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Bubbly Booms And Welfare, Feng Dong, Yang Jiao, Haoning Sun Jul 2024

Bubbly Booms And Welfare, Feng Dong, Yang Jiao, Haoning Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

We show the competing effects of a housing bubble on the real economy by developing a multi-sector dynamic model with housing production. On the one hand, firms can sell or collateralize their housing, so a housing bubble helps firms obtain credit to finance their investment and expand production. On the other hand, a boom in the housing sector crowds out labor in the non-housing sector. We show that housing booms can reduce social welfare both in the steady state and in the transitional dynamics only when the production externalities in the non-housing sector are sufficiently large. We quantitatively evaluate our …


Green Transition And Financial Stability: The Role Of Green Monetary And Macroprudential Policies And Vouchers, Ying Tung Chan, Maria Teresa Punzi, Hong Zhao Apr 2024

Green Transition And Financial Stability: The Role Of Green Monetary And Macroprudential Policies And Vouchers, Ying Tung Chan, Maria Teresa Punzi, Hong Zhao

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

This paper analyzes a mix of alternative policies in supporting the green transition and the phase-out of fossil fuels, without compromising financial stability. An environmental dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (E-DSGE) model with two sectors (green and brown) and endogenous default is developed to assess potential climate-induced financial stability threats that can be mainly generated through physical and transition risks mechanism. Those risks are evaluated through a compound capital depreciation shock and a carbon tax shock. The paper offers several findings. First of all, a too stringent carbon tax would increase the medium-term default rate in both sectors, harming financial stability …


Local Institutional Investors And Corporate Monitoring: Evidence From Cross-Listed Korean Stocks In The Us Market, Changhwan Choi, Chune Young Chung, Jun Myung Song Jan 2024

Local Institutional Investors And Corporate Monitoring: Evidence From Cross-Listed Korean Stocks In The Us Market, Changhwan Choi, Chune Young Chung, Jun Myung Song

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Using Korean firms that are cross-listed in the US market, this paper investigates whether there are standalone effects of geographic and market proximity of institutional investors on monitoring performance. We find that Korean institutional ownership is negatively associated with earnings management while the US institutional ownership has no impact on earnings management. This suggests that there is the geographic proximity advantage over the market proximity advantage in the emerging markets. Furthermore, we also show that the impact of geographic proximity is stronger for firms with high informational opacity


Geographic Links And Predictable Returns, Zuben Jin, Frank Weikai Li Jan 2024

Geographic Links And Predictable Returns, Zuben Jin, Frank Weikai Li

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Using establishment-level data of U.S. public firms, we construct a novel measure of geographic linkage between firms. We show that the returns of geography-linked firms have strong predictive power for focal firm returns and fundamentals. This effect is distinct from other cross-firm return predictability and is not easily attributable to risk-based explanations. It is more pronounced for focal firms that receive lower investor attention, are more costly to arbitrage, and during high sentiment periods. The cross-firm information spillovers and return predictability are also stronger for geographic peers with economic linkages and with positive information. Our results are broadly consistent with …


Market For Manipulable Information, Hui Chen, Jian Sun Jan 2024

Market For Manipulable Information, Hui Chen, Jian Sun

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study how investors, firms, and information sellers interact in a market with manipulable information. To better predict the firm characteristics they care about, investors can buy a score from a monopolistic information seller, which aggregates signals that are subject to firm manipulation. The average degree of signal manipulability has no effect on the equilibrium, while the uncertainty about manipulability becomes a new source of noise. Its contribution depends on firms' incentive to manipulate the signals, which in turn depends on the equilibrium price sensitivity to the score. The optimal design of the score weighs signal precision against the endogenous …


How Commonality Persists? (Through Investors' Sentiment And Attention), Chyng Wen Tee, Raja Velu, Zhaoque Zhou Dec 2023

How Commonality Persists? (Through Investors' Sentiment And Attention), Chyng Wen Tee, Raja Velu, Zhaoque Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Studies on commonality generally attribute the variation in asset returns to the variation in order flows. In this research study, we show that order flows do not predict asset returns, rather their relationship have been static over time. Thus we model both returns and the order flows as endogenous variables, and use investors' sentiment and attention as exogenous factors via a reduced-rank regression. We provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that cross-sectional commonality in attention (sentiment) is linearly (nonlinearly) associated with both returns and order flows at the intraday level, while the sentiment and attention measures themselvesexhibit a nonlinear mutual relationship, …


In Search Of Cryptocurrency Failure, Donglian Ma, Jun Tu, Zhaobo Zhu Dec 2023

In Search Of Cryptocurrency Failure, Donglian Ma, Jun Tu, Zhaobo Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper explores the determinants of cryptocurrency failure and the pricing of crypto failure risk. We document different significant market- and characteristic-based predictors for coin and token failures. The introduction of Bitcoin futures and the outbreak of COVID19 affect the importance of many predictors. Investors require extra return for bearing high failure risk of crypto assets. The return difference across high and low failure risk crypto assets is not explained by the market, size and momentum factors in the cryptocurrency market. Finally, investors benefit from diversifying into high failure risk crypto assets that is little correlated with the stock market.


Legal Risk And Insider Trading, Marcin Kacperczyk, Emiliano Sebastian Pagnotta Dec 2023

Legal Risk And Insider Trading, Marcin Kacperczyk, Emiliano Sebastian Pagnotta

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Do illegal insiders internalize legal risk? We address this question with hand-collected data from 530 SEC (the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) investigations. Using two plausibly exogenous shocks to expected penalties, we show that insiders trade less aggressively and earlier and concentrate on tips of greater value when facing a higher risk. The results match the predictions of a model where an insider internalizes the impact of trades on prices and the likelihood of prosecution and anticipates penalties in proportion to trade profits. Our findings lend support to the effectiveness of U.S. regulations' deterrence and the long-standing hypothesis that insider …


Housing Fever In Australia 2020-23: Insights From An Econometric Thermometer, Shuping Shi, Peter C. B. Phillips Sep 2023

Housing Fever In Australia 2020-23: Insights From An Econometric Thermometer, Shuping Shi, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

Australian housing markets experienced widespread and, in some cases, extraordinary growth in prices between 2020 and 2023. Using recently developed methodology that accounts for fundamental economic drivers, we assess the existence and degree of speculative behaviour, as well as the timing of exuberance and downturns in these markets. Our findings indicate that speculative behaviour was indeed present in six of the eight capital cities at some time over the period studied. The sequence of events in this nation-wide housing bubble began in the Brisbane market and concluded in Melbourne, Canberra, and Hobart following the interest rate rise implemented by the …


Does Abstract Thinking Facilitate Information Processing? Evidence From Financial Analysts, Frank Weikai Li, Rong Wang, Yang Yu, Gloria Yang Yu Sep 2023

Does Abstract Thinking Facilitate Information Processing? Evidence From Financial Analysts, Frank Weikai Li, Rong Wang, Yang Yu, Gloria Yang Yu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study whether abstract thinking – an essential cognitive trait established by psychological and neuroscientific studies – facilitates analysts’ information processing. Exploiting analysts’ questions during earnings calls, we construct an Abstract Thinking Index (ATI) that measures their tendency to involve abstract words, logical reasoning, broader topics, and future outlooks. We find that abstract thinking improves analysts’ forecast accuracy and recommendation informativeness. Consistent with abstract thinking featuring identifying central characteristics and comprehending intangible things, ATI has stronger effects for firms with fundamentals co-moving more with peers and less tangible information. Additional analyses suggest that ATI captures analysts’ cognitive traits rather than …


What Drives The Value Of Financial Analysts’ Advice? The Role Of Earnings And Growth Forecasts, Ohad Kadan, Leonardo Madureira, Rong Wang, Tzachi Zach Sep 2023

What Drives The Value Of Financial Analysts’ Advice? The Role Of Earnings And Growth Forecasts, Ohad Kadan, Leonardo Madureira, Rong Wang, Tzachi Zach

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We offer a parsimonious index at the individual analyst level to measure the extent to which an analyst relies on earnings and long-term growth forecasts in producing her advice. Using this index, we evaluate the contribution of earnings and growth forecasts to the investment value of analysts’ stock recommendations. We find that the fraction of analysts’ advice attributed to forecasts varies considerably across analysts and sectors. The investment value of recommendations is higher for analysts who rely less on their forecasts and more on other sources of information when forming investment advice. Investors recognize the superiority of recommendations from analysts …


Seeking Better Sharpe Ratio Via Bayesian Optimization, Peng Liu Jul 2023

Seeking Better Sharpe Ratio Via Bayesian Optimization, Peng Liu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Developing an excellent quantitative trading strategy to obtain a high Sharpe ratio requires optimizing several parameters at the same time. Example parameters include the window length of a moving average sequence, the choice of trading instruments, and the thresholds used to generate trading signals. Simultaneously optimizing all these parameters to seek a high Sharpe ratio is a daunting and time-consuming task, partly because of the unknown mechanism determining the Sharpe ratio. This article proposes using Bayesian optimization to systematically search for the optimal parameter configuration that leads to a high Sharpe ratio. The author shows that the proposed intelligent search …


Disagreement In Market Index Options, Guilherme Salome, George Tauchen, Jia Li Jun 2023

Disagreement In Market Index Options, Guilherme Salome, George Tauchen, Jia Li

Research Collection School Of Economics

We generate new evidence on disagreement among traders in the S&P 500 options market from high-frequency intraday price and volume data. Inference on disagreement is based on a model where investors observe public information but agree to disagree on its interpretation; disagreement among investors is captured by the volume–volatility elasticity. For options, there are two natural variables related to disagreement: moneyness and tenor, which we relate to disagreement about the distribution of the market index at different quantiles and times. The estimated volume–volatility elasticity equals unity for options near the money and close to expiration, which is consistent with the …


Liquidity Constraints, Consumption, And Debt Repayment: Evidence From Macroprudential Policy In Turkey, Sumit Agarwal, Muris Hadzic, Changcheng Song, Yildirim Yildiray Apr 2023

Liquidity Constraints, Consumption, And Debt Repayment: Evidence From Macroprudential Policy In Turkey, Sumit Agarwal, Muris Hadzic, Changcheng Song, Yildirim Yildiray

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Using account-level credit card data from a large Turkish bank, we study the impact of a unique credit card policy that increases minimum payment on consumption and debt repayment. We show that the policy reduces credit card spending and debt, boosts existing debt repayment, and reduces credit card delinquency. The credit card debt of affected consumers falls on average by 50% two years into the policy’s implementation. An increase in minimum payment has a stronger effect than does a decrease of a similar magnitude. We build a benchmark life cycle model with soft liquidity constraint to explain the reduction in …


Hedging Cryptos With Bitcoin Futures, Francis Liu, Natalie Packham, Meng-Jou Lu, Wolfgang Karl Haerdle Mar 2023

Hedging Cryptos With Bitcoin Futures, Francis Liu, Natalie Packham, Meng-Jou Lu, Wolfgang Karl Haerdle

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

The introduction of derivatives on Bitcoin enables investors to hedge risk exposures in cryptocurrencies. Because of volatility swings and jumps in cryptocurrency prices, the traditional variance-based approach to obtain hedge ratios may not be suitable for hedgers. In this work, we consider two extensions of the traditional approach: first, different dependence structures are modelled by different copulae, such as the Gaussian, Student-t, Normal Inverse Gaussian and Archimedean copulae; second, different risk measures, such as value-at-risk, expected shortfall and spectral risk measures are employed to find the optimal hedge ratio. Extensive out-of-sample tests using the data from the time …


Exchange-Traded Funds And Real Investment, Constantinos Antoniou, Frank Weikai Li, Xuewen Liu, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Chengzhu Sun Mar 2023

Exchange-Traded Funds And Real Investment, Constantinos Antoniou, Frank Weikai Li, Xuewen Liu, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Chengzhu Sun

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate the link between exchange-traded funds and real investment. Cross-sectionally, higher ETF ownership is associated with an increased sensitivity of real investment to Tobin's q and a heightened ability of stock returns to forecast future earnings. Inclusion of stocks in industry ETFs enhances investment-q sensitivity and implies greater incorporation of earnings information into prices prior to public releases. Greater nonmarket ETF ownership leads to increased (reduced) reliance of real investment on own (peers') stock prices. Overall, the evidence is consistent with ETFs positively affecting real investment efficiency via greater flows of information.


Assessing The Odds Of A Us Recession, Thomas Lam, David Fernandez Feb 2023

Assessing The Odds Of A Us Recession, Thomas Lam, David Fernandez

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

In this commentary, SMU Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics (SKBI) Principal Researcher Thomas Lam and SKBI Director SMU Professor of Finance (Practice) Dave Fernandez offer their perspectives on the current multifaceted and highly charged US recession debate. While America is currently not in a downturn, the near-term odds of one have edged up, according to models based on key monthly and weekly indicators.


Impact Of Geographical Diversification And Limited Attention On Private Equity Fund Returns, Victor Ong Feb 2023

Impact Of Geographical Diversification And Limited Attention On Private Equity Fund Returns, Victor Ong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article analyzes the effect of geographical diversification on global private equity (PE) fund returns. We find that there is a negative correlation between geographical diversification and PE fund returns. To establish the causality between geographical diversification and PE fund returns, we employ an instrumental variable analysis where the instrument used is the stock market capitalization of the host country where the PE fund is based. Our results apply to Net IRR, TVPI and DPI as dependent variables used to proxy for PE fund returns in the main regression model. A one standard deviation increase in geographical diversification results in …


The Financialization Of Cryptocurrencies, Lei Huang, Tse-Chun Lin, Fangzhou Lu, Jian Sun Feb 2023

The Financialization Of Cryptocurrencies, Lei Huang, Tse-Chun Lin, Fangzhou Lu, Jian Sun

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that change in Grayscale Bitcoin Trust premium is the single most significant predictor of Bitcoin daily return. This sentiment measure is similar to the closed-end fund discount measure as in Baker and Wurgler (2006), but more likely to reflect the excess demand from traditional investors than from blockchain specialists. Although there is a substantial variation in Bitcoin price quotes worldwide, this Grayscale premium and discount predict Bitcoin daily return for the most liquid Bitcoin exchanges. Using K-means clustering and LDA analysis, we find that this predictability is especially significant when there is a large variation in bullish and …


Learning From Manipulable Signals, Mehmet Ekmekci, Leandrro Gorno, Lucas Maestri, Jian Sun, Dong Wei Dec 2022

Learning From Manipulable Signals, Mehmet Ekmekci, Leandrro Gorno, Lucas Maestri, Jian Sun, Dong Wei

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study a dynamic stopping game between a principal and an agent. The agent is privately informed about his type. The principal learns about the agent’s type from a noisy performance measure, which can be manipulated by the agent via a costly and hidden action. We fully characterize the unique Markov equilibrium of this game. We find that terminations/ market crashes are often preceded by a spike in (expected) performance. Our model also predicts that, due to endogenous signal manipulation, too much transparency can inhibit learning. As the players get arbitrarily patient, the principal elicits no useful information from the …


The Alphabet Soup In Reporting And Measuring Esg, Hao Liang, Kam Chee Chan Oct 2022

The Alphabet Soup In Reporting And Measuring Esg, Hao Liang, Kam Chee Chan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Harmonising frameworks with the Impact-Weighted Accounts Framework.


International Asset Pricing With Strategic Business Groups, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang, Hong Zhang Aug 2022

International Asset Pricing With Strategic Business Groups, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Firms in global markets often belong to business groups. We argue that this feature can have a profound influence on international asset pricing. In bad times, business groups may strategically reallocate risk across affiliated firms to protect core “central firms.” This strategic behavior induces co-movement among central firms, creating a new intertemporal risk factor. Based on a novel data set of worldwide ownership for 2002–2012, we find that central firms are better protected in bad times and that they earn relatively lower expected returns. Moreover, a centrality factor augments traditional models in explaining the cross section of international stock returns.


Customer Concentration And Corporate Carbon Emissions, Saiying Deng, Tinghua Duan, Frank Weikai Li, Xiaoling Pu Aug 2022

Customer Concentration And Corporate Carbon Emissions, Saiying Deng, Tinghua Duan, Frank Weikai Li, Xiaoling Pu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines whether economic links with major corporate customers curb corporate carbon emissions. We show that supplier firms with a concentrated customer base have significantly lower carbon emissions. The baseline results are robust to alternative measures of carbon emissions and customer concentration, and various approaches that mitigate endogeneity concerns due to omitted variables and reverse causality. Moreover, the curbing effect of customer concentration on supplier carbon emissions is more pronounced in firms facing lower customer switching costs, with less (more) supplier (customer) bargaining power, fewer redeployable assets, operating in more carbon-intensive industries, and after the Paris Agreement of 2015. …


Inflation Expectations Can Be A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Aurobindo Ghosh, Khyati Chauhan, Muskan Bagrodia Aug 2022

Inflation Expectations Can Be A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Aurobindo Ghosh, Khyati Chauhan, Muskan Bagrodia

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a commentary, SMU Assistant Professor of Finance (Education) Aurobindo Ghosh, SMU postgraduate student and Research Assistant for the SInDEx Project Muskan Bagrodia and International Monetary Fund Economic Research Assistant Khyati Chauhan weighed in on why inflation expectations matter as much as economic data. They discussed how inflation expectations can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and shared the key takeaways of the quarterly DBS-Sim Kee Boon Institute’s Singapore Index of Inflation Expectations (DBS-SKBI SInDEx) survey. They concluded that effective communication on inflation control measures, in addition to credible policy decisions, will help consumers feel assured and refrain from basing purchasing decisions …


The Cryptocurrency Participation Puzzle, Ran Duchin, David H. Solomon, Jun Tu, Xi Wang Aug 2022

The Cryptocurrency Participation Puzzle, Ran Duchin, David H. Solomon, Jun Tu, Xi Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that ongoing zero portfolio weights in cryptocurrency are surprisingly difficult to generate in a standard Bayesian portfolio theory framework. With ten years of prior data, equity market investors would need very pessimistic priors on mean returns to justify never having bought cryptocurrency: -10.6% per month for Bitcoin, and -19.6% per month for a diversified portfolio of cryptocurrencies. Moreover, most priors that involve never purchasing cryptocurrency imply that investors should short cryptocurrency. Optimal absolute weights are generally small but non-trivial (1-5%), frequently positive, and fairly smooth despite returns being volatile. Under a wide range of priors, the certainty equivalent …


Why Do U.S. Firms Invest Less Over Time?, Fangjian Fu, Sheng Huang, Rong Wang Jul 2022

Why Do U.S. Firms Invest Less Over Time?, Fangjian Fu, Sheng Huang, Rong Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Capital expenditures of U.S. public firms, relative to total assets, decrease by more than half from 1980 to 2020. The decline is pervasive across industries and firms of different characteristics and cannot be explained by the usual determinants of investment and many other seemingly plausible reasons. The decline is consistent with the transformation in production technology — firms rely more on intangible capital and less on fixed assets in production. Industry-level analyses yield supporting evidence. We observe similar declining trend in capital expenditure in other developed countries but not in most emerging markets.


Eradicating Malaria: Innovation Diffusion In The Face Of Grand Challenges, Han Jiang, Hao Liang, Dongning Yang Jul 2022

Eradicating Malaria: Innovation Diffusion In The Face Of Grand Challenges, Han Jiang, Hao Liang, Dongning Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

What is the role of organizational innovation—beyond technological innovation—in an era of grand challenges concerning health, poverty, and economic development around the world? How is organizational innovation developed and diffused to influence resource allocation in the field? We conduct a qualitative case study by analyzing a Chinese pharmaceutical firm’s efforts to combat malaria in Africa over 10 years. Through documentation and extensive interviews, we study the role of innovation diffusion and resource allocation to address grand challenges in emerging markets with significant institutional voids. Our conceptual model delineates the different stages of innovation diffusion to show how organizations can draw …


Oil Price Shocks And Stock Market Anomalies, Zhaobo Zhu, Licheng Sun, Jun Tu, Qiang Ji Jul 2022

Oil Price Shocks And Stock Market Anomalies, Zhaobo Zhu, Licheng Sun, Jun Tu, Qiang Ji

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper provides a novel perspective to the nexus of oil prices and stock markets by examining the impact of oil price shocks on stock market anomalies. After decomposing oil price shocks into three types , we find that aggregate demand shocks have the strongest influence on stock market anomalies. In contrast, oil supply shocks and oil-specific demand shocks have little impact. Similar results are also found in the industry analysis. Interestingly, the link between aggregate demand shocks and anomalies is the strongest among firms with either small size or high idiosyncratic risks. The documented effects are robust after controlling …


What, Why And How Financial Development Matters: Evidence Of Asean-5, Asia-5 And Oecd-7 Economies, Swee Liang Tan Jul 2022

What, Why And How Financial Development Matters: Evidence Of Asean-5, Asia-5 And Oecd-7 Economies, Swee Liang Tan

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper analyzed the association between bank and capital markets financial development with income per capita in three regions; ASEAN-5 economies (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia), Asia-5 (Japan, China, Hong Kong SAR, South Korea, and India), and OECD-7 (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, UK, and US) from 2000 to 2017 using panel data regressions. A key lesson ASEAN-5 can learn from Asia-5 and OECD-7 experience is that bank size does matter despite digital disruptions to their banking system; yet large financial structure that favors banks is negatively associated with Asia-5, and importantly, efficient banking system (not bank size alone) is …


Internal Capital Markets And Predictability In Complex Ownership Firms, Ran Chang, Angelica Gonzalez, Sergei Sarkissian, Jun Tu Jun 2022

Internal Capital Markets And Predictability In Complex Ownership Firms, Ran Chang, Angelica Gonzalez, Sergei Sarkissian, Jun Tu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Using global cross-firm ownership data, we find that both stock returns and cash-flow news of ownership-linked firms predict focal firm's returns for all types of ownership structures: subsidiary-parent, parent-subsidiary, subsidiary-subsidiary, and parent-parent. This effect, observed only after the establishment of cross-firm ownership, is not subsumed by focal firm or industry momentum, or alternative inter-firm relations, including customer-supplier links and shared analyst coverage. Our findings are explained by mispricing due to internal capital markets - a mechanism unique to complex ownership firms. Higher internal capital market activity among ownership-linked firms also induces larger investments and lower external financing of the focal …