Year-End Tax-Induced Sales and Stock Market Seasonality

The paper relates two phenomena in the stock market: the high return during the month of January and the apparent existence of widespread sales of stocks for tax purposes towards the end of the fiscal year. The findings suggest that, due to the tax-induced sales, the price of many stocks over the last 35 years was temporarily depressed in December but recovered in the following January. This price recovery is a major contributor to the high returns observed in January. The tax effect is present in firms of all sizes but much more pronounced for small firms. The analysis also indicates that a more precise identification of the tax-switch candidates may prove that the tax-induced sales are, in fact, the sole contributor to the high January's returns.     

Further Evidence On Investor Overreaction and Stock Market Seasonality

In a previous paper, we found systematic price reversals for stocks that experience extreme long-term gains or losses: Past losers significantly outperform past winners. We interpreted this finding as consistent with the behavioral hypothesis of investor overreaction. In this follow-up paper, additional evidence is reported that supports the overreaction hypothesis and that is inconsistent with two alternative hypotheses based on firm size and differences in risk, as measured by CAPM-betas. The seasonal pattern of returns is also examined. Excess returns in January are related to both short-term and long-term past performance, as well as to the previous year market return.     

Tax Holidays and the International Capital Market

The paper shows how a tax holiday may signal to a skepticalcapital market that the future level of taxation will be moderate.After the signal has informed investors that the host countrygovernment is a low-spender, the tax profile flattens out, correspondingto a tax reform stage. Contrary to the recent literature on taxholidays, this model assumes that: the capital market is perfectlycompetitive; sunk costs are captured by a convex cost function,instead of fixed costs; taxation is distortionary, not lump-sum;and the government maximizes a welfare function rather than taxrevenue.     

Cultural New Year Holidays and Stock Returns around the World

Using data from 11 major international markets that celebrate six cultural New Year holidays that do not occur on January 1, we find that stock markets tend to outperform in days surrounding a cultural New Year. After controlling for firm characteristics, an average stock earns 2.5% higher abnormal returns across all markets in the month of a cultural New Year relative to other months of the year. Further evidence suggests that positive holiday moods, in conjunction with cash infusions prior to a cultural New Year, produce elevated stock prices, particularly among those stocks most preferred and traded by individual investors.     

Seasonality in the Option Market

This study examines call and put option returns from 1983 to 1985 for the presence of a January seasonal effect, a monthly effect, and a day-of-the-week effect. Results in dicate the presence of seasonality in call returns, with returns significantly higher in early January and significantly lower on Mondays. Put returns generally exhibit less seasonality, although out-of-the-money put options are significantly lower in January and in-the-money put options are significantly lower in early January. These results are generally consistent with stock return patterns.     

优化股市政策化解股市失灵

目前我国股市缺乏吸引力源于股市失灵,其特征为市场机制失灵和政府政策失灵共存.股市失灵的真正原因总是归根为政策失灵.化解股市失灵关键是采取积极的态度,不断改革、创新,从根本上消除股市理论失灵,以优化政策资源配置,促进我国股市健康、稳定发展.     

High Stock Returns before Holidays: Existence and Evidence on Possible Causes

On the trading day prior to holidays, stocks advance with disproportionate frequency and show high mean returns averaging nine to fourteen times the mean return for the remaining days of the year. Over one third of the total return accruing to the market portfolio over the 1963–1982 period was earned on the eight trading days which each year fall before holiday market closings. Examination of hourly pre-holiday stock returns reveals high returns throughout the day. Pre-holiday stock returns in the post-test 1983–1986 period are also examined.     

Microstructure and Seasonality in the UK Equity Market

This paper explores seasonality in the UK stock market. It examines the impact of alternative company year-ends on returns as well as seasonality in bid-ask spreads and trading activity variables including volume, number and size of trades. Consistent with the evidence elsewhere, seasonal variation in stock returns and trading activity is established although there is little evidence of a seasonal pattern in relative bid-ask spreads. Trading rules based on the seasonal patterns do not suggest that seasonality can be exploited to earn excess profits.     

Portfolio Returns,Market Volatility,and Seasonality

This paper examines three important issues related to the relationship between stock returns and volatility. First, are Duffee's (1995) findings of the relationship between individual stock returns and volatility valid at the portfolio level? Second, is there a seasonality of the market return volatility? Lastly, do size portfolio returns react symmetrically to the market volatility during business cycles? We find that the market volatility exhibits strong autocorrelation and small size portfolio returns exhibit seasonality. However, this phenomenon is not present in large size portfolios. For the entire sample period of 1962–1995, the highest average monthly volatility occurred in October, followed by November, and then January. Examining the two sub-sample periods, we find that the average market volatility increases by 15.4% in the second sample period of 1980–1995 compared to the first sample period of 1962–1979. During the contraction period, the average market volatility is 60.9% higher than that during the expansion period. Using a binary regression model, we find that size portfolio returns react asymmetrically with the market volatility during business cycles. This paper documents a strongly negative contemporaneous relationship between the size portfolio returns and the market volatility that is consistent with the previous findings at the aggregate level, but is inconsistent with the findings at the individual firm level. In contrast with the previous findings, however, we find an ambiguous relationship between the percentage change in the market volatility and the contemporaneous stock portfolio returns. This ambiguity is attributed to strongly negative contemporaneous and one-month ahead relationships between the market volatility and portfolio returns.

     

股指期货与现货市场的关系研究

本文从市场结构、交易执行效率和市场信息传播三个方面，由浅入深地展开了期现货市场关系的梳理和分析。股指期货市场的出现，一是使得原本现货市场单轨运行的市场结构变为了期现货市场双轨运行的新结构，增加了市场稳定性；二是依托期货交易方式的独特机制，大大提高了交易执行效率；三是期货价格也因此包含了更多内容，促进了市场信息的传播与扩散。同时，股指期货的独特设计使得其非常适合在危机条件下充分发挥功能，是一个重要的风险管理工具，已经成为现代资本市场的重要组成部分和基础性的内在稳定机制。     

股票拆分和股票红利原因及其影响

股票拆分是公司调整股票价格的重要方式,而送红股是股利政策中重要的组成部分。公司拆分股票、发放股票股利主要目的在于传递公司业绩良好的信号,以及使股价保持在一个合理的范围内从而更受投资者欢迎。市场对其反应一般都是正向的。股票在公告之后出现了超额收益,而且交易活动增加,股票收益波动性变得更大。但公告之后流动性的变化在理论界并没有达成一致的结论。     

Awareness and Stock Market Participation

The paper documents lack of awareness of financial assets in the 1995 and 1998 Bank of Italy Surveys of Household Income and Wealth. It then explores the determinants of awareness, and finds that the probability that survey respondents are aware of stocks, mutual funds and investment accounts is positively correlated with education, household resources, long-term bank relations and proxies for social interaction. Lack of financial awareness has important implications for understanding the stockholding puzzle and for estimating stock market participation costs. We thank Raman Uppal, the referee, Raffaele Miniaci and seminar participants at the Bank of Italy, the U.K. Financial Service Authority (FSA), the Universities of Padua, Salerno, Tilburg, Turin, and Venice for helpful comments. This work has been supported by the European Community’s Human Potential Programme under contract HPRN-CT-2002-00235 (AGE) and by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR).     

Terrorism and Stock Market Sentiment

This paper examines the effects of terrorism on stock market sentiment by focusing on the behavior of expected probability density functions of the FTSE 100 index around terrorist attacks. We find that terrorism has a strong adverse impact on stock market sentiment. In particular, terrorist attacks are found to cause a pronounced downward shift in the expected value of the FTSE 100 index and a significant increase in stock market uncertainty. Furthermore, our results show that the expected FTSE 100 probability densities became significantly more negatively skewed and fat‐tailed in the immediate aftermath of terrorist acts.     

Stock Market Declines and Liquidity

Consistent with recent theoretical models where binding capital constraints lead to sudden liquidity dry-ups, we find that negative market returns decrease stock liquidity, especially during times of tightness in the funding market. The asymmetric effect of changes in aggregate asset values on liquidity and commonality in liquidity cannot be fully explained by changes in demand for liquidity or volatility effects. We document interindustry spillover effects in liquidity, which are likely to arise from capital constraints in the market making sector. We also find economically significant returns to supplying liquidity following periods of large drops in market valuations.     

Stock Market Volatility and Learning

We show that consumption‐based asset pricing models with time‐separable preferences generate realistic amounts of stock price volatility if one allows for small deviations from rational expectations. Rational investors with subjective beliefs about price behavior optimally learn from past price observations. This imparts momentum and mean reversion into stock prices. The model quantitatively accounts for the volatility of returns, the volatility and persistence of the price‐dividend ratio, and the predictability of long‐horizon returns. It passes a formal statistical test for the overall fit of a set of moments provided one excludes the equity premium.     

Stock Market Returns and Consumption

This paper employs Swedish data on households' stock holdings to investigate how consumption responds to changes in stock market returns. We instrument the actual capital gains and dividend payments with past portfolio weights. Unrealized capital gains lead to a marginal propensity to consume of 23% for the bottom 50% of the wealth distribution and about 3% for the top 30% of the wealth distribution. Household consumption is significantly more responsive to dividend payouts across all parts of the wealth distribution. Our findings are consistent with households treating capital gains and dividends as separate sources of income.     

IQ and Stock Market Participation

Stock market participation is monotonically related to IQ, controlling for wealth, income, age, and other demographic and occupational information. The high correlation between IQ and participation exists even among the affluent. Supplemental data from siblings, studied with an instrumental variables approach and regressions that control for family effects, demonstrate that IQ's influence on participation extends to females and does not arise from omitted familial and nonfamilial variables. High‐IQ investors are more likely to hold mutual funds and larger numbers of stocks, experience lower risk, and earn higher Sharpe ratios. We discuss implications for policy and finance research.