Stock market aversion? Political preferences and stock market participation

We find that left-wing voters and politicians are less likely to invest in stocks, controlling for income, wealth, education, and other relevant factors. This finding from unique data sets in Finland is robust both at the zip code and at the individual level. A moderate left voter is 17–20% less likely to own stocks than a moderate right voter. The results are consistent with the idea that personal values are a factor in important investment decisions, in this case leading to “stock market aversion.” The results are inconsistent with alternative explanations such as wealth effects, risk aversion, reverse causality, return expectations, or social capital.     

Which affects stock performances more,words or deeds of the key person?

This study provides the first evidence regarding stock markets' heterogeneous responses to news on words and deeds of the key person. Focusing on the cross-listed company of Alibaba, we collect the daily data of news on words and deeds of its key person, the founder and former CEO Jack Ma. We then examine and compare how news on words and deeds affect the shares listed on various exchanges in different regions, i.e., Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, and the United States. The results suggest that news on words of the key person provides useful information into stock prices additional to news on deeds. While news of words of the key person tends to enhance the stock returns of Alibaba concept stocks in Chinese Mainland, it reduces share returns in the United States. Such finding reveals the difference of information interpretation in different markets. Focusing on the sentiment of news on deeds, investors' reactions are highly heterogeneous, particularly for Chinese mainland, where positive news is better absorbed than negative news. Overall, this study suggests that both words and deeds of the key person matters in assessing abnormal stock returns but with significantly heterogeneous roles.     

Rainfall or Rainmaking? Lawyers,Courts, and the Price of Mold Insurance in Texas

In well‐functioning property‐‐liability insurance markets, the price of coverage reflects the impact of the legal environment on the frequency and severity of claims. This article presents a case study of the Texas mold insurance crisis of 2001–2002. We provide a narrative of the controversy in Texas over insurance coverage for household mold and use county‐level data from a single Texas insurer to assess the determinants of postcrisis prices for supplemental mold, slab, and extended water loss coverages. We find that more attorneys per capita and more heavily Democratic courts were both associated with higher prices for mold and slab coverage.     

Do the size,value, and momentum factors drive stock returns in emerging markets?

This paper investigates the size, value, and momentum effects in 18 emerging stock markets during the period 1990–2013. We find that size and momentum strategies generally fail to generate superior returns in emerging markets. The value effect exists in all markets except Brazil, and it is robust to different periods and market conditions. Value premiums tend to move positively together across different markets, and such inter-market comovements increase overtime and during the global financial crisis.     

Does the Euro affect the dynamic interactions of stock markets in Europe? Evidence from France,Germany and Italy

The dynamic links between stock market indices are analyzed in a GARCH-M framework, using daily data from France, Germany, Italy and the USA. It is shown that indices in the periods before and after the introduction of the Euro as a single currency display a very distinct behaviour. Consistent with the literature, in the earlier period price changes are found to have an impact the next day on other markets. In the latter period this type of co-movement disappeared within Europe. Feedback trading has been shown to induce (negative) autocorrelation in national stock markets. In this paper an international version of the feedback trading model is used to illustrate that the lead–lag relationships across countries and the strength of these links depend on the currency regime.     

Who gains and who loses on stock markets? Risk preferences and timing matter

This paper uses an agent-based multi-asset model to examine the effect of risk preferences and optimal rebalancing frequency on performance measures while tracking profit and risk-adjusted return. We focus on the evolution of portfolios managed by heterogeneous mean-variance optimizers with a quadratic utility function under different market conditions. We show that patient and risk-averse agents are able to outperform aggressive risk-takers in the long-run. Our findings also suggest that the trading frequency determined by the optimal tolerance for the deviation from portfolio targets should be derived from a tradeoff between rebalancing benefits and rebalancing costs. In a relatively calm market, the absolute range of 6% to 8% and the complete-way back rebalancing technique outperforms others. During particular turbulent periods, however, none of the existing rebalancing techniques improves tax-adjusted profits and risk-adjusted returns simultaneously.     

Survival of the Fittest or the Fattest? Exit and Financing in the Trucking Industry

This paper studies the impact that capital market imperfections have on the natural selection of the most efficient firms by estimating the effect of the prederegulation level of leverage on the survival of trucking firms after the Carter deregulation. Highly leveraged carriers are less likely to survive the deregulation shock, even after controlling for various measures of efficiency. This effect is stronger in the imperfectly competitive segment of the motor carrier industry. High debt seems to affect survival by curtailing investments and reducing the price per ton-mile that a carrier can afford to charge after deregulation.     

Has the correlation of inflation and stock prices changed in the United States over the last two centuries?

The relationship between stock prices and the inflation can be either negative or positive, depending on the strengths of various theoretical channels at work. In this study, we examine the dynamic conditional correlations of stock prices and inflation in the United States over the period of 1791–2015 under a time-varying framework. The results of our empirical analysis reveal that correlations between the inflation and stock prices in the United States evolve heterogeneously overtime. In particular, the correlations are significantly positive in the 1840s, 1860s, 1930s and 2011, and significantly negative otherwise. The policy implications of these findings are then discussed.     

Do the stock and CDS markets price credit risk equally in the long-run?

In this paper, we examine the existence and stability of the long-run equilibrium relation between the price of credit risk in the stock and CDS markets for a sample of non-financial iTraxx Europe companies during the 2004–2017 period. We show that standard cointegration tests with no breaks frequently fail to detect cointegration. Once we formally account for the breaks in the cointegrating vector, we are able to detect cointegration over the entire sample period for the vast majority of the companies considered. An application of these results to CDS-equity trading shows that the profitability of traditional trading strategies crucially depends on the presence of cointegration and on the stability of the cointegrating vector. Finally, we find that CDS illiquidity factors decrease the likelihood of the stock and CDS market cointegration.     

Where are the sources of stock market mispricing and excess volatility?

Using a simple dividend model, we illustrate and synthesize the sources of stock market mispricing and excess volatility based upon two hypotheses—inflation illusion and heterogeneous beliefs. Our theoretical framework posits that equity mispricing arises when investors have subjective expectations about discount rates or dividend growth rates. We then analyze the sources of equity mispricing and market excess volatility under a VAR framework. Empirically, we find that both inflation illusion and heterogeneous beliefs explain equity mispricing. However, heterogeneous beliefs play a more important role in explaining stock mispricing in the long run. We also find that heterogeneous beliefs cause excess volatility, but inflation illusion does not. Therefore, dispersion in investors’ beliefs is a better explanation of stock market mispricing than the investors’ inability to properly discount future cash flows.     

Predicting premiums for the market, size, value, and momentum factors

This paper investigates the out-of-sample predictability of monthly market as well as size, value, and momentum premiums. We use a sample from each of the US and the Swiss stock markets between 1989 and 2007. Using the Swiss sample provides an important new perspective as the repeated evaluation of the same (US) data set leads to data mining problems. To avoid data mining in our predictability study, we test both statistical significance and robustness in the two samples. Our key results are as follows. We find no robust indication that the market premium is predictable, which is also true for the momentum and value premiums. It cannot be excluded that the results from the US may be caused by data mining in light of the results from the Swiss sample. However, the size premium seems to be somewhat predictable, due to the credit spread. We theorize that there are three possible reasons for this rare evidence for predictability. First, predictability may have disappeared over the last decade, as academic research made the respective information public. Second, predictability seems, as we demonstrate, not to be robust to the choice of methodology. Third, robustness tests in the Swiss sample reveal that many of the supposedly statistically significant interrelations from the US sample may be attributed to randomness, which, in that case, would be data mining. Therefore, we think that future discussions of predictability should address the issue of data mining by applying robustness tests.

Who moves the stock market in an emerging country – Institutional or retail investors?

By analyzing the dynamic behavior of institutional and retail investors in the Indonesia Stock Exchange using their completed transactions (comprising over 250 million observations), this study highlights that their trading strategies and behavior, in which institutions play a more important role than individuals in the market, are indeed different. Specifically, past trading activities by individual (institutional) investors have significantly affected the current trading behaviors and strategies of individual investors (both investor types). Furthermore, retail (institutional) investors are most likely to perform contrarian (momentum) strategies and trade frequently (infrequently) with small (large) amounts of money and short (long) holding periods.     

Is consumption risk priced in the stock market?

The paper examines whether the risk in the consumption of stockholders caused by incomplete consumption insurance is priced in the cross-section of average stock returns. Using Taylor series expansion of the average marginal utility of consumption, we show that the risk in the consumption of stock market participants can be decomposed into two components, insurable (hedgeable using financial assets) and uninsurable (caused by incomplete consumption insurance) consumption risks. We argue that the growth rate of average consumption may be viewed as a proxy for the insurable component of consumption risk, while the growth rates of the rescaled higher-order cross-sectional consumption distribution moments may be regarded as a multivariate proxy for uninsurable risk in consumption. Exploiting microlevel household quarterly consumption data from the US Consumer Expenditure Survey, we find that both components of consumption risk are significantly priced when the limited stock market participation is taken into account. Neither the insurable and uninsurable components of consumption risk nor the Fama–French risk factors are rejected as capturing important components of systematic risk when tested against each other in an integrated multifactor asset pricing model.     

Race to the top or bottom? Corporate governance,freedom of reincorporation and competition in law

Summary This paper investigates the governance structure choices of firms when there is competition between legal systems. We study the impact of the allocation of control over choice of governance and reincorporation on firms’ technologies and technological specialization of countries in the context of a model of the firm in which there are agency conflicts between shareholders and managers. We show that the allocation of control over firms’ reincorporation decisions determines the corporate governance choice ex ante and the outcome of the competition between legal regimes ex post. When managers have control over reincorporation then competitive deregulation and “runs to the bottom” ensue. When shareholders have partial or full control then there is diversity in governance structures. Runs to the bottom are not necessarily socially undesirable but they have a feedback effect on firms’ choices of technologies that may make the party in control worse off ex ante. We show that it is impossible for any country to achieve social welfare maximization of its existing and new enterprises. With competition between legal regimes, start-up and mature companies incorporate in different jurisdictions even when reincorporation is correctly anticipated.     

When do investors gamble in the stock market?

Recent studies have uncovered gambling-motivated trading activities in financial markets in which investors seek lottery-type payoffs by using financial assets. Building on prospect theory, this study provides an important complement to prior research and investigates what period that investors make gambling-motivated trading in the stock market. Examining data from the Chinese stock market, investors are revealed to have asymmetric gambling preferences in gain and loss domains. Investors' gambling motivations are more easily triggered when the market is experiencing a loss. In such periods of time, investors may preferentially opt for lottery-type stocks that offer them a small chance to earn an extreme return at the risk of a likely small loss, simply due to their ‘aversion to a sure loss’.     

Paper profits or real money? Trading costs and stock market anomalies in country ETFs

Are the quantitative equity strategies for country selection robust to implementation costs? To answer this question, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the country-level strategies so far. We review, classify, and replicate 120 equity anomalies within a sample of 42 country equity indices for the years 1996–2017. Next, using ETF price and spread data, we test the effect of real-life conditions and trading costs on the anomaly performance. We also examine three cost-mitigation strategies: infrequent rebalancing, capitalization-based weighting, and focus on low-cost securities. We find that 46% of the long-only monthly rebalanced anomaly portfolios display significant alphas, concentrated strongly among strategies based on value, momentum, and liquidity. The effect of transaction costs proves largely lethal to returns, leaving only a handful of anomalies profitable. Less frequent rebalancing (annually) helps to regain the effectiveness of the strategies, increasing the monthly alphas on the long-only anomaly portfolios to 0.44% on average.     

Who exacerbates the extreme swings in the Chinese stock market?

We investigate which investors buy or sell relatively more on the days when the absolute value of market returns or the daily range of market index prices exceeds 5% in the Chinese stock market. Unlike Dennis and Strickland [Journal of Finance 57(5): 1923–1949 (2002)] who find that institutional investors are buying (selling) more when there is a large market increase (decline) in U.S. equity markets, we find that institutional investors in China are systematically buying more than the less sophisticated individual investors during extreme market swings, particularly on extreme market-down days. We reveal that institutional investors in China (primarily pension funds), provide a stabilizing influence during market downturn days. Our findings highlight the benefits of having active institutional investors in an extremely volatile emerging market dominated by less sophisticated individual investors.     

Does the choice in valuation method matter in the judicial appraisal of private firms?

This paper investigates empirical relations between the redemption values of minority shares and valuation methods used by dissenting parties in the judicial valuation of private firms. We examine a comprehensive data set of Finnish judicial appraisal cases in which the judge decides the valuation of the minority stake in a private firm after learning the valuation estimates put forward by the controlling shareholder(s) and the minority shareholder(s). Rationality in valuation will be achieved if a valuation estimate incorporates all the available information regardless of the valuation method adopted. Conversely, the measurement perspective argues that biases inherent in valuation approaches determine the information content in a valuation estimate. Our statistical analyses suggest that the choices made concerning the valuation method are statistically correlated with the appraisal outcomes. We interpret this as evidence consistent with the measurement perspective.     

Central bank digital currencies and the international payment system: The demise of the US dollar?

The international monetary system is marked by a hierarchical relationship between currencies, where the US dollar is widely used. Recently, central banks have started to launch Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which, in contrast to cryptocurrencies, are issued by monetary authorities. The purpose of this paper is (i) to analyse and explain domestic retail CBDCs in detail, and (ii) to assess whether the creation of CBDCs poses a threat to the US dollar as the key currency of the international monetary and financial system. It will be argued that, despite the innovations a CBDC may bring, the role of the US dollar will not be affected by the introduction of multiple CBDCs (mCBDCs) alone. Although mCBDC arrangements might decentralise the international payment system, the underlying structures supporting today's unipolar system would not automatically change. It is crucial that central banks work together to establish an alternative international monetary system.