Two Essays on Effects of Information and Liquidity in Asset Pricing PDF Download

Author: Thomas W. Barkley
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Languages : en
Pages :

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ABSTRACT: Information and liquidity interact when asset prices are to be determined. I study these effects in the price discovery process of the S & P 500 index traded in the cash, futures and options markets, and document that transaction costs and market trading activity proxies are important determinants. I also study the liquidity risk premiums associated with stocks traded on different exchanges, and document that there are multiple aspects to liquidity showing considerable variation over time. Empirical results suggest that some common liquidity measures can be consolidated into two latent liquidity variables: one arising from asymmetric information among traders and another from order processing or direct transaction costs associated with trading the asset. Taken together, my research suggests that traders pay close attention to information asymmetries and fixed costs of trading when evaluating asset prices; this subsequently influences an informed investor's decision regarding the market in which they should transact.

Author: Yangqiulu Luo
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Category : Finance
Languages : en
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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.

Author: Qingqing Chen
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Chishen Wei
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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This dissertation contains two essays that use empirical techniques to shed light on open questions in the asset pricing literature. In the first essay, I investigate whether foreign institutional investors affect stock liquidity in domestic equity markets. The evidence indicates that stocks with higher foreign institutional ownership subsequently experience higher liquidity. However, it is difficult to interpret the causal relation of this finding because institutional investors self-select into more liquid stocks. To solve this problem, I exploit a provision in the 2003 US dividend tax cut which extends tax-relief to dividends from US tax-treaty countries but not to dividends from non-treaty countries. This natural experiment suggests a causal link between foreign institutional investors and liquidity. Consistent with the predictions of theoretical models, I find that liquidity improves due to foreign institutional investors increasing information competition. In the second essay, I introduce a new measure of difference of opinion using mutual fund portfolio weights to test prominent competing theories of the effect of heterogeneous beliefs on asset prices. The over-valuation theory (Miller (1977)) proposes that in the presence of short-sale constraints stock prices reflects only the view of optimistic investors which implies lower subsequent returns. Alternatively, neo-classical asset pricing models (Williams (1977), Merton (1987)) suggest that differences of opinions indicate high levels of information uncertainty or risk which implies higher expected returns. My initial result finds no support for the over-valuation theory. Instead, the measure used in this study finds that high differences of opinion stocks weakly outperform low differences of opinion stocks by 2.42% annually which is more consistent with the information uncertainty explanation.

Author: Xin Zhou
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ISBN:
Category : Assets (Accounting)
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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The second essay examines the effect of a short-sale constraint on risky asset price in a rational expectations model with asymmetric information. Imposing a short-sale constraint creates two competing effects. On one hand, it reduces the risky asset supply and exerts upward pressure on asset price. On the other hand, it forces investors with negative views on asset payoff to be sidelined. The latter effect can reduce the informational efficiency of asset price, which in turn decreases investors' demand for the risky asset. Consequently, imposing a short-sale constraint can bias equilibrium asset price in either direction depending on which effect dominates. Empirical analysis using short interest and institutional ownership data suggests that an increase in short interest relative to shares outstanding for individual stocks reduces informational efficiency measured by the probability of information-based trading and leads to lower risk adjusted stock returns. The effect of short-sale constraint on return volatility is ambiguous.

Author: Zhongzhi Lawrence He
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Category : Assets (Accounting)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The dissertation consists of three essays that address both the theoretical and empirical aspects of characteristics-based asset pricing models. In the first essay, we reformulate a characteristics-based model to demonstrate why firm characteristics explain cross-sectional expected returns. The model is based on an economic setting where the fully-rational group of investors adopts contrarian strategies against the quasi-rational group of investors. The key result is a parsimonious cross-sectional equation that is not only specified by the risk-return relationship, but is also determined by both market-wide and firm-specific adjustments. We offer consistent explanations for the behaviors of growth and value stocks, and also for the prominent cross-sectional patterns such as book-to-market, earnings-to-price, and size effects. In the second essay, we reformulate an asset pricing model where liquidity is an endogenous determinant of expected returns. The key result is that a firm's expected return can be explained by three components: an interest rate term that includes a market-average expected liquidity, a market risk term determined by a weighted average consumption beta, and a firm-specific term determined by a linear deviation of the firm's expected liquidity from that of the market portfolio. We test various empirical implications derived from the theory and find that the expected liquidity effect and the size effect are significant, but the risk-return relationship is flat in the Canadian market. In the third essay, we propose a characteristics-based asset-pricing model from an ex post perspective. We examine the widely used empirical procedure that groups stocks into portfolios by sorting firm characteristics, showing that the exhibited systematic patterns may be largely due to the way of forming portfolios. We design a new portfolio approach and perform robustness tests for the cross-sectional relationships between risk, liquidity, and returns using Canadian stock market data. We find a strong liquidity-return relationship and a significant risk-return relationship when conditioning on realized returns. Both the risk effect and the liquidity effect are highly robust across different portfolio formations.

Author: Nardos M. Beyene
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ISBN:
Category : Capital assets pricing model
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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The main objective of my three essays is to incorporate liquidity shocks and the linkages between the liquidity condition of financial markets into asset pricing and valuation models. The first essay focuses on the liquidity adjusted capital asset pricing model, while the second and the third essays examine the popular asset valuation model called the Fed model. The first essay investigates the pricing of the commonality risk in the U.S. stock market by using a more comprehensive market illiquidity measure that can reflect the liquidity condition of different asset markets. This measure is given by the yield difference between commercial paper and treasury bill. In addition, consistent with the definition of commonality risk, I form portfolios based on the sensitivity of each stock's illiquidity to the market-wide illiquidity. Using monthly data from January 1997 to December 2016 and the conditional version of the Liquidity-adjusted Capital Asset Pricing Model (LCAPM) estimated by the Dynamic Conditional Correlation approach, I find a significant commonality risk premium of 0.022% and 0.014% per year for 12-month and 24-month holding periods, respectively. This premium estimate is significantly higher than those found using the market illiquidity measure and estimation procedures from previous studies. These findings provide evidence that a security's easiness in terms of tradability at times of liquidity dry up is extremely important. It is also higher than the excess return associated with other forms of liquidity risk. In addition, the paper finds a variation in the estimated commonality risk premium over time, with values being higher during periods of market turmoil. Moreover, estimating the LCAPM with the yield difference between commercial paper and treasury bill as a measure of market illiquidity performs better in predicting returns for the low commonality risk portfolios. The second essay examines the inflation illusion hypothesis in explaining the high correlation between government bond yield and stock yield as implied by the Fed model. According to the inflation illusion hypothesis, there is mis-pricing in the stock market due to the failure of investors to adjust their cash flow expectation to inflation. This led to a co-movement in stock yield and government bond yield. I use the Gordon Growth model to determine the mis-pricing component in the stock market. In the next step, the correlation between bond yield and stock yield is estimated using the Asymmetric Generalized Dynamic Conditional Correlation (AG-DCC) model. Finally, I regress this correlation on mis-pricing and two other control variables, GDP and inflation. I use monthly data from January 1983 to December 2016. Consistent with the Fed model, the paper finds a significant positive correlation between the yield on government bonds and stock yield, with an average correlation of 0.942 - 0.997. However, in contrast to the inflation illusion hypothesis, mis-pricing in the stock market has an insignificant impact on this correlation. The third essay provides liquidity shocks contagion between the stock market and the corporate bond market as the driving force behind the high correlation between the yield on stocks and the yield on government bonds as implied by the Fed model. The idea is that when liquidity drops in the stock market, firms' credit risk rises because the deterioration in the liquidity of equities traded in the stock market increases the firms' default probability. Consequently, investors' preferences shift away from corporate bonds to government bonds. Higher demand for government bonds keeps their yield low, leading to a co-movement of government bond yield and stock yield. In order to test this liquidity-based explanation, the paper first examines the interdependence between liquidity in the stock and corporate bond markets using the Markov switching model, and a time series non-parametric technique called the Convergent Cross Mapping (CCM). In order to see the response of government bond yield and stock yield to liquidity shocks in the stock market, the study implements an Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model. Using monthly data from January 1997 to December 2016, the paper presents strong evidence of liquidity shocks transmission form the stock market to the corporate bond market. Furthermore, liquidity shocks in the stock market are found to have a significant impact on the stock yield. These findings support the illiquidity contagion explanation provided in this paper.

Author: Jingjing Chen
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ISBN:
Category : Information behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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This dissertation consists of two essays that study the effects of information transmission on asset pricing under dynamic settings. My first essay studies the pricing of earnings announcement risk. Earnings announcements present a clear risk to investors and, under rational asset pricing theory, such risk should be consistently priced in stocks. However, I find that stocks with high earnings announcement risk earn significantly higher returns only during months when firms have earnings or M&A announcements. Moreover, the higher returns are realized mostly around the date of announcements. The findings seem to suggest that the risk premium is accrued concurrently when investors adjust stock valuation in response to significant information events. I provide additional evidence to substantiate the conjecture based on the effects of information updates and investor information consumption.My second essay investigates market excess returns around scheduled macroeconomic news announcements. Prior literature documents significantly positive market excess returns implied from CAPM (i.e., the coefficient of market beta) and significantly positive realized market excess returns on scheduled macroeconomic announcement days. In this study, I find that market excess return swings from negative on the day before, to positive on the day of, and negative again on the day after announcements. The average market excess returns, both implied and realized, over the three-day announcement window are insignificant. I show that market excess returns around macroeconomic announcements are primarily driven by a mood swing, i.e., changes of investor appetite toward risk. Specifically, investors become highly risk-averse prior to announcement but are much less so on the announcement day. I also show that uncertainty resolution at best partially accounts for the swing of market excess returns.

Author: Andrei I. Nikiforov
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ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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In these essays, I identify the effects of earnings seasons (i.e., the clustering of earnings releases), on stock market liquidity and asset pricing. In the first essay, I document strong seasonal regularities associated with aggregate earnings announcements. Applying the large body of literature linking earnings announcements to liquidity effects, I argue that these earnings seasons create market-wide liquidity shocks and I show that both liquidity betas and liquidity risk change during earnings seasons In the second essay, I test the impact of earnings seasons on commonality in liquidity as measured by both spreads and depths. I find that commonality significantly decreases during the four weeks of each calendar quarter when most companies release their earnings. These findings contribute to the literature by identifying and examining the clustering effect of firm-specific information on commonality in liquidity. In the third essay, I extend the study of the liquidity effects of earnings seasons to a sample of 20 countries. I find that the international data corroborate both hypotheses. I also find that the aggregate quality of accounting information, and the duration and frequency of interim reporting periods are important determinants of the liquidity effects (both liquidity betas and commonality in liquidity) during earnings seasons.

Author: Ying Wu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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The empirical research focuses on the common risk factors in stock returns and trading activities. The first essay is titled "Asset Pricing with Extreme Liquidity Risk". Defining extreme liquidity as the tails of illiquidity for all stocks, I propose a direct measure of market-wide extreme liquidity risk and find that extreme liquidity risk is priced cross-sectionally in the U.S. equity market. From 1973 through 2011, stocks in the highest quintile of extreme liquidity risk loadings earned value-weighted average returns 6.6% per year higher than stocks in the lowest quintile. The extreme liquidity risk premium is robust to common risk factors related to size, value and momentum. The premium is different from that on aggregate liquidity risk documented in Pástor and Stambaugh (2003) as well as that based on tail risk of Kelly (2011). Extreme liquidity estimates can offer a warning sign of extreme liquidity events. Predictive regressions show that extreme liquidity measure reliably outperforms aggregate liquidity measures in predicting future market returns. Finally, I incorporate the extreme liquidity risk into Acharya and Pedersen's (2005) framework and find new supporting evidence for their liquidity-adjusted capital asset pricing model. The second essay is co-authored with Prof. Andrew Karolyi. We have developed a multi-factor returns-generating model for an international setting that captures how restrictions on investability or accessibility can matter. The model works reasonably well in a wide variety of settings. More specifically, using monthly returns for over 37,000 stocks from 46 developed and emerging market countries over a two-decade period, we propose and test a multi-factor model that includes factor portfolios based on firm characteristics and that builds separate factors comprised of globally-accessible stocks, which we call "global factors," and of locally-accessible stocks, which we call "local factors." Our new "hybrid" multi-factor model with both global and local factors not only captures strong common variation in global stock returns, but also achieves low pricing errors and rejection rates using conventional testing procedures for a variety of regional and global test asset portfolios formed on size, value, and momentum. In the third essay, I examine the implications of the Lo and Wang (2000, 2006) mutual fund separation model in the cross-sectional behavior of global trading activity. It demonstrates that return-based factors work poorly around the world. On average across countries, market-wide turnover captures 37% of all systematic turnover components in individual stock trading, and two additional Fama and French (1993) factor turnovers increase the explanatory power by 23%. Similarly Lo and Wang's (2000) turnovers only capture on average 64% of all systematic turnover components. Using this multi-factor asset pricing-trading framework, a horserace is further performed to explore other factors in return by examining the turnover behavior of different factor mimicking portfolios. All the return-based factors capture at most 67% of the common variation in trading, suggesting that stock pricing and trading volume may not be compatible around the world. In cross-country analysis, the explanatory power of the returnbased factor model varies substantially across countries and markets, with better performance for European developed markets and China. Surprisingly, in North America, Japan and most emerging markets there are larger amounts of commonality in trading, mostly higher than 47 %, for reasons other than return motive.