Blue horseshoe loves
Insider Trading in Supervised Industries
David Reeb, Yuzhao Zhang & Wanli Zhao
Journal of Law and Economics, August 2014, Pages 529-559
Abstract:
We investigate the impact of government agency oversight, such as by the Federal Reserve, on insider trading at the firm level. Regulatory supervision potentially limits trading based on material, nonpublic information, as it provides another layer of corporate governance to mitigate outflows of private information. Yet regulators themselves may serve as a source of information leakage, thereby facilitating insider-trading activity. We find, first, that in comparison to nonsupervised firms, supervised firms exhibit substantially greater trading based on inside information prior to earnings announcements. Second, in the first few days after firms provide private information to regulators or when regulators possess private information inaccessible to corporate insiders, these firms exhibit greater symptoms of insider trading. Finally, within a given supervised industry, insider-trading symptoms appear more pronounced when regulators exhibit greater leniency or operate in states with more political corruption. These insider-trading activities translate into over $1 billion in annual transfers.
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Thar SHE Blows? Gender, Competition, and Bubbles in Experimental Asset Markets
Catherine Eckel & Sascha Füllbrunn
American Economic Review, February 2015, Pages 906-920
Abstract:
Do women and men behave differently in financial asset markets? Our results from an asset market experiment show a marked gender difference in producing speculative price bubbles. Mixed markets show intermediate values, and a meta-analysis of 35 markets from different studies confirms the inverse relationship between the magnitude of price bubbles and the frequency of female traders in the market. Women's price forecasts also are significantly lower, even in the first period. Implications for financial markets and experimental methodology are discussed.
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Rumor Has It: Sensationalism in Financial Media
Kenneth Ahern & Denis Sosyura
Review of Financial Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
The media has an incentive to publish sensational news. We study how this incentive affects the accuracy of media coverage in the context of merger rumors. Using a novel dataset, we find that accuracy is predicted by a journalist's experience, specialized education, and industry expertise. Conversely, less accurate stories use ambiguous language and feature well-known firms with broad readership appeal. Investors do not fully account for the predictive power of these characteristics, leading to an initial target price overreaction and a subsequent reversal, consistent with limited attention. Overall, we provide novel evidence on the determinants of media accuracy and its effect on asset prices.
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Benjamin Blau, Jared DeLisle & McKay Price
Journal of Corporate Finance, April 2015, Pages 203–219
Abstract:
Recent research finds that investors, broadly defined, react to the linguistic tone of quarterly earnings conference calls; there is a positive relation between firms' stock returns and call tone (a measure of “sentiment” related word tabulations). However, this type of soft information can be subtle, context-specific, and difficult to interpret. Moreover, the literature suggests cross-sectional variation in information processing skills among investors. Thus, we test whether sophisticated investors interpret earnings conference call tone differently than investors at large by examining short selling activity and its relation to earnings conference call tone. We find that short sellers target firms with simultaneous high earnings surprise and abnormally high management tone. The combination of positive earnings surprise and unusually positive tone strengthens short sellers' return predictability. This result indicates that short sellers interpret revealed “inflated” call language by managers more completely than naïve investors. The incomplete stock price reaction by naïve investors due to the lack of reliability they place on this soft information results in overpricing of the stock. However, it also suggests that managers are unable to maintain prolonged overvaluation of their stock by striking an overly optimistic posture in the interactive conference call disclosure forum since short sellers' trades provide additional price discovery.
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Tips and Tells from Managers: How Analysts and the Market Read Between the Lines of Conference Calls
Marina Druz, Alexander Wagner & Richard Zeckhauser
NBER Working Paper, February 2015
Abstract:
Stock prices react significantly to the tone (negativity of words) managers use on earnings conference calls. This reaction reflects reasonably rational use of information. “Tone surprise” – the residual when negativity in managerial tone is regressed on the firm’s recent economic performance and CEO fixed effects – predicts future earnings and analyst uncertainty. Prices move more, as hypothesized, in firms where tone surprise predicts more strongly. Experienced analysts respond appropriately in revising their forecasts; inexperienced analysts overreact (underreact) to tone surprises in presentations (answers). Post-call price drift, like post-earnings announcement drift, suggests less-than-full-use of information embedded in managerial tone.
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The hidden face of the media: How financial journalists produce information
Congcong Li
University of Maryland Working Paper, December 2014
Abstract:
This study investigates how the media produces information. Using a sample of 296,497 Wall Street Journal news articles, I find that news articles written by experienced and reputable financial journalists are more informative about future earnings. I then examine the source of such information advantage by studying the detailed quotes from news articles. I further find that these journalists rely more heavily on first-hand access to management, institutional investors, and other external experts, an important channel through which they produce informative news. Interestingly, however, this information advantage is present only when the experienced and reputable journalists remain independent — for those journalists that repeatedly cover the same firm or rely primarily on information from management, the networking information advantage is completely muted. These results suggest that the quality of the media as an information intermediary depends critically on individual journalists’ ability to access information from industry networks and provide unbiased news.
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Hedge Funds and Stock Market Efficiency
Joni Kokkonen & Matti Suominen
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We measure misvaluation using the discounted residual income model. As shown in the literature, this measure of stocks' misvaluation significantly explains their future cross-sectional returns. We measure the market-level misvaluation (market inefficiency) by the misvaluation spread: the difference in the misvaluation of the most overvalued and undervalued shares. We show that the misvaluation spread is a strong predictor of a misvaluation-based long–short portfolio’s returns, reinforcing the hypothesis that it proxies for the level of mispricing in the stock market. Using data on hedge fund returns, hedge fund industry assets under management, flows, and individual hedge fund holdings, we present evidence that hedge funds' trading reduces market-level misvaluation. Our results are robust across different time periods and are not driven by market liquidity. Moreover, we find that mutual funds do not have the price-correcting effect that hedge funds have.
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Trust and Investment Management: The Effects of Manager Trustworthiness on Hedge Fund Investments
Ankur Pareek & Roy Zuckerman
Rutgers Working Paper, October 2014
Abstract:
This paper studies the effect of perceived manager trustworthiness on hedge fund investment. Controlling for past-performance, we find that hedge fund managers whose photographs are rated as more trustworthy are able to attract greater fund flows, in the medium performance range, and have a less convex flow-performance relationship compared to the managers rated as less trustworthy. We also find that "trustworthy" managers are more likely to survive given poor past-performance and generate lower risk-adjusted returns when compared to managers who are perceived as less trustworthy. We attribute this phenomenon to over-investment with "trustworthy" managers caused by an investor bias.
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Positive Mood and Investment Decisions: Evidence from Comedy Movie Attendance in the U.S.
Gabriele Lepori
Research in International Business and Finance, May 2015, Pages 142–163
Abstract:
Positive mood has been repeatedly shown to affect decision-making under risk. In this study I exploit the time-series variation in the domestic theatrical release of comedy movies as a natural experiment for testing the impact that happy mood (proxied by weekend comedy movie attendance) has on the demand for risky assets (proxied by the performance of the U.S. stock market). Using a sample of data from 1994 to 2010, I estimate that an increase in comedy attendance on a given weekend is followed by a decrease in equity returns on the subsequent Monday, which is consistent with the mood-maintenance hypothesis.
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Investor Mood and Demand for Stocks: Evidence from Popular TV Series Finales
Gabriele Lepori
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper I employ a novel discrete mood proxy to investigate the response of the U.S. stock market to exogenous daily variations in investor mood. Drawing upon the psychology and communication literature, which documents that the end of popular TV series causes negative emotional reactions in large numbers of television viewers, I employ major TV series finales (between 1967 and 2012) as mood-altering events. I find that an increase in the fraction of Americans watching a TV show finale on a given day is immediately followed by a decrease in U.S. stock returns. This effect is stronger in small-cap and high-volatility stocks, whose pricing is more sensitive to sentiment, and is consistent with the hypothesis that negative mood reduces the demand for risky assets.
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Contractual incompleteness, limited liability and asset price bubbles
James Dow & Jungsuk Han
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
When should we expect bubbles? Can levered intermediaries bid up risky asset prices through asset substitution? We study an economy with financial intermediaries that issue debt and equity to buy risky assets. Asset substitution alone cannot cause bubbles because it is priced into the intermediaries׳ securities. But incomplete contracts and managerial agency problems can make intermediaries take excessive risk to exploit limited liability, bidding up risky asset prices. This destroys welfare through misallocation of resources. We argue that incentives for private monitoring cannot solve this problem. Finally, even without agency problems, debt subsidies will create similar effects.
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A Comparison of Buy-Side and Sell-Side Analysts
Jeffrey Hobbs & Vivek Singh
Review of Financial Economics, January 2015, Pages 42–51
Abstract:
There is very little research on the topic of buy-side analyst performance, and that which does exist yields mixed results. We use a large sample from both the buy- and sell-side and report several new results. First, while the contemporaneous returns to portfolios based on sell-side recommendations are positive, the returns for buy-side analysts, proxied by changes in institutional holdings, are negative. Second, the buy-side analysts’ underperformance is accentuated when they trade against sell-side analysts’ recommendations. Third, abnormal returns positively relate to both the portfolio size, and turnover of buy-side analysts’ institutions, suggesting that large institutions employ superior analysts and that superior analysts frequently change their recommendations. Abnormal returns are also positively related to buy-side portfolios with stocks that have higher analyst coverage, greater institutional holding, and lower earnings forecast dispersion. Fourth, there is substantial persistence in buy-side performance, but even the top decile performs poorly. These findings suggest that sell-side analysts still outperform buy-side analysts despite the severe conflicts of interest documented in the literature.
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Change You Can Believe In? Hedge Fund Data Revisions
Andrew Patton, Tarun Ramadorai & Michael Streatfield
Journal of Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
We analyze the reliability of voluntary disclosures of financial information, focusing on widely-employed publicly available hedge fund databases. Tracking changes to statements of historical performance recorded between 2007 and 2011, we find that historical returns are routinely revised. These revisions are not merely random or corrections of earlier mistakes; they are partly forecastable by fund characteristics. Funds that revise their performance histories significantly and predictably underperform those that have never revised, suggesting that unreliable disclosures constitute a valuable source of information for investors. These results speak to current debates about mandatory disclosures by financial institutions to market regulators.
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Daniel Bradley, Incheol Kim & Laurie Krigman
Journal of Corporate Finance, April 2015, Pages 186–202
Abstract:
Before the IPO bubble burst, the first day return for IPOs backed by top VCs firms was double that of non-top VCs IPOs. Top VC IPOs were also twice as likely to receive all-star analyst coverage and suffered twice as large negative returns upon lockup expiration. We argue that this was not a coincidence. Underwriters benefited from underpricing vis-à-vis allocation strategies whereas VCs gain from information momentum which allows them to cash-out at higher prices at lockup expiration. All-stars are a scarce resource underwriters allocate to their best clients (Top VCs) who bring them repeat business. Post-bubble, regulatory shocks restricted preferential IPO allocations and reduced the value of all-star coverage. Consequently, these relations disappeared indicating that regulatory changes likely had the desired effect.
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The Real Effects of Short-Selling Constraints
Gustavo Grullon, Sébastien Michenaud & James Weston
Review of Financial Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use a regulatory experiment (Regulation SHO) that relaxes short-selling constraints on a random sample of U.S. stocks to test whether capital market frictions have an effect on stock prices and corporate decisions. We find that an increase in short-selling activity causes prices to fall, and that small firms react to these lower prices by reducing equity issues and investment. These results not only provide evidence that short-selling constraints affect asset prices, but also confirm that short-selling activity has a causal impact on financing and investment decisions.
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How Quickly Do Markets Learn? Private Information Dissemination in a Natural Experiment
Robert Jackson, Wei Jiang & Joshua Mitts
Columbia University Working Paper, December 2014
Abstract:
Using data from a unique episode in which the SEC disseminated securities filings to a small group of private investors before releasing them to the public, we provide a direct test of the process through which private information is impounded into stock prices. Because the delay between the time when the filings were privately distributed and when the filings were made public was randomly distributed, our setting provides a rare natural experiment for examining how markets process new private information. We find that it takes minutes — not seconds — for informed traders to incorporate fundamental information into stock prices. We also show that the private investors who had early access to fundamental information profited more, and convey more information into stock prices, when the delay before the filings are released to the public is longer. More importantly, the rate at which information is impounded into stock prices is more correlated with the length of the predicted delay before public release than the actual delay, suggesting that informed investors trade strategically. Our study serves as the modern counterpart to Koudijs’s (2014a) study on insider trading on eighteenth-century stock exchanges — except, in our case, week-long sailing voyages have been replaced by modern electronic transmission as the conduit for information flows.
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Joining the conversation: How quiet is the IPO quiet period?
Matthew Cedergren
NYU Working Paper, December 2014
Abstract:
This study evaluates the IPO quiet period, which restricts managers' ability to publicly communicate in the weeks immediately following the IPO. I investigate the effectiveness of and compliance with the quiet period for a sample of 3,380 IPOs from 1996 through 2011, and report several key findings. Firms significantly increase their communication immediately after the quiet period expires, and this manifests in more firm-specific information in returns. While this suggests the quiet period rules are effective on average, I find that there is non-random variation across firms in this effectiveness. In particular, the marginal effect of increased communication on firm-specific information processed by the market is greater for firms which are harder to value or receive less-than-expected attention in the aftermarket. Moreover, notwithstanding overall effectiveness, I find wide variation in the level of compliance with the quiet period, and that firms benefit from non-compliance. In particular, firms with more quiet period "loudness" obtain more analyst attention and are more likely to meet or beat future consensus forecasts. Collectively, the results suggest that [1] the quiet period rules prevent investors from learning useful information in a timely manner, and [2] a lack of SEC enforcement provides advantages to firms that violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the rules. This calls into question whether the IPO quiet period rules — essentially unchanged for over 80 years — remain relevant and useful in modern equity markets.
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Are Firms in "Boring" Industries Worth Less?
Jia Chen, Kewei Hou & René Stulz
NBER Working Paper, January 2015
Abstract:
Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability have on average higher market-to-book ratios than firms in low dispersion industries. This positive relation between market-to-book ratios and industry profitability dispersion is economically large and statistically significant and is robust to controlling for variables used to explain firm-level valuation ratios in the literature. Consistent with the mispricing explanation of this finding, we show that firms in less boring industries have a lower implied cost of equity and lower realized returns. We explore alternative explanations for our finding, but find that these alternative explanations cannot explain our results.
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Should you globally diversify or let the globally diversified firm do it for you?
Javeria Farooqi, Daniel Huerta & Thanh Ngo
Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines whether investor-made international diversification outperforms corporate international diversification. Our results indicate that internationally diversified firms yield higher returns relative to investor-made internationally diversified portfolios. Our results partially offer an explanation for the ‘home bias puzzle’, which argues that international asset holdings in individual portfolios remain significantly lower than forecasted by analysts despite the integration of global capital markets. However, as firms increase the number of geographic segments, the excess returns are lower. Additionally, firms that belong to durables, energy, manufacturing, shops and telecommunication industries have higher excess returns relative to other industries. Overall, our results suggest that investors will earn higher returns by investing in globally diversified MNCs rather than by attempting to build mimicking internationally diversified portfolios.
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Home away from Home: Geography of Information and Local Investors
Gennaro Bernile, Alok Kumar & Johan Sulaeman
Review of Financial Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
We develop a 10-K-based multidimensional measure of firm locations. Using this measure, we show that firm-level information is geographically distributed and institutional investors are able to exploit the resulting information asymmetry. Specifically, institutional investors overweigh firms whose 10-K frequently mentions the investors' state even when those firms are not headquartered locally and earn superior returns on those stocks. These ownership and performance patterns are stronger among hard-to-value firms. Local investor performance increases with the degree of local bias and with the local economic exposure of portfolio firms. Overall, geographical variation in firm-level information generates economically significant location-based information asymmetry.
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(How) has the market become more efficient?
Stephen Bertone, Imants Paeglis & Rahul Ravi
Journal of Banking & Finance, May 2015, Pages 72–86
Abstract:
Using a portfolio of Dow Jones Industrial Average index constituents and the index ETF, we document significant intraday deviations from the law of one price. These are especially pronounced at very short time intervals. The extent of deviations is related to volatility, liquidity, and transaction costs of both the index constituents and the ETF. Further, the influence of news arrival, and liquidity (volatility) shocks on the deviations persists for several hours. Finally, we document significant decline (by at least 80%) in the deviations between 1998 and 2010. We find that this decline is largely due to decimalization, the repeal of the uptick rule, and the introduction of automated updating of the NYSE order book. Overall, our findings indicate an increase in operational market efficiency.
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Does transparency imply efficiency? The case of the European soccer betting market
Anastasios Oikonomidis, Alistair Bruce & Johnnie Johnson
Economics Letters, March 2015, Pages 59–61
Abstract:
We discover mispricing in an apparently transparent market - the European soccer betting market. Efficiency differences between countries are accounted for by variations in league competitiveness. We conclude that barriers to efficiency (e.g., risk evaluation problems) may remain in transparent markets.
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Why Stay-at-Home Investing Makes Sense
Martha O’Hagan-Luff & Jenny Berrill
International Review of Financial Analysis, March 2015, Pages 1–14
Abstract:
Despite the benefits of international diversification investors continue to display a preference for home based investments. Given this preference we investigate whether it is possible to mimic the benefits of international diversification via domestically traded products. We test this from the perspective of US investors for 37 countries between 1996 and 2011. We seek to replicate the equity index of each country with domestically traded US products such as Industry Indices, Multinational Corporations, American Depository Receipts, single country iShares ETFs and Closed-End Country Funds to investigate whether the benefits of international diversification can be exhausted domestically. While the benefits of investing overseas vary significantly across sub-periods, portfolios of US-traded products can replicate 36 of the 37 foreign country indices. These findings are robust to variance in the performance and volatility of the US market relative to other markets. US investors do not need to invest overseas to reap the benefits of international diversification.
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Can the Bond Price Reaction to Earnings Announcements Predict Future Stock Returns?
Omri Even-Tov
University of California Working Paper, January 2015
Abstract:
In this paper I show that the bond price reaction to earnings announcements has predictive power for post-announcement stock returns and that it is incremental to previously documented accounting-related anomalies. I find that bonds’ predictive ability is driven by non-investment grade bonds, for which earnings releases provide more value-relevant information. It is also stronger in firms with a lower proportion of institutional shareholders and for bonds whose trading is more heavily dominated by sophisticated investors. This suggests that the greater level of investor sophistication in the bond market relative to the stock market is what gives bond returns the ability to predict future stock returns. By demonstrating that a firm’s bond price reaction to an earnings announcement can predict future stock returns, this paper adds to the literature which documents that various earnings components also have predictive ability for post-announcement stock returns.