Two Essays on Investor Emotions and Their Effects in Financial Markets

This dissertation provides empirical evidences on media-based investor emotions in predicting stock return, conditional volatility, and stock and bond return comovements. We first studied the interaction between US media content and the US stock market returns and volatility. We utilize propriety investor sentiment measures developed by Thompson Reuters MarketPsych. We select four measures of investor sentiment that reflect both pessimism and optimism of small investors. Our objective is two-fold. First, we examine the ability of these sentiment measures to predict market returns. For this purpose, we use dynamic Vector Auto-Regressive models. Second, we are interested in exploring the effects of these sentiment measures on the market returns and volatility. For this purpose, we utilize a Threshold-GARCH model. Next, we investigated the effect of investor emotions (fear, gloom, joy and optimism) in financial futures markets by using Thompson Reuters MarketPsych Indices. The purpose of this study is three fold. First, we investigate the extent of usefulness of informational content of our sentiment measures in predicting stock futures and treasures futures returns using daily data for different measures of emotional sentiments. Second, we investigate whether emotion sentiments affect financial futures returns and volatilities. Third, we explore the role of emotion sentiment factors in volatility transmission in financial futures markets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that extensively explores the role of investors’ sentiment in the most liquid contracts (S&P 500 futures and 10-year Treasury notes) in futures markets

Six papers on computational methods for the analysis of structured and unstructured data in the economic domain

This work investigates the application of computational methods for structured and unstructured data. The domains of application are two closely connected fields with the common goal of promoting the stability of the financial system: systemic risk and bank supervision. The work explores different families of models and applies them to different tasks: graphical Gaussian network models to address bank interconnectivity, topic models to monitor bank news and deep learning for text classification. New applications and variants of these models are investigated posing a particular attention on the combined use of textual and structured data. In the penultimate chapter is introduced a sentiment polarity classification tool in Italian, based on deep learning, to simplify future researches relying on sentiment analysis. The different models have proven useful for leveraging numerical (structured) and textual (unstructured) data. Graphical Gaussian Models and Topic models have been adopted for inspection and descriptive tasks while deep learning has been applied more for predictive (classification) problems. Overall, the integration of textual (unstructured) and numerical (structured) information has proven useful for systemic risk and bank supervision related analysis. The integration of textual data with numerical data in fact, has brought either to higher predictive performances or enhanced capability of explaining phenomena and correlating them to other events.This work investigates the application of computational methods for structured and unstructured data. The domains of application are two closely connected fields with the common goal of promoting the stability of the financial system: systemic risk and bank supervision. The work explores different families of models and applies them to different tasks: graphical Gaussian network models to address bank interconnectivity, topic models to monitor bank news and deep learning for text classification. New applications and variants of these models are investigated posing a particular attention on the combined use of textual and structured data. In the penultimate chapter is introduced a sentiment polarity classification tool in Italian, based on deep learning, to simplify future researches relying on sentiment analysis. The different models have proven useful for leveraging numerical (structured) and textual (unstructured) data. Graphical Gaussian Models and Topic models have been adopted for inspection and descriptive tasks while deep learning has been applied more for predictive (classification) problems. Overall, the integration of textual (unstructured) and numerical (structured) information has proven useful for systemic risk and bank supervision related analysis. The integration of textual data with numerical data in fact, has brought either to higher predictive performances or enhanced capability of explaining phenomena and correlating them to other events

EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATIONS INTO SYSTEMIC RISK, ECONOMIC GROWTH AND INTERDEPENDENCE OF FACTORS IN FAMA-FRENCH FIVE FACTOR ASSET PRICING MODEL

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

The Impact of Complexity, Rate of Change and Information Availability on the Production Planning and Control Structure

The organizational theory literature argues that the more uncertain the environment, the more likely the firm’s operational decision structure is decentralized. However, it remains unclear which uncertainty dimensions (i.e. complexity, rate of change and lack of information) impacts the production planning and control structure the most given today’s turbulent manufacturing environments. Based on 206 responses from medium sized Dutch discrete parts manufacturing firms, this study retests the impact of these uncertainty dimensions. This study indicates that each dimension of uncertainty affects the production planning and control structure in a different way. In general, complexity, rate of change and lack of information result in a decentralization of the operational planning and control decision structure, but at the same time a centralization of the customer-order processing decision structure.empirical research method;production planning and control structure;structural equations model;uncertainty

Analysis of the Association Between Topics in Online Documents and Stock Price Movements

This paper aims at discovering the topics hidden in the newspaper articles that have an impact on movements of stock prices of the corresponding companies. Document topics are characterized by combinations of specific words in documents and are shared across a document collection. We describe the process of discovering the topics, the creation of a mapping of the topics to stock price movements, and quantifying and evaluating the results. As the method for finding and quantifying the association, we use machine learning-based classification. We achieved an accuracy of stock price movement predictions higher than 70 %. A feature selection procedure was applied to the features characterizing the topics in order to facilitate the process of assigning a label to the topic by a human expert.O

Reconstructing dynamical networks via feature ranking

Empirical data on real complex systems are becoming increasingly available. Parallel to this is the need for new methods of reconstructing (inferring) the topology of networks from time-resolved observations of their node-dynamics. The methods based on physical insights often rely on strong assumptions about the properties and dynamics of the scrutinized network. Here, we use the insights from machine learning to design a new method of network reconstruction that essentially makes no such assumptions. Specifically, we interpret the available trajectories (data) as features, and use two independent feature ranking approaches -- Random forest and RReliefF -- to rank the importance of each node for predicting the value of each other node, which yields the reconstructed adjacency matrix. We show that our method is fairly robust to coupling strength, system size, trajectory length and noise. We also find that the reconstruction quality strongly depends on the dynamical regime