Essays on Corporate Finance Theory and Behavioral Asset Pricing

Essays on Corporate Finance Theory and Behavioral Asset Pricing PDF Author: Jieying Hong
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This thesis consists of three self-contained papers. The first two papers study how firms should be structured to facilitate their access to funds in the face of agency conflicts between borrowers (firms) and lenders (investors). Chapter 1 studies the relationship between firm scope and financial constraints. Chapter 2 uses an optimal contracting approach to analyze the development of an innovative product through strategic alliance by an entrepreneur and an incumbent. Chapter 3 analyzes whether traders' experience reduce their propensity to speculate?

Essays on Corporate Finance Theory and Behavioral Asset Pricing

Essays on Corporate Finance Theory and Behavioral Asset Pricing PDF Author: Jieying Hong
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This thesis consists of three self-contained papers. The first two papers study how firms should be structured to facilitate their access to funds in the face of agency conflicts between borrowers (firms) and lenders (investors). Chapter 1 studies the relationship between firm scope and financial constraints. Chapter 2 uses an optimal contracting approach to analyze the development of an innovative product through strategic alliance by an entrepreneur and an incumbent. Chapter 3 analyzes whether traders' experience reduce their propensity to speculate?

Essays on Emirical Asset Pricing and Corporate Finance : Behavioral Finance, Regulations and M&A

Essays on Emirical Asset Pricing and Corporate Finance : Behavioral Finance, Regulations and M&A PDF Author: Barış İnce
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business enterprises
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description


A Behavioral Approach to Asset Pricing

A Behavioral Approach to Asset Pricing PDF Author: Hersh Shefrin
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080482244
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 636

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Book Description
Behavioral finance is the study of how psychology affects financial decision making and financial markets. It is increasingly becoming the common way of understanding investor behavior and stock market activity. Incorporating the latest research and theory, Shefrin offers both a strong theory and efficient empirical tools that address derivatives, fixed income securities, mean-variance efficient portfolios, and the market portfolio. The book provides a series of examples to illustrate the theory. The second edition continues the tradition of the first edition by being the one and only book to focus completely on how behavioral finance principles affect asset pricing, now with its theory deepened and enriched by a plethora of research since the first edition

Essays in Behavioral Finance and Corporate Finance

Essays in Behavioral Finance and Corporate Finance PDF Author: Bradley J. Cannon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Corporations
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This dissertation consists of three chapters that study how psychology impacts stock prices and how stock prices then impact corporate decisions. In the first chapter, I study whether a firm’s investment responds to the stock valuations of other firms headquartered nearby. I document a positive relation between a firm’s investment and the valuation of neighboring firms. This relation is stronger among financially constrained firms and is robust to controlling for the actual investment of other firms in the region. These findings are difficult to reconcile with traditional theories that link investment opportunities to firm valuations, but instead suggest that the ability of firms to raise external finance rises and falls with the stock valuations of other firms located nearby. Consistent with this explanation, I document that financially constrained firms issue more debt and receive more trade credit when neighboring firms have high stock valuations. In the second chapter, I test models of return extrapolation in the cross-section of stock returns. Return extrapolation is a biased belief structure that has received considerable attention because of its ability to generate prominent empirical findings in the asset pricing literature, while also being able to match investor beliefs. I document that return extrapolation is not uniform across firms but is instead more prevalent among firms that do not pay dividends (capital-gain firms). Specifically, analyst return expectations are positively related to past annual returns for capital-gain firms but show no relation among dividend-paying firms. I exploit this difference in extrapolative expectations to test asset pricing predictions stemming from models of return extrapolation. Consistent with return extrapolation models, I show that the value premium and long-term reversal are stronger among capital-gain firms. Momentum, however, is stronger among dividend-paying firms and, consequently, does not appear to be a result of return extrapolation. In the third chapter, co-authored with Hannes Mohrschladt, we test whether reference prices impact how investors respond to news. When current prices are farther from a reference price, investors react more strongly to news. We first document that individual investors are more (less) likely to sell a stock following bad (good) news when the stock's trading price is farther from the investor's purchase price. Motivated by this micro-level evidence, we construct a stock-level measure to capture the distance between a stock's trading price and its purchase price for the average investor. We provide evidence that this distance from purchase price produces a substantial amount of cross-sectional variation in the degree to which stocks over- or underreact to news. Stocks trading farthest from their purchase price react more strongly to news than stocks trading near their purchase price. Consistent with relative overreaction, stocks trading farthest from their purchase price also exhibit greater return reversal following news days. We document that a cross-sectional strategy exploiting these return patterns earns a monthly alpha of 0.93%. These findings are distinct from alternative explanations related to size, illiquidity, and volatility. Our evidence instead suggests that reference prices have a meaningful impact on how investors respond to news.

Essays in Behavioral and Corporate Finance

Essays in Behavioral and Corporate Finance PDF Author: Tomas Hernan Reyes Torres
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
This dissertation examines the factors that influence investors' attention to the stock market and the relationship that exists among attention and real output variables including stock returns, trading volume, and volatility. Traditional asset pricing models assume that information is effortlessly obtained and instantaneously incorporated into pricing. This assumption requires that investors devote sufficient attention to the asset, and ignores the existence of various channels through which public information is disseminated. In reality, attention is a scarce cognitive resource which is related to the effort that investors must expend to obtain information; the implications of this contingency of attention on these limitations have been remarkably under-researched in the past. In the first chapter of this study, I familiarize readers with Google Trends data and explain why such data is a better source to proxy for attention than the measures previously used in the literature. Next, utilizing this data, I describe how to measure investors' attention with regard to M\&A announcements, and show that attention is not instantaneous with the release of information, but is, instead, spread over a period surrounding the announcement. Retail investors pay attention and demand information about a firm as the announcement date approaches, during the announcement, and for days afterward. Finally, I present three aggregate measures of attention in the stock market, which are also based on search volume from Google. After constructing these measures, I study how they correlate with, but differ from, existing proxies of attention. In the second chapter, I consider whether limited attention explains the announcement effect bias found in the M\&A literature concerning merger and acquisition announcements. More specifically, I ask: How does variation in investors' attention affect the capital market response to M\&A announcements? To answer this question I rely on the measure for attention to M\&A announcements described in the previous chapter and find that high abnormal attention on the day of announcement predicts high adjusted abnormal returns the day after. This effect is strongest among firms with high standard deviations and betas, and it partially reverses over the following months. The third chapter argues that negative stock market performance attracts more attention from retail investors than comparable positive performance. Specifically, I rely on the three aggregate measures of attention in the stock market to test and confirm the hypothesis that retail investors pay more attention to negative rather than positive extreme returns. Empirical results strongly support that with respect to stock returns investors display this negativity bias in attention allocation. Across all specifications, lagged negative extreme returns are stronger predictors than positive extreme returns of high attention at the stock and market level. I rule out that negative returns are stronger simply because they are more unusual or because negative and positive returns are not symmetrical events to stockholders.

Three Essays on Asset Pricing and Behavioral Finance

Three Essays on Asset Pricing and Behavioral Finance PDF Author: Huijing Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay, we develop a model to study the role of CSR costs in the cross-section of stock returns. Our CAPM-based model predicts CSR factors are priced in the cross-section of stock returns. We then empirically test the implication of our pricing model by using data from MSCI ESG. The univariate analysis reveals that the quantile portfolio with the lowest CSR (social or environmental) cost beta significantly outperforms the highest CSR cost beta portfolio. In addition, we find negative and significant risk premiums on both the environmental and social risk factor. The second essay reports the results of three experimental studies that investigate the impact of moral identity (MI) on individuals' financial decision-making. Study 1 suggests that individuals' MI is negatively related to the willingness to invest (WTI) in an immoral portfolio. Study 2 shows that individuals with a low MI have a higher WTI for an immoral portfolio only when they are incentivized by a higher financial return. Study 3 reveals that when immoral stocks provide a higher return incentive, individuals with low MI do have a higher WTI, but only when they perceive themselves to be distant from the immoral company. When individuals perceive themselves to be physically close to an immoral company, they are less sensitive to the return incentive and their WTI is lower. In the third essay, we study human capital from the perspective of ex ante health perception. We obtain search volume data of medical symptoms from Google Trends and follow the methodology of Da, Engelberg, and Gao, (2015). We propose that increased (decreased) search volume of medical symptoms implies an ex ante decline (increase) in the value of health oriented human capital. We then use the inverse of our health concern index to proxy the health dimension of human capital (denoted as HHC). We estimate stock exposure (beta) to the HHC, and a univariate analysis reveals the highest HHC beta portfolio significantly outperforms the lowest HHC beta portfolio. Also, our results suggest that the HHC is positively priced in the cross-section of stock returns.

Theory and Reality in Financial Economics

Theory and Reality in Financial Economics PDF Author: George M. Frankfurter
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9812707913
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
A collection of essays dealing with financial markets' imperfections, and the inability of neoclassical economics to deal with such imperfections. This book argues that financial economics, as based on the tenets of neoclassical economics, cannot answer or solve the real-life problems that people face.

Essays in Behavioral Finance and Asset Pricing

Essays in Behavioral Finance and Asset Pricing PDF Author: Jun Wu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Essays on Behavioral Finance and Asset Pricing

Essays on Behavioral Finance and Asset Pricing PDF Author: Chen Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

Essays in Corporate Finance and International Asset Pricing

Essays in Corporate Finance and International Asset Pricing PDF Author: Xiangdong Mao
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description