Why a poor governance environment does not deter foreign direct investment: The case of China and its implications for investment protection

It is widely believed that countries with a poor governance environment (e.g., weak laws and rampant corruption) do not attract foreign direct investment (FDI); however, our study suggests otherwise. Using China as a case study, this article argues that the prevailing theory that a good governance environment begets FDI is incomplete. When faced with a poor governance environment, investors choose direct investment over indirect (portfolio) investment because the former can be better protected by private means. In fact, China attracts a large amount of FDI because of, rather than despite, its lack of a good governance environment. In conclusion, this article offers strategies to better protect investments and to chart through the pitfalls resulting from rapid changes in the governance environment.     

Sponsorship portfolio as brand image creation strategies: A commentary essay

This essay discusses Chien, Cornwell, and Pappu's (forthcoming) paper, “Sponsorship portfolio as brand image creation strategy.” Although Chien et al. (forthcoming) seek to enhance understanding of the impact of a brand's sponsorship portfolio on its brand image they are not completely successful in this endeavor. One of their key constructs, the event personality fit (EPF) construct, has no significant effect on brand meaning. This essay suggests that this finding is because of limitations in the brand personality metrics in the study and because of the tautological nature of the hypotheses proposals. Their sponsorship category relatedness (SCR) construct, however, is a useful construct for those seeking to assemble a portfolio of sponsored products that builds positive brand meaning for the sponsor's brand.     

Financial institutions’ business models and the global transmission of monetary policy

Global financial institutions play an important role in channeling funds across countries and, therefore, transmitting monetary policy from one country to another. In this paper, we study whether such international transmission depends on financial institutions’ business models. In particular, we use Dutch, Spanish, and U.S. confidential supervisory data to test whether the transmission operates differently through banks, insurance companies, and pension funds. We find marked heterogeneity in the transmission of monetary policy across the three types of institutions, across the three banking systems, and across banks within each banking system. While insurance companies and pension funds do not transmit home-country monetary policy internationally, banks do, with the direction and strength of the transmission determined by their business models and balance sheet characteristics.     

Hysteresis bands on returns,holding period and transaction costs

In the presence of transactions costs, no matter how small, arbitrage activity does not necessarily render equal all riskless rates of return. When two such rates follow stochastic processes, it is not optimal immediately to arbitrage out any discrepancy that arises between them. The reason is that immediate arbitrage would induce a definite expenditure of transactions costs whereas, without arbitrage intervention, there exists some, perhaps sufficient, probability that these two interest rates will come back together without any costs having been incurred. Hence, one can surmise that at equilibrium the financial market will permit the coexistence of two riskless rates that are not equal to each other. For analogous reasons, randomly fluctuating expected rates of return on risky assets will be allowed to differ even after correction for risk, leading to important violations of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. The combination of randomness in expected rates of return and proportional transactions costs is a serious blow to existing frictionless pricing models.     

Technical analysis,spread trading,and data snooping control

This paper utilizes a large universe of 18,410 technical trading rules (TTRs) and adopts a technique that controls for false discoveries to evaluate the performance of frequently traded spreads using daily data over 1990–2016. For the first time, the paper applies an excessive out-of-sample analysis in different subperiods across all TTRs examined. For commodity spreads, the evidence of significant predictability appears much stronger compared to equity and currency spreads. Out-of-sample performance of portfolios of significant rules typically exceeds transaction cost estimates and generates a Sharpe ratio of 3.67 in 2016. In general, we reject previous studies’ evidence of a uniformly monotonic downward trend in the selection of predictive TTRs over 1990–2016.     

Gross capital inflows and outflows: Twins or distant cousins?

We investigate the long-run relations and equilibrium correction mechanisms between gross capital inflows, outflows and global financial conditions for advanced (AE) and emerging market economies (EME). According to our results, the puzzling findings of the recent literature suggesting that domestic and foreign investors act as distant cousins, leading to capital inflows and outflows to act as twins, tend to be supported for the long run. The short-run relations, however, often appear to be consistent with the conventional theory suggesting that the behaviors of residents and non-residents do not systematically diverge from each other. Consistent with flight to safety concerns, capital outflows from EME and capital inflows to AE tend to increase in the long run in response to worsening global financial conditions. We find that these results essentially hold for the main components of capital flows as well.     

Re-evaluating portfolio diversification and design using cryptocurrencies: Are decentralized cryptocurrencies enough?

This paper investigates the portfolio diversification potential of a pool of cryptocurrencies classified based on their degree of leadership. We employ the mean-variance and the higher-order moments optimization approaches to evaluate the diversification potential of centralized and decentralized cryptocurrencies across multiple frameworks. While theoretical implications of the mean-variance and the higher-order moments optimization approaches are similar, our results suggest that the latter provides a more precise portfolio allocation strategy because it considers investor risk-aversion for each moment. Furthermore, we find that extending the pool of cryptocurrencies achieves marginal diversification benefits due to considerable co-movements among the cryptocurrencies. Moreover, we find that decentralized cryptocurrencies offer greater diversification potential than centralized cryptocurrencies, although centralized cryptocurrencies carry some diversification potential during alt-seasons. In order of their weights, Bitcoin, Chainlink, and Ethereum (all decentralized) offer the highest contribution to portfolio diversification across most portfolio frameworks, while Ethereum offers greater diversification benefits during the alt-seasons.     

Diversification benefits of NFTs for conventional asset investors: Evidence from CoVaR with higher moments and optimal hedge ratios

This study investigates the risk and returns on one of the newest digital asset classes instruments, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), by accounting for tail dependence of higher-order moments and portfolio characteristics. We used a wide range of asset classes, encompassing equites, fixed income securities, and commodities, and document the desirable hedging and portfolio attributes of NFTs by employing Conditional Value-at-Risk (CoVaR) and ∆CoVaRs with various copula functions. We found that NFTs exhibit beneficial investment and hedging attributes under all market conditions, including the Covid-19 pandemic. Our findings have important implications for investors, risk managers, and regulators.     

套息交易对中国短期资本流动的影响——基于动态资产组合理论的研究

本文基于动态资产组合最优权重的变化研究套息交易对中国短期跨境资本流动的影响。通过将人民币套息资产、美元无风险资产和美元风险资产作为基础资产,构建国际投资组合,计算动态最优权重并考察其对中国短期资本流动的影响。结果显示,当汇率及利差等状态变量随时间发生改变时,套息交易资产组合的最优权重也会随之发生改变,且能显著地解释我国短期资本流动的变化,但套息交易的资产配置并不是导致当前我国资本流动出现趋势性变化的根本原因。