Two Essays on Financial Market Behavior

Two Essays on Financial Market Behavior PDF Author: Dazhi Zheng
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Finance
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Two Essays on Financial Market Behavior

Two Essays on Financial Market Behavior PDF Author: Dazhi Zheng
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Finance
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description


Essays on Two Financial Market Anomalies

Essays on Two Financial Market Anomalies PDF Author: Hui Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Essays on Financial Markets and Investor Behavior

Essays on Financial Markets and Investor Behavior PDF Author: Jennifer Chu
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ISBN:
Category : Capitalists and financiers
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Two Essays on Market Behavior

Two Essays on Market Behavior PDF Author: Denys Vitalievich Glushkov
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ISBN:
Category : Corporations
Languages : en
Pages :

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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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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 Trading in Financial Markets

Essays on Trading in Financial Markets PDF Author: Alessia Testa
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ISBN:
Category : Closed-end funds
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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The first part of the thesis consists of three chapters focusing on herd behavior in financial markets. Chapter one reviews the herding literature while chapter two studies a market where informed and noise traders show up sequentially and anonymously in front of a competitive and risk neutral market maker. Traders can in some cases observe whether some of their predecessors were informed, although they cannot observe their private in- formation. This creates an informational asymmetry between the traders and the market maker which generates herd behavior. I find that herd and contrarian behavior is gener- ated more easily in better-informed markets than in poorly informed ones. Informational cascades can never occur and the market learns in the limit. Moreover, I illustrate how a market dominated by herding features a price that is more informative of the asset value than the price of a market where traders always follow their signal. I also discuss how contrarianism has the exact opposite effect by decreasing price informativeness. In chap- ter two I consider the case of multiple trading rooms, where traders can in some cases observe whether some of the predecessors coming from the same room were informed. I first analyze herding conditions for the case of disconnected rooms where agents trading during the same time exhibit information correlation, and find that herding is more likely to occur in a market with positive correlation than in a market without correlation. I then link rooms by means of a network structure which dictates which rooms' predecessors one can observe. I check whether it is possible for a trader to herd with traders outside his own neighborhood instead of with his direct neighbors. I find that the answer to this question is negative and that herding cannot spread from one part of the market to another. Finally, I bring together information correlation and the network structure and I illustrate the example of a market where there are trading histories such that herd behavior can lead to the complete loss of information and, once herding has started, learning can be recovered only if noise traders enter the market. In the second part of the thesis I build a signalling model of delegated portfolio management where the manager can be of different qualities which affect the performance of the closed-end fund under his management. I find that in his effort to appear of high quality, the manager sends signals to the market which affect the share price of the fund in such a way that momentum and reversal are generated. While in the momentum phase, the price accumulates a discount with respect to its net asset value; during the reversal phase, the discount narrows and the price reverses back towards the net asset value of the fund.

Laboratory Investigation of Asset Market Efficiency

Laboratory Investigation of Asset Market Efficiency PDF Author: Katerina Straznicka
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This thesis contains three essays that focus on asset market inefficiency using the experimental method. Financial market efficiency is crucial for good performance of the economy as a whole. Research in behavioral finance has shown that investors do not always behave fully rationally and systematically violate the assumptions of the traditional framework. It is therefore important to fully understand how individuals create their expectations regarding financial decisions, what influences them, how they affect the global market, and therefore financial market efficiency.Individual expectations about a financial decision are influenced by the manner assets are determined. The first essay investigates the impact of skewness of traded assets on first, aggregate market development, second, the way individuals perceive risky assets according to their risk preferences, and third, the stability of the assets' risk perception in time. Our results suggest that assets' skewness influences only marginally the asset market development, but directly effects the individual risk perception.Agents interacting in financial markets are not fully rational. Their decisions are influenced by their preferences, personality traits and the degree they are prone to behavioral biases. We suppose that the personal profile influences individual market behavior, such as trading activity, stock accumulation and performance, and also the aggregate market development, such as price dynamic or turnover of traded assets. This is the objective of the second essay. We find that the personality traits are the best predictors of both individual and aggregate market behavior.The third essay examines whether competitive incentives do contribute to the increase of mispricing in financial markets. If they do, does the extended time horizon of performance comparison help to improve the control against excessive risk-taking and therefore improve financial market efficiency. We find that the bonuses with extended time horizon help to diminish mispricing and improve the financial market efficiency.

Three Essays on Finance, Culture and Investor Behavior

Three Essays on Finance, Culture and Investor Behavior PDF Author: Andreanne Tremblay Simard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation consists of three essays that examine the effects of corporate culture and investor psychology on corporate decisions and financial markets. The first essay focuses on the role of corporate culture in acquisitions, whereas the last two essays investigate deviations from market efficiency. The first essay uses textual analysis of firms annual reports to develop an estimate of the differences in corporate cultures of the combining firms, and finds that greater cultural differences between the firms lead to higher synergistic gains, but only when the acquirer has a stronger culture than its target. The synergy gains concentrate among deals where the acquirers values are not antagonistic to the targets. Further analysis of profitability and productivity (measured as earnings per employee) around the acquisition transaction corroborates these findings. Overall, the evidence suggests that differences in corporate culture are an important driver of announcement returns in mergers and acquisitions. The second essay investigates whether stock misvaluation drives industry-level merger waves by examining intra-wave patterns in acquirers valuation levels in a sample of acquisitions during 1981-2010. The essay contrasts two types of merger waves: stock waves defined on pure stock acquisitions, and cash waves formed on pure cash offers. Consistent with the misvaluation hypothesis, the essay finds that the occurrence of stock merger waves is tightly associated with industry stock valuation, and bidder stock valuation is negatively associated with long-run abnormal returns, especially so during waves of stock mergers. In contrast, there is little evidence of such patterns using the cash wave definition. The third essay investigates the effects of sunshine, wind, rain, snow, and temperature on daily index returns of 49 countries from 1973 to 2012. The paper finds pervasive weather effects that vary across temperature regions (cold, hot, and mild) and months. A hedge strategy that exploits the return predictability of daily weather generates up to 25% (11.8%) annualized out-of-sample gross (net) profits during 1993-2012. The systematic patterns of weather effects together with the relationship between their strength and timing and individuals seasonal propensity to spend time outdoors, suggest a plausible mechanism through which weather-induced mood influences index returns.

Two Essays on Signaling in Financial Markets

Two Essays on Signaling in Financial Markets PDF Author: Kartik Raman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Markets
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Essays on Retail Investor Behavior in Financial Markets

Essays on Retail Investor Behavior in Financial Markets PDF Author: Shushu Liang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation examines the trading behavior of retail investors using large datasets and both causal inference and structural estimation methods. The study has two main objectives: to understand the heterogeneity across different investors and to quantify the price impacts of various trading behaviors. Chapter 1 uses data on account-level stock holdings to quantify the importance of different mechanisms contributing to stock booms and busts during the 2015 Chinese stock market bubble. By estimating a structural model of heterogenous investor demand, I find that retail investors account for 78% of the variance in cross-sectional stock returns, but the contribution of different channels varies as the bubble evolves. Chapter 2 studies retail investors' return-chasing behavior leveraging the same data on 18 million individual equity accounts. I find that return chasing predicts both investor returns and stock returns more strongly than various other investor characteristics. Chapter 3 documents the decline in the average profitability of IPOs in the United States between 2010 and 2022. This work provides valuable insights into the drivers of stock price fluctuations and highlights the importance of understanding investor heterogeneity.