Performance of Enhanced Index and Quantitative Equity Funds

We examine the performance of enhanced index and quantitative equity funds. Both types of funds use quantitative models in investment selection. Enhanced index funds set an explicit objective to outperform a benchmark index. Proponents of quantitative funds argue that their management style takes human emotions out of the investment decision‐making process and leads to more objective stock selection. We find evidence of outperformance by quantitatively managed growth funds, especially those investing in small cap stocks.     

The Determinants of the Intermediary Spread: Evidence from Australian, UK and USA-based International Equity Funds

This paper develops and tests a new measure of mutual fund performance, based on Brennan's (1993a) equilibrium model of the pricing of retail financial products, which assumes that search costs of investors are non-trivial and cause the demand for mutual funds to be inelastic, thus creating an intermediary spread. This implies that the marginal costs of the intermediary spread in the form of expenses and sales load must be explicitly traded off against the marginal benefits in terms of the fund's return relative to a benchmark. The measure is used to evaluate the performance of twelve USA, eight UK and five Australian-based internationally diversified equity funds over the period 1982–95, and provides new insights into their performance in ways that are not revealed by the Jensen measure.     

Persistent performance in the mutual fund market: Tests with funds and investment advisers

Recent studies of mutual funds have concluded that there is some evidence of superior performance. We test for the existence of superior performance and its persistence with mutual funds and mutual fund investment advisers on a data set of monthly returns from 1979 to 1989 for 1,387 mutual funds grouped by 243 advisers. We find no evidence of superior performance or its persistence but we do find significant evidence of persistence of inferior performance. Consistent with previous studies our findings depend on the benchmark chosen, with multiple benchmarks producing a larger degree of inferior performance.     

A performance measure for mutual funds using the Connor-Korajczyk methodology: An empirical study

This article examines the performance of a sample of bond, stock, and balanced funds. Close attention is paid to the bond versus equity composition of the mutual funds and how this asset composition affects the performance measure. This research includes the period from January 1977 through March 1984. The results of the analysis show that none of these mutual funds categories has outperformed the market. Fund managers in this sample are unable to predict security prices consistently to warrant the associated costs. In addition, the “goodness of fit” varied significantly between the types of funds examined.     

The information content of portfolio performance history and persistence in fund performance: An examination of rollover funds

This paper examines the relation between past and future performance and explores the optimal past performance information set for a subset of Australian investment funds, namely, rollover funds. Four categories of funds are examined: fixed interest; multi-sector yield; multi-sector balanced; and multi-sector growth. This study extends the performance persistence literature through the use of three methodologies (1) regression analysis;(2) non-parametric contingency tables; and (3) top (and bottom) quartile rankings to explore the information content of fund performance history for groups of funds differentiated by investment objective. The results of the regression analysis suggest that there is evidence in support of persistence in performance for the fixed interest funds (particularly when performance is measured in terms of Jensen Alpha) but much more ambiguous evidence in relation to the multi-sector funds. Contingency table analysis of fund performance histories of varying lengths reveals quite different results depending upon whether raw or risk-adjusted returns are used. Use of raw returns creates an overall impression of performance reversals, whereas use of risk-adjusted returns suggests the existence of performance persistence. Finally, the use of prior period top-quartile and bottom-quartile ranking are found to show strong evidence of persistence in respect to the risk-adjusted performance of fixed-interest funds.     

Testing for persistence in mutual fund performance and the ex-post verification problem: evidence from the Greek market

The present study examines a series of performance measures with the aim of solving the ex-post verification problem. These measures are employed to test the performance persistence hypothesis of domestic equity funds in Greece, during the period 1998–2004. Correctly adjusting for risk factors and documented portfolio strategies explains a significant part of the reported persistence. The intercept of the augmented Carhart regression is proposed as the most appropriate performance measure. Using this measure, weak evidence for persistence, only before 2001, is documented. The growth of the fund industry, the direction of flows to past winners and the integration in the international financial system are suggested to be the reasons for the absence of performance persistence.     

The residual market factor,the APT,and mean-variance efficiency

The rapidly increasing volume of both published and unpublished work on the arbitrage pricing theory (APT) of Ross (1976) has given rise to a number of misunderstandings at the interface of theoretical and econometric work. In this article we extend the theoretical structure of our previous work (McElroy and Burmeister, 1985, 1988; Burmeister and McElroy, 1987, 1988) to provide a broad yet rigorous framework both for econometric estimation and for better economic interpretation of new empirical results. We begin with the case where allK factors are observed, and then present the second case ofK−1≡J observed APT factors and one unobserved factor, theresidual market factor introduced in McElroy and Burmeister (1985). The economic interpretations for equivalent specifications of this model are discussed, and we enumerate several immediate payoffs to these specifications. The main new results are concerned with the sometimes intricate relationships among APT models withK factors and APT models withK factors that are constrained to satisfy mean-variance efficiency restrictions. These results are not only of theoretical interest, but more importantly they provide the basis for econometric estimation and testing of nested hypotheses. These econometric issues are discussed in detail.     

Index Revision,House Price Risk,and the Market for House Price Derivatives

It is widely recognized that options and futures markets for housing can reduce and manage the risks inherent in consumers’ large investments in housing equity. The integrity of such markets depends, however, upon the use of transparent and replicable benchmarks for house prices and settlement values. In the USA, a series of state and metropolitan indexes have been produced by a government agency (the US Office of Housing Enterprise Oversight, OFHEO), and they have been widely disseminated for over a decade. By construction, the entire historical path of each of these indexes is, in principle, subject to revision quarterly, that is, every time the index is recalculated and data are published. This paper provides the first analysis of the magnitude and bias of these revisions, and it analyzes their systematic effects on the settlement prices in housing options markets. The paper considers the implications of these magnitudes for the development of risk-reducing futures markets.

Insider ownership, ownership concentration and investment performance: An international comparison

This article makes two important contributions to the literature on the incentive effects of insider ownership. First, it presents a clean method for separating the positive wealth effect of insider ownership from the negative entrenchment effect, which can be applied to samples of companies from the US and any other country. Second, it measures the effects of insider ownership using a measure of firm performance, namely a marginal q, which ensures that the causal relationship estimated runs from ownership to performance. The article applies this method to a large sample of publicly listed firms from the Anglo-Saxon and Civil law traditions and confirms that managerial entrenchment has an unambiguous negative effect on firm performance as measured by both Tobin's (average) q and our marginal q, and that the wealth effect of insider ownership is unambiguously positive for both measures. We also test for the effects of ownership concentration for other categories of owners and find that while institutional ownership improves the performance in the USA, financial institutions have a negative impact in other Anglo-Saxon countries and in Europe.     

Environmental Conditions,Reservation Prices,and Time on the Market for Housing

A general analytical model to describe the impact of environmental disamenities on duration of sales is derived. A statistical technique to recover a sellers reservation price is proposed. An econometric procedure that consistently estimates market duration and a sellers reservation price is described. An application to the impact of highway noise on property values and market duration is presented. The estimation results show that, while highway noise has a significant negative impact on forming reservation prices and predicting sale prices, the noise effect on duration of sales is not statistically significant. Empirical evidence also shows a negative impact of market duration on reservation prices, which indicates an updating process for reservation prices over time.     

Accounting for Accountability and Management in NPOs. A Comparative Study of Four Countries: Canada, the United Kingdom, the USA and Spain

Financial and non–financial information are developing issues in the NPO field. Countries such as Canada, the UK, the USA and Spain have recently updated their accounting systems for NPOs through the implementation of full accrual basis to enhance their accountability and the usefulness of accounting information for decision–making purposes. The information provided by accrual accounting will be incomplete until performance indicators are developed. The performance indicators are essential for making budgets, for planning and forecasting, for evaluating the financial needs, for carrying out benchmarking with other NPOs or governmental entities, and for explaining the welfare activities realised to donors.     

Stability, Asymmetry and Seasonality of Fund Performance: An Analysis of Australian Multi‐sector Managed Funds

Using a sample of Australian Multi-sector trusts we examine selectivity and market timing performance and extend the analysis to include the relatively new measure of volatility timing. This is of particular relevance to our data set, as high levels of volatility persistence are prevalent in Australia. In addition we consider the stability, asymmetry and seasonality of the various performance and risk measures. A survivorship adjustment procedure is also employed in order to assess the impact of survivorship on selectivity, market timing and volatility timing performance.     

Forecasting and Arbitrage of the Nikkei Stock Index Futures: An Application of Backpropagation Networks

A neural network model was used in forecasting the basis in SIMEX Nikkei Stock Index futures. Results for out of sample show that the neural network forecast performance was better than that of the ARIMA model. Also, a two-way ANOVA confirms that the employed neural network was able to provide the trader with more arbitrage profits than the traditional cost-of-carry model even though it observed relative less profitable arbitrage timing. The results can be attributed to the network';s higher ability to capture nonlinear market patterns.     

长期护理保险制度中老年人的失能风险和照料时间——基于Barthel指数的分析

文章采用我国长期护理保险试点地区普遍使用的失能评估工具Barthel指数作为老年人的失能评估标准,以2014年的CLASS和CLHLS数据为基础,在将两项数据合并后,综合运用多重填补法、生命表技术、沙利文法,对老年人的失能水平及其长期照料需求时间进行评估。分析结果表明:第一,老年人失能水平随年龄增加而快速增长,且存在明显的性别差异,女性老年人的生活自理预期寿命及其带残存活时间均高于男性,应将其作为重点关注人群;第二,轻中、重度失能人群中受损的活动能力项目存在差异,在提供照料时应加以区分;第三,60岁的老年人在重度失能状态下需要照料的时间约为0.42年,中重度状态下为0.79年,但是如果将轻度失能也考虑在内,需要照料的时间将增至5.01年。因此,将项目的受益人群扩大到轻度失能人群会导致照料成本大幅度上升。     

If It's Good for the Firm,It's Good for Me: Insider Trading and Repurchases Motivated by Undervaluation

My findings suggest that information inherent in insider trading can be used to identify undervalued repurchasing firms. I examine the relation between insider trading and the performance of open market repurchase (OMR) firms. I show that firms with high net insider buying prior to OMR announcements not only earn abnormal stock returns in both the short‐ and long‐run, but also exhibit better operating performance. Overall, the evidence is consistent with insiders timing their trades prior to OMR announcements.     

Accounting and environmentalism: An exploration of the challenge of gently accounting for accountability,transparency and sustainability

Concern for the natural environment has not occupied a prominent role in accounting scholarship and practice. This paper attempts to redress this omission by investigating the implications for accounting of placing the environment at the centre of the analysis. The paper introduces the principles of this “deep green” position and explores how accounting might articulate them. Whilst there may be no place for what we currently consider to be conventional financial accounting in any “green utopia” the paper does not attempt to operationalise, within a non-green world, certain of the principles of the green position. Emphasis is placed on an accounting's potential for contribution to accountability and transparency in participative democracy, the potential for non-financial accounts of the biosphere and, perhaps most contentiously, the use of current accounting techniques for the operationalisation of an accounting for sustainability.     

An Evaluation of Contingent Claims Using the CKLS Interest Rate Model: An Analysis of Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom

In this paper we apply a new efficient numerical method for valuing default free bonds and contingent claims within the CKLS interest rate model. Using historical parameter estimates of the CKLS model for Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom we compare implied bond and contingent claim prices. Our results indicate that default free bond prices and contingent claim prices are sensitive to the underlying interest rate model used.     

A-Level Subject Choice,Systematic Bias and University Performance in the UK: The Case of Accounting

British students from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to attend non-selective state schools and are therefore more likely to take a wider variety of A-level subjects including applied disciplines such as Accounting. This is attributed to the performative pressure subjected by school league tables that incentivise schools to encourage students to select subjects that will yield the highest grades. However, many leading universities have restricted the chances of applicants holding particular combinations of A-level subjects that, in some cases, include Accounting. Interviews held within a large English university reveal that few students are aware of such restrictions, whilst corresponding quantitative data indicates that students who enter university with two or more restricted A-level subjects perform no differently on average than other students. Those entering university with an Accounting A-level, however, perform, better in their first year but exhibit lower degree performance, on average, by the end of their studies.     

Organizational legitimacy,conflict, and hypocrisy: An alternative view of the role of internal auditing

This article provides a commentary on Everett and Tremblay's (2014) analysis of ethics and internal audit by further exploring the role of the internal audit function within Nils Brunsson's model of organized hypocrisy (Brunsson, 1986, Brunsson, 1993, Brunsson, 2002). Specifically, we extend Everett and Tremblay's discussion of internal auditors as ‘moral’ actors and propose that the counter-coupling of an organization's primary outputs–talk, decision and action–provides internal auditors with the necessary tools to carry out conflicting ethical roles within the organization.