Investor heterogeneity and the cross-section of U.K. investment trust performance

We use the upper and lower bounds derived by Ferson and Lin (2010) to examine the impact of investor heterogeneity on the performance of U.K. investment trusts relative to alternative linear factor models. We find using the upper bounds that investor heterogeneity has an important impact for nearly all investment trusts. The upper bounds are large in economic terms and significantly different from zero. We find no evidence of any trusts where all investors agree on the sign of performance beyond what we expect by chance. Using the lower bound, we find that trusts with a larger disagreement about trust performance have a weaker relation between the trust premium and past Net Asset Value (NAV) performance

Measuring and Modeling Risk Using High-Frequency Data

Measuring and modeling financial volatility is the key to derivative pricing, asset allocation and risk management. The recent availability of high-frequency data allows for refined methods in this field. In particular, more precise measures for the daily or lower frequency volatility can be obtained by summing over squared high-frequency returns. In turn, this so-called realized volatility can be used for more accurate model evaluation and description of the dynamic and distributional structure of volatility. Moreover, non-parametric measures of systematic risk are attainable, that can straightforwardly be used to model the commonly observed time-variation in the betas. The discussion of these new measures and methods is accompanied by an empirical illustration using high-frequency data of the IBM incorporation and of the DJIA index

Land of Addicts? An Empirical Investigation of Habit-Based Asset Pricing Models

A popular explanation of aggregate stock market behavior suggests that assets are priced as if there were a representative investor whose utility is a power function of the difference between aggregate consumption and a “habit” level, where the habit is some function of lagged and (possibly) contemporaneous consumption. But theory does not provide precise guidelines about the parametric functional relationship between the habit and aggregate consumption. This makes for- mal estimation and testing challenging; at the same time, it raises an empirical question about the functional form of the habit that best explains asset pricing data. This paper studies the ability of a general class of habit-based asset pricing models to match the conditional moment restrictions implied by asset pricing theory. Our approach is to treat the functional form of the habit as unknown, and to estimate it along with the rest of the model’s finite dimensional parameters. This semiparametric approach allows us to empirically evaluate a number of interesting hypotheses about the specification of habit-based asset pricing models. Using stationary quarterly data on consumption growth, assets returns and instruments, our empirical results indicate that the estimated habit function is nonlinear, the habit formation is internal, and the estimated time-preference parameter and the power utility parameter are sensible. In addition, our estimated habit function generates a positive stochastic discount factor (SDF) proxy and performs well in explaining cross-sectional stock return data. We find that an internal habit SDF proxy can explain a cross-section of size and book-market sorted portfolio equity returns better than (i) the Fama and French (1993) three-factor model, (ii) the Lettau and Ludvigson (2001b) scaled consumption CAPM model, (iii) an external habit SDF proxy, (iv) the classic CAPM, and (v) the classic consumption CAPM

Collective investments for pension savings: Lessons from Singapore's central provident fund scheme

opinions are solely those of the authors who acknowledge research support from the Wharton-SM

U.S. monetary policy and herding: Evidence from commodity markets

This paper investigates the presence of herding behavior across a spectrum of commodities (i.e., agricultural, energy, precious metals, and metals) futures prices obtained from Datastream. The main novelty of this study is, for the first time in the literature, the explicit investigation of the role of deviations of U.S. monetary policy decisions from a standard Taylor-type monetary rule, in driving herding behavior with respect to commodity futures prices, spanning the period 1990-2017. The results document that the commodity markets are characterized by herding, while such herding behavior is not only driven by U.S. monetary policy decisions, but also such decisions exert asymmetric effects this behavior. An additional novelty of the results is that they document that herding is stronger in discretionary monetary policy regimes.N/

Exploring the conditional performance of UK unit trusts

We evaluate the conditional performance of U.K. equity unit trusts using the approach of Lynch and Wachter (2007, 2008) relative to three conditional linear factor models. We find significant time variation in the conditional performance of some trust portfolios and individual trusts using the lag term spread as the information variable. The conditional performance of the trusts is countercyclical and larger trusts have more countercyclical performance than smaller trusts within certain investment sectors. These patterns in conditional trust performance cannot be fully explained by the underlying securities that the trusts hold

The pricing of exchange risk in emerging stock markets

In this paper, we provide new evidence about the unconditional pricing of exchange risk in the stock market, based on emerging market data. We conduct empirical tests using cross-sectional data at the market, portfolio and firm level from nine emerging markets (EMs) to determine whether exchange risk is priced under alternative model specifications and exchange rate measures. Our results support the hypothesis of a significant unconditional exchange risk premium in emerging stock markets, differently from most unconditional tests for major developed markets. However, there is indication that at the aggregate market level the significance of the exchange risk factor is subsumed by local market risk. With firm-level data, although the importance of local market is confirmed for most countries, some measure of exchange rate risk remains significant for most countries. This suggests that a careful model specification is necessary for EMs when testing for the pricing of exchange risk in order to avoid a potential spurious significance of such factor because of a missing local risk or vice versa. Journal of International Business Studies (2006) 37, 372–391. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400204