We propose a new, valuation-based measure of world equity market segmentation. While we observe decreased levels of segmentation in many countries, the level of segmentation remains significant in emerging markets. We characterize the factors that account for variation in market segmentation both through time as well as across countries. Both a country's regulation with respect to foreign capital flows and certain nonregulatory factors are important. In particular, we identify a country's political risk profile and its stock market development as two additional local segmentation factors as well as the U.S. corporate credit spread as a global segmentation factor.
Accounting rules, through their interactions with capital regulations, affect financial institutions’ trading behavior. The insurance industry provides a laboratory to explore these interactions: life insurers have greater flexibility than property and casualty insurers to hold speculative-grade assets at historical cost, and the degree to which life insurers recognize market values differs across U.S. states. During the financial crisis, insurers facing a lesser degree of market value recognition are less likely to sell downgraded asset-backed securities. To improve their capital positions, these insurers disproportionately resort to gains trading, selectively selling otherwise unrelated bonds with high unrealized gains, transmitting shocks across markets.
We identify a new channel for the transmission of shocks across international markets. Investor flows to funds domiciled in developed markets force significant changes in these funds' emerging market portfolio allocations. These forced trades or “fire sales” affect emerging market equity prices, correlations, and betas, and are related to but distinct from effects arising purely from fund holdings or from overlapping ownership of emerging markets in fund portfolios. A simple model and calibration exercise highlight the importance to these findings of “push” effects from funds' domicile countries and “co-ownership spillover” between markets with overlapping fund ownership.
Relative performance is central to investment management and yet relative performance securities do not trade directly. Complex trading strategies must be devised to capture relative gains. This paper introduces a suite of relative performance indexes and index derivatives that offer new and attractive payoff structures. We illustrate a variety of ways in which the products can provide a more efficient and cost-effective means of realizing investment objectives than can traditional futures and options markets.
On Thursday, December 14, leaders in public finance, private equity, venture capital, hedge funds and investment management convened at the Kenan Center in Chapel Hill to discuss 2018 investment challenges and opportunities. The 2018 Investment Outlook forum was sponsored by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.
We examine the trading behavior of particularly intensive traders, those who contribute the most to daily trading volume, and provide new evidence that is consistent with the presence of informational advantages. Using a unique Chinese data set of the most active daily market participants for each stock, we demonstrate that intensive traders’ buying (selling) predicts large positive (negative) abnormal returns, both unconditionally and, in particular, around key, value-relevant announcements.
We construct a comprehensive panel of trading venue-level short sales and examine where short sellers exploit their information advantage. We examine the tradeoff that informed traders weigh between transaction costs and execution probability posited by Hendershott and Mendelson (2000), Ye (2011), and Zhu (2014), and find that short sales comprise a greater proportion of exchange trading than of dark pool trading. Furthermore, exchange short sales are more informative than dark pool short sales about future price moves. We find evidence of increased exchange short sales and exchange short sale informativeness prior to corporate news events. Finally, we examine the relationship between several market design characteristics and informed trade. The results provide direct evidence that dark pools attract less informed trade than exchanges do, particularly when information is short lived.
Several influential studies have concluded that earnings surprises just to the right or to the left of a hypothesized bright line produce distinct price reactions compared with surrounding earnings surprises because they convey special meaning. In this study, we examine whether previous inferences of asymmetric stock price reactions to bright-line surprises are observed when empirical tests are designed to be consistent with a rational expectations equilibrium.
This paper argues that the seemingly lower returns on distressed stocks are partly the result of estimation bias and proposes an exact theoretical correction that can be applied in practice.
The recipients of the Kenan Investment Management Fellowships for 2017 were announced by the Institute for Private Capital and Center for Excellence in Investment Management in partnership with the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.
Over 1960 to 2017, we show that a positive risk premium from holding high-beta stocks (versus low-beta stocks) and small-cap stocks (versus large-cap stocks) is reliably earned only after the expected stock-market volatility breaches an approximate top-quintile threshold. The high conditional average returns with this nonlinear risk-return phenomenon are persistently evident over months t+1 to t+6 following a volatility-threshold breach in month t-1.
This study asks whether investors learn differently from gains versus losses. I find experimental evidence that indicates that being in the negative domain leads individuals to form overly pessimistic beliefs about available investment options.
This study examines whether the value a venture derives from an affiliation depends on its relative standing in the portfolio of all affiliations held by its partner. Relative standing refers to how the venture ranks among other ventures in the partner’s portfolio with respect to expected returns. The relative standing of a venture in its partner’s portfolio influences the venture’s access to the partner’s resources and the venture’s performance.
Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi (2008) show that firms with a high probability of default have abnormally low average future returns. We show that firms with a high potential for default (death) also tend to have a relatively high probability of extremely large (jackpot) payoffs.
By 2012, all European Union countries began requiring the disclosure of large short positions. This regime change reduced short interest, bid-ask spreads, and the informativeness of prices. After specific disclosures, short-run abnormal returns are insignificantly negative, but 90-day cumulative abnormal returns are –5.23%.
We revisit the relation between stock market volatility and macroeconomic activity using a new class of component models that distinguish short run from secular movements. We study long historical data series of aggregate stock market volatility, starting in the 19th century, as in Schwert (1989).
We find evidence of systematic optimism and pessimism among credit analysts, comparing contemporaneous ratings of the same firm across rating agencies. These differences in perspectives carry through to debt prices and negatively predict future changes in credit spreads, consistent with mispricing. Moreover, the pricing effects are the largest among firms that are the most opaque, likely exacerbating financing constraints.
Since 2008, the Alternative Investments Conference has served as a forum for private equity, hedge fund, venture capital and other alternative asset professionals to network, share ideas and stay abreast of industry trends. This conference serves as a forum for investment managers, institutional investors and academics to network, share ideas and stay abreast of the latest industry trends.
Except for relatively short but intense episodes of high market risk, average idiosyncratic risk (IR) falls steadily after 2000 until almost the end of our sample period in 2017. The decrease has been such that from 2012 to 2017 average IR was lower than any time since 1965.