The Behaviour of Banking Stocks During the Financial Crisis and Recessions. Evidence from Changes‐in‐Changes Panel Data Estimations

This paper examines the impact of the financial crisis and economic recessions on bank shares compared to the overall stock market index for 18 OECD countries from 1993 to 2015. The empirical methodology utilizes the changes‐in‐changes approach. We compare and contrast the returns of the banking stock price index (treatment group) in each country with their general stock price index (control group), which experiences smaller changes. Our results suggest that bank returns on average perform significantly worse than that of the general stock price index during recessions. In addition, we also find significantly greater volatility in bank share returns.     

The Diversification and Performance of Self-Managed Superannuation Funds

In this article we examine the diversification and performance of a small preliminary sample of Australian self‐managed superannuation (retirement) funds (SMSFs). Using the single index model and traditional (risk‐adjusted) performance measures within the context set by modern portfolio theory we find that the SMSFs in our sample exhibit considerable under‐diversification. In addition, we find that the SMSFs do not appear to be benefiting from even naive diversification and, unsurprisingly, perform poorly on a risk‐adjusted basis vis‐à‐vis the unmanaged S&P/ASX300 index. This empirical investigation contributes to economists' understanding of the microeconomic structure of this increasingly important component of Australia's retirement income stream.     

The Performance of Market‐Timing Strategies of Italian Mutual Fund Investors

In this paper, we show that simple buy‐and‐hold strategies over‐perform market‐timing strategies effectively used by Italian investors in equity mutual funds. We estimate returns from market‐timing strategies using aggregate data on net flows for a large sample of equity mutual funds, available to Italian investors, that buy stocks in the following markets: Europe and the euro area, the United States and Emerging markets. In all cases, buy‐and‐hold over‐performs market‐timing with extra returns that go from 0.24 per cent per quarter (Europe and euro area) to 0.87 per cent per quarter (US market). These differences are not explained by differences in risk and risk exposure. Investors should re‐consider their investment strategies and choose cheaper, in terms of fees and simpler, in terms of portfolio allocation, passive strategies.     

Improved Mutual Fund Investment Choice Architecture

Two choice architecture interventions were explored to debias investors' irrational preference for mutual funds with high past returns rather than funds with low fees. A simple choice task was used involving a direct trade-off between maximizing past returns and minimizing fees. In the first intervention, warning investors that “Some people invest based on past performance, but funds with low fees have the highest future results” was more effective than 3 other disclosure statements, including the U.S. financial regulator's, “Past performance does not guarantee future results.” The second intervention involved converting mutual fund annual percentage fees into a 10-year dollar cost equivalent. This intervention also improved investors' fee sensitivity, and remained effective even as past returns increased. Financially literate participants were surprisingly more likely to irrationally maximize past returns in their investment choices.     

Information Sharing within the Networks of Delegated Portfolio Managers: Evidence from Plan Sponsors and Their Subadvisers

The authors study information sharing among delegated portfolio managers through networks connected by investment mandates between plan sponsors and their subadvisers. Specifically, they identify similarity in returns, holdings, and trading between mutual funds operated by subadvisers, and test whether such similarity is stronger when two funds share a mandate network. The authors find evidence consistent with information sharing among these delegated portfolio managers. A mutual fund on average shares more similar returns, holdings, and trading with funds in subadvisory mandate networks than with funds outside the networks. Preliminary evidence suggests that information about both general investment styles and individual firms is transferred within mandate networks.     

我国证券投资基金总体绩效的实证分析——基于总业绩评价理论

本文基于2007—2010年间数据,对我国开放式证券投资基金中的股票型基金、混合型基金和债券型基金的总体绩效进行了比较实证分析。研究发现:各股票基金的业绩表现极不均衡,基金经理的选股能力参差不齐,但选股能力或者择时能力有了明显的提高;各混合型基金的绩效分布都较为接近正态分布;我国债券型基金的业绩表现基本稳定,并没有随着股票市场的大起大落而表现出明显的好与差,其风险收益均大于与市场同风险的投资组合的风险收益,但是这种优势并不太明显。     

Does High Stock Price Synchronicity Always Hurt Mutual Fund Industry? Sentiment Matters

Investors have agreed that high synchronicity of stock returns adversely influences professional funds' profitability. However, different market conditions where high synchronicity exists may have different effects on this relationship. This study incorporates aggregate investor sentiment as a market condition in the equation to explore whether and when the negative association between synchronicity and fund performance holds. The authors use a sample of actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds from 2000 to 2014 and employ a portfolio of 11 passively managed funds as the benchmark to measure fund performance and fund management skill. They find empirical evidence that synchronicity negatively impacts mutual funds' profitability when the investor sentiment is low. This negative relationship disappears in high-sentiment periods. They also find that in both low- and high-sentiment states, fund managers with superior stock selection skill make more profits from high synchronicity than the average.     

Luck versus skill over time: time-varying performance in the cross-section of mutual fund returns

ABSTRACT

Using returns histories spanning January 1984 to October 2014 of 5785 actively managed US closed-end equity mutual funds, we address the ‘thorny problems’ highlighted by Fama and French (The Journal of Finance, 2010, vol. 65, p. 1925) that arise due to their resampling procedure. This prevents them from capturing time variation in the parameters of equilibrium asset pricing models. These problems are addressed by combining innovative procedures which allow for testing of multiple break dates on fund-specific parameters along with cross-section bootstraps that remain valid in the presence of time-varying parameters. We find that substantial proportion – 8% – of the estimated versions of the asset pricing model have significant changes in their parameters. The effects of this time variation on the cross-section distribution of the risk-adjusted performance measure are significant and substantially increase centiles of the right tail of this distribution when compared to those produced without time-varying parameters. Our evidence regarding the lack of actively managed US equity mutual funds that generate excess returns is significantly weaker than those of Fama and French but our results do not overturn their pessimistic conclusion regarding the lack of skilled managers. We do find, unlike Fama and French, that managers generating negative returns are just unlucky but have no skill.     

Investing in mutual funds: the determinants of implied and actual net cash flows

Estimating the fund investors’ demand plays an important role in the mutual fund management. In this line, mutual fund demand can be measured as the total net cash flows experienced by the fund during a period. Due to a lack of the data for inflows and outflows in some countries and databases, many authors estimate the net cash flows using fund size and return information. This rough measure, although being a good approximation, implicitly assumes an error in its calculation. For a sample of 2985 US open-end funds, we find evidence that estimating this implied fund flows, the error generated is higher for smaller funds, funds with higher returns, and for those experiencing higher levels of inflows or outflows. This lack of precision leads to a distortion in the estimation of the effect of some determinants on the mutual fund demand, especially when longer periods are considered when constructing the net cash flows.     

Downward nominal wage rigidity in Canada: Evidence against a “greasing effect”

The existence of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) has often been used to justify a positive inflation target. It is traditionally assumed that positive inflation could “grease the wheels” of the labour market by putting downward pressure on real wages, easing labour market adjustments during a recession. A rise in the inflation target would attenuate the long‐run level of unemployment and hasten economic recovery after an adverse shock. Following Daly and Hobijn (2014), we re‐examine these issues in a model that accounts for precautionary motives in wage‐setting behaviour. We confirm that DNWR generates a long‐run negative relationship between inflation and unemployment, in line with previous contributions to the literature. However, we also find that the increase in the number of people bound by DNWR following a negative demand shock rises with the inflation target, offsetting the beneficial effects a higher inflation target has on closing the unemployment gap. As an implication, contrary to previous contributions that neglected precautionary behaviour, the speed at which unemployment returns back to pre‐crisis levels during recessions is relatively unaffected by variations in the inflation target.     

Endogenous lifetime and economic growth

Endogenous mortality is introduced in a two-period overlapping generations model: probability of surviving from the first period to the next depends upon health capital that is augmented through public investment. High mortality societies do not grow fast since shorter lifespans discourage savings; development traps are possible. Productivity differences across nations result in persistent differences in capital-output ratios and relatively larger gaps in income and mortality. High mortality also reduces returns on education, where risks are undiversifiable. When human capital drives economic growth, countries differing in health capital do not converge to similar living standards, ‘threshold effects’ may also result.     

Performance and diversification benefits of foreign-equity ETFs in emerging markets

This study provides a comprehensive review of the risk-return characteristics, performance and international diversification benefits of an uncharted fast-growing segment of the global exchange-traded fund (ETF) market by examining 17 foreign-equity ETFs traded in 6 emerging markets. The results indicate that the sample ETFs domiciled in these economies perform poorly providing relatively low returns while exposing emerging market investors to substantial total and systematic risks. In addition, these ETFs are found to be more sensitive to downside risk, making them relatively more vulnerable to market downturns. Although the foreign-equity ETFs are designed to provide investors with full international diversification benefits, we find that they are significantly affected by their local market conditions and sentiments, making them ineffective international diversification tools.     

Political Pressure or Rent Seeking? The Role of Mutual Funds in China's Split Share Structure Reform

In this paper, we provide further evidence on the role of mutual funds in China using the split share structure reform as an experiment. We find no supportive evidence for the political pressure hypothesis of Firth et al. (2010), but provide a set of unique results that are consistent with rent‐seeking behaviour by mutual funds. In addition, fund‐level governance can weaken the negative relationship between compensation ratio and fund ownership. Finally, we document a specific form of private benefits that can contribute to rent‐seeking behaviour by mutual funds.     

Medical Expenditures and Health Status in Australia: A Story of Increasing or Decreasing Returns?

We use a three‐equation model to estimate a health production function for Australia using population data for 1996. Working at the level of the Statistical Local Area (n= 1335) we match (i) data on private practice medical services (derived from the Medicare scheme), (ii) mortality data derived from the de‐identified unit records produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), and (Hi) social and economic data from the Australian Census of Population and Housing (ABS 1997). We detect strong and statistically significant positive marginal effects of medical expenditure on health status as well as increasing returns. These findings are remarkably different from those of US health production studies, which have tended to lend support to the hypothesis of ‘flat‐of‐the‐curve (that is, zero marginal product) medicine’. Moreover, our conclusions are in stark contrast to those produced by Richardson and Peacock (2003, p. 6), who have argued that their econometric work indicates that ‘an increase in the [Australian] doctor supply is associated with increasing mortality’.     

A Characterization of Australian Unemployment Compensation: An Analysis of Labour Market Adjustment*

This paper uses a labour contracting framework to analyze the microeconomics of the Australian unemployment compensation system. We find that employers adjust labour inputs by using layoffs rather than shortened workweeks or work-sharing during economic recessions. Increases in government benefits tend to reinforce this result Countervailing influences are shown to be the severity of the income test applying to benefits eligibility and the Family Allowance Supplement in its role as supplementing the income of low-income families.     

SEEKING RENT IN THE INFORMAL SECTOR

Rent seeking within the vast informal segment of the developing world is a relatively under‐explored topic in the interface of labor market policies and public economics. Moreover, how rent seeking and corruption within the informal segment gets affected by economic reforms targeted for the formal sector is rarely discussed in the literature. This paper fills the gap. We identify conditions under which economic reform in the formal segment will increase the rate of corruption or rent seeking in the informal sector and raise the pay‐off for those involved in rent‐seeking activities. When the formal sector contracts due to reforms, rent seeking in the informal sector may increase and lower the level of welfare unconditionally. Economic reforms may increase corruption instead of reducing it, unlike standard conjectures.     

Comparative risk adjusted performance of Islamic,socially responsible and conventional funds: Evidence from United Kingdom

This study investigates the risk and return characteristics of Islamic funds in comparison with SRI and the conventional open-end mutual funds for the UK, which, having attracted over £11.7 billion in Islamic investment in the past decade has emerged as the largest financial market for Islamic funds in the west. In addition, contrasting with previous literature, this research categorizes SRI and Islamic funds into two distinct types in order to allow a fair comparison. Our findings demonstrate that Islamic and SRI funds in general perform close to the conventional funds with significantly better risk-return tradeoff in US focused funds. Results further indicate that the UK-based Islamic and SRI funds were less effected during financial crisis as the magnitude of loss was significantly lower for them when compared to conventional funds. The research suggests that Islamic and SRI funds do provide a rational substitute and investors can benefit from investing in these funds as ethic and faith-based screening criteria do not affect the returns of Islamic and SRI funds adversely. This was also substantiated by our findings on investment behavior of these funds.     

SYSTEMATIC INFLUENCES ON TEACHING EVALUATIONS: THE CASE FOR CAUTION*

In this paper, we examine eight years of Quality of Teaching (QOT) responses from an Economics Department in an Australian University. This is done to determine what factors, besides the instructor, have an impact on the raw average student evaluation scores. Most of the previous research on student ratings has been conducted in the US. One significant difference between US and Australian tertiary education is that, on average, the number of foreign undergraduate students in Australia is ten times the number in US institutions. We find that cultural background significantly affects student evaluations. Other factors that have an influence on the average QOT score include: year level; enrolment size; the quantitative nature of the subject; the gender of the student; fee‐paying status by gender; course of study; the differences between the course mark and previous marks; the quality of workbooks; the quality of textbooks; and the QOT score relative to those in other subjects taught at the same time. In addition, average QOT scores for instructors who have taught in a mix of subjects are similar to those based on scores adjusted to account for subject and student characteristics.     

Australian Bond Excess Returns: An Asset Allocation Perspective

We examine the out‐of‐sample predictability of excess returns in the Australian government bond market. Our results confirm previous findings that a linear combination of forward rates provides a statistically significant prediction of bond excess returns on 1‐ to 5‐year maturity bonds. However, from an asset allocation perspective, our predictive model fails to obtain positive economic utility against the no‐predictability benchmark. Our results are robust to the sample period and different parameter assumptions.     

Do market prices aggregate information about macroeconomic uncertainty (or risk)?

This article examines several economic variables that represent either confidence in future economic conditions or the degree of risk/uncertainty about future conditions in order to determine which contain more information about future employment and output. Some of these variables are prices, while others are from surveys. Causality tests, historical decompositions within a VAR and out-of-sample forecasts are among the tools used. This article concludes that monthly stock returns contain much more information about future economic conditions than the other variables. The spread between Moody’s BAA and AAA bonds, the spread between the constant maturity 10-year government bond and the federal funds rate, as well as uncertainty in future economic conditions as measured by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Business Outlook Survey also provide information about future economic conditions. Notably, this article finds that monthly stock returns contain more information about future economic conditions than does the vix and that variables based on market prices provide more information than survey data. This result provides some support for the notion that market prices aggregate information.