Selected Essays in Empirical Asset Pricing

Selected Essays in Empirical Asset Pricing
Author: Christian Funke
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 123
Release: 2008-09-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3834998141

Christian Funke aims at developing a better understanding of a central asset pricing issue: the stock price discovery process in capital markets. Using U.S. capital market data, he investigates the importance of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) for stock prices and examines economic links between customer and supplier firms. The empirical investigations document return predictability and show that capital markets are not perfectly efficient.

Three Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing in International Equity Markets

Three Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing in International Equity Markets
Author: Birgit Charlotte Müller
Publisher: Springer Gabler
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2021-08-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9783658354787

In this Open-Access-book three essays on empirical asset pricing in international equity markets are presented. Despite being of fundamental economic and scientific importance, international financial markets have remained considerably underresearched until today. In the first essay, the role of firm-specific characteristics is analyzed for the momentum effect to exist in international equity markets. The second essay investigates the validity, persistence, and robustness of the newly discovered capital share growth factor across international equity markets as proposed by Lettau et al. (2019) for the U.S. market. Lastly, the third and final essay studies stock market reactions of European vendor banks to distressed loan sale announcements.

Essays in Empirical Asset Pricing

Essays in Empirical Asset Pricing
Author: Weike Xu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 93
Release: 2016
Genre: Institutional investors
ISBN:

This dissertation includes two essays. The first essay examines how changes in ownership breadth affect the profitability of 21 anomaly-based strategies. I find that the profitability of these strategies is weaker following a growth in ownership breadth in the prior quarter. The return pattern is primarily attributed to the insignificant returns in the short portfolios. In addition, reduction in short-sale constraints due to increase in the ownership breadth can explain the insignificant return in the short portfolio. The conclusions stay the same after controlling for the common risk factors including the Fama-French three factors and the momentum factor. My results are robust to different size groups, different portfolio weighting methods, an alternative measure of active institutional investors and cross-sectional regression tests. These findings indicate that active institutional investors improve market efficiency. In the second essay, I examine how the relaxation of short-sale constraints affects the readability in financial disclosures using a natural experiment. From 2005 to 2007, the SEC implemented a pilot program in which one-third of the Russell 3000 stocks were randomly selected as pilot stocks and were exempted from short-sale price tests. I find that the readability of 10-K reports for the pilot stocks significantly decreases during the program period. Moreover, the relation between a reduction in short-sales constraint and annual report readability is not uniform in the cross-section. I find that the results are more pronounced for firms that are smaller, less profitable or riskier; for firms that have lower institutional ownership or analyst coverage; and for firms with worse corporate governance or corporate social responsibility. I conclude that Regulation SHO leads to lower readability in the context of financial disclosures.

A Behavioral Approach to Asset Pricing

A Behavioral Approach to Asset Pricing
Author: Hersh Shefrin
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 636
Release: 2008-05-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0080482244

Behavioral finance is the study of how psychology affects financial decision making and financial markets. It is increasingly becoming the common way of understanding investor behavior and stock market activity. Incorporating the latest research and theory, Shefrin offers both a strong theory and efficient empirical tools that address derivatives, fixed income securities, mean-variance efficient portfolios, and the market portfolio. The book provides a series of examples to illustrate the theory. The second edition continues the tradition of the first edition by being the one and only book to focus completely on how behavioral finance principles affect asset pricing, now with its theory deepened and enriched by a plethora of research since the first edition

Two Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing

Two Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing
Author: Yangqiulu Luo
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2013
Genre: Finance
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of two essays on empirical asset pricing. The first essay examines if the idiosyncratic risk is priced. Theories such as Merton (1987) predict that idiosyncratic risk should be priced when investors do not diversify their portfolio. However, the previous literature has presented a mixed set of results of the pricing of idiosyncratic risk. We find strong evidence that idiosyncratic risk is priced differently across bull and bear markets. For the sample period from June 1946 to the end of 2010, a factor portfolio long on stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility and short on stocks with low idiosyncratic volatility yields an equal-weighted monthly return of 1.59% for bull markets but -1.29% for bear markets. These evidences support the hypothesis that investors are rewarded for betting on individual stocks during bull markets and holding more diversified portfolios during bear markets. The second essay examines the role of the limits to arbitrage in the negative effect of liquidity on subsequent stock returns. I hypothesize that if the negative effect persists because of the limits to arbitrage, the effect should be more pronounced when there are more severe limits to arbitrage. My empirical evidence supports the hypothesis. In addition, I find that the effect of the limits to arbitrage on the liquidity anomaly is not correlated to the liquidity risk.

Three Essays on Asset Pricing and Behavioral Finance

Three Essays on Asset Pricing and Behavioral Finance
Author: Huijing Li
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay, we develop a model to study the role of CSR costs in the cross-section of stock returns. Our CAPM-based model predicts CSR factors are priced in the cross-section of stock returns. We then empirically test the implication of our pricing model by using data from MSCI ESG. The univariate analysis reveals that the quantile portfolio with the lowest CSR (social or environmental) cost beta significantly outperforms the highest CSR cost beta portfolio. In addition, we find negative and significant risk premiums on both the environmental and social risk factor. The second essay reports the results of three experimental studies that investigate the impact of moral identity (MI) on individuals' financial decision-making. Study 1 suggests that individuals' MI is negatively related to the willingness to invest (WTI) in an immoral portfolio. Study 2 shows that individuals with a low MI have a higher WTI for an immoral portfolio only when they are incentivized by a higher financial return. Study 3 reveals that when immoral stocks provide a higher return incentive, individuals with low MI do have a higher WTI, but only when they perceive themselves to be distant from the immoral company. When individuals perceive themselves to be physically close to an immoral company, they are less sensitive to the return incentive and their WTI is lower. In the third essay, we study human capital from the perspective of ex ante health perception. We obtain search volume data of medical symptoms from Google Trends and follow the methodology of Da, Engelberg, and Gao, (2015). We propose that increased (decreased) search volume of medical symptoms implies an ex ante decline (increase) in the value of health oriented human capital. We then use the inverse of our health concern index to proxy the health dimension of human capital (denoted as HHC). We estimate stock exposure (beta) to the HHC, and a univariate analysis reveals the highest HHC beta portfolio significantly outperforms the lowest HHC beta portfolio. Also, our results suggest that the HHC is positively priced in the cross-section of stock returns.