Heterogeneous Expectations and Bond Markets

This paper presents a dynamic equilibrium model of bond markets, in which two groups of agents hold heterogeneous expectations about future economic conditions. Our model shows that heterogeneous expectations can not only lead to speculative trading, but can also help resolve several challenges to standard representative-agent models of the yield curve. First, the relative wealth fluctuation between the two groups of agents caused by their speculative positions amplifies bond yield volatility, thus providing an explanation for the "excessive volatility puzzle" of bond yields. In addition, the fluctuation in the two groups' expectations and relative wealth also generates time-varying risk premia, which in turn can help explain the failure of the expectation hypothesis. These implications, essentially induced by trading between agents, highlight the importance of incorporating heterogeneous expectations into economic analysis of bond markets.

What Does Stock Ownership Breadth Measure?

Using holdings data on a representative sample of all Shanghai Stock Exchange investors, we show that increases in ownership breadth (the fraction of market participants who own a stock) predict low returns: highest change quintile stocks underperform lowest quintile stocks by 23% per year. Small retail investors drive this result. Retail ownership breadth increases appear to be correlated with overpricing. Among institutional investors, however, the opposite holds: Stocks in the top decile of wealth-weighted institutional breadth change outperform the bottom decile by 8% per year, consistent with prior work that interprets breadth as a measure of short-sales constraints.

Financial Innovation, Investor Behavior, and Arbitrage: Implications from the ETF Market

Regular and levered ETFs are markedly different financial innovations. Regular ETFs improve liquidity: they are more liquid than their underlying stocks. In contrast, although the levered ETF market has a substantially higher turnover, it also has a significantly higher bid-ask spreads and larger price impacts. Our interpretation is that levered ETFs are appealing to short-term levered speculators. The aggregate cost levered ETF investors incur is around 10% of the market capitalization, or around $2 billion, each year. Moreover, regular ETF investors appear to be momentum traders, while levered ETF investors are contrarians: For regular (levered) ETFs, their monthly fund flows are strongly positively (negatively) correlated with past returns. Finally, arbitrage forces push ETF prices partially towards their NAVs, and this mechanism is less effective for levered ETFs than for regular ones

A Search Model of the Aggregate Demand for Safe and Liquid Assets

Safe and liquid assets, such as Treasury bonds, are money-like instruments that command a convenience yield. We analyze this in a search model of two assets that differ in liquidity and safety. In contrast to the reduced-form approach, which puts the safe and liquid asset in utility function, we explicitly model investors\u27 trading needs and the trading friction. One new implication from this approach is that the marginal investor\u27s preference for safety and liquidity is not enough in determining the premium. Instead, the distribution of investors\u27 preferences plays a direct role. Our model implies that an increase in the supply of the liquid asset may increase or decrease the liquidity premium, depending on the distribution of investors\u27 liquidity preference. Our model shows that investors may over- or underinvest in the search technology relative to a central planner, and that overinvestment occurs when investors\u27 expected trading frequency is in the intermediate region

Reputation Concerns and Slow-Moving Capital

Our paper shows that fund managers\u27 reputation concerns induce a preference over the skewness of strategy returns. This preference is non-monotonic in the manager\u27s reputation level: While managers with average reputations prefer negatively skewed strategies, those with very high or very low reputations prefer the opposite. Our model also explains why only negatively skewed strategies tend to suffer from slow-moving capital: A subtle but natural consequence of adopting negatively skewed strategies is that after poor performance, managers\u27 reputations recover slowly. In the meantime, they are unable to raise capital, leaving attractive opportunities unexploited

Personality differences and investment decision-making

We survey thousands of affluent American investors to examine the relationship between personalities and investment decisions. The Big Five personality traits correlate with investors' beliefs about the stock market and economy, risk preferences, and social interaction tendencies. Two personality traits, Neuroticism and Openness, stand out in their explanatory power for equity investments. Investors with high Neuroticism and those with low Openness tend to allocate less investment to equities. We examine the underlying mechanisms and find evidence for both standard channels of preferences and beliefs and other nonstandard channels. We show consistent out-of-sample evidence in representative panels of Australian and German households

Global Perspective or Local Knowledge: The Macro-Information in the Sovereign CDS Market

This paper shows that sovereign CDS spreads can predict future stock index returns, sovereign bond yields, as well as real macroeconomic variables such as GDP and PMI. The predictive power comes almost entirely from the global, rather than country-specific, component of sovereign CDS spreads. This is consistent with the interpretation that the information advantage of sovereign CDS investors is derived from their global perspective rather than their local knowledge about individual countries. Stock and sovereign bond market indices gradually “catch up” with sovereign CDS spreads, mostly during the days surrounding credit rating or outlook changes, and especially for downgrades

Under-reaction in the Sovereign CDS Market

The sovereign CDS market has been growing rapidly in recent years, with a gross notional amount of around 2 trillion dollars in 2015. We document a strong momentum effect in this market. Its unique feature is that this momentum strategy returns are positively skewed and higher during recessions. Hence, this effect cannot be attributed to momentum crash risk or exposure to business cycles. Our evidence is consistent with the interpretation that the effect is due to investors’ initial underreaction to sovereign credit information followed by corrections, especially during public announcements of credit rating or outlook changes of the underlying countries

Financial Intermediation Chains in an OTC Market

This paper analyzes financial intermediation chains in a search model with an endogenous intermediary sector. We show that the chain length and price dispersion among interdealer trades are decreasing in search cost, search speed, and market size but increasing in investors\u27 trading needs. Using data from the U.S. corporate bond market, we find evidence broadly consistent with these predictions. Moreover, as search speed approaches infinity, the search equilibrium does not always converge to the centralized-market equilibrium: prices and allocation converge, but the trading volume might not. Finally, we analyze the multiplicity and stability of the equilibrium

Informed Trading and Expected Returns

Does information asymmetry affect the cross-section of expected stock returns? We explore this question using representative portfolio holdings data from the Shanghai Stock Exchange. We show that institutional investors have a strong information advantage, and that past aggressiveness of institutional trading in a stock positively predicts institutions’ future information advantage in this stock. Sorting stocks on this predictor and controlling for other correlates of expected returns, we find that the top quintile’s average annualized return in the next month is 10.8% higher than the bottom quintile’s, indicating that information asymmetry increases expected returns