Download or read book Investors Beliefs and Their Implications on Asset Pricing Excess Returns and Volatilities in Financial Markets written by Doina G. Vlad and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Investors Belief in Stock Returns and Volatilities written by Jiakou Wang and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motivated by the asset pricing implications of the regime-switching equilibrium models in the literature, this paper investigates empirically the effects of regime switches in aggregate stock returns and volatilities. The investors' belief, defined as the posterior probability of the bear regime, is estimated based on a regime-switching model where the regime of the economy follows a two-state hidden Markov process. Veronesi (1999) shows that both the expected excess return and the volatility of the returns are the concave, bell-shaped functions of the investors' belief if risk aversion is a constant.The empirical findings in this paper suggest that the expected excess return and the volatility are monotonically increasing functions of the investors' belief. Therefore, a reasonable explanation for the empirical finding is that risk aversion is time-varying and the representative agent is more risk averse in the bear regime so that a higher expected excess return and higher volatility in the bad regime are generated. A second empirical finding is that the stock return predictors, such as the term spread, the in flation rate, and the T-bill rate, have significant business cycle patterns in the predictive regressions. For example, the term spread is positively related to the stock market returns in the boom regime, but is negatively related to the stock market returns in the bear regime. This suggests that the increasing term spread is good news in the bear regime because it indicates that the economy is improving and will recover soon, thus the investors require a lower equity premium. In addition, the equity premium is more sensitive to the predictors in the bear regime because the bear regime is short lived. Similar results are also found in the predictive regressions for the variance of the stock market returns.

Download or read book Financial Decisions and Markets written by John Y. Campbell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the field's leading authority, the most authoritative and comprehensive advanced-level textbook on asset pricing In Financial Decisions and Markets, John Campbell, one of the field’s most respected authorities, provides a broad graduate-level overview of asset pricing. He introduces students to leading theories of portfolio choice, their implications for asset prices, and empirical patterns of risk and return in financial markets. Campbell emphasizes the interplay of theory and evidence, as theorists respond to empirical puzzles by developing models with new testable implications. The book shows how models make predictions not only about asset prices but also about investors’ financial positions, and how they often draw on insights from behavioral economics. After a careful introduction to single-period models, Campbell develops multiperiod models with time-varying discount rates, reviews the leading approaches to consumption-based asset pricing, and integrates the study of equities and fixed-income securities. He discusses models with heterogeneous agents who use financial markets to share their risks, but also may speculate against one another on the basis of different beliefs or private information. Campbell takes a broad view of the field, linking asset pricing to related areas, including financial econometrics, household finance, and macroeconomics. The textbook works in discrete time throughout, and does not require stochastic calculus. Problems are provided at the end of each chapter to challenge students to develop their understanding of the main issues in financial economics. The most comprehensive and balanced textbook on asset pricing available, Financial Decisions and Markets is an essential resource for all graduate students and practitioners in finance and related fields. Integrated treatment of asset pricing theory and empirical evidence Emphasis on investors’ decisions Broad view linking the field to financial econometrics, household finance, and macroeconomics Topics treated in discrete time, with no requirement for stochastic calculus Forthcoming solutions manual for problems available to professors

Download or read book Investor Experiences and Financial Market Dynamics written by Ulrike Malmendier and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do macro-financial shocks affect investor behavior and market dynamics? Recent evidence suggests long-lasting effects of personally experienced outcomes on investor beliefs and investment but also significant differences across older and younger generations. We formalize experience-based learning in an OLG model, where different cross-cohort experiences generate persistent heterogeneity in beliefs, portfolio choices, and trade. The model allows us to characterize a novel link between investor demographics and the dependence of prices on past dividends, while also generating known features of asset prices, such as excess volatility and return predictability. The model produces new implications for the cross-section of asset holdings, trade volume, and investors' heterogeneous responses to recent financial crises, which we show to be in line with the data.

Download or read book Essays on Behavioral Finance and Asset Pricing written by Chen Wang and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of four essays exploring how people form beliefs and make decisions in the financial markets and their implications for asset prices. Two common threads run through this dissertation: the persistence of key state variables and the less-than-fully-rational approach to economic decision-making.Chapter 1 studies how professional forecasts of interest rates across maturities respond to new information. I document that forecasts for short-term rates underreact to new information while forecasts for long-term rates overreact. I propose a new explanation based on "autocorrelation averaging,'' whereby, to limited cognitive processing capacity, forecasters' estimate of the autocorrelation of a given process is biased toward the average autocorrelation of all the processes they observe. Consistent with this view, I show that forecasters over-estimate the autocorrelation of the less persistent term premium component of interest rates and under-estimate the autocorrelation of the more persistent short rate component. A calibrated model quantitatively matches the documented pattern of misreaction. Finally, I explore the pattern's implication for asset prices by showing that an overreaction-motivated predictor, the realized forecast error for the 10-year Treasury yield, robustly predicts excess bond returns.Chapter 2, joint with Ye Li, generalizes an exponential-affine asset pricing model to show that the prices of dividend strips reveal the underlying state variables, and thus, strongly predict future market return and dividend growth. We derive and empirically show that expected dividend growth is non-persistent, under which condition the ratio of market price to short-term dividend price, "duration,'' reveals only expected returns information. Duration predicts annual market return with an out-of-sample of R2 19%, subsuming the price-dividend ratio's predictive power. After controlling for duration, the price-dividend ratio predicts dividend growth with an out-of-sample R2 of 30%. Our results hold outside the U.S. We find the expected return is countercyclical and responds forcefully to monetary policy shocks. As implied by the ICAPM, shocks to duration, the expected-return proxy, are priced in the cross-section.Chapter 3, joint with Cameron Peng, shows that mutual funds contribute to cross-sectional momentum and excess volatility through positive feedback trading. Stocks held by positive feedback funds exhibit much stronger momentum, almost doubling the returns from a simple momentum strategy. This ``enhanced'' momentum is robust to alternative positive feedback trading measures and cannot be explained by other stock characteristics, ex-post firm fundamentals, fund flows, or herding. Moreover, enhanced momentum is almost entirely reversed after one quarter, suggesting initial overshooting and subsequent reversal. We argue that the most likely explanation is the price pressure from positive feedback trading. Finally, we relate positive feedback trading to mutual fund performance and show that it can positively predict a fund's return from active management.Chapter 4, joint with Ye Li, presents an intrinsic form of uncertainty in asset management, which we call ``delegation uncertainty.'' Investors hire managers for their superior models of asset markets, but delegation outcome is uncertain precisely because the managers' model is unknown to investors. We model investors' delegation decisions as a trade-off between asset return uncertainty and delegation uncertainty. Our theory explains several puzzles on fund performances. It also delivers asset pricing implications supported by our empirical analysis: (1) because investors partially delegate and hedge against delegation uncertainty, CAPM alpha arises; (2) the cross-section dispersion of alpha increases in uncertainty; (3) managers bet on alpha, engaging in factor timing, but factors' alpha is immune to the rise of their arbitrage capital -- when investors delegate more, delegation hedging becomes stronger. Finally, we offer a novel approach to extract model uncertainty from asset returns, delegation, and survey expectations.

Download or read book Inefficient Markets written by Andrei Shleifer and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-03-09 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The efficient markets hypothesis has been the central proposition in finance for nearly thirty years. It states that securities prices in financial markets must equal fundamental values, either because all investors are rational or because arbitrage eliminates pricing anomalies. This book describes an alternative approach to the study of financial markets: behavioral finance. This approach starts with an observation that the assumptions of investor rationality and perfect arbitrage are overwhelmingly contradicted by both psychological and institutional evidence. In actual financial markets, less than fully rational investors trade against arbitrageurs whose resources are limited by risk aversion, short horizons, and agency problems. The book presents and empirically evaluates models of such inefficient markets. Behavioral finance models both explain the available financial data better than does the efficient markets hypothesis and generate new empirical predictions. These models can account for such anomalies as the superior performance of value stocks, the closed end fund puzzle, the high returns on stocks included in market indices, the persistence of stock price bubbles, and even the collapse of several well-known hedge funds in 1998. By summarizing and expanding the research in behavioral finance, the book builds a new theoretical and empirical foundation for the economic analysis of real-world markets.

Download or read book Essays in Asset Pricing and Institutional Investors written by Qi Shang and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis includes three papers: 1. Limited Arbitrage Analysis of CDS Basis Trading By modeling time-varying funding costs and demand pressure as the limits to arbitrage, the paper shows that assets with identical cash-flows have not only different expected returns, but also different expected returns in excess of funding costs. I solve the model in closed-form to show that the arbitrage on the CDS and corporate bond market is a risky arbitrage. The sign of the expected excess return of the arbitrage is decided by the sign and size of market frictions rather than the observed price discrepancy. The size and risk of the arbitrage excess return are increasing in market friction levels and assets' maturities. High levels of market frictions also destruct the positive predictability of credit spread term structure on credit spread changes. Results from the empirical section support the above-mentioned model predictions. 2. General Equilibrium Analysis of Stochastic Benchmarking This paper applies a closed-form continuous-time consumption-based general equilibrium model to analyze the equilibrium implications when some agents in the economy promise to beat a stochastic benchmark at an intermediate date. For very risky benchmark, these agents increase volatility and risk premium in the equilibrium. On the other hand, when they promise to beat less risky benchmark, they decrease volatility and risk premium in the equilibrium. In both cases, the degree of effect is state-dependent and stock price rises. 3. Institutional Asset Pricing with Heterogenous Belief (Co-authored) We propose an equilibrium asset pricing model in which investors with heterogeneous beliefs care about relative performance. We find that the relative performance concern leads agents to trade more similarly, which has two effects. First, similar trading directly decreases volatility. Second, similar trading decreases the impact of the dominant agents. When the economy is extremely good or bad, the second effect is dominant so that the relative performance concern enlarges the excess volatility caused by heterogeneous beliefs. When the first effect is dominant, which corresponds to a normal economy, the volatility is lower than without the relative performance concern. Moreover, this paper shows that the relative performance concern also influences investors' holdings, stock prices and risk premia.

Download or read book Financial Markets and the Real Economy written by John H. Cochrane and published by Now Publishers Inc. This book was released on 2005 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Financial Markets and the Real Economy reviews the current academic literature on the macroeconomics of finance.

Download or read book Investors Horizon and Stock Prices written by Sahar Parsa and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays on the relation between investors' trading horizon and stock prices. The first chapter explores the theoretical relation between the horizon of traders and the negative externality generated by their activity on the information revealed by stock prices. The last two chapters focus on the empirical relation between institutional investors trading frequency and stock prices behaviour. The first chapter examines how short term trading impacts the aggregation of information in financial markets. I develop a model where short-term traders, in an attempt to learn about the average beliefs of future market participants, make the price relatively more noisy. This typically introduces a negative informational externality on long-term investors. I show that (i) as the horizon of the informed traders decreases, the price becomes relatively less precise; (ii) an inflow of informed traders in the market can decrease the informativeness of the price when the traders have a relatively short horizon or the market is expected to be thin in the future; (iii) finally, as rational informed short-term traders have access to an extra source of information about the future price, they end up creating more noise and a decrease in the informativeness of the price might result. Thus, paradoxically, more informed trading could lead to a less informative price. Among scholars, practitioners and policy makers, investor short-termism and high frequency trading have been associated with excess volatility in financial markets and with a disconnect between asset prices and fundamentals. Motivated by this observation, in Chapter 2 I construct a novel measure of the intrinsic frequency of trading for each of the large US institutional investors (13-F institutions) using Thomson-Reuters Institutional Holdings quarterly data for the period 1980-2005. This measure controls for the market and portfolio characteristics and identifies an investor-specific fixed effect in the frequency of trading. I then study how the composition of these fixed effects impacts stock price behavior through their forecasting role in explaining the return and the return on equity (cash flow of a company) in the short run as well as the long run. I show that (i) the securities in which investors exhibit higher intrinsic trading frequency exhibit higher volatility, but (ii) this volatility is mainly driven by the cashflow component of the security prices. Further, (iii) the prices of the securities held by investors with a higher intrinsic trading frequency do not forecast the long-run return as opposed to the securities held by investors with a lower intrinsic trading frequency. As such, the prices mainly respond to the long-run return on equity. Overall, the results challenge the view that higher frequency of trading-a commonly used proxy for investor short-termnism-causes a disconnect between asset prices and fundamentals. Finally, in Chapter 3 (co-auhtored with Fernando Duarte) we show a novel relation between the institutional investors' intrinsic trading frequency-a commonly used proxy for the investors's investment horizon- and the cross-section of stock returns. We show that the 20$ of stocks with the lowest trading frequency earn mean returns that are 6 percentage points per year higher than the 20% of stocks that have the highest trading frequency. The magnitude and predictability of these returns persist or even increase when risk-adjusted by common indicators of systematic risks such as the Fama-French, liquidity or momentum factors. Our results show that the characteristics of stockholders affect expected returns of the very securities they hold, supporting the view that heterogeneity among investors is an important dimension of asset prices.

Download or read book The Implications of Investor Behaviour to Financial Markets written by Lisa Desiree Majmin and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Financial markets are subject to sentiment from within and beyond their nation's borders. Fund flows either flood markets with liquidity, or drain them to the point of asset fire sales. This typically occurs in accordance with investors' beliefs and risk preferences and ultimately renders markets unstable. This thesis serves to establish the implications of investor behaviour to financial markets. Chapter 2 proposes macro sentiment as a leading indicator for financial instability within the Early Warning Framework of Borio & Lowe (2002). This signalling method identifies imbalances within the financial system. Key indicators include real equity and property prices, and private credit. Macro sentiment is then shown to display excess pessimism prior to systemic crises and therefore, is a relevant leading indicator. US institutional investor sentiment is measured through the demand for portfolio insurance in Chapter 3. Shefrin (1999) advocates index option markets as the manifestation of institutional investor sentiment. A decrease in index option skewness is associated with bearish sentiment. This chapter applies a non-parametric method to extract the risk-neutral distribution to gauge sentiment based on the 30-day probability of the underlying reaching the at-the-money futures level, and the third moment. These measures are examined in relation to the VIX, the put-call ratio, the slope of the implied volatility function and the Bakshi, Kapadia & Madan (2003) skew. Chapter 4 proposes a theory of sentiment propagation and examines the link between global and investor sentiment within the US. An extensive literature review of mutual fund flows and sentiment within the broad context of the macroeconomy affirms the use of cross-border fund flows as the channel through which sentiment propagates. The empirical section then establishes congruency between global sentiment, as measured by dedicated USA equity and bond fund flows of US and non-US domiciled investors and sentiment within the US.

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 Swing Pricing and Fragility in Open end Mutual Funds written by Dunhong Jin and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to prevent runs on open-end mutual funds? In recent years, markets have observed an innovation that changed the way open-end funds are priced. Alternative pricing rules (known as swing pricing) adjust funds’ net asset values to pass on funds’ trading costs to transacting shareholders. Using unique data on investor transactions in U.K. corporate bond funds, we show that swing pricing eliminates the first-mover advantage arising from the traditional pricing rule and significantly reduces redemptions during stress periods. The positive impact of alternative pricing rules on fund flows reverses in calm periods when costs associated with higher tracking error dominate the pricing effect.

Download or read book Beast on Wall Street written by Robert A. Haugen and published by Pearson. This book was released on 1999 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is now abundantly clear that stock volatility is a contagious disease that spreads virulently from market to market around the world. Price changes in one market drive subsequent price changes in that market as well as in others. In Beast, Haugen makes a compelling case for the fact that even under normal conditions, fully 80 percent of stock volatility is price driven. Moreover, this volatility is far from benign. It acts to reduce the level of investment spending and constitutes a significant and permanent drag on economic growth. Price-driven volatility is unstable. Dramatic and unpredictable explosions in price-driven volatility can send stock markets in a downward spiral and cause significant disruptions in economic activity. Haugen argues that this indeed happened in 1929 and 1930. If volatility in Asian markets persists, it can easily become the source of the problem rather than merely a symptom.

Download or read book Handbook of Behavioral Economics Foundations and Applications 1 written by and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2018-09-27 with total page 749 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Handbook of Behavioral Economics: Foundations and Applications presents the concepts and tools of behavioral economics. Its authors are all economists who share a belief that the objective of behavioral economics is to enrich, rather than to destroy or replace, standard economics. They provide authoritative perspectives on the value to economic inquiry of insights gained from psychology. Specific chapters in this first volume cover reference-dependent preferences, asset markets, household finance, corporate finance, public economics, industrial organization, and structural behavioural economics. This Handbook provides authoritative summaries by experts in respective subfields regarding where behavioral economics has been; what it has so far accomplished; and its promise for the future. This taking-stock is just what Behavioral Economics needs at this stage of its so-far successful career. Helps academic and non-academic economists understand recent, rapid changes in theoretical and empirical advances within behavioral economics Designed for economists already convinced of the benefits of behavioral economics and mainstream economists who feel threatened by new developments in behavioral economics Written for those who wish to become quickly acquainted with behavioral economics

Download or read book International Capital Flows written by Martin Feldstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent changes in technology, along with the opening up of many regions previously closed to investment, have led to explosive growth in the international movement of capital. Flows from foreign direct investment and debt and equity financing can bring countries substantial gains by augmenting local savings and by improving technology and incentives. Investing companies acquire market access, lower cost inputs, and opportunities for profitable introductions of production methods in the countries where they invest. But, as was underscored recently by the economic and financial crises in several Asian countries, capital flows can also bring risks. Although there is no simple explanation of the currency crisis in Asia, it is clear that fixed exchange rates and chronic deficits increased the likelihood of a breakdown. Similarly, during the 1970s, the United States and other industrial countries loaned OPEC surpluses to borrowers in Latin America. But when the U.S. Federal Reserve raised interest rates to control soaring inflation, the result was a widespread debt moratorium in Latin America as many countries throughout the region struggled to pay the high interest on their foreign loans. International Capital Flows contains recent work by eminent scholars and practitioners on the experience of capital flows to Latin America, Asia, and eastern Europe. These papers discuss the role of banks, equity markets, and foreign direct investment in international capital flows, and the risks that investors and others face with these transactions. By focusing on capital flows' productivity and determinants, and the policy issues they raise, this collection is a valuable resource for economists, policymakers, and financial market participants.

Download or read book The Efficient Market Theory and Evidence written by Andrew Ang and published by Now Publishers Inc. This book was released on 2011 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) asserts that, at all times, the price of a security reflects all available information about its fundamental value. The implication of the EMH for investors is that, to the extent that speculative trading is costly, speculation must be a loser's game. Hence, under the EMH, a passive strategy is bound eventually to beat a strategy that uses active management, where active management is characterized as trading that seeks to exploit mispriced assets relative to a risk-adjusted benchmark. The EMH has been refined over the past several decades to reflect the realism of the marketplace, including costly information, transactions costs, financing, agency costs, and other real-world frictions. The most recent expressions of the EMH thus allow a role for arbitrageurs in the market who may profit from their comparative advantages. These advantages may include specialized knowledge, lower trading costs, low management fees or agency costs, and a financing structure that allows the arbitrageur to undertake trades with long verification periods. The actions of these arbitrageurs cause liquid securities markets to be generally fairly efficient with respect to information, despite some notable anomalies.

Download or read book International Capital Markets written by International Monetary Fund and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1999-09-24 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following a review and assessment of recent developments in capital market and banking systems, this year's International Capital Markets report reviews and assesses recent developments in mature and emerging financial markets and continues the analysis of key issues affecting global financial markets. It examines the systemic implications of the continued rapid development of the global over-the-counter derivatives markets and the expansion of foreign-owned banks into emerging markets. The report also analyzes market participants' assessments of the proposals for private sector involvement in the prevention and resolution crises.