Evaluating Brazilian mutual funds with stochastic frontiers

We evaluate the performance of 307 Brazilian stock mutual funds employing stochastic frontiers. We list the top ten actively managed funds and the bottom ten for the period April 2001-July 2003, and show that a fund's efficiency increases with management skill to beat the market. We also find that portfolios with low volatility tend to be more efficient. Yet we find no relationship between fund size and performance, though this might be blurred by a survivorship bias.

DEA investment strategy in the Brazilian stock market

This paper presents a multi-period investment strategy using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in the Brazilian stock market. Results show that the returns based on the DEA strategy were superior to the returns of a Brazilian stock index in most of the 22 quarters analyzed, presenting a significant Jensen's alpha.

Delegated Portfolio Management and Risk Taking Behavior

Standard models of moral hazard predict a negative relationship between risk and incentives; however empirical studies on mutual funds present mixed results. In this paper, we propose a behavioral principal-agent model in the context of professional managers, focusing on active and passive investment strategies. Using this general framework, we evaluate how incentives affect the risk taking behavior of managers, using the standard moral hazard model as a special case; and solve the previous contradiction. Empirical evidence, based on a comprehensive world sample of 4584 mutual funds, gives support to our theoretical model.

Pessimistic Foreign Investors and Turmoil in Emerging Markets: the case of Brazil in 2002

Using survey data, we document that foreign-owned institutions became more pessimistic than locally owned institutions about the strength of the Brazilian currency around the 2002 presidential elections. As a result of their relative pessimism, foreign-owned institutions made larger forecast errors. Consistent with the emergence of their relative pessimism, foreign investors heavily sold Brazilian stocks and the Brazilian currency in futures markets ahead of the 2002 elections. Periods of stronger foreign sell-off were associated with larger equity price declines and larger depreciation of the Brazilian Real in spot and futures markets. These results are consistent with foreign investors’ relative lack of knowledge of Brazilian institutions contributing to the sharp depreciation of the Brazilian currency and stock market ahead of the 2002 presidential elections.

The law of corporate groups in Portugal

After the pioneering German “Aktiengesetz” of 1965 and the Brazilian “Lei das Sociedades Anónimas” of 1976, Portugal has become the third country in the world to enact a specific regulation on groups of companies. The Code of Commercial Companies (“Código das Sociedades Comerciais”, abbreviately hereinafter CSC), enacted in 1986, contains a unitary set of rules regulating the relationships between companies, in general, and the groups of companies, in particular (arts. 481° to 508°-E CSC). With this set of rules, the Portuguese legislator has dealt with one of the major topics of modern Company Law. While this branch of law is traditionally conceived as the law of the individual company, modern economic reality is characterized by the massive emergence of large-scale enterprise networks, where parts of a whole business are allocated and insulated in several legally independent companies submitted to an unified economic direction. As Tom HADDEN put it: “Company lawyers still write and talk as if the single independent company, with its shareholders, directors and employees, was the norm. In reality, the individual company ceased to be the most significant form of organization in the 1920s and 1930s. The commercial world is now dominated both nationally and internationally by complex groups of companies”. This trend, which is now observable in any of the largest economies in the world, holds also true for small markets such as Portugal. Although Portuguese economy is still dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises, the organizational structure of the group has always been extremely common. During the 70s, it was estimated that the seven largest groups of companies owned about 50% of the equity capital of all domestic enterprises and were alone responsible for 3/4 of the internal national product. Such a trend has continued and even highlighted in the next decades, surviving to different political and economic scenarios: during the 80s, due to the process of state nationalization of these groups, an enormous public group with more than one thousand controlled companies has been created (“IPE - Instituto de Participações do Estado”); and during the 90s until today, thanks to the reprivatisation movement and the opening of our national market, we assisted to the re-emergence of some large private groups, composed of several hundred subsidiaries each, some of which are listed in foreign stock exchange markets (e.g., in the banking sector, “BCP – Banco Comercial Português”, in the industrial area, “SONAE”, and in the media and communication area, “Portugal-Telecom”)

Policy mix, public debt management, and fiscal rules - lessons from the 2002 Brazilian crisis

Despite significant progress in economic reformthroughout the 1990s, and an exemplary development of the policymaking framework in the second part of the decade, Brazil suffered a major public debt and currency crisis in 2002. Though the political origin of the uncertainty cannot be ignored, the author identifies other sources of uncertainty emanating from the policymaking framework: fiscal policy was not responsive to the shocks, public debt instruments were used with several objectives (to stabilize the currency and to lengthen maturity) and there was inadequate supervision of agents holding public debt. Most of the flaws have been fixed following the crisis: a) The primary fiscal balance has been increased, sending the signal that it is a flexible instrument that will be used to ensure commitment of the sovereign to honor its obligations. b) The central bank formally transferred to the Treasury the remaining debt-issuance functions, facilitating a more adequate balancing of different risks involved in debt management. c) Mutual funds'public debt holdings are better regulated, ensuring that end-investors have the proper information to assess the risk of the institutions in which they invest.Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Strategic Debt Management,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Economic Stabilization,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance

Brazil's Financial System: Resilience to Shocks, no Currency Substitution, but Struggling to Promote Growth

Brazil has evolved a financial system with a smaller presence of public banks and larger participation of foreign banks, less directed credit, and well capitalized banks. Over the years it has been resilient to shocks and was able to preserve the real value of savings in the system, thus avoiding both dollarization and desintermediation. However, reducing the cost and increasing the volume of credit in the economy remains a challenge. Notwithstanding these hurdles, recent advances in the regulation of the financial system should pave the way for better intermediation and higher growth.

Stochastic frontiers of efficiency for Brazilian investment funds: A panel data analysis

Foundations, methodological and empirical possibilities of measurement and analysis in the performance of financial investments within investment funds have been developed since they were once introduced in the 1970s, thus establishing a path of growing acceptance in financial markets and universities'' academies. The first approaches over the efficiency of these funds, considering their stochastic implications, occurred in the late 1990s and have evolved with the help of SFA - Stochastic Frontier Analysis, although it still needs more careful verification. This article measured and analyzed the stochastic frontier of efficiency over 33 different Brazilian investment funds from 2012 to 2015. For doing so, Battese and Coelli's (1995) specifications was used. It shows the effects of inefficiencies, which are defined as explicit functions of specific factors in the context of panel data funds. They are estimated by the maximum likelihood method. Sharpe ratios (SR) were also calculated for comparative purposes. Based on these two indicators (SFA and SR), the most recommendable funds to invest and the ones in which the application should not be performed were identified. Such procedures have stimulated the necessary and promising studies, as well as future researches, which, in turn, may establish new methodological formulation as an efficient and effective instrument to choose the best and the safest funds to invest