Military experience and household stock market participation: Evidence from China

This paper examines the relationship between military experience and household stock market participation. Using data from the 2010 wave of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we find that the military experience promotes the households participating in the stock market. We further investigate how military experience affects a household investment decision. The results show that the level of risk-taking and social trust of military households mainly drives the positive nexus. Moreover, the length of military service rather than the age affects household equity investment decisions. We also find that the positive relationship is more prominent in high-income households, and low-education households.     

Economic policy uncertainty and stock market activity: Evidence from China

The effects of various China economic policy uncertainty (EPU) indices on Chinese listed firms' stock price behavior are examined in this study. We find that the mass media in China-based index is the best indicator of stock price crash risk for Chinese A- or B-share listings, but the index based on independent Chinese media is better for H-share listings. Chinese firms face a greater risk of stock price crashes during high EPU periods, but for B-share listings this relationship becomes negative after more media coverage is considered. We follow Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016) and construct an EPU measure for the Chinese economy based on a Chinese character search of newspapers. We compare our EPU index with the BBD index of Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016), which is based on an English-language Hong Kong news source. We find that the BBD index is a reasonable proxy for China's EPU but that it omits some useful information. We further demonstrate that our EPU index predicts China's economic trends more effectively than the BBD index, particularly when based on mass media in China.     

Pandemic-induced fear and stock market returns: Evidence from China

We construct a pandemic-induced fear (PIF) index to measure fear of the COVID-19 pandemic using Internet search volumes of the Chinese local search engine and empirically investigate the impact of fear of the pandemic on Chinese stock market returns. A reduced-bias estimation approach for multivariate regression is employed to address the issue of small-sample bias. We find that the PIF index has a negative and significant impact on cumulative stock market returns. The impact of PIF is persistent, which can be explained by mispricing from investors' excessive pessimism. We further reveal that the PIF index directly predicts stock market returns through noise trading. Investors' Internet search behaviors enhance the fear of the pandemic, and pandemic-induced fear determines future stock market returns, rather than the number of cases and deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.     

Economic policy uncertainty exposure and stock price bubbles: Evidence from China

We explore the impact of economic policy uncertainty exposure (hereafter, EPU exposure) on stock price bubbles. We find that there exists a significantly positive relationship between EPU exposure and stock price bubbles. This result is still significant after a series of robustness checks. Moreover, the relationship between EPU exposure and bubbles is due to retail investors' speculative trading behavior. In addition, optimistic aggregate states and firms with higher information uncertainty characteristics strengthen the EPU exposure effects. Overall, we provide unique evidence regarding the impact of uncertainty on stock prices.     

Patent pledge policy and stock price crash risk: Evidence from China

This study examines the influence of China’s patent pledge policy on the stability of stock prices for Chinese listed businesses. We find that when businesses use patent rights as collateral for loans, the probability of stock price crash increases. Additionally, this unfavorable effect is more pronounced in businesses with strong financial standing, excessive managerial confidence, and serious agency problems than in businesses with weak financial standing, non-excessive managerial confidence, and non-serious agency problems. Indeed, a mechanism analysis reveals that the patent pledge policy aggravates management’s excessive investment and contributes to stock price instability. Furthermore, the pledge financing process and corporate financing goals are not sufficiently transparent and lack internal and external supervision, due to the challenges associated with determining the value of patent rights, the lack of awareness of risk control in the pledge process, and the imperfections in pertinent policies and systems.     

Extreme volumes and expected stock returns: Evidence from China's stock market

We examine the relation between extreme trading volumes and expected returns for individual stocks traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange over the July 1994–December 2000 interval. Contrasted with the evidence obtained from the US data [J. Finance 56 (2001) 877], our results show that stocks experiencing extremely high (low) volumes are associated with low (high) subsequent returns. Moreover, this extreme volume–return relation significantly co-varies with security characteristics like past stock performance, firm size, and book-to-market values. In particular, stocks with extreme volumes are related to poorer performance if they are past winners, large firms, and glamour stocks than if they are past losers, small firms, and value stocks, respectively. These results are robust to both daily and weekly samples as well as stock exchange sub-samples. Although the liquidity premium hypothesis of Amihud and Mendelson [J. Financ. Econ. 17 (1986) 223] provides a partial explanation for the extreme volume–return relation, our results fit better the behavioral hypothesis of Baker and Stein [J. Financ. Mark. 7 (2004) 271].     

Personality traits and stock market participation

We analyze the relationship between personality traits and stock market participation. Our sample comes from combining personality trait scores and socioeconomic status information from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966 with data from Finnish Central Securities Depository, the official register of stock holdings in Finland. We find the traits, and especially the subscales of the traits, to be significant predictors of stock market participation. In particular, exploratory excitability, extravagance, sentimentality, and dependence have large effects. One-standard-deviation changes in the subscale scores have marginal effects of up to 4 percentage points on the probability of participating in the stock market.     

Broadband internet and stock market participation

This paper examines the effect of broadband Internet on household stock market participation. By exploiting the expansion of broadband in the U.S. from 1999 to 2008, we find that the availability of broadband in a household's zip code significantly increases the likelihood of stockholding and the share of wealth invested in stocks. Moreover, this effect operates through a higher tendency to follow the stock market, indicating that broadband access reduces the information cost associated with stockholding. The effect of broadband access concentrates among people with high socioeconomic status. By contrast, the arrival of broadband has little impact on the portfolio choice and stock market following of people with low socioeconomic status, who most need to improve wealth accumulation. Our study sheds light on the role of technology development in household finance and the potential distributional effect of technology diffusion.     

Windfall gains and stock market participation

We exploit the randomized assignment of lottery prizes in a large administrative Swedish data set to estimate the causal effect of wealth on stock market participation. A $150,000 windfall gain increases the stock market participation probability by 12 percentage points among prelottery nonparticipants but has no discernible effect on prelottery stock owners. A structural life cycle model significantly overpredicts entry rates even for very high entry costs (up to $31,000). Additional analyses implicate pessimistic beliefs regarding equity returns as a major source of this overprediction and suggest that both recent and early-life return realizations affect beliefs.     

Financial literacy and stock market participation

We have devised two special modules for De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) Household Survey to measure financial literacy and study its relationship to stock market participation. We find that the majority of respondents display basic financial knowledge and have some grasp of concepts such as interest compounding, inflation, and the time value of money. However, very few go beyond these basic concepts; many respondents do not know the difference between bonds and stocks, the relationship between bond prices and interest rates, and the basics of risk diversification. Most importantly, we find that financial literacy affects financial decision-making: Those with low literacy are much less likely to invest in stocks.     

Feasible momentum strategies: Evidence from the Swiss stock market

While there is little controversy on the profitability of momentum strategies, their implementation is afflicted with many difficulties. Most important, chasing momentum can generate high turnover. Though there are already several attempts to make momentum strategies less expensive with respect to transaction costs, we go a step further in the simplification of momentum strategies. By restricting our sample to Switzerland’s largest blue-chip stocks and choosing only one winner and one loser stock, we find average returns to our momentum arbitrage portfolios of up to 44% p.a. depending on the formation and holding periods. While unconditional risk models are at odds with momentum profits, stock market predictability and time-varying expected returns explain a large part of the momentum payoffs, including the post-holding period behavior of the winner and loser stocks (overreaction and subsequent price correction).

Asymmetric volatility spillovers between economic policy uncertainty and stock markets: Evidence from China

This study explores the spillovers between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and stock market realized volatility (RV). The monthly index of Chinese and US EPU and RV are used to analyze the pairwise directional spillovers. We find that RV is a net receiver that is more vulnerable to shocks from U.S. EPU than to shocks from Chinese EPU. We further decompose the RV into good and bad volatility to test the asymmetric spillover effect between the stock market and EPU. The results suggest that EPU has a bigger effect on bad volatility in the stock market throughout most of the sample period. However, we find that good volatility spillovers become larger during periods of stimulated reform, whereas bad volatility spillovers become larger during periods of international disputes. We show that Chinese stock market volatility is sensitive to both U.S. and Chinese EPU and that the spillover is asymmetric in different periods.     

Overreaction to stock market news and misevaluation of stock prices by unsophisticated investors: Evidence from the option market

This paper examines investors' option activity on value and growth stocks before earnings announcements. The main finding is that unsophisticated investors enter option positions that load up on growth stocks relative to value stocks in the days leading up to earnings announcements. This occurs despite the fact that at earnings announcements value stocks outperform growth stocks by a wide margin. The paper's results provide evidence that unsophisticated option market investors (1) overreact to past news on underlying stocks and (2) mistakenly believe that mispriced stocks will move even further away from fundamentals at impending scheduled news releases.     

Liquidity and asset pricing: Evidence from the Hong Kong stock market

This study investigates the role of liquidity in pricing stock returns in the Hong Kong stock market. Our results show that liquidity is an important factor for pricing returns in Hong Kong after taking well-documented asset pricing factors into consideration. The results are robust to adding portfolio residuals and higher moment factor in the factor models. The results are also robust to seasonality, and conditional-market tests. We also compare alternative factor models and find that the liquidity four-factor model (market excess return, size, book-to-market ratio, and liquidity) is the best model to explain stock returns in the Hong Kong stock market, while the momentum factor is not found to be priced.     

Individual and institutional herding and the impact on stock returns: Evidence from Taiwan stock market

Using high frequency intraday data, this paper investigates the herding behavior of institutional and individual investors in the Taiwan stock market. The study finds evidence of herding by both investors but a stronger herding tendency among institutional than among individual investors. Institutional investors herd more on firms with small capitalizations and lower turnovers and they follow positive feedback strategies. The portfolios that institutional investors herd buy outperform those they sell by an average of 1.009% during the 20 days after intense trading episodes. By contrast, individual investors herd more on firms with small sizes and higher turnovers, and they crowd to buy (sell) stocks with negative (positive) past returns. The portfolios that individual investors herd buy underperform those they sell by an average of − 0.829% during the following 20 days. Moreover, these return differences of both investors are more pronounced under a market with higher pressure and among small stocks. These findings suggest that the herding of institutional investors speeds up the price-adjustment process and is more likely to be driven by correlated private information, while individual herding is most likely to be driven by behavior and emotions.     

Determinants of idiosyncratic volatility: Evidence from the Indian stock market

This paper investigates whether firm-specific characteristics explain idiosyncratic volatility in the stocks of non-financial firms traded in the Indian stock market. It employs the linear time series five-factor model, augmented with a liquidity factor and the conditional EGARCH model, to extract yearly idiosyncratic volatility. We estimate a panel data regression to quantify the relationship between firm-specific characteristics and the volatility of individual securities. The results show that idiosyncratic volatility is significant in emerging markets such as India, and that cross-sectional return variations of firms are associated with firm-specific characteristics such as firm size, book-to-market ratio, momentum, liquidity, cash flow-to-price ratio, and returns on assets. We find that the idiosyncratic risk documented in this study is associated with smaller size of company, higher liquidity, low momentum, high book-to-market ratio, and low cash flow-to-price ratio. The findings suggest need to develop alternative tools to make investment decisions in emerging markets.     

Market liquidity risk factor and financial market anomalies: Evidence from the Chinese stock market

The Chinese stock market is an order-driven market and hence its characteristics are structurally different from quote-driven markets. There are no studies that consider the role of the market liquidity risk factor in determining cross-sectional stock returns in a model including financial market anomalies for order-driven markets. Our aim is to test whether financial market anomalies such as firm size, the book-to-market ratio, the turnover rate, and momentum both with and without the inclusion of the market liquidity risk factor in the case of the Chinese stock market can explain cross-sectional stock returns. The empirical framework is based on the model proposed by Avramov and Chordia (AC, 2006). Our main finding is that the AC model can capture financial market anomalies except momentum when we include the market liquidity risk factor on the Chinese stock market.     

中国股票市场股利政策(英文)

本文解释了鼓励政策的定义和现今中国企业通常使用的股利政策方法。文中将对中国与西方的股利政策的异同进行对比,同时分析了具有中国特色股利政策形成的原因,并且提出了一些改善现状的意见和建议。     

中国股票市场股利政策

本文解释了鼓励政策的定义和现今中国企业通常使用的股利政策方法.文中将对中国与西方的股利政策的异同进行对比,同时分析了具有中国特色股利政策形成的原因,并且提出了一些改善现状的意见和建议.