Persistent performance in the mutual fund market: Tests with funds and investment advisers

Recent studies of mutual funds have concluded that there is some evidence of superior performance. We test for the existence of superior performance and its persistence with mutual funds and mutual fund investment advisers on a data set of monthly returns from 1979 to 1989 for 1,387 mutual funds grouped by 243 advisers. We find no evidence of superior performance or its persistence but we do find significant evidence of persistence of inferior performance. Consistent with previous studies our findings depend on the benchmark chosen, with multiple benchmarks producing a larger degree of inferior performance.     

Technology and Firm Size-Wage Differentials in Colombia, Mexico, and Taiwan (China)

In many economies, studies have found large wage differentialsnot accounted for by work force characteristics, collectivebargaining, or market power. Researchers attribute these differentialsto either unobserved worker quality or pay incentives designedto elicit worker effort. This article finds empirical supportfor an alternative explanation: These wage differentials resultfrom firms' technology-generating activities. Using firm-leveldata from Colombia, Mexico, and Taiwan (China), the articlecompares the effects of research and development, worker training,and exports by employers on the wages of skilled and unskilledworkers. The results suggest that technology investments leadto large wage premiums for skilled workers but not for unskilledworkers. These wage premiums are primarily the result of investmentsin research and development and in training, while exportingis relatively less important except in Colombia.     

Ex-day behavior of japanese stock prices: New insights from new methodology

We study the ex-dividend day behavior of Japanese stock prices on the ex-day in March, when most stocks simultaneously go ex-divided, for the period 1983–1987. We find a positive abnormal return for stocks that go ex-dividend. However, prices drop by nearly the full amount of the dividend. However, prices drop by nearly the full amount of the dividend once the common abnormal return is subtracted from individual returns. For the many ex-dividend day stocks that also go ex-rights on the same March ex-day, we find that the return is on average higher than that for stocks without rights issues.     

An Asymptotic Theory for Estimating Beta-Pricing Models Using Cross-Sectional Regression

Without the assumption of conditional homoskedasticity, a general asymptotic distribution theory for the two-stage cross-sectional regression method shows that the standard errors produced by the Fama–MacBeth procedure do not necessarily overstate the precision of the risk premium estimates. When factors are misspecified, estimators for risk premiums can be biased, and the t -value of a premium may converge to infinity in probability even when the true premium is zero. However, when a beta-pricing model is misspecified, the t -values for firm characteristics generally converge to infinity in probability, which supports the use of firm characteristics in cross-sectional regressions for detecting model misspecification.     

The Many Faces of Competition

Marketing Letters - Despite a great deal of theoretical research on competition, there has been limited empirical work assessing the type of competitive interaction that actually exists in the...     

THE MAGNITUDE OF PRICING ERRORS IN THE ARBITRAGE PRICING THEORY

In this paper the arbitrage pricing theory (APT) pricing errors for individual securities are estimated employing maximum likelihood factor analysis and Fama-MacBeth style aggregation. Results show that the pricing errors are large and statistically significant and that there is a high degree of variability in pricing errors across securities. This evidence contradicts the prevailing APT intuition that the pricing errors can be ignored as negligible. Pricing errors are also found to be related to residual variance and firm size.     

Hedging customers

You are a marketing director with $5 million to invest in customer acquisition and retention. Which customers do you acquire, and which do you retain? Up to a point, the choice is obvious: Keep the consistent big spenders and lose the erratic small ones. But what about the erratic big spenders and the consistent small ones? It's often unclear whether you should acquire or retain them and at what cost. Businesses have begun dealing with unpredictable customer behavior by following the practices of sophisticated investors who own portfolios comprising dozens of stocks with different, indeed divergent, histories and prospects. Each portfolio is diversified so as to produce the investor's desired returns at the particular level of uncertainty he or she can tolerate. Customers, too, are assets--risky assets. As with stocks, the cost of acquiring them is supposed to reflect the cash-flow values they are likely to generate. The authors explain how to construct a portfolio based on the notion that a customer's risk-adjusted lifetime value depends on its anticipated effect on the riskiness of the group it is joining. They also show how this approach was used to identify the best prospects for Myron Corporation, a global leader in the personalized business-gift industry. The concept of risk-adjusted lifetime value has a transforming power: For companies that rely on it, product managers will be replaced by customer managers, and the current method of accounting for profit and loss--which is by product--will be replaced by one that determines each customer's P&L. Once adjusted for risk, those P&Ls will become the firm's key performance and operational metric.