A note on estimating the divisional cost of capital for diversified companies: an empirical evaluation of heuristic-based approaches

This note provides an empirical analysis of the potential for heuristic-based approaches to derive a divisional cost of equity from a firm's total cost of capital. Since an empirical relationship between fundamental information and systematic risk has previously been shown in other studies, idiosyncratic information on risk and performance ought to serve as a good proxy to calculate divisional adjustments. Two practically used, heuristic-based approaches are tested and a significant relationship is found between one of the measures and CAPM beta. This method may offer a plausible and comparatively uncomplicated method for adjusting a firm's total cost of capital for divisional use.     

Discrete credit barrier models

The model introduced in this article is designed to provide a consistent representation for both the real-world and pricing measures for the credit process. We find that good agreement with historical and market data can be achieved across all credit ratings simultaneously. The model is characterized by an underlying stochastic process that takes on values on a discrete lattice and represents credit quality. Rating transitions are associated with barrier crossings and default events are associated with an absorbing state. The stochastic process has state-dependent volatility and jumps which are estimated by using empirical migration and default rates. A risk-neutralizing drift is estimated to consistently match the average spread curves corresponding to all the various ratings.     

Reprint of: Stock salience and the asymmetric market effect of consumer sentiment news

We document asymmetric announcement effects of consumer sentiment news on United States stock and stock futures markets. While a negative market effect occurs upon the release of bad sentiment news, there is no market reaction for the counterpart good news. This supports the “negativity effect” hypothesis. Notably, this effect seems most likely to occur in salient stocks, which is consistent with the availability heuristic.     

Co-monotonicity of optimal investments and the design of structured financial products

We prove that, under very weak conditions, optimal financial products on complete markets are co-monotone with the reversed state price density. Optimality is meant in the sense of the maximization of an arbitrary preference model, e.g., expected utility theory or prospect theory. The proof is based on a result from transport theory. We apply the general result to specific situations, in particular the case of a market described by the Capital Asset Pricing Model or the Black–Scholes model, where we derive a generalization of the two-fund-separation theorem and give an extension to APT factor models and structured products with several underlyings. We use our results to derive a new approach to optimization in wealth management, based on a direct optimization of the return distribution of the portfolio. In particular, we show that optimal products can (essentially) be written as monotonic functions of the market return. We provide existence and nonexistence results for optimal products in this framework. Finally we apply our results to the study of bonus certificates, show that they are not optimal, and construct a cheaper product yielding the same return distribution.     

Conditional risk measures in a bipartite market structure

In this paper, we study the effect of network structure between agents and objects on measures for systemic risk. We model the influence of sharing large exogeneous losses to the financial or (re)insurance market by a bipartite graph. Using Pareto-tailed losses and multivariate regular variation, we obtain asymptotic results for conditional risk measures based on the Value-at-Risk and the Conditional Tail Expectation. These results allow us to assess the influence of an individual institution on the systemic or market risk and vice versa through a collection of conditional risk measures. For large markets, Poisson approximations of the relevant constants are provided. Differences of the conditional risk measures for an underlying homogeneous and inhomogeneous random graph are illustrated by simulations.     

Displaying expected values in risk elicitation tasks: the effect of information in experimental risk research

We investigate the influence of providing expected lottery results to experiment participants in two common risk attitude elicitation tasks. In a between-subject design, either the Holt and Laury task or the Eckel and Grossman task is carried out by a sample of 208 students. We find no significant effect of shown expected values on the risk attitude measured by the tasks. This result even holds true if we divide the experiment participants into specific sub-groups, i.e. female and male, or lower numeracy and higher numeracy participants. Furthermore, comprehension and processing time are not significantly influenced by presented expected values. Therefore, we conclude that providing information on expected values does not influence decision-making in tasks involving risk. This result indicates the robustness of elicited risk attitudes to variation in common experimental methods, and demonstrates that more information could be provided without creating bias in the results.