Institutional Trade Persistence and Long‐Term Equity Returns

Recent studies show that single‐quarter institutional herding positively predicts short‐term returns. Motivated by the theoretical herding literature, which emphasizes endogenous persistence in decisions over time, we estimate the effect of multiquarter institutional buying and selling on stock returns. Using both regression and portfolio tests, we find that persistent institutional trading negatively predicts long‐term returns: persistently sold stocks outperform persistently bought stocks at long horizons. The negative association between returns and institutional trade persistence is not subsumed by past returns or other stock characteristics, is concentrated among smaller stocks, and is stronger for stocks with higher institutional ownership.     

机构持股、特质风险与股票收益的实证研究

机构投资者的投资行为对股票市场的风险与收益产生了极大的影响,机构投资者的大量参与有助于股票市场的稳定、特质风险的分散以及超额收益的减少。文章选取机构投资者持股占股票市值比例这一指标来刻画机构投资者的行为,检验机构持股比例、特质风险和股票收益之间的关系。实证发现,在中国股市,特质风险与股票收益呈显著的正相关关系;机构大量持股有助于降低股票的特质风险;机构投资者持股比例越低的股票,特质风险越大,股票预期收益越高。     

Default Risk in Equity Returns

This is the first study that uses Merton's (1974) option pricing model to compute default measures for individual firms and assess the effect of default risk on equity returns. The size effect is a default effect, and this is also largely true for the book‐to‐market (BM) effect. Both exist only in segments of the market with high default risk. Default risk is systematic risk. The Fama–French (FF) factors SMB and HML contain some default‐related information, but this is not the main reason that the FF model can explain the cross section of equity returns.     

Connecting Optimal Capital Investment and Equity Returns

Economic theory predicts a contemporaneous correlation between equity returns and investment growth that is only weakly present in the data. By modifying the firm's production function to include a lag between investment decisions and expenditures, and after correcting for the temporal aggregation of investment, I find the predicted correlation to be present in the data. I estimate the model for 31 industries and find that investment returns are highly correlated with the industry portfolio equity returns. Further, the portion of investment returns orthogonal to equity returns is associated positively with changes in profitability and negatively with lagged differences between equity and investment returns.     

Institutional Investors and Private Equity

Entrepreneurial finance literature has highlighted that institutionalinvestors are the main contributors to private equity funds.This paper complements these findings by documenting that institutionalinvestors also invest directly in private equity. A major concernfor such investments is the higher agency costs associated withprivate equity. We show that institutions invest in privatefirms with governance mechanisms that tend to reduce the expectedagency costs and risk of minority expropriation. Good governancemechanisms further allow institutional investors to enjoy thebenefits of syndication and thereby reduce idiosyncratic risk.In addition, we show that institutional investments tend tobe followed by further improvements in corporate governanceand tend to occur in high-growth firms within research and developmentintensive industries.     

The Risk and Predictability of International Equity Returns

We investigate predictability in national equity market returns,and its relation to global economic risks. We show how to consistentlyestimate the fraction of the predictable variation that is capturedby an asset pricing model for the expected returns. We use amodel in which conditional betas of the national equity marketsdepend on local information variables, while global risk premiadepend on global variables. We examine single- and multiple-betamodels, using monthly data for 1970 to 1989. The models capturemuch of the predictability for many countries. Most of thisis related to time variation in the global risk premia.     

Ratings,Commercial Paper,and Equity Returns

We present the first evidence that initial ratings of commercial paper influence common stock returns. Highly-rated industrial issues of commercial paper, unaccompanied by bank letters of credit, are associated with significantly positive abnormal returns; lower-rated issues are not. The stock price effects of changes in commercial paper ratings also demonstrate the relevance of ratings to the financing of firms. Rating downgrades, especially those that imply an exit from the commercial paper market, produce significantly negative abnormal returns; upgrades have no effects. Initial commercial paper ratings and subsequent reratings appear to help investors sort firms by their future prospects.     

机构持股与中小投资者保护

信息不对称是导致中小投资者在资本市场遭受利益损失的重要原因,本文以会计盈余质量作为衡量中小投资者保护水平的指标,以2003-2005年沪、深两市A股为样本,实证检验了中国机构持股对中小投资者保护的影响.结果发现,机构持股降低了会计盈余质量,没有发挥保护中小投资者的利益的作用.上述研究发现,对理解机构持股的经济后果具有重要意义,有助于更加深入地理解机构持股影响中小投资者利益保护的制度条件,也为投资者保护研究提供了一个有益的视角.     

Circuit Breakers and the Tail Index of Equity Returns

Using the tail index of returns on U.S. equities as a summarymeasure of extreme behavior, we examine changes in the equitymarkets surrounding the development of program trading for portfolioinsurance, the crash of 1987, and the subsequent introductionof circuit breakers and other changes in market architecture.Recently-developed tests for the null of constancy of the tailindex, versus the alternative of a change at an unknown date,permit inference on changes in extreme behavior over a longtime period while allowing for second-moment dependence in thereturn data. We find strong evidence of a decrease in the tailindex (increase in the probability of extreme events) aroundthe beginning of large-scale program trading, and weaker, butstill substantial, evidence of further significant change inthe tail index following the introduction of circuit breakers.Point estimates of the tail index suggest that the tail indexmay have roughly regained pre-program trading levels. More generally,the results tend to suggest that long samples of U.S. equityreturns should not be treated as samples from a single distributionfunction, particularly in examining extremes.     

Growing Pains: International Instability and Equity Market Returns

We use the ratio of growth in global military expenditures to gross domestic product (GDP) to capture ex ante expectations of political instability and explore the relation between this measure and returns. In a standard global asset pricing framework with 44 countries, this measure helps to explain cross‐country return differences. Furthermore, emerging countries have greater exposure to international political instability risk than developed countries. This partially explains the higher returns observed in emerging countries.     

Equity Returns and Business Cycles in Small Open Economies

This is the first paper in the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium literature to match key business cycle moments and long‐run equity returns in a small open economy with production. These results are achieved by introducing four modifications to a standard real business cycle model: (i) borrowing and lending costs are imposed to increase the volatility of the marginal rate of substitution over time, (ii) capital adjustment costs are assumed to make equity returns more volatile, (iii) GHH preferences are employed to smooth consumption, and (iv) a working capital constraint to generate countercyclical trade balances. Our results are based on data from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.     

Investment and the Cross‐Section of Equity Returns

The data show that, upon being hit by adverse profitability shocks, large public firms have ample latitude to divest their least productive assets, reducing the risk faced by shareholders and the returns that they are likely to demand. In the one‐factor production‐based asset pricing model, when the frictions to capital adjustment are shaped to respect the evidence on investment, the model‐generated cross‐sectional dispersion of returns is only a small fraction of that documented in the data. Our conclusions hold even when operating or labor leverage is modeled in ways shown to be promising in the extant literature.     

Institutional Investor Ownership and Corporate Pension Transparency

We examine the association between institutional ownership and defined benefit (DB) pension decisions. We find that institutional ownership is negatively associated with pension underfunding, opportunistic increases in the expected rate of return assumption in the presence of underfunding, and significant ownership of the firm's own stock in the DB plan portfolio. Furthermore, these relations are stronger when institutional ownership is concentrated, when institutions are nontransient investors, or when institutions are relatively large. These results suggest that institutional investors are monitoring firm pension decisions, particularly those institutions with stronger monitoring incentives or resources.     

The Asymmetric Response of Equity REIT Returns to Inflation

This paper posits that the failure of past studies to document a positive relationship between REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) returns and inflation is an artifact of the empirical framework that has predominated in these studies. Applying a pooled estimation methodology to an expansive data set containing 195 publicly traded equity REITs for the period 1981–2002, the study documents a strong asymmetry in the response of equity REIT returns to inflation. Specifically, when expected and unexpected inflation are separated into positive and negative changes, results indicate that equity REIT returns rise in response to both increases and decreases in inflation. The evidence, which is partly contingent on the prevailing monetary policy environment, carries important policy implications for portfolio management and provides insights into the observed anomalous relationship between REITs and inflation.     

Multivariate Models of Equity Returns for Investment Guarantees Valuation

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the valuation of investment guarantees in a multivariate (discrete-time) framework. We present how to build multivariate models in general, and we survey the most important multivariate GARCH models. A direct multivariate application of regime-switching models is also discussed, as is the estimation of these models using maximum likelihood and their comparison in a multivariate setting. The computation of the CTE provision is further presented. We have estimated the models with a multivariate dataset (Canada, United States, United Kingdom, and Japan), and we compared the quality of their fit using multiple criteria and tests. We observe that multivariate GARCH models provide a better overall fit than regime-switching models. However, regime-switching models appropriately represent the fat tails of the returns distribution, which is where most GARCH models fail. This leads to significant differences in the value of the CTE provisions, and, in general, provisions computed with regime-switching models are higher. Thus, the results from this multivariate analysis are in line with what was obtained in the literature of univariate models.     

The Equity Share in New Issues and Aggregate Stock Returns

The share of equity issues in total new equity and debt issues is a strong predictor of U.S. stock market returns between 1928 and 1997. In particular, firms issue relatively more equity than debt just before periods of low market returns. The equity share in new issues has stable predictive power in both halves of the sample period and after controlling for other known predictors. We do not find support for efficient market explanations of the results. Instead, the fact that the equity share sometimes predicts significantly negative market returns suggests inefficiency and that firms time the market component of their returns when issuing securities.     

机构投资者与股票市场稳定：以基金业为例

回顾美国基金业及股票市场的历史，我们发现，美国的投资基金并不是自始就发挥了稳定市场的作用。