Essays on International Asset Pricing, Cultural Finance, and the Price Effect

Essays on International Asset Pricing, Cultural Finance, and the Price Effect PDF Author: Ulrich Johannes Hammerich
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Essays on International Asset Pricing, Cultural Finance, and the Price Effect

Essays on International Asset Pricing, Cultural Finance, and the Price Effect PDF Author: Ulrich Johannes Hammerich
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Essays in Asset Pricing

Essays in Asset Pricing PDF Author: Man Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book Here

Book Description
This thesis undertakes empirical and theoretical research in asset pricing in both US and Global financial markets, with a particular focus on the financial impact of socially responsible investment (SRI) and implementation of the ICAPM and CCAPM frameworks in the US market. We aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of the financial impact of SRI on the US and Global equity markets and to resolve issues relating to the CCAPM that remain in the asset pricing literature. Prior studies that examine the financial impact of SRI produce mixed findings. Therefore, we begin by reviewing the relevant international literature and stress the importance of selecting appropriate SRI proxies in asset pricing tests. We enrich the literature by identifying areas that need to be carefully considered in constructing an SRI proxy and this will shed new light on the question of what measure of SRI should be used. In the first empirical chapter, we examine the financial impact of SRI on global equity returns, assessing our SRI proxies in the context of standard asset pricing models. We find that SRI has no significant impact on the global equity market. However, since SRI has become an increasingly popular practice only recently, our results may be hampered by data constraints. This motivates the next stage of the analysis wherein we employ the ICAPM framework. In Chapter 3, we formulate a two-factor empirical model under the ICAPM framework and construct SRI proxies by using the economic tracking portfolio method of Lamont (2001) to further examine whether SRI has financial impacts on the US equity market. Our findings in Chapter 3 are consistent with those of Chapter 2. The combined import of our findings in both chapters suggests that investors are free to implement SRI mandates without fear of breaching their fiduciary duties from inferior performance due to incorporating an SRI process. This will encourage the adoption of socially responsible investment strategies in practice. In the final chapter, we examine the empirical validity of the CCAPM that assumes investor's utility is non-separable across states of nature. To our knowledge, it is the first to evaluate the cross-sectional implications of the recursive utility function of Epstein and Zin (1991) by using innovations in consumption growth. Based on these analyses, we conclude that a variable capturing innovations in consumption growth is significantly priced in asset returns.

Essays on International Asset Pricing in Partially Segmented Markets

Essays on International Asset Pricing in Partially Segmented Markets PDF Author: Sundaram Janakiramanan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description


Three Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing in International Equity Markets

Three Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing in International Equity Markets PDF Author: Birgit Charlotte Müller
Publisher: Springer Gabler
ISBN: 9783658354787
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : de
Pages : 147

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this Open-Access-book three essays on empirical asset pricing in international equity markets are presented. Despite being of fundamental economic and scientific importance, international financial markets have remained considerably underresearched until today. In the first essay, the role of firm-specific characteristics is analyzed for the momentum effect to exist in international equity markets. The second essay investigates the validity, persistence, and robustness of the newly discovered capital share growth factor across international equity markets as proposed by Lettau et al. (2019) for the U.S. market. Lastly, the third and final essay studies stock market reactions of European vendor banks to distressed loan sale announcements.

Three Essays on International Asset Pricing

Three Essays on International Asset Pricing PDF Author: Chu-Sheng Tai
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
Abstract: Two dimensions that complicate finance in an international setting are market segmentation and foreign exchange risk. With the increasing globalization of financial markets, these two effects require that many issues such as investment analysis, risk management, asset pricing and capital budgeting confronting financial professionals have to rethink in an international context. My dissertation consists of three essays that intend to address the following questions: "Can time-varying risk premia explain the deviations from Uncovered Interest Parity (UIP)?", "Is foreign exchange risk priced in international financial markets?", and "Are emerging financial markets integrated with world markets?"

Essays in Asset Pricing and International Finance

Essays in Asset Pricing and International Finance PDF Author: Mary Tian
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 115

Get Book Here

Book Description
This thesis consists of three chapters in asset pricing and international finance. In Chapter 1, I examine the effect of tradability, the proportion of a firm's output that is exported, on its stock returns. The empirical patterns are consistent with the adjustment of the relative price of tradable to non-tradable goods, due to endowment shocks. I find firms that produce tradable goods have asset returns and earnings that are twice as cyclical as firms that produce non-tradable goods. A tradable minus nontradable portfolio of stock returns can predict changes in real exchange rates and the relative quantity of exports. A two-country endowment economy model formalizing the relative price mechanism is able to match the empirical facts. In Chapter 2, joint with Leonid Kogan and Roberto Rigobon, we take an openeconomy perspective on consumption growth predictability. We find that the combination of the U.S. and the world real interest rates predicts U.S. consumption growth. Predictability is highly significant, both statistically and economically, and is strongest at horizons of two to three years. The growth rate of consumption of services is more predictable than the growth rate of consumption of nondurable goods. We interpret this evidence using a two-country equilibrium exchange economy model and conclude that the predictive relation between interest rates and consumption growth is likely generated by output shocks in the non-tradable good sector. In Chapter 3, joint with Leonid Kogan, we examine the effects of data snooping on the performance of linear factor models at explaining asset pricing anomalies. We gather 22 anomalies established in the literature and create three-factor models from sorting firms into portfolios with respect to these anomalies. From 1950-2007, half of the factor models we construct can explain 31% or more of anomalies. In comparison, the CAPM and Fama French models rank in the 20th and 40th percentile of models respectively. Factors constructed from sorting by external financing characteristics (net stock issues and composite issuance) are able to explain a large proportion of anomalies. None of the models are able to explain momentum.

Three Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing

Three Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing PDF Author: Amir Akbari
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This thesis explores the role of borrowing frictions, exchange rate risk, and intertemporal demand in stock prices across international financial markets. Specifically, I study how global asset prices are governed, considering the constraints and incentives that investors face when making investment decisions. The first essay adds a new dimension to the research on the dynamics of global market integration, providing an explanation for reversals in market integration via funding illiquidity. I show that when funding capital dries out, investors, unable to borrow and trade freely, fail to facilitate the integration process. Therefore, international asset prices during these periods are explained more by country-specific asset pricing factors than by global asset pricing factors. The second essay explores the role of exchange rate risk and intertemporal demand in international markets. These sources of risk are linked via the interest rate channel and are both likely proxies of the state variables that affect asset prices over time. We carefully disentangle the two risk factors and study the international equity market indices with multiple risk factors in a large cross-section through time. We show that the evidence of global pricing of risk crucially hinges on pooling assets with substantial cross-sectional variation. The third essay introduces a methodological innovation to study the dynamics of the compensation for the intertemporal risk in business cycles. Specifically, we contribute to the empirical asset pricing literature by studying the relative importance of prices of intertemporal risk during recessions, recoveries, and expansions." --

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

Get Book Here

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 on Asset Pricing, Portfolio Choice, and International Finance

Essays on Asset Pricing, Portfolio Choice, and International Finance PDF Author: Maxime Sauzet
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dissertation investigates a number of topics in international finance and macroeconomics, with a particular emphasis on using and adapting tools from asset pricing to this context. Chapter 1, co-authored with Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas and Helene Rey, starts by providing an overview of the structure of the international monetary and financial system. Chapter 2 zooms in on a specific and long-standing open issue that has received a lot of attention in the international finance literature: the international portfolio choice problem, which is concerned with how investors allocate their portfolio internationally. Despite this attention, the literature has only provided limited answers to this problem in terms of resolution methods and the generality of preferences, an issue that I aim to alleviate in this Chapter. Because of its generality, the framework of Chapter 2 lends itself to several applications and extensions. Chapter 3 focuses on one main application, in which I show that the model can reproduce a number of stylized facts about the structure and dynamics of the international financial system, and in particular the role of the United States, and of asset returns in this context. Finally, Chapter 4, co-authored with Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas and Helene Rey, focuses on the secular decline in global real interest rates, another key theme in international finance and macroeconomics. We suggest that the world real rate of interest is likely to remain low or negative for an extended period of time, and discuss a number of possible explanations, an important one being the process of deleveraging of the balance sheets of investors.

Essays on International Portfolio Choice and Asset Pricing Under Financial Contagion

Essays on International Portfolio Choice and Asset Pricing Under Financial Contagion PDF Author: Zhenzhen Fan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789036104852
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The 2008 financial crisis has witnessed prices of assets traded on different exchange markets, of various asset classes, from different geographical locations plunge simultaneously or in close succession, causing serious problems for banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions. It calls for models that account for the unconventional dependence structure of asset prices beyond the classical paradigm. The class of mutually exciting jump-diffusion processes is a promising workhorse for modeling financial contagion in continuous-time finance. The class provides a parsimonious model of jump propagation, allowing for cross-sectional asymmetry and serial dependence through time: a jump that takes place in one asset market today leads to a higher probability of experiencing future jumps in the same market as well as in other markets around the world. This thesis tries to reconsider some of the classical problems in finance, most noticeably asset pricing, portfolio choice, hedging, and valuation, in the presence of contagion. We show that many investment and risk management implications and market efficiency conditions derived from classical models are no longer valid in the context of financial contagion."--Samenvatting auteur.