Idiosyncratic Volatility Matter? New Zealand Evidence

Standard asset pricing models ignore idiosyncratic risk. In this study we examine if stock idiosyncratic or unique risk affects returns for New Zealand stocks using the factor portfolio mimicking approach of Fama and French (1993, 1996). We find evidence of a negative relationship between firm size and a stock’s idiosyncratic volatility. Small firms and firms with high idiosyncratic risk also generate positive risk premia after controlling for market returns. We find no evidence of seasonal effects that can explain our findings. Our study provides support for an asset-pricing model with multiple risk factors.Idiosyncratic volatility, Asset Pricing, Unique risk

Small Firm Effect, Liquidity and Security Returns: Australian Evidence

Standard asset pricing models ignore the costs of liquidity. In this study we advance the ongoing debate on empirical asset pricing and test if liquidity costs (as proxied by turnover rate, turnover ratio and bid-ask spread) affect stock returns for Australian stocks. Our tests use the factor portfolio mimicking approach of Fama and French (1993, 1996). We find small and less liquid firms generate positive risk premia after controlling for market returns and firm size. We find no evidence of any seasonal effects that can explain our multifactor asset pricing model findings. In summary, our study provides support for a broader asset-pricing model with multiple risk factors.Liquidity, Turnover, Asset Pricing, and Closing Bid-Ask Spread

The Impact of Disclosure Reform on the NZX's Financial Information Environment

This study investigates the impact of amendments to the New Zealand Exchange's listing rules and the Securities Markets Act 1988 enacted in December 2002. These reforms provided statutory backing for a continuous disclosure listing rule requiring companies to immediately release all price-sensitive information to investors. We follow the methodology employed by Helfin et al. (2003) to test the impact of Regulation FD in the US. Our results show that under New Zealand's continuous disclosure regime analysts' earnings forecast errors did not decline but that analysts' forecasts showed less dispersion in the post-reform period. In respect of informational efficiency we find a smaller abnormal return around the annual earnings announcement date in the post-reform period for small companies. Our results suggest that the reforms have improved the flow of information to investors consistent with the intent of the reform

Historical and Siegel Estimates of the Market Risk Premium in New Zealand

Slides by Associate Professor Alastair Marsden of the Business School at the University of Auckland, presented Historical and Siegel Estimates of the Market Risk Premium in New Zealand at the half-day Regulatory Cost of Capital II: What is the Market Risk Premium

Historical and Siegel Estimates of the Market Risk Premium in New Zealand

Slides by Associate Professor Alastair Marsden of the Business School at the University of Auckland, presented Historical and Siegel Estimates of the Market Risk Premium in New Zealand at the half-day Regulatory Cost of Capital II: What is the Market Risk Premium

The Impact of Disclosure Reform on the NZX's Financial Information Environment

This study investigates the impact of amendments to the New Zealand Exchange's listing rules and the Securities Markets Act 1988 enacted in December 2002. These reforms provided statutory backing for a continuous disclosure listing rule requiring companies to immediately release all price-sensitive information to investors. We follow the methodology employed by Helfin et al. (2003) to test the impact of Regulation FD in the US. Our results show that under New Zealand's continuous disclosure regime analysts' earnings forecast errors did not decline but that analysts' forecasts showed less dispersion in the post-reform period. In respect of informational efficiency we find a smaller abnormal return around the annual earnings announcement date in the post-reform period for small companies. Our results suggest that the reforms have improved the flow of information to investors consistent with the intent of the reform

Cross-border scheduled macroeconomic news impacts: evidence from high-frequency Asia Pacific currencies

The current study utilizes a comprehensive set of influential scheduled macroeconomic announcements released from various developed and emerging markets to investigate the speed and persistence of news impacts on major Asia-Pacific currencies sampled at high frequencies. A richly varied set of findings emerge. In general, we document that the responses to economic news released domestically and from the U.S. are rapid, and there is some evidence of persistency concerning U.S. economic news and news related to the China's purchasing manager index. The currency reactions to asymmetric economic news surprises and the states of the U.S. economy are heterogeneous. Finally, we show that macroeconomic announcements have contributed to the sudden increase in realized volatility and trading volumes of the currencies around the time of announcements

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead