Crisis and extremism: can a powerful extreme right emerge in a modern democracy? Evidence from Greece’s Golden Dawn

By local and international standards, Golden Dawn (GD) is at the far end of Extreme Right, yet it has emerged as Greece’s third largest party, gaining most of its electoral support within months, in early 2012. Its electoral rise has been attributed to the severe economic crisis the country had previously and since experienced. We investigate this remarkable case study econometrically, using both panel vote-share, and individual vote-intent regressions. Dramatic changes in parameters provide congruent evidence that GD’s success was due to a change in voter behaviour, rather than changes in individual characteristics or contextual conditions. Around one third of this change was due to GD’s success in taking ownership of the previously ownerless niche issues of immigration and law-and-order; the remaining change is attributed to its success in attracting financially distressed voters and voters fitting a typical Extreme Right demographic. Auxiliary evidence suggests this change was driven by a massive realignment of voters fleeing mainstream parties, after a coalition government imposed harsh austerity measures

A tug of war: overnight versus intraday expected returns

We link investor heterogeneity to the persistence of the overnight and intraday components of returns. We document strong overnight and intraday firm-level return continuation along with an offsetting cross-period reversal effect, all of which lasts for years. We look for a similar tug of war in the returns of 14 trading strategies, finding in all cases that profits are either earned entirely overnight (for reversal and a variety of momentum strategies) or entirely intraday, typically with profits of opposite signs across these components. We argue that this tug of war should reduce the effectiveness of clienteles pursuing the strategy. Indeed, the smoothed spread between the overnight and intraday return components of a strategy generally forecasts time variation in that strategy's close-to-close performance in a manner consistent with that interpretation. Finally, we link cross-sectional and time-series variation in the decomposition of momentum profits to a specific institutional tug of war

A tug of war: overnight versus intraday expected returns

We decompose the abnormal profits associated with well-known patterns in the cross-section of expected returns into their overnight and intraday components. We show that, on average, all of the abnormal returns on momentum strategies remarkably occur overnight while the abnormal profits on the other trading strategies we consider occur intraday. These patterns are extremely robust across subsamples and indeed are stronger for large-cap and high-price stocks. Furthermore, we find that all of the variables that are anomalous with respect to the Fama-French-Carhart model have risk premiums overnight that partially offset their much larger intraday average returns. Indeed, a closer look reveals that in every case a positive risk premium is earned overnight for the side of the trade that might naturally be deemed as riskier. In fact, we show that an overnight CAPM explains much of the cross-sectional variation in average overnight returns we document. Finally, we argue that investor heterogeneity may explain why momentum profits tend to accrue overnight. We first provide evidence that, relative to individuals, institutions prefer to trade during the day and against the momentum characteristic. We then highlight conditional patterns that reveal a striking tug of war. Either in the time series, when the amount of momentum activity is particularly low, or in the cross-section, when the typical institution holding a stock has a particularly strong need to rebalance, we find that momentum returns are even larger overnight and more strongly reverse during the day. Both cases generate variation in the spread between overnight and intraday returns on the order of 2 percent per month

Electoral misgovernance cycles: evidence from wildfires and tax evasion in Greece and elsewhere

We present detailed empirical evidence that around Greek elections, misgovernance results in significant increases in wildfires and tax evasion and with important economic implications: the cumulative cost of these effects in recent years has been over 8% of GDP and has therefore been a contributing factor to Greece’s debt crisis and any effect this has had on the global economy. We interpret this evidence as a type of misgovernance which arises from electoral cycles in two types of incumbent incentives: (i) to allocate effort or attention between governing vs. campaigning; and/or (ii) to adopt even very inefficient redistributive policies if they benefit special interests with a lead over when the costs are observed. While these incentives may manifest differently among countries, our analysis suggests that electoral cycles everywhere may be much more multifaceted and harmful than previous literature suggests

Financial Returns and Efficiency As Seen By An Artificial Technical Analyst

We introduce trading rules which are selected by an artificially intelligent agent who learns from experience - an Artificial Technical Analyst. These rules restrict the data-mining concerns associated with the use of 'simple' technical trading rules as model evaluation devices and are good at recognising subtle regularities in return processes. The relationship between the efficiency of financial markets and the efficacy of technical analysis is investigated and it is shown that the Artificial Technical Analyst can be used to provide a quantitative measure of market efficiency. We estimate this measure on the DJIA daily index from 1962 to 1986 and draw implications for the optimal behaviour of certain classes of investors. It is also shown that the structure of technical trading rules commonly used is consistent with utility maximisation for risk neutral agents and in a myopic sense even for risk-averse agents

Risk neutral forecasting

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020