Stock Return Predictability of Residual‐Income‐Based Valuation: Risk or Mispricing?

In an influential paper, Frankel and Lee (1998) conclude that the stock return predictability of the value‐to‐price ratio (V/P) results from market mispricing. This paper confirms whether the V/P reflects the rational risk premiums associated with the V/P factor or is better explained by market inefficiency. Following Daniel and Titman (1997), this paper examines whether the V/P characteristics or the V/P factor loadings predict stock returns. The findings show that the V/P loadings are positively associated with average returns even after controlling for the V/P characteristics in both time series and cross‐sectional tests. The overall results suggest that the mispricing explanation of the V/P effect is premature.     

Mispricing and the cross-section of stock returns

This paper employs the Campbell-Shiller (Rev Financ Stud 1:195–228, 1988) VAR model to derive a model-based mispricing measure that captures investor overreaction to growth. Using this mispricing measure, we find that stocks with low levels of mispricing outperform otherwise similar stocks. The long–short mispricing strategy generates statistically and economically significant returns over the sample period of July 1981 to June 2006. Moreover, this mispricing strategy outperforms the contrarian strategy using various accounting-fundamental-to-price ratios. Our results cast doubt on the risk story in explaining the abnormal returns of the mispricing strategy. Rather, our evidence suggests that asset prices reflect both covariance risk and mispricing.

壳溢价:错误定价还是管制风险？

IPO审核制下,上市公司凭借稀缺的上市资源获得真实价值以外的壳价值。本文检验了上市公司壳价值含量(ESV/MV)与股票横截面收益的关系。在控制了规模、账面市值比、盈利、投资等特征后,我们发现壳价值含量与股票回报率显著正相关。根据ESV/MV构造的对冲组合在时间序列上存在无法被现有风险因子模型所解释的超额收益(壳溢价)。进一步检验表明,壳溢价来源于与管制政策相关的系统性风险而不是股票市场的错误定价。     

The fundamentals of momentum investing: European evidence on understanding momentum through fundamentals

This paper tests Ahmed and Safdar's noise‐related fundamentals‐based explanation for the momentum premium in European equity markets. Consistent with the view that past price changes may be partially driven by noise, the future return behaviour of winners and losers is significantly dependent upon the degree to which past price performance is consistent with fundamentals. European momentum profits are concentrated among those firms where past price performance is congruent with fundamentals, but absent among those firms where past price performance is incongruent with fundamentals. The significantly different momentum premiums on congruent and incongruent fundamentals‐momentum strategies are attributable to the exploitation of existing mispricing among momentum stocks that can be ex ante identified using firm fundamentals.     

Distress risk anomaly and misvaluation

This paper examines the effects of misvaluation on the well-documented negative relation between distress risk and stock returns (distress risk anomaly). Findings indicate that distress risk is negatively related to subsequent stock returns only in the subset of the most overvalued stocks, which is consistent with mispricing explanations provided by prior studies. The distress anomaly disappears after controlling for mispricing effects. Further analysis reveals earnings management to be one possible cause for the overvaluation of highly distressed firms. The results are robust to alternative specifications of distress risk and mispricing measures.     

Mispricing firm-level productivity

This paper provides a mispricing-based explanation for the negative relation between firm-level productivity and stock returns. Investors appear to underprice unproductive firms and overprice productive firms. We find evidence consistent with the speculative overpricing of productive firms driven by investor sentiment and short sale constraints. Investors erroneously extrapolate past productivity growth and its associated operating performance and stock returns, despite their subsequent reversals. Such mispricing is perpetuated because of limits to arbitrage and is partially corrected around earnings announcements when investors are surprised by unexpected earnings news. Decomposition analysis indicates that extrapolative mispricing and limits to arbitrage explain most of the return predictability of firm-level productivity.     

Do option-like incentives induce overvaluation? Evidence from experimental asset markets

One potential reason for bubbles evolving prior to the financial crisis was excessive risk taking stemming from option-like incentive schemes in financial institutions. By running laboratory asset markets, we investigate the impact of option-like incentives on price formation and trading behavior. The main results are that (i) we observe significantly higher market prices with option-like incentives than linear incentives. (ii) We further find that option-like incentives provoke subjects to behave differently and to take more risk than subjects with linear incentives. (iii) We finally show that trading at inflated prices is rational for subjects with option-like incentives since it increases their expected payout.     

Do actively managed mutual funds exploit stock market mispricing?

Constructing a proxy for mispricing with 15 well-known stock market anomalies, we examine whether actively managed mutual funds exploit mispricing. We find that, in the aggregate, mutual funds overweight overvalued stocks and underweight undervalued stocks relative to a passive benchmark, and this tendency is explained by the ill-motivated trades of agency-prone fund managers. In addition, we find that mutual funds with the highest weights in undervalued stocks outperform those with the highest weights in overvalued stocks by an annualized three-factor alpha of 2.12% (t = 2.38), implying that slanting portfolios based on our proxy helps mutual funds improve performance.     

Rationally mispriced assets in equilibrium

We present a simple model of trading in a financial market where agents are asymmetrically informed and information is transmitted through the price system. We characterize the equilibrium for this economy and show that ‘rational mispricing’ of assets occurs if the price system fails to reveal the insider information accurately. It is argued that the communication of wrong information through equilibrium prices is compatible with full rationality on the part of the investors and may explain deviations from the efficient markets hypothesis.     

Do mispricing and financial constraints matter for investment decisions?

This study investigates how mispricing and financing constraints affect ?rms’ future capital investments. We find that when the financing constraints are high, overpriced (underpriced) firms invest more (less) subsequently under previous non-optimal investments. The overpriced (underpriced) firms with precautionary motives invest significantly less subsequently when they are financially constrained. The overall evidence suggests that share mispricing, financial constraints and precautionary motives play a critical role that enables investors to less effectively monitor managers’ real decisions, thus limiting firms’ capital investments.