The Value Relevance of Financial Institutions' Fair Value Disclosures: A Study in the Difficulty of Linking Unrealized Gains and Losses to Equity Values

This article provides a residual-income valuation framework for assessing whether fair value disclosures required by SFAS 119, Disclosures About Derivative Financial Instruments and Fair Values of Financial Instruments , are value-relevant. The primary theoretical and empirical result is that when using a residual-income valuation model, the estimated relation between variables measuring fair value-book value differences for financial instruments and security prices may be contrary to what one would have expected. Specifically, the greater the firm's return on invested capital and growth rate relative to its cost of capital, the more negative the estimated relation between fair value-book value differences for financial instruments and security prices. A generalization of this result is that tests linking equity values to various types of unrecognized gains and losses are, in many cases, unlikely to generate the hypothesized positive relation between equity values and the unrecognized gains and losses.     

Estimating Beta

This paper presents evidence that Ordinary Least Squares estimators of beta coefficients of major firms and portfolios are highly sensitive to observations of extremes in market index returns. This sensitivity is rooted in the inconsistency of the quadratic loss function in financial theory. By introducing considerations of risk aversion into the estimation procedure using alternative estimators derived from Gini measures of variability one can overcome this lack of robustness and improve the reliability of the results.     

Sentiment and stock prices: The case of aviation disasters

Behavioral economic studies reveal that negative sentiment driven by bad mood and anxiety affects investment decisions and may hence affect asset pricing. In this study we examine the effect of aviation disasters on stock prices. We find evidence of a significant negative event effect with an average market loss of more than $60 billion per aviation disaster, whereas the estimated actual loss is no more than $1 billion. In two days a price reversal occurs. We find the effect to be greater in small and riskier stocks and in firms belonging to less stable industries. This event effect is also accompanied by an increase in the perceived risk: implied volatility increases after aviation disasters without an increase in actual volatility.     

THE LIQUIDITY ROUTE TO A LOWER COST OF CAPITAL

The managements of many public companies do not pay much attention to the liquidity of their securities. Many if not most CEOs and CFOs feel powerless to affect what goes on in financial markets, and a common attitude among top executives is that maintaining liquidity is the concern of the securities exchanges and the Securities and Exchange Commission. This approach may work for those companies whose stocks are already highly liquid—a group made up mainly of large‐cap companies, as well as a number of smaller high‐flying, high‐tech firms. But, for the vast majority of public companies—especially smaller and mid‐sized firms—this is likely to be the wrong policy. As the authors of this article demonstrated in their pioneering study (published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1986), liquidity appears to be a major determinant of a company's cost of capital. As their theory suggests and their empirical tests confirmed, the more liquid a company's securities, the lower its cost of capital and the higher its stock price. And, as discussed in this article, academic research since then has produced a large and impressive body of evidence linking greater liquidity to higher stock prices. Although recent technological innovations such as Internet‐based trading have increased liquidity generally, not all companies appear to have benefited equally. The authors offer a number of suggestions for companies intent on increasing the liquidity of their stock. Specifically, they propose that managers do the following: (1) consider measures, such as stock splits, designed to increase their investor base by attracting small investors; (2) seek trading venues for their securities that promise to increase liquidity; and (3) take advantage of the new Internet technology to provide more and better information to investors. Moreover, for smaller companies with little or no analyst coverage, the authors offer the radical suggestion that such companies actually pay analysts to cover their stock, much as companies pay Moody's or Standard & Poors to rate their bonds. This, in the authors' view, would be a more efficient alternative to the current practice of using stock splits to encourage intermediaries to make markets in the firm's shares.     

The Estimation of Systematic Risk under Differentiated Risk Aversion: A Mean-Extended Gini Approach

This paper examines a mean-Gini model of systematic risk estimation that resolves some econometric problems with mean-variance beta estimation and allows for heterogeneous risk aversion across investors. Using the mean-extended Gini (MEG) model, we estimate systematic risks for different degrees of risk aversion. MEG betas are shown to be instrumental variable estimators that provide econometric solutions to biases generated by the estimation of mean-variance (MV) betas. When security returns are not normally distributed, MEG betas are proved to differ from MV betas. We design an econometric test that assesses whether these differences are significant. As an application using daily returns, we estimate MEG and MV betas for U.S. securities.     

Earnings Variability and Disclosure of R&D: Evidence from Press Releases

This study explores press releases in the pharmaceutical industry to expand our understanding of how investments in R&D outlays influence uncertainty of future earnings. The findings make two contributions to the literature. First, they provide evidence that equal investments in different R&D ventures are associated with differential variability of future earnings. This result suggests that non‐financial information contained in press releases captures attributes of firm‐specific R&D investments that are not revealed through R&D expenditures reported in financial statements. Second, prior studies have indicated that investments in pharmaceutical R&D are associated with the highest variability of future earnings among all industries. The results, however, suggest that for a large class of low‐risk pharmaceutical R&D investments, the relative variability of future earnings is low and similar to that generated by capital expenditures. The findings hold when we control for endogeneity in voluntary disclosure of press releases.     

Seasonality in outliers of daily stock returns: A tail that wags the dog?

We document significant intra-year seasonality in outliers of S&P500 daily rates of return. Controlling for outliers in dummy regressions reveals that both the January and Monday effects turn from insignificant to highly significant. Mean daily return on January doubles and becomes significantly higher than all other months of the year, and Monday's mean return turns significantly positive and higher than other days of the week. The recently documented Halloween effect turns significant only after controlling for outliers as June, August, and September turn out to be months with remarkably low rates of returns. Being random, outliers cannot serve as instrumental variables for designing trading rules, yet, their impact on options pricing through the increase in volatility, may be applied for profitable options strategies.     

Tests of the efficiency of the U.S. rights offering market: An option pricing approach

The efficiency of the U.S. market for stock purchase rights is empirically analyzed in an options framework, in which prices of rights, given the prices of underlying stock, are examined with regard to the possibilities of actually earning above-normal profits, considering the risk taken. Two neutral hedging tests for market efficiency, along with a simple buy-and-exercise trading strategy, are applied to daily traded rights data. Results from ex-post hedging tests suggest that the trading strategy based on the rights valuation model is able to differentiate between overpriced and underpriced rights so as to generate substantial book profits. The positive ex-ante hedge return, found to exist empirically, is completely eliminated once transaction costs are introduced, lending support for the efficient U.S. rights offering market on an after-transaction cost basis.