Personal Security
Beauty and stock market participation
Hongwu Gan et al.
Journal of Banking & Finance, October 2023
Abstract:
This paper investigates whether beauty, an important natural endowment, affects investment decisions. Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey (WLS), which provides a photo-based measure of facial beauty, we find that better-looking individuals are more likely to own stocks and invest a larger share of wealth in stocks. We consider a wide range of potential mediators that may drive this relationship between beauty and stock market participation. We find that income and sociability explain a large portion of the beauty effect. For both males and females, beauty has a significant positive impact on stock market participation. Using another dataset that includes the interviewer's rating of the respondent's physical attractiveness, we find similar results. Our study contributes to a better understanding of the economic returns to beauty and the source of heterogeneity in household portfolio choice.
Out of the Office: How Does Professional Inattention Impact Retail Investors?
Owen Davidson et al.
BYU Working Paper, August 2023
Abstract:
Accounting and finance research has long recognized that, relative to professional investors, retail investors face a significant trading disadvantage at earnings announcements. We examine the extent to which professional inattention impacts this disadvantage using plausibly exogenous variation induced by annual Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) conferences that draw buy-side analyst attendance. Our evidence suggests professional investors' information advantage is significantly attenuated during these conferences, implying a more level playing field for retail investors. We also find a larger volume of retail trading during earnings announcements concurrent to CFA conferences, and these trades appear more profitable. We conduct several robustness tests to validate that our inferences are driven by CFA conferences. In sum, we provide novel evidence that professional inattention during earnings announcements likely benefits retail traders.
Fragmented Securities Regulation, Information-Processing Costs, and Insider Trading
Sehwa Kim & Seil Kim
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a unique setting where stand-alone banks submit filings to bank regulators instead of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), we examine the consequences of fragmented securities regulation for information-processing costs and opportunistic insider trading. We find the market reaction to insider-trading filings on FDICconnect is less timely than to those on SEC's Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system, suggesting FDICconnect generates higher information-processing costs. We also find only large investors trade more on insider-trading filings on FDICconnect than on insider-trading filings on SEC EDGAR, thus extracting benefits from the delayed market reaction to insider-trading filings on FDICconnect. Finally, we find increased insider selling in stand-alone banks prior to negative earnings news, suggesting insiders' opportunistic use of private information. These findings collectively suggest regulatory fragmentation undermines market efficiency and distorts the level playing field.
Who Profits from Trading Options?
Jianfeng Hu et al.
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use account-level transaction data to examine trading styles and profitability in a leading derivatives market. Approximately 66% of active retail investors predominantly hold simple, one-sided positions in only one class of options, whereas institutional investors are more likely to use complex strategies. Hypothesizing that the complexity of trading styles reflects investors' skills, we examine the effect of options trading styles on investment performance. We find that retail investors using simple strategies lose to the rest of the market. For both retail and institutional investors, selling volatility is the most successful strategy. We conclude that these style effects are persistent and cannot be fully explained by systematic risk exposure.
Initial Margin Requirements and Market Efficiency
Ferhat Akbas, Lezgin Ay & Paul Koch
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine the association between margin requirements and the market's efficiency in incorporating firm-specific and market-level public news. Combining the Fed's 22 changes in margin requirements with a hand-collected sample of earnings announcements between 1934-1975, we show that higher margin requirements induce greater delay in incorporating earnings information into prices. We draw similar conclusions when we analyze the Hou and Moskowitz (2005) price delay measure, as well as indirect measures of leverage constraints over recent years. Further tests suggest that, despite the Fed's expressed intent to curtail excess speculation, higher margin requirements restrict trading by arbitrageurs more than noise traders.
Tokenomics: When Tokens Beat Equity
Katya Malinova & Andreas Park
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In a token offering, investors fund a venture in exchange for tokens that grant rights to future economic output. To many financial industry insiders, tokens have no intrinsic merit and exist only as a way to evade regulations. We demonstrate that generic revenue-based token contracts are indeed economically inferior to equity and lead to over- or underproduction. However, an optimally designed token contract, which is a combination of an output presale and an incremental revenue-sharing agreement, yields the same payoffs as equity and debt. Moreover, with entrepreneurial moral hazard, tokens can finance a strictly larger set of ventures than equity.
The Deterrent Effect of Whistleblowing on Insider Trading
Jacob Raleigh
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
I study whether the Dodd-Frank whistleblower program reduced informed trading by corporate insiders. To identify the effect, I partition firms based on the extent to which this program affected the likelihood of whistleblowing at each firm. I find a relative reduction in trading profits on purchases made by insiders at more affected firms after the program was initiated. I analyze insider sales in settings where they are more likely to be informed and find a reduction in the number of sales before negatively perceived events. The results suggest that whistleblower protections and rewards can effectively deter insider trading.
Portfolio Management in Private Equity
Gregory Brown, Celine Yue Fei & David Robinson
NBER Working Paper, September 2023
Abstract:
General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5,925 global investments from 1999 to 2016, we show that these portfolio considerations are important for understanding fund-level private equity returns. The largest investments in PE funds typically have the lowest returns on average, but are also the least risky. Returns and risk are both increasing in industry or geographic concentration. And while GP-specific return variation (e.g., skill) only accounts for 4%-6% of the total return variation of a typical investment, it accounts for around 40% of the return variation at the fund level. These findings show that GPs use portfolio construction, and not just deal selection, to seek risk-adjusted fund-level returns.