. We find that management taking responsibility for a material weakness does not lead to increased trust in management before or after remediation. However, investors perceive more favorable market reactions to remediation when management had previously taken responsibility for the control weakness. Further, we find that replacing the CFO with someone who has technology expertise results in increases in investor trust and improvements in perceptions of investment risk after control weakness remediation. This suggests the importance of sending clear signals to investors that the company is hiring managers with appropriate technology expertise.     

Excess Volatility and UK Investment Trusts

Abstract:   The issue of whether or not asset prices are more volatile than the underlying fundamentals is an empirical question with implications for market efficiency. Recent research suggests that the volatility of closed end fund returns in the USA is significantly higher than the returns on assets held by the funds. This has been attributed to noise trading as closed‐end fund shares are predominantly held by individual investors. This study demonstrates that UK investment trust returns exhibit similar excess volatility in spite of the prevalence of institutional investors. However, big investment trusts in terms of market capitalisation show greater excess volatility than small trusts. Although most of the excess volatility appears to be idiosyncratic, investor sentiment index is the most important variable associated with residual returns.     

Institutional investor stability and crash risk: Monitoring versus short-termism?

This study tests two opposing views of institutional investors—monitoring versus short-termism. We present evidence that institutional investor stability is negatively associated with 1-year-ahead stock price crash risk, consistent with the monitoring theory of institutional investors but not the short-termism theory. Our findings are shown to be robust to alternative empirical specifications, estimation methods and endogeneity concerns. In addition, we find that institutional ownership by public pension funds (bank trusts, investment companies, and independent investment advisors) is significantly negatively (positively) associated with future crash risk, consistent with findings that pension funds more actively monitor management than other types of institutions.     

Ethical Unit Trust Financial Performance: Small Company Effects and Fund Size Effects

Recent papers which have examined unit trusts have controlled either for a 'fund size effect' or for the 'small firms effect' in the investment portfolio. The contribution of this paper is an analysis of the 'small firms effect' whilst simultaneously controlling for the 'fund size effect'. We show that the ethical unit trusts have significantly greater exposure than general unit trusts to the 'small firms effect', and that net of this there is no significant evidence of over or under performance by ethical trusts using an adjusted Jensen measure. Using two cross-sectional approaches, we demonstrate that whilst a 'small firms effect' has a role to play in explaining unit trust performance, fund size is not correlated with the financial performance of unit trusts. This cross-sectional analysis also provides some evidence that ethical unit trusts may perform less well than general unit trusts.     

Forecasting the returns on UK investment trusts: a comparison

The well known fact that investment trusts (closed-end mutual funds in the USA) trade at a discount means that the return to an investor depends not only on the change in net asset value (NAV), but also on changes in the discount over the holding period. Using daily data, this paper models the relationship between UK investment trust prices and NAV's using cointegration methodology then shows that the forecasts based on the, error correction mechanism (ECM) compare poorly with those from vector autoregressions. And then incorporates a number of modifications to the ECM in an attempt to improve the forecasts. In particular, modelling volatility persistance and allow for asymmetric resonses in the ECM.     

Does favorable investor sentiment lead to costly decisions to go public?

We investigate the real effects of decisions to undertake an initial public offering of stock in periods of favorable investor sentiment. Specifically, we examine potential effects of favorable investor sentiment on investment expenditures and how effects on investment affect firm operating performance and value as well as the likelihood of survival. We find that firms going public during periods of favorable sentiment, on average, spend substantially more on investments, especially acquisitions, than firms going public in other periods. The effect of favorable investor sentiment on investment is more pronounced for younger firms. We do not find, however, that the higher investment spending in the wake of favorable sentiment leads to worse operating or stock performance. Stock returns around acquisitions announcements are also positive for firms going public in favorable sentiment periods. The preponderance of our findings indicate that decisions to go public in favorable investor sentiment periods do not lead to corporate investment decisions that harm firm performance and value.     

Performance of UK Investment Trusts: 1980–1994

This study investigates the selectivity and timing performance of a large sample (79) of UK investment trusts over a long period (15 years) by applying a number of models. There are few studies in this area in the UK. It is often argued that investors hold investment trust shares to obtain diversification and managerial skills. Managerial skill, if present, should be observed in the form of superior selectivity and timing performance measures. The general decline in the level of discount observed in the industry over the sample period suggests that excess returns could be obtained by holding investment trusts shares. We use single index and multifactor models for the analysis. Positive but statistically insignificant, selectivity estimates and negative, and at times significant, timing estimates are observed.     

An exploration of the persistence of UK unit trust performance

We examine the persistence in UK unit trust performance between January 1982 and December 1996. We find significant persistence in the relative rankings of trusts using different performance measures. We also find significant persistence in the performance of portfolios of trusts, formed on the basis of prior year excess returns, when performance is evaluated relative to models based on the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) or arbitrage pricing theory (APT). However this persistence is eliminated when performance is evaluated relative to a model similar to Carhart [Journal of Finance 52 (1997) 57]. Using a conditional performance measure leads to significant reversals in performance with this model.     

Do Convertible Bond Issuers Cater to Investor Demand?

We examine the impact of fluctuations in investor demand for convertible securities on convertible bond issue volumes, pricing, and design. We find evidence of a positive impact of investor demand proxies on convertible bond issue volumes. We also document significantly lower convertible bond underpricing in periods with higher investor demand. The results hold in a variety of specifications, and are robust to controlling for firm‐specific and macroeconomic financing cost proxies. However, we obtain only limited evidence that issuers adjust the design of their convertible bond offerings in response to investor demand.     

REIT Institutional Ownership Dynamics and the Financial Crisis

Collectively, institutional investors hold large ownership stakes in REITs. The traditional view is that institutions are both long-term and passive investors. The financial crisis beginning in 2007 provides an opportunity to analyze the investment choices of institutional investors before, during, and after the crisis. Our results indicate that institutional ownership increased prior to the financial crisis, declined significantly during the period of market stress, but rebounded after. These results hold for four institutional investor subtypes: mutual funds/investment advisors, bank trusts, insurance companies, and other institutions, with mutual funds/investment advisors and bank trusts most clearly exhibiting this pattern. We also find evidence that institutions actively manage their REIT portfolios, displaying a “flight to quality” after the market downturn by reducing beta and individual risk exposure, and by increasing ownership in larger REITs.