Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Essays In Empirical Asset Pricing, Landon James Ross

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines several empirical questions regarding the determiniation of asset prices. The first chapter studies the effect of firm characteristics’ interactions on the cross-section of expected returns via a modified Fama-Macbeth regression suitable for estima- tion problems involving thousands of firm characteristics. The second chapter estimates eco- nomically significant risks from legally required risk disclosures in public companies annual filings via a novel regression specification designed for the estimation of firm characteristics that are both aligned with expected returns and semantically meaningful. The third chapter examines the aggregate financial consequences of firms’ cash holdings for shareholders.

Essays On Information And Liquidity, Swaminathan Balasubramaniam

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The 2008 financial crisis has highlighted the challenges faced by financial systems in aggregating information, ensuring coordination among various market participants and providing adequate liquidity. In this backdrop, the three chapters of the dissertation explore (i) the role of disagreement in enabling communication and trade among strategic investors (ii) how uncertainty about what others know could be exploited in preventing coordination failures (ii) pricing liquid and illiquid assets in response to unforeseen liquidity demand.

When do competing traders, endowed with different pieces of information pertaining to a security payoff, exchange information before trading? The first essay shows that competing traders …

Essays In Corporate Finance And Machine Learning, Manish Jha

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation focuses on two broad questions. First, why do shareholder’s preferences vary, and how various agents persuade them? And second, how public perceptions about the financial sector and regulations affect economic outcomes? While my research plan contributes to the two distinct fields of literature, a unifying theme of my research is the use of innovative machine learning techniques to overcome the empirical challenges that would typically prevent measuring these sentiments objectively.

In my Chapter 1, I use a supervised machine learning model on mutual fund family’s proxy voting choices to estimate their preferences. I find that hedge fund activists …

Essays In Investments, Lina Han

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Over the past decade, the asset management industry has experienced significant changes, with exponential growth due to the demand from individual investors. Within this context, my dissertation focuses on studying both individual and institutional investors’ behaviors. In Chapter 1, I study individual investors’ behaviors on the Alipay platform. I use unique, individual transaction data from a trading experiment implemented through the Alipay app and the same individuals’ trading history in the financial market. In response to the exogenous price movements in the experiment, investors tend to be contrarian traders. The sophisticated investors tend to be more contrarian than the less …

Essays On Asset Pricing: A Model Comparison Perspective, Lingxiao Zhao

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I focus on theoretical and empirical asset pricing from a Bayesian model comparison perspective. In the first Chapter, revisiting the framework of Barillas and Shanken (2018), BS henceforth, we show that the Bayesian marginal likelihood-based model comparison method in that paper is unsound: the priors on the nuisance parameters across models must satisfy a change of variable property for densities that is violated by the Jeffreys priors used in the BS method. Extensive simulation exercises confirm that the BS method performs unsatisfactorily. We derive a new class of improper priors on the nuisance parameters, starting from a …

On The Wedge Between Theoretical And Actual Prices And Its Implications For Investment Decisions, Luca Pezzo

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

State of the arts equilibrium models explain several financial markets' regularities but still miss many important dimensions. My research investigates the existing wedge between theoretical and actual prices and its implications for investment decisions. In the first chapter, I develop a new approach to locate and quantify the wedge between the main-stream Representative Agent pricing of the U.S. market portfolio and actual data. The determinants of the wedge are high uncertain and illiquid recessionary periods where, according to the marginal pricing rules, more efficient portfolios than the market can be formed. Since illiquidity is a major determinant, chapter two and …

Essays On Financial And Monetary Economics, Xi Wang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first part of this dissertation explores an empirical relevance to understand the equity premium puzzle. Since only the wealthiest people invest significant amounts in the stock market (limited participation), it is reasonable to combine the consumption data of the wealthy, instead of aggregate data, with observed asset returns to estimate the risk aversion coefficient (RRA). I approximate the consumption by the rich from two angles: one explores the income and wealth data to back out synthetic consumption directly, and the other explores the sales data to approximate the expenditure by the rich. By using the created indices, the lowest …

Essays In Financial Economics, Jinji Hao

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the first chapter of my dissertation, I provide a novel framework – the cumulant generating function (cgf) of the market risk on the positive half real line – for studying the market risk which can be replicated by cross sections of index option prices in a model-free manner. Within this unifying framework, independent of the underlying price process, the VIX index measures the height of the cgf at one while the SVIX index proposed by Martin (2016) measures the convexity of the cgf over the interval [0, 2]. A tail index of the market risk, TIX, is proposed based …

Market Risk Management For Financial Institutions Based On Garch Family Models, Qiandi Chen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The financial stock market turned out to rise and fall suddenly and sharply in recent years, which means that volatility and uncertainty is very significant in market and measuring the market risk accurately is of great importance. I collect the historical close price of S&P 500 Financials Sector Index from January 19th 2011 to January 31st 2017, and use the daily logarithm yield as time series data to build 2 ARMA models and 5 GARCH family models using t-distribution. Then I calculate future 10 days’ relative VAR in 1-day horizon under 99\% confidence level based on the selected model. E-GARCH …

Spot Volatility Estimation Of Ito Semimartingales Using Delta Sequences, Weixuan Gao

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies a unifying class of nonparametric spot volatility estimators proposed by Mancini et. al.(2013). This method is based on delta sequences and is conceived to include many of the existing estimators in the field as special cases. The thesis first surveys the asymptotic theory of the proposed estimators under an infill asymptotic scheme and fixed time horizon, when the state variable follows a Brownian semimartingale. Then, some extensions to include jumps and financial microstructure noise in the observed price process are also presented. The main goal of the thesis is to assess the suitability of the proposed methods …