Download or read book Four Empirical Essays on Asset Pricing Models written by Edward R. Lawrence and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Asset Pricing written by Irina Pimenova and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I revisit two problems in empirical asset pricing. In Chapter 1, I propose a methodology to evaluate the validity of linear asset pricing factor models under short sale restrictions using a regression-based test. The test is based on the revised null hypothesis that intercepts obtained from regressing excess returns of test assets on factor returns, usually referred to as alphas, are non-positive. I show that under short sale restrictions a much larger set of models is supported by the data than without restrictions. In particular, the Fama-French five-factor model augmented with the momentum factor is rejected less often than other models. In Chapter 2, I investigate patterns of equity premium predictability in international capital markets and explore the robustness of common predictive variables. In particular, I focus on predictive regressions with multiple predictors: dividend-price ratio, four interest rate variables, and inflation. To obtain precise estimates, two estimation methods are employed. First, I consider all capital markets jointly as a system of regressions. Second, I take into account uncertainty about which potential predictors forecast excess returns by employing spike-and-slab prior. My results suggest evidence in favor of predictability is weak both in- and out-of-sample and limited to a few countries. The strong predictability observed on the U.S. market is rather exceptional. In addition, my analysis shows that considering model uncertainty is essential as it leads to a statistically significant increase of investors' welfare both in- and out-of-sample. On the other hand, the welfare increase associated with considering capital markets jointly is relatively modest. However, it leads to reconsider the relative importance of predictive variables because the variables that are statistically significant predictors in the country-specific regressions are insignificant when the capital markets are studied jointly. In particular, my results suggest that the in-sample evidence in favor of the interest rate variables, that are believed to be among the most robust predictors by the literature, is spurious and is mostly driven by ignoring the cross-country information. Conversely, the dividend-price ratio emerges as the only robust predictor of future stock returns.

Download or read book Essays on Asset Pricing written by Lingxiao Zhao and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In my dissertation, I focus on theoretical and empirical asset pricing from a Bayesian model comparison perspective. In the first Chapter, revisiting the framework of Barillas and Shanken (2018), BS henceforth, we show that the Bayesian marginal likelihood-based model comparison method in that paper is unsound: the priors on the nuisance parameters across models must satisfy a change of variable property for densities that is violated by the Jeffreys priors used in the BS method. Extensive simulation exercises confirm that the BS method performs unsatisfactorily. We derive a new class of improper priors on the nuisance parameters, starting from a single improper prior, which leads to valid marginal likelihoods and model comparisons. The performance of our marginal likelihoods is significantly better, allowing for reliable Bayesian work on which factors are risk factors in asset pricing models. In the second Chapter, starting from the twelve distinct risk factors in four well-established asset pricing models, a pool we refer to as the winners, we construct and compare 4,095 asset pricing models and find that the model with the risk factors, Mkt, SMB, MOM, ROE, MGMT, and PEAD, performs the best in terms of Bayesian posterior probability, out-of-sample predictability, and Sharpe ratio. A more extensive model comparison of 8,388,607 models, constructed from the twelve winners plus eleven principal components of anomalies unexplained by the winners, shows the benefit of incorporating information in genuine anomalies in explaining the cross-section of expected equity returns.

Download or read book Essays on Using High frequency Data in Empirical Asset Pricing Models written by Qianqiu Liu and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores using high-frequency data in empirical asset pricing models. Since 1990s, the progress of information technology has made tick-by-tick data available in some financial markets and also allows for empirical investigations of a wide range of issues.

Download or read book Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing written by Xiang Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three essays on empirical asset pricing around three themes: evaluating linear factor asset pricing models by comparing their misspecified measures, understanding the long-run risk on consumption-leisure to investigate their pricing performances on cross-sectional returns, and evaluating conditional asset pricing models by using the methodology of dynamic cross-sectional regressions. The first chapter is ̀̀Comparing Asset Pricing Models: What does the Hansen-Jagannathan Distance Tell Us?''. It compares the relative performance of some important linear asset pricing models based on the Hansen-Jagannathan (HJ) distance using data over a long sample period from 1952-2011 based on U.S. market. The main results are as follows: first, among return-based linear models, the Fama-French (1993) five-factor model performs best in terms of the normalized pricing errors, compared with the other candidates. On the other hand, the macro-factor model of Chen, Roll, and Ross (1986) five-factor is not able to explain industry portfolios: its performance is even worse than that of the classical CAPM. Second, the Yogo (2006) non-durable and durable consumption model is the least misspecified, among consumption-based asset pricing models, in capturing the spread in industry and size portfolios. Third, the Lettau and Ludvigson (2002) scaled consumption-based CAPM (C-CAPM) model obtains the smallest normalized pricing errors pricing gross and excess returns on size portfolios, respectively, while Santos and Veronesi (2006) scaled C-CAPM model does better in explain the return spread on portfolios of U.S. government bonds. The second chapter (̀̀Leisure, Consumption and Long Run Risk: An Empirical Evaluation'') uses a long-run risk model with non-separable leisure and consumption, and studies its ability to price equity returns on a variety of portfolios of U.S. stocks using data from 1948-2011. It builds on early work by Eichenbaum et al. (1988) that explores the empirical properties of intertemporal asset pricing models where the representative agent has utility over consumption and leisure. Here we use the framework in Uhlig (2007) that allows for a stochastic discount factor with news about long-run growth in consumption and leisure. To evaluate our long-run model, we assess its performance relative to standard asset pricing models in explaining the cross-section of returns across size, industry and value-growth portfolios. We find that the long-run consumption-leisure model cannot be rejected by the J-statistic and it does better than the standard C-CAPM, the Yogo durable consumption and Fama-French three-factor models. We also rank the normalized pricing errors using the HJ distance: our model has a smaller HJ distance than other candidate models. Our paper is the first, as far as we are aware, to use leisure data with adjusted working hours as a measure of leisure i.e., defined as the difference between a fixed time endowment and the observable hours spent on working, home production, schooling, communication, and personal care (Yang (2010)). The third essay: ̀̀Empirical Evaluation of Conditional Asset Pricing Models: An Economic Perspective'' uses dynamic Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regressions and tests the performance of several important conditional asset pricing models when allowing for time-varying price of risk. It compares the performance of conditional asset pricing models, in terms of their ability to explain the cross-section of returns across momentum, industry, value-growth and government bond portfolios. We use the new methodology introduced by Adrian et al. (2012). Our main results are as follows: first we find that the Lettau and Ludvigson (2001) conditional model does better than other models in explaining the cross-section of momentum and value-growth portfolios. Second we find that the Piazessi et al. (2007) consumption model does better than others in pricing the cross-section of industry portfolios. Finally, we find that in the case of the cross-section of risk premia on U.S. government bond portfolios the conditional model in Santos and Veronesi (2006) outperforms other candidate models. Overall, however, the Lettau and Ludvigson (2001) model does better than other candidate models. Our main contributions here is using a recently developed method of dynamic Fama-MacBeth regressions to evaluate the performance of leading conditional CAPM (C-CAPM) models in a common set of test assets over the time period from 1951-2012.

Download or read book Essays on Asset Pricing Models written by Yan Li and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation contains three chapters. Chapter one proposes a nonparametric method to evaluate the performance of a conditional factor model in explaining the cross section of stock returns. There are two tests: one is based on the individual pricing error of a conditional model and the other is based on the average pricing error. Empirical results show that for valueweighted portfolios, the conditional CAPM explains none of the asset-pricing anomalies, while the conditional Fama-French three-factor model is able to account for the size effect, and it also helps to explain the value effect and the momentum effect. From a statistical point of view, a conditional model always beats a conditional one because it is closer to the true data-generating process. Chapter two proposes a general equilibrium model to study the implications of prospect theory for individual trading, security prices and trading volume. Its main finding is that different components of prospect theory make different predictions. The concavity/convexity of the value function drives a disposition effect, which in turn leads to momentum in the cross-section of stock returns and a positive correlation between returns and volumes. On the other hand, loss aversion predicts exactly the opposite, namely a reversed disposition effect and reversal in the cross-section of stock returns, as well as a negative correlation between returns and volumes. In a calibrated economy, when prospect theory preference parameters are set at the values estimated by the previous studies, our model can generate price momentum of up to 7% on an annual basis. Chapter three studies the role of aggregate dividend volatility in asset prices. In the model, narrow-framing investors are loss averse over fluctuations in the value of their financial wealth. Persistent dividend volatility indicates persistent fluctuation in their financial wealth and makes stocks undesirable. It helps to explain the salient feature of the stock market including the high mean, excess volatility, and predictability of stock returns while maintaining a low and stable risk-free rate. Consistent with the data, stock returns have a low correlation with consumption growth, and Sharpe ratios are time-varying.

Download or read book Essays in asset pricing written by Fatima Khushnud and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation follows on an asset pricing theme. Overall, it explores asset pricing tests in the equity and the bond markets and attempts to identify the common risk factors that best explain cross sectional variation in stock and bond returns. The first three studies use US data, while the last study explores European bonds data. The sample period is from January 2002 to December 2012 and the Fama and French (1993) time series framework is used in each of the studies. The first two studies in this dissertation focus on equity markets, while the third and fourth study encompasses the US and European corporate bond markets respectively. There has been extensive research on asset pricing models. However, despite being a well-researched area, there is little consensus as to which model is most appropriate. Motivated by this gap in literature, this thesis builds on the work of Fama and French (1993) and applies their time series framework to both equity and bonds. Chapter 2 draws on the link between firm leverage and stock returns as supported by capital structure theory. It examines whether a leverage (LEV) factor exhibits explanatory power over the US stock return variations. The analysis indicates that the LEV factor significantly contributes towards the explanatory power of the fitted models and thus appears to have some explanatory power over U.S. stock returns. Chapter 3 addresses the question of whether ex-post returns should be used in testing ex-ante asset pricing models. This chapter explores the impact of using IBES mean target price as a proxy for expected price in tests of the CAPM, Fama and French (1993) three factor and the Cahart (1997) four factor models. The analysis suggests that the expectation based proxy of returns performs in a similar manner to realized returns in asset pricing tests and thus the use of realized returns should not adversely bias asset pricing tests. Chapter 4 and 5 add to the bond pricing literature by applying time-series studies to US and European bonds. Chapter 4 investigates common risk factors within the US corporate bond returns. The analysis shows that stock market factors do not add explanatory power to the bond return models used in this study. The bond market factor, DEF, dominates all other explanatory variables in regression analysis. Chapter 5 of this dissertation examines the common risk factors explaining variation within the European corporate bond returns. The results are consistent with Chapter 4 indicating that the European DEF factor also captures much of the variation in European bond returns. This dissertation enhances our understanding of the asset pricing models within a Fama and French (1993) time series framework for both equity and bond markets. Support is provided for the importance of leverage in asset pricing. The choice between realised returns and expected returns is also explored in this thesis, with the results suggesting that this choice has little impact on the results from time series asset pricing tests. The pricing of corporate bonds is also explored with evidence to confirm the Fama and French (193) result that equity and bond pricing models differ considerably in US market. Finally, it is found that the key pricing factors are common to both US and European corporate bonds.

Download or read book Essays on International Asset Pricing Cultural Finance and the Price Effect written by Ulrich Johannes Hammerich and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is not only a pioneer work in the new finance sphere cultural finance, but also a feat of fundamental research in international empirical asset pricing. I present significant evidence that the most basic stock characteristic, the nominal price, is consequential for stock returns (and associated with higher statistical moments) in a comprehensive cross-country dataset comprising 41 countries and a culture-dependent capital market anomaly (as it was already shown e.g. for the momentum effect). For the case of Germany, I additionally provide an in-depth analysis of the price effect (i.e. a high/low price of an asset goes hand in hand with high/low subsequent returns) as this country offers a unique possibility to investigate the evolution and trigger of this genuinely price-based capital market anomaly due to a rapid and dramatic countrywide dispersion of stock prices in the aftermath of law amendments. Furthermore, I find the explanatory power of risk factor mimicking hedge portfolios (especially RMRF, HML, and WML, i.e. the beta, value, and momentum factors), which are consistently implemented in empirical asset pricing models (like the FF 3-, 5-, and 6-factor models and the Carhart 4-factor model), as well as their effectiveness as investment styles to vary across cultures. That is, the spectrum of this dissertation strikes both implications of the weak EMH that time series data (like the price) should have no informational value for future returns and assumptions of theoretical asset pricing models that (only) systematic risk (CAPM), future investment opportunities (ICAPM) or consumption risk (CCAPM) drives asset returns (universally). Finally, yet importantly, I find evidence that even cultural characteristics in itself (measured via the cultural dimensions of Hofstede and others) have explanatory and predictive power for global, cross-sectional stock returns as well as characteristics-based (hedge) portfolio returns. By virtue of these contributions to pertinent financial research, this dissertation is an empirical primer for possible future fields of research culture-based/culture-neutral asset pricing, asset management, and asset allocation.

Download or read book Empirical Essays on Cross sectional Asset Pricing and Institutional Investors written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Empirical Asset Pricing written by Wayne Ferson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the theory and methods of empirical asset pricing, integrating classical foundations with recent developments. This book offers a comprehensive advanced introduction to asset pricing, the study of models for the prices and returns of various securities. The focus is empirical, emphasizing how the models relate to the data. The book offers a uniquely integrated treatment, combining classical foundations with more recent developments in the literature and relating some of the material to applications in investment management. It covers the theory of empirical asset pricing, the main empirical methods, and a range of applied topics. The book introduces the theory of empirical asset pricing through three main paradigms: mean variance analysis, stochastic discount factors, and beta pricing models. It describes empirical methods, beginning with the generalized method of moments (GMM) and viewing other methods as special cases of GMM; offers a comprehensive review of fund performance evaluation; and presents selected applied topics, including a substantial chapter on predictability in asset markets that covers predicting the level of returns, volatility and higher moments, and predicting cross-sectional differences in returns. Other chapters cover production-based asset pricing, long-run risk models, the Campbell-Shiller approximation, the debate on covariance versus characteristics, and the relation of volatility to the cross-section of stock returns. An extensive reference section captures the current state of the field. The book is intended for use by graduate students in finance and economics; it can also serve as a reference for professionals.

Download or read book Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing written by Chishen Wei and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains two essays that use empirical techniques to shed light on open questions in the asset pricing literature. In the first essay, I investigate whether foreign institutional investors affect stock liquidity in domestic equity markets. The evidence indicates that stocks with higher foreign institutional ownership subsequently experience higher liquidity. However, it is difficult to interpret the causal relation of this finding because institutional investors self-select into more liquid stocks. To solve this problem, I exploit a provision in the 2003 US dividend tax cut which extends tax-relief to dividends from US tax-treaty countries but not to dividends from non-treaty countries. This natural experiment suggests a causal link between foreign institutional investors and liquidity. Consistent with the predictions of theoretical models, I find that liquidity improves due to foreign institutional investors increasing information competition. In the second essay, I introduce a new measure of difference of opinion using mutual fund portfolio weights to test prominent competing theories of the effect of heterogeneous beliefs on asset prices. The over-valuation theory (Miller (1977)) proposes that in the presence of short-sale constraints stock prices reflects only the view of optimistic investors which implies lower subsequent returns. Alternatively, neo-classical asset pricing models (Williams (1977), Merton (1987)) suggest that differences of opinions indicate high levels of information uncertainty or risk which implies higher expected returns. My initial result finds no support for the over-valuation theory. Instead, the measure used in this study finds that high differences of opinion stocks weakly outperform low differences of opinion stocks by 2.42% annually which is more consistent with the information uncertainty explanation.

Download or read book Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing written by John Robert Vogel and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation includes three essays of empirical asset pricing. In the first essay, The Value/Growth Anomaly and Hard to Value Firms, I show that combining quality signals (firm fundamentals) and hard to value measures increases the return spread between value and growth portfolios. A portfolio that is long high quality value firms that are hard to value and short low quality growth firms that are hard to value yields a 4-factor alpha of up to 1.41% per month. Second, ex-ante observed quality signals are better at predicting high performance and low performance growth stocks as compared to value stocks. This growth stock mispricing can be explained by extreme quality measures, and enhanced by focusing on hard to value growth firms. In the second essay, Using Maximum Drawdowns to Capture Tail Risk, I, along with my co-author Wesley R. Gray, propose the use of maximum drawdown, the maximum peak to trough loss across a time series of compounded returns, as a simple method to capture an element of risk unnoticed by linear factor models: tail risk. Unlike other tail-risk metrics, maximum drawdown is intuitive and easy-to-calculate. We look at maximum drawdowns to assess tail risks associated with market neutral strategies identified in the academic literature. Our evidence suggests that academic anomalies are not anomalous: all strategies endure large drawdowns at some point in the time series. Many of these losses would trigger margin calls and investor withdrawals, forcing an investor to liquidate. In the third essay, Analyzing Valuation Measures: A Performance Horse Race over the Past 40 Years, I, along with my co-author Wesley R. Gray, show that EBITDA/TEV has historically been the best performing valuation metric and outperforms many investor favorites such as price-to-earnings, free-cash-flow to total enterprise value, and book-to-market. We also explore the investment potential of long-term valuation ratios, which replaces one-year earnings with an average of long-term earnings. In contrast to prior empirical work, we find that long-term ratios add little investment value over standard one-year valuation metrics.

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Asset Pricing written by Daniel Robert Smith and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Two Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing written by Liang Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Asset Pricing written by Lorne Dwight Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Asset Pricing and Empirical Estimation written by Pooya Nazeran and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: A considerable portion of the asset pricing literature considers the demand schedule for asset prices to be perfectly elastic (flat). As argued, asset prices are determined using information about future payoff distribution, as well as the discount rate; consequently, an asset would be priced independent of its available supply. Furthermore, such a flat demand curve is considered to be a consequence of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. My dissertation evaluates and questions the factuality of these assertions. I approach this problem from both an empirical and a theoretical perspective. The general argument is that asset prices do respond to supply-shocks; and changes in aggregate demand, stemming from preference changes, new international investments, or quantitative easing by the Fed, can result in price changes. Hence, asset prices are determined by both demand and supply factors. In the first essay, "Downward Sloping Asset Demand: Evidence from the Treasury Bills Market," I report on my empirical study which establishes the existence of a downward sloping demand curve (DSDC) in the T-bill market. In the second essay, "Asset Pricing: Inelastic Supply," I examine the theoretical issues concerning a downward sloping demand curve. I begin by clarifying a common confusion in the literature, namely, that many asset pricing models imply a flat demand curve. I show that the prominent asset pricing models, including Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) and Consumption Capital Asset Pricing Model (CCAPM), all have an underlying DSDC. I further show that, while these models imply the relevance of supply, they are inconvenient as a vehicle for the estimation and analysis of the DSDC in the data. For those purposes, I develop an asset pricing framework based on the stochastic discount factor framework, specifically designed with a DSDC at its heart. I end the essay with a discussion of the framework's implications and applications. In the third essay I develop on the Factor-Augmented Vector-Autoregression (FAVAR) literature, proposing a bias-corrected method. As implemented in the literature, the Principal Component Analysis stage of FAVAR introduces a classical-error-in-variable problem which leads to bias. I propose an instrument-based method for bias correction.

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Asset Pricing written by Eric Marius Pondi Endengle and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis has three chapters in which I develop tools for comparisons and dynamic analysis of linear asset pricing models. In the first chapter, I introduce the notion of dynamically useless factors: factors that may be useless (uncorrelated with the assets returns) at some periods of time, while relevant at other periods of time. This notion bridges the literature on classical empirical asset pricing and the literature on useless factors, where both assume that the relevance of a factor remains constant through time. In this new framework, I propose a modified Fama-Macbeth procedure to estimate the time-varying risk premia from conditional linear asset pricing models. At each date, my estimator consistently estimates the conditional risk premium for every useful factor and is robust to the presence of the dynamically useless ones. I apply this methodology to the Fama-French five-factor model and find that, with the exception of the market, all the factors of this model are dynamically useless, although they remain useful 90 percent of the time. In the second chapter, I infer the time-varying parameters of a potentially misspecified stochastic discount factor (SDF) model. I extend the model of Gospodinov et al. (2014) to the framework of conditional SDF models, as the coefficients and the covariances are allowed to vary over time. The proposed misspecification-robust inference is able to eliminate the negative effects of potential useless factors, while maintaining the relevance of the useful ones. Empirically, I analyze the dynamical relevance of each factor in seven common asset pricing models from 1963 to 2016. The Fama-French's three-factor model (FF3) and five factor model (FF5) have been the overall best SDFs in the last 50 years. However, since 2000, the best SDF is CARH (FF3 + momentum factor), followed by FF5 as the second best. Apart from traded factors, the results bring a nuance on non-traded factors. We analyze the relevance, for linear pricing, of a human capital model inspired by Lettau & Ludvigson (2001) and Gospodinov et al. (2014). The third chapter proposes a method for ranking Fama-French linear factor models according to investors' preference for higher-order moments. I show that adding a new Fama- French factor to a prior Fama-French model systematically leads to a better model, only when the preference for higher-order moments is moderate (in absolute value). When the preference for higher-order moments is important or extreme, the four-factor model of Carhart (1997) has a better pricing ability than all the Fama-French models. An analysis of models with non-traded factors confirms the relevance, for linear pricing, of the human capital model analyzed in the second chapter. However, I show that this relevance is effective only for investors with null or very low preferences for higher-order moments.