Overreaction diamonds: precursors and aftershocks for significant price changes

Overreactions and other behavioral effects in stock prices can best be examined by adjusting for the changes in fundamentals. We perform this by subtracting the relative price changes in the net asset value (NAV) from that of market price (MP) daily for 134 406 data points of closed-end funds trading in US markets. We examine the days before and after a significant rise or fall in price deviation and MP return and find evidence of overreaction in the days after the change. Prior to a spike in deviation we find a gradual two- or three-day decline (and analogously in the other direction). Overall, there is a characteristic diamond pattern, revealing a symmetry in deviations before and after the significant change. Much of the statistical significance and the patterns disappear when the subtraction of NAV return is eliminated, suggesting that the frequent changes in fundamentals mask behavioral effects. A second study subdivides the data depending on whether the NAV or market price is responsible for the spike in the relative difference. In a majority of spikes, it is the change in market price rather than NAV that is dominant. Among those spikes for which there is little or no change in NAV, the results are similar to the overall study. Furthermore, the upward spikes are preceded by one or two days of declining market price while NAV rises slightly or is relatively unchanged. This suggests that a cause of the spike may be due to over-positioning of traders in the opposite direction in anticipation.     

管理者能力与资本市场稳定

管理者能力是管理者有效率地利用企业资源创造价值的能力。本文以企业股价大幅下跌风险为切入点系统分析了管理者能力对资本市场稳定的影响。研究发现:管理者能力能够显著抑制企业未来股价大幅下跌的风险,具有市场稳定效应。这种稳定效应主要体现在管理者隐藏坏消息动机较强和隐藏坏消息空间较大(内部缺乏大股东治理和外部制度环境水平较低)的企业。进一步研究发现,管理者能力主要通过降低企业经营风险和提高企业治理水平等路径缓解企业未来股价大幅下跌的风险。本文丰富了管理者能力和股价下跌风险的研究,还对如何合理利用企业家资源维护我国资本市场平稳健康发展提供了重要的现实证据。     

Short Selling and Firm Operating Performance

While it is well known that short selling predicts future negative stock price performance, it has not been established whether short selling predicts future negative operating performance. We find that firms in the top decile of increases in short interest (an increase of about four percentage points) experience a 21% subsequent decline in operating performance relative to matched control firms. The greater the increase in short interest, the larger the decline in operating performance. The results are robust to alternative performance measures and to sample splits based on firm size. These results suggest that short interest may reflect private information about firm fundamentals rather than other factors that may drive stock price changes.     

The valuation of American call options and the expected ex-dividend stock price decline

This study focuses on the ex-dividend stock price decline implicit within the valuation of American call options on dividend-paying stocks. The Roll (1977) American call option pricing formula and the observed structure of CBOE call option transaction prices are used to infer the expected ex-dividend stock price decline as a proportion of the amount of the dividend. The relative decline is shown to be not meaningfully different from one, confirming some recent evidence from studies which examined stock prices in the days surrounding ex-dividend.     

An examination of the relative economic efficiency of mutual vs. stock savings institutions

This article employs a nonlinear system of Cobb-Douglas profit and input demand equations to analyze price and technical efficiency in a sample of presumably not-for-profit mutual and presumably profit-maximizing stock savings institutions. Theories of property rights and agency are reviewed to provide predictions of price efficiency (i.e., profit maximization and cost minimization behavior), and technical efficiency. The study makes several contributions to the literature. First, it examines the effect of ownership form on both price and technical efficiency. Second, it separately examines the effect of regulatory form on both price and technical efficiency. The model enables us to analyze the separate effects of ownership and regulatory form across a heterogeneous sample of firms. We also analyze the effects of risk in the form of two separate regulatory variables and the effect of market share on economic efficiency.     

What Does the Corporate Bond Market Know?

Do related markets reflect new information simultaneously? For high‐yield bonds, a large abnormal price decline in a corporation's most liquid bond over a month is followed by an average abnormal stock price decline of ?1.42%. This effect is larger for stocks that have increased in value and for volatile stocks. It is also larger for bonds with high coupons and shorter maturities. These results support the view that high‐yield corporate bonds have an informational edge when news is negative and stock returns are noisy, and add to the growing literature on the substantial lags in price discovery between related markets.     

Measuring Mutual Fund Flow Pressure as Shock to Stock Returns

A large and rapidly growing literature examines the impact of misvaluation on firm policies by using mutual fund outflow-induced price pressure to isolate nonfundamental price variation. I demonstrate that the standard approach to computing outflow-induced price pressure produces a measure that is inadvertently a direct function of a stock's actual realized return during the outflow quarter, raising doubts about its orthogonality to fundamentals. After removing these direct measurements of return, outflows generate a fairly negligible quarterly decline in returns, with no subsequent reversal, and many established results in this literature no longer hold. I provide suggestions for future analysis.     

The distribution of information in speculative markets: a natural experiment

We use a unique natural experiment to shed light on the distribution of information in speculative markets. In June 2011, Betfair – a UK betting exchange – levied a tax of up to 60% on all future profits accrued by the top 0.1% of profitable traders. Such a move appears to have driven at least some of these traders off the exchange, taking their information with them. We investigate the effect of the new tax on the forecasting capacity of the exchange (our measure of the market's incorporation of information into the price). We find that there was scant decline in the forecasting capacity of the exchange – relative to a control market – suggesting that the bulk of information had hitherto been held by the majority of traders, rather than the select few affected by the rule change. This result is robust to the choice of forecasting measure, the choice of forecasting interval, and the choice of race type. This provides evidence that more than a few traders are typically involved in the price discovery process in speculative markets.     

Technology,Utilization, and Inflation: What Drives the New Keynesian Phillips Curve?

We argue that the New Keynesian Phillips Curve literature has failed to deliver a convincing measure of real marginal costs. We start from a careful modeling of optimal price setting allowing for nonunitary factor substitution, nonneutral technical change, and time‐varying factor utilization rates. This ensures the resulting real marginal cost measures match volatility reductions and level changes witnessed in many U.S. time series. The cost measure comprises conventional countercyclical cost elements plus procyclical (and covarying) utilization rates. Although procyclical elements seem to dominate, the components of real marginal cost components are becoming less cyclical over time. Incorporating this richer driving variable produces more plausible price‐stickiness estimates than otherwise and suggests a more balanced weight of backward‐ and forward‐looking inflation expectations than commonly found. Our results challenge existing views of inflation determinants and have important implications for modeling inflation in New Keynesian models.     

Market Microstructure Empirical Regularities: Behavior of the Bid-Ask Spread and Closing Prices

A substantial number of last reported transactions for stocks trading on the New York Stock Exchange occur inside the quoted closing bid-ask spread. The tendency to close inside the spread results in price change magnitudes much smaller than those predicted from binomial models. Moreover, although the change magnitude is biased by the underlying trend of the market, the distribution of next day price change relatives is largely unaffected. The result is a systematic regularity between the location of today's close and tomorrow's close relative to the bid-ask spread.     

Industry contagion effects of internal control material weakness disclosures

This study examines whether there is an industry contagion effect for negative market reactions to internal control material weakness (ICMW) disclosures. From a sample of companies experiencing market share price declines to disclosures of ICMW over the years 2005–2014, results indicate that peer industry companies also experience market share price declines. We also find that the decline in share prices is related to accounting quality in that peer industry companies with higher accrual, relative to cash flow, components of earnings have larger negative market reaction compared to companies with lower accrual components of earnings. Our study contributes to the literature streams examining accounting information transfer and internal control quality.Data availability: Data are publicly available from sources identified in the paper.     

Addition to the Nikkei 225 Index and Japanese market response: Temporary demand effect of index arbitrageurs

We examine the Japanese stock market response to additions to the Nikkei 225 Index from 1991 to 2002. Similar to the reactions in the U.S. markets, the stock prices of the added firms go up on the announcement date, continue to increase until the day before the effective change date, and then decrease on and just after the change date. The stock price increase in this run-up period is thus temporary, as it is canceled out by the decline that begins on the change date. We also find that the excess demand of index arbitrageurs for shares of newly added firms is the main source of the temporary stock price increase.     

送转股对股东财富的影响——基于中国上市公司的证据

以2008、2009年的送转股除权日进行事件研究,通过均值比较与检验方法,首次实证研究我国上市公司送转股后股价变化对股东财富的影响,结果发现:相对于经过调整的除权前一日的股价,2008年股票除权后,股价以高于送转股的比例单调下降;而2009年股票除权后,股价呈上升趋势,并于第14日显著高于经过调整的除权前一日的股价。除权后20天内的股价整体上高于年末股价,说明相对基于年末股价的股利决策,送转股没有降低股价。企业发放股票股利,导致股票总市值上升,增加了股东财富。     

Crude oil price volatility and equity return predictability: A comparative out-of-sample study

We evaluate the predictive power afforded by crude oil price volatility relative to widely used variables in the financial literature, such as the dividend yield, earnings-to-price ratio, the default yield spread as well several crude oil price-based variables. From a statistical viewpoint, predictions employing the suggested crude oil price volatility-based measures display a similar pattern as predictions using dividend ratios and interest rates, namely, they have relatively weak out-of-sample power. However, we find that gains in utility for an investor that uses predictions produced under the model employing crude oil price log-realized semivolatilities are statistically significant higher than an investor relying on predictions produced under the competitors as well as the historical average benchmark. We discuss and explain the reasons for our results. Overall, we argue that it is hard not to justify more attention to crude oil price semivolatilities relative to widely used financial and macroeconomic variables.     

Modernization of agriculture and long-term growth

This paper develops a two-sector model that illuminates the role played by agricultural modernization in the transition from stagnation to growth. When agriculture relies on traditional technology, industrial development reduces the relative price of industrial products, but has a limited effect on per capita income because most labor has to remain in farming. Growth is not sustainable until this relative price drops below a certain threshold, thus inducing farmers to adopt modern technology that employs industry-supplied inputs. Once agricultural modernization begins, per capita income emerges from stasis and accelerates toward modern growth. Our calibrated model is largely consistent with the set of historical data we have compiled on the English economy, accounting well for the growth experience of England encompassing the Industrial Revolution.     

LEAPS introductions and the value of the underlying stocks

We examine the change in the value of the underlying stock associated with long-term option introduction. Analysis of the abnormal returns associated with LEAPS (Long-Term Equity Anticipation Security) introductions indicates a decline in firm value even after we control for the endogenous nature of the listing decision. However, the evidence does not support previously-offered explanations for the price change associated with option introductions. In particular, we do not find the predicted relations between the cumulative abnormal returns and variables associated with loosening of short sale constraints such as beta, proxies for the dispersion in investor beliefs, and change in relative short interest.     

Stock price effects and costs of secondary distributions

This study does not support the view that a large number of shares can be sold at the prevailing market price and at a small cost. A significant stock price decrease is observed at the initial announcement of secondary distributions. The price declines are greater for offerings by officers and directors and for larger offerings, but are significant for all types of sellers and for large and small offerings. There is no significant price decline at the offering when secondaries are announced in advance. Underwriting and other selling costs are substantial and are positively related to relative offering size.     

Option markets and implied volatility: Past versus present

Traders in the nineteenth century appear to have priced options the same way that twenty-first-century traders price options. Empirical regularities relating implied volatility to realized volatility, stock prices, and other implied volatilities (including the volatility skew) are qualitatively the same in both eras. Modern pricing models and centralized exchanges have not fundamentally altered pricing behavior, but they have generated increased trading volume and a much closer conformity in the level of observed and model prices. The major change in pricing is the sharp decline in implied volatility relative to realized volatility, evident immediately upon the opening of the CBOE.     

Agent Change and Seller Bargaining Power: A Case of Principal Agent Problem in the Housing Market

When a seller hires an agent to sell his/her property, a successful outcome depends on the list price, marketing time, unobserved relative bargaining power of the buyers and sellers, and the effort levels of the seller and the seller’s agent. A divergence with respect to the list/transaction prices and the expected effort levels between seller and agent will create a principal-agent interest conflict. This conflict in some cases results in an agent change before the house is sold. The change will reduce the relative bargaining power of the seller, affecting the observed marketing time and transaction price. This study estimates the effects of an agent change on marketing time and transaction price after controlling for degree of overpricing, list-price revisions, marketing time, and endogenous selection bias. Our results show that: (1) on average, an agent change increases the marketing time by about 3 months and adversely affects the transaction price by about 2.7 %. Furthermore, we found that an agent change before the expiration of the listing contract, compared to that of after the expiration, has a smaller effect on the marketing time (2.3 vs. 3.8 months) and has a smaller transaction price discount (2.1 % vs. 4.2 %).     

Agricultural Incentives in Developing Countries: Measuring the Effect of Sectoral and Economywide Policies

The impact of sector-specific (direct) and economywide (indirect)policies on agricultural incentives for eighteen developingcountries for the period 1975–84 are estimated. The directeffect is measured by the proportional difference between theproducer price and the border price (adjusting for distribution,storage, transport, and other marketing costs). The indirecteffect has two components. The first is the impact of the unsustainableportion of the current account deficit and of industrial protectionpolicies on the real exchange rate and thus on the price ofagricultural commodities relative to nonagricultural nontradables.The second is the impact of industrial protection policies onthe relative price of agricultural commodities to that of nonagriculturaltradable goods. We find that (1) in almost all cases the directeffect is equivalent to a tax on exportable goods (–11percent on average) and to a subsidy for importables (20 percenton average); (2) the indirect effect also taxes agriculture(–27 percent on average) and dominates the direct effect(whether the direct effect is positive or negative); and (3)the direct policies for both importables and exportables stabilizedomestic producer prices.