Brand capital and firm value

We study the role of brand capital – a primary form of intangible capital – for firm valuation and risk in the cross section of publicly traded firms. Using an empirical measure of brand capital stock constructed from advertising expenditures accounting data, we show that: (i) firms with low brand capital investment rates have higher average stock returns than firms with high brand capital investment rates, a difference of 5.2% per annum; (ii) more brand capital intensive firms have higher average stock returns than less brand capital intensive firms, a difference of 5.1% per annum; and (iii) investment in both brand capital and physical capital is volatile and procyclical. A neoclassical investment-based model in which brand capital is a factor of production subject to adjustment costs matches the data well. The model also provides a novel explanation for the empirical links between advertising expenditures and stock returns around seasoned equity offerings (SEO) documented in previous studies.     

市场势力、资产专用性与企业研发投入:来自卖方与买方双维度考量的实证研究

在纵向关联市场中,市场势力和资产专用性是企业创新研发投入的重要影响因素。基于2012-2016年我国121家医药制造业上市公司微观数据,从买方与卖方双重视角探究市场势力、资产专用性与企业创新研发投入的关系。结果表明：买方势力、卖方势力与企业研发投入之间均呈现“倒U型”关系,即当买卖双方市场势力较小时,市场势力对企业研发投入的正向“激励效应”占主导地位;在市场势力超过一定水平后,市场势力对企业研发投入的负向“挤出效应”占主导地位,且相比于专用性资产投资强度较低的医药企业而言,卖方势力与买方势力对具有高资产专用性强度的医药企业研发投入所产生的“倒U型”影响更为显著。     

金融形势指数与货币政策——基于中国数据的实证研究

本文采用VAR模型计算出反映月度中国货币及金融市场形势变化的金融形势指数FCI(financial condition index),该指数对通货膨胀有较好的预测能力,包含未来通货膨胀的信息。将FCI纳入麦克勒姆规则对中国货币政策进行检验,结果表明中央银行货币政策总体上遵循该规则,其主要调控目标是实际经济增长和通货膨胀,对资本市场价格变化反应不显著。整体看,中央银行货币政策对经济运行的调节力度不足,这在一定程度上助长了一定时期内我国经济过热和资产价格不稳定。     

Pricing the Chicago Board of Trade T-Bond futures

The aim of this paper is to investigate the pricing of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) Treasury-Bond futures. The difficulty in pricing it arises from its multiple inter-dependent embedded delivery options, which can be exercised at various times and dates during the delivery month. We consider a general Markov diffusion process model for stochastic interest rates and propose a pricing algorithm that can handle all the delivery rules embedded in the CBOT T-Bond futures. Our procedure combines dynamic programming, finite-elements approximation, and fixed-point evaluation. Numerical illustrations are provided under the one-factor Vasicek and Cox–Ingesoll–Ross models, and under the time in-homogeneous Hull–White model.     

The role of speculation in international futures markets on commodity prices

The role of futures contracts on spot prices has been one of the key focus areas of research since the recent surge in commodity prices and increase in the volatility of commodity returns. However, no consensus arises from this literature, and hence it is difficult to link the use of futures contracts in agricultural commodities by non-hedgers and the growing food insecurity within developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to highlight causal relationships from futures contracts to spot prices of underlying assets, namely agricultural commodities. As research that focus on exchange-traded funds do not provide any clear conclusions, we focus on the imbalance between short- and long-open positions, this imbalance being caused by the exchange traded funds’ participation in futures markets. In this paper, we estimate relationships between financial variables including indicators for speculation in futures markets and the returns of cocoa, corn, soybean, wheat, coffee, rice, and sugar on a weekly basis from 1998 to 2013. Significant results lead to Granger-causality tests that in turn validate the hypothesis of a positive impact of speculation in futures markets to returns on the underlying commodities.     

New low-frequency spread measures

I develop new spread proxies that pick up on three attributes of the low-frequency (daily) data: (1) price clustering, (2) serial price covariance accounting for midpoint prices on no-trade days, and (3) the quoted spread that is available on no-trade days. I develop and empirically test two different approaches: an integrated model and combined models. I test both new and existing low-frequency spread measures relative to two high-frequency benchmarks (percent effective spread and percent quoted spread) on three performance dimensions: (1) higher individual firm correlation with the benchmarks, (2) higher portfolio correlation with the benchmarks, and (3) lower distance relative to the benchmarks. I find that on all three performance dimensions the new integrated model and the new combined model do significantly better than existing low-frequency spread proxies.     

Capital expenditures and firm performance: evidence from a cross‐sectional analysis of stock returns

Using a simple two‐period model of investment, we show that there should be a nonlinear relation between a firm's investment‐to‐capital ratio and its subsequent stock returns. This prediction finds substantial empirical support. The evidence indicates that the slope of the investment function is negative at low investment levels, close to zero at intermediate investment levels and negative at high investment levels. Our results, which are robust to the use of narrowly‐ and broadly‐defined measures of capital investment, pose a challenge to the hypothesis that the negative cross‐sectional correlation between investment and stock returns is attributable to some sort of overinvestment phenomenon.     

Risk-taking incentives of executive stock options and the asset substitution problem

Various theoretical models show that managerial compensation schemes can reduce the distortionary effects of financial leverage. There is mixed evidence as to whether highly levered firms offer less stock‐based compensation, a common prediction of such models. Both the theoretical and empirical research, however, have overlooked the leverage provided by executive stock options. In principle, adjusting the exercise prices of executive stock options can mitigate the risk incentive effects of financial leverage. We show that the near‐universal practice of setting option exercise prices near the prevailing stock price at the date of grant effectively undoes most of the effects of financial leverage. In a large cross‐sectional sample of Canadian option‐granting firms, we find evidence that executives' incentives to take equity risk are negatively rather than positively related to the leverage of their employers.     

Universal bounds for asset prices in heterogeneous economies

We establish universal bounds for asset prices in heterogeneous complete market economies with scale invariant preferences. Namely, for each agent in the economy we consider an artificial homogeneous economy populated solely by this agent, and calculate the “homogeneous” price of an asset in each of these economies. Dumas (Rev. Financ. Stud. 2, 157–188, [1989]) conjectured that the risk free rate in a heterogeneous economy must lie in the interval determined by the minimal and maximal of the “homogeneous” risk free rates. We show that the answer depends on the risk aversions of the agents in the economy: the upper bound holds when all risk aversions are smaller than one, and the lower bound holds when all risk aversions are larger than one. The bounds almost never hold simultaneously. Furthermore, we prove these bounds for arbitrary assets.      

Shaking the tree: an agency-theoretic model of asset pricing

Summary. In this paper, we develop an agency-theoretic extension of the Lucas asset pricing model and examine the resulting asset price dynamics. In the model, an agent of the firm can expand or contract the firms output and dividend payments in response to exogenous shocks, although expansions become increasingly costly for the agent to maintain. Analysis of numerical simulations shows that the time-series of equilibrium asset prices exhibits both significant time-varying conditional heteroskedasticity, and longer memory persistence.We would like to thank Beth Shorish for her patience and guidance during this project, as well as conference participants at the 1998 North American Econometric Society Summer Meetings, Montreal, and the 53rd Econometric Society European Meetings, Berlin for their many useful comments.