Too Small or too Low? New Evidence on the 4-Factor Model

The aim of this paper is to study the pricing factor structure of Italian equity returns. Using twenty five years of data, we focus on the role of other risk factors besides the market beta, namely size, book to market, and momentum. A two step empirical analysis is provided where first we estimate an unrestricted multi-factor model to test if there is any evidence of misspecification. Then, we estimate the restricted model, i.e. with pricing errors equal to zero, through the Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM). We find that the market premium and the size premium for stocks are confirmed for a domestic Italian investor. On the contrary, according to our asset pricing tests, weak evidence is found for the value premium. Finally, we highlight, coherently with recent evidence on other countries but in contrast with previous evidence for the Italian stock market, that augmenting the model with a momentum factor does not improve its performance.the Fama-French factors; size effect; value premium; GMM; momentum anomaly

Do U.S. Analysts Improve the Local Information Environment of Cross-Listed Stocks? Evidence from Recommendation Revisions

We investigate the role of U.S. analysts in facilitating home market information transmission for firms from 40 countries cross-listed in the U.S.. Recommendation revisions by U.S. analysts lead to significantly higher (lower) abnormal returns (volumes) in the home market compared to those by local analysts. This U.S.-location premium to information production cannot be explained by a bonding or certification role of U.S. analysts or differences in broker or analyst characteristics. Our results suggest that U.S. analysts facilitate U.S. investors’ access to foreign firms’ home markets and improve the information environment particularly in countries where the local analyst advantage is smaller

Market response to news: rationality and conformism in an euro-dollar exchange rate model

This paper examines the determinants of the Euro/US Dollar exchange rate during the 2003-2011 period to investigate the possible effects of the financial crisis on dynamics of the Euro-Dollar rate. We use an EGARCH (3,1) news-type model with thrice-daily frequency data to represent three temporal trading zones with unscheduled news in addition to the traditional scheduled macroeconomic news. In line with some behavioral finance insights, we find that when comparing pre-crisis and post crisis periods there are noticeable differences in agents’ attitudes across the three trading time zones in terms of asymmetric reactions, over/under-reactions to news, policies and fundamentals variables