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Full-Text Articles in Business

Are Disagreements Agreeable? Evidence From Information Aggregation, Dashan Huang, Jiangyuan Li, Liyao Wang Dec 2017

Are Disagreements Agreeable? Evidence From Information Aggregation, Dashan Huang, Jiangyuan Li, Liyao Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Most studies on disagreement focus on cross-sectional asset returns and well-recognized disagreement measures generally cannot predict the stock market with a horizon less than 12 months. This paper proposes three aggregate disagreement indexes by aggregating information across 20 disagreement measures. We show that disagreement measures collectively have a common component that has significant power in predicting the stock market both in- and out-of-sample. Consistent with the theory developed by Atmaz and Basak (2017), the indexes asymmetrically forecast the market with greater power in high sentiment periods. Moreover, the indexes negatively predict economic activities, and positively predict market volatility, illiquidity, and …


Clogged Intermediation: Were Home Buyers Crowded Out?, Hyunsoo Choi, Hyun-Soo Choi, Jung-Eun Kim Dec 2017

Clogged Intermediation: Were Home Buyers Crowded Out?, Hyunsoo Choi, Hyun-Soo Choi, Jung-Eun Kim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Post-crisis policy interventions significantly increased the demand for mortgage refinancing, but could this surge in refinancing applications have crowded out the supply of credit to home buyers? In this paper, we examine two frictions that hamper financial intermediation and result in banks' substitution of home purchase loans for refinance loans: The risk capacity channel through which banks with limited risk appetites prefer safer loans over riskier loans, and the operating capacity channel through which banks with limited operating capacities prefer applications that require less screening time. We find that following the recent financial crisis, banks facing these capacity constraints indeed …


Clogged Intermediation: Were Home Buyers Crowded Out?, Hyunsoo Choi, Hyun-Soo Choi, Jung-Eun Kim Dec 2017

Clogged Intermediation: Were Home Buyers Crowded Out?, Hyunsoo Choi, Hyun-Soo Choi, Jung-Eun Kim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Post-crisis policy interventions significantly increased the demand for mortgage refinancing, but could this surge in refinancing applications have crowded out the supply of credit to home buyers? In this paper, we examine two frictions that hamper financial intermediation and result in banks' substitution of home purchase loans for refinance loans: The risk capacity channel through which banks with limited risk appetites prefer safer loans over riskier loans, and the operating capacity channel through which banks with limited operating capacities prefer applications that require less screening time. We find that following the recent financial crisis, banks facing these capacity constraints indeed …


Sell Side Benchmarks, Ohad Kadan, Leonardo Madureira, Rong Wang, Tzachi Zach Dec 2017

Sell Side Benchmarks, Ohad Kadan, Leonardo Madureira, Rong Wang, Tzachi Zach

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Sell-side analysts employ different benchmarks when defining their stock recommendations. For example, a ‘buy’ for some brokers means the stock is expected to outperform its peers in the same sector (“sector benchmarkers”), while for other brokers it means the stock is expected to outperform the market (“market benchmarkers”), or just some absolute return (“total benchmarkers”). We explore the validity and implications of the adoption of these different benchmarks. Analysis of the relation between analysts’ recommendations and their long-term growth and earnings forecasts suggests that analysts indeed abide by their benchmarks: Sector benchmarkers rely less on across-industry information, and focus more …


Hedge Fund Franchises, William Fung, David Hsieh, Narayan Y. Naik, Melvyn Teo Dec 2017

Hedge Fund Franchises, William Fung, David Hsieh, Narayan Y. Naik, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Duplicate, see https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/5964/. We investigate the growth strategies of hedge fund firms. We find that firms with successful first funds are able to launch follow-on funds that charge higher performance fees, set more onerous redemption terms, and attract greater inflows. Motivated by the aforementioned spillover effects, first funds outperform follow-on funds, after adjusting for risk. The multiple-product growth strategy hurts investors while benefiting hedge fund firms; multiple-product firms underperform single-product firms but harvest greater fee revenues. Investors respond to this growth strategy by redeeming from first funds of firms with follow-on funds that do poorly. Moreover, skilled investors allocate …


Volume Information In Nikkei And Topix Futures Transactions, Chyng Wen Tee, Christopher Ting Dec 2017

Volume Information In Nikkei And Topix Futures Transactions, Chyng Wen Tee, Christopher Ting

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

According to the Kyle (1985) model of informed trading, information in trade size is likely to effect a permanent price impact. However, two prominent structural models in the literature do not include trade size in their framework. In this paper, we present a nesting relationship of major structural models and formulate a generalized model that includes all trade variables. A new measure to quantify the amount of information in the order flow is proposed. Our empirical analysis shows that it is indeed the "surprise" in trade size that contributes significantly in reflecting the price change of Nikkei and TOPIX futures.


Permanent Price Impact Asymmetry Of Trades With Institutional Constraints, Chiraphol N. Chiyachantana, Pankaj Jain, Christine Jiang, Vivek Sharma Nov 2017

Permanent Price Impact Asymmetry Of Trades With Institutional Constraints, Chiraphol N. Chiyachantana, Pankaj Jain, Christine Jiang, Vivek Sharma

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Dynamic institutional trading constraints related to capital, diversification, and short-selling asymmetrically affect the incorporation of new information as reflected in the permanent price impact of their trades. The sign of the permanent price impact asymmetry between institutional buys versus sells is positive at the initial stage of a price run-up and reverses due to changing constraints with a prolonged price run-up in a stock. Idiosyncratic volatility, analyst forecast dispersion, trading intensity, price dispersion, and bullish market conditions further sharpen the initial asymmetry, as well as its reversal after a price run-up.


Dissecting Arbitrage Costs, F. Y. Eric Lam, Chishen Wei, K. C John Wei Nov 2017

Dissecting Arbitrage Costs, F. Y. Eric Lam, Chishen Wei, K. C John Wei

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper systematically examines the impact of nine popular arbitrage costs measures on cross-sectional mispricing based on ten well-known and robust anomalies. We show that binding arbitrage barriers slowly change over time. In early years with few publications documenting return anomalies, arbitrage costs have tiny impact even though mispricing is present. As anomalies become more widely known, arbitrage costs impact mispricing substantially. Arbitrage risk, ambiguity of fundamental value, round-trip broker’s commission plus bid-ask spreads, and stock loan supply are binding on arbitrageurs. Only arbitrage risk is binding if larger cap stocks are emphasized. In recent years when market quality improves …


The Flow Of Funds In Asean, Philip C. Zerrillo Nov 2017

The Flow Of Funds In Asean, Philip C. Zerrillo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In his novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden wrote, “Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.” Something similar seems to be happening with the flow of funds in ASEAN.


Do Security Analysts Learn From Their Colleagues?, Kenny Phua, T. Mandy Tham, Chi Shen Wei Oct 2017

Do Security Analysts Learn From Their Colleagues?, Kenny Phua, T. Mandy Tham, Chi Shen Wei

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine how learning from colleagues affects security analyst forecast outcomes. We represent the brokerage house as an information network of analysts connected through industry overlaps in their coverage portfolios. Analysts who are more centrally connected in their brokerage network produce more accurate forecast estimates and generate more influential forecast revisions. Consistent with learning, more central analysts tend to unwind their colleagues’ recent forecast errors in their forecast revisions. Learning appears to benefit all colleagues, as working at more interconnected brokerages (i.e., denser networks) improves forecast accuracy for all analysts.


The Impact Of Csr On Corporate Financial Performance, David K. Ding Sep 2017

The Impact Of Csr On Corporate Financial Performance, David K. Ding

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We provide one of the first analyses of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm performance using only annual financial reports. We document a link between corporate financial performance (CFP) and CSR, although this is not always positive. Specifically, we investigate whether CSR performance can be implied from financial reporting and provide evidence that CSR information implied by financial reports have a significant association with CFP. Furthermore, we provide the first comprehensive study of CSR reporting and link it with CFP in New Zealand.


Temporal Aggregation And Risk-Return Relation, Xing Jin, Leping Wang, Jun Yu Aug 2017

Temporal Aggregation And Risk-Return Relation, Xing Jin, Leping Wang, Jun Yu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The function form of a linear intertemporal relation between risk and return is suggested by Merton's (1973) analytical work for instantaneous returns, whereas empirical studies have examined the nature of this relation using temporally aggregated data, i.e., daily, monthly, quarterly, or even yearly returns. Our paper carefully examines the temporal aggregation effect on the validity of the linear specification of the risk-return relation at discrete horizons, and on its implications on the reliablility of the resulting inference about the risk-return relation based on different observation intervals. Surprisingly, we show that, based on the standard Heston's (1993) dynamics, the linear relation …


Analyst Effort Allocation And Firms' Information Environment, Rong Wang, Jarrad Harford, Feng Jiang, Fei Xie Aug 2017

Analyst Effort Allocation And Firms' Information Environment, Rong Wang, Jarrad Harford, Feng Jiang, Fei Xie

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that a firm’s information environment is significantly impacted by the characteristics of the other firms its analysts cover. Analysts strategically allocate effort among portfolio firms by devoting more effort to firms that are relatively more important for their career concerns. Specifically, controlling for analyst and firm characteristics, we find that within each analyst’s portfolio, firms ranked relatively higher based on market capitalization, trading volume, or institutional ownership receive more accurate, frequent, and informative earnings forecast revisions and stock recommendation changes that contain greater information content from that analyst. Firms’ relative rank across analysts varies widely, so this is …


Public Hedge Funds, Lin Sun, Song Wee Melvyn Teo Aug 2017

Public Hedge Funds, Lin Sun, Song Wee Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Hedge funds managed by listed firms significantly underperform funds managed by unlisted firms. The underperformance is more severe for funds with low manager deltas, poor governance, and no manager co-investment, or managed by firms whose prices are sensitive to earnings news. Notwithstanding the underperformance, listed asset management firms raise more capital, by growing existing funds and launching new funds post listing, and harvest greater fee revenues than do comparable unlisted firms. The results are consistent with the view that, for asset management firms, going public weakens the alignment between ownership, control, and investment capital, thereby engendering conflicts of interest.


Public Hedge Funds, Lin Sun, Song Wee Melvyn Teo Aug 2017

Public Hedge Funds, Lin Sun, Song Wee Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Hedge funds managed by listed firms significantly underperform funds managed by unlisted firms. The underperformance is more severe for funds with low manager deltas, poor governance, and no manager co-investment, or managed by firms whose prices are sensitive to earnings news. Notwithstanding the underperformance, listed asset management firms raise more capital, by growing existing funds and launching new funds post listing, and harvest greater fee revenues than do comparable unlisted firms. The results are consistent with the view that, for asset management firms, going public weakens the alignment between ownership, control, and investment capital, thereby engendering conflicts of interest.


Twin Momentum: Fundamental Trends Matter, Dashan Huang, Huacheng Zhang, Guofu Zhou Aug 2017

Twin Momentum: Fundamental Trends Matter, Dashan Huang, Huacheng Zhang, Guofu Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Using both the levels and the time-series trends of a collection of firms' major fundamentals, we find that fundamentals matter after all: they can also generate strong return momentum. A fundamental momentum strategy that goes long stocks with fundamental in the top quintile and short stocks with fundamental in the bottom quintile earns a monthly average return of 88 bps, and is comparable with the popular price momentum but has little correlation. Combining price momentum and fundamental momentum yields a twin momentum, which has an average return more than the sum of both price momentum and fundamental momentum. Twin momentum …


Powerful Blockholders And Ceo Turnover, Chi Shen Wei, Lei Zhang Aug 2017

Powerful Blockholders And Ceo Turnover, Chi Shen Wei, Lei Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We identify the power of institutional blockholders to influence management using previous occurrences of forced CEO turnover at other firms in the blockholders’ overall portfolio. We create a “powerful blockholder linkage” measure that strongly predicts future forced CEO turnover. These effects are larger when “powerful” blockholders are more motivated to monitor and when they have had valuable monitoring experience. Moreover, firms with powerful blockholders display higher CEO turnover-performance sensitivity, pursue more value-increasing mergers, and have higher firm value. Overall, our results suggest that an identifiable group of powerful blockholders play an important role in corporate governance.


Forecasting Stock Returns In Good And Bad Times: The Role Of Market States, Dashan Huang, Fuwei Jiang, Jun Tu, Guofu Zhou Jul 2017

Forecasting Stock Returns In Good And Bad Times: The Role Of Market States, Dashan Huang, Fuwei Jiang, Jun Tu, Guofu Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper proposes a two-state predictive regression model and shows that stock market 12-month return (TMR), the time-series momentum predictor of Moskowitz, Ooi, and Pedersen (2012), forecasts the aggregate stock market negatively in good times and positively in bad times. The out-of-sample R-squares are 0.96% and 1.72% in good and bad times, or 1.28% and 1.41% in NBER economic expansions and recessions, respectively. The TMR predictability pattern holds in the cross-section of U.S. stocks and the international markets. Our study shows that the absence of return predictability in good times, an important finding of recent studies, is largely driven by …


Hedging And Pricing Rent Risk With Search Frictions, Briana Chang, Hyunsoo Choi, Harrison Hong, Jeffrey Kubik Jul 2017

Hedging And Pricing Rent Risk With Search Frictions, Briana Chang, Hyunsoo Choi, Harrison Hong, Jeffrey Kubik

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The desire of risk-averse households to hedge rent risk is thought to increase home ownership and prices. While evidence for the ownership implication is compelling, support for the price effect is mixed. We show that an important reason is search frictions. Rent risk reduces outside options, leading to less-picky buyers and worse home/buyer matches. This attenuates the rise in the price-to-rent ratio that would otherwise occur without frictions. Consistent with our model, a house remains on the market for fewer days when rent risk is higher. Accounting for frictions significantly increases the effect of rent risk on home prices.


Hedging And Pricing Rent Risk With Search Frictions, Briana Chang, Hyunsoo Choi, Harrison Hong, Jeffrey Kubik Jul 2017

Hedging And Pricing Rent Risk With Search Frictions, Briana Chang, Hyunsoo Choi, Harrison Hong, Jeffrey Kubik

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The desire of risk-averse households to hedge rent risk is thought to increase home ownership and prices. While evidence for the ownership implication is compelling, support for the price effect is mixed. We show that an important reason is search frictions. Rent risk reduces outside options, leading to less-picky buyers and worse home/buyer matches. This attenuates the rise in the price-to-rent ratio that would otherwise occur without frictions. Consistent with our model, a house remains on the market for fewer days when rent risk is higher. Accounting for frictions significantly increases the effect of rent risk on home prices.


Short Interest, Returns, And Unfavorable Fundamental Information, Ferhat Akbas, Ekkehart Boehmer, Bilal Erturk, Sorin Sorescu Jun 2017

Short Interest, Returns, And Unfavorable Fundamental Information, Ferhat Akbas, Ekkehart Boehmer, Bilal Erturk, Sorin Sorescu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Several months before information becomes public, the level of short interest contains value-relevant information about publicly traded corporations. Short interest predicts future bad news, negative earnings surprises, and downward revisions in analyst earnings forecasts. This informational content is stronger for stocks that are harder to short. We also find that nearly half of the well-known cross-sectional relation between short interest and future stock returns is related to future changes in firms’ value-relevant information. Our results suggest that short interest predicts future returns, in part, due to short sellers’ ability to uncover unfavorable information about firms.


Shades Of Darkness: A Pecking Order Of Trading Venues, Albert J. Menkveld, Bart Zhou Yueshen, Haoxiang Zhu Jun 2017

Shades Of Darkness: A Pecking Order Of Trading Venues, Albert J. Menkveld, Bart Zhou Yueshen, Haoxiang Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We characterize the dynamic fragmentation of U.S. equity markets using a unique data set that disaggregates dark transactions by venue types. The "pecking order" hypothesis of trading venues states that investors "sort" various venue types, putting low-cost-low-immediacy venues on top and high-cost-high-immediacy venues at the bottom. Hence, midpoint dark pools on top, non-midpoint dark pools in the middle, and lit markets at the bottom. As predicted, following VIX shocks, macroeconomic news, and firms' earnings surprises, changes in venue market shares become progressively more positive (or less negative) down the pecking order. We further document heterogeneity across dark venue types and …


Industry Integration And Stock Price Synchronicity, Hao Cheng, Kian Guan Lim, Tien Foo Sing, Long Wang Jun 2017

Industry Integration And Stock Price Synchronicity, Hao Cheng, Kian Guan Lim, Tien Foo Sing, Long Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper provides an alternative explanation of the negative relationship between price synchronicity and proprietary right protection that are uncorrelated to the information hypothesis. Using empirical data for 40 countries, we show that stock market volatility and firm size have significant impact on stock price synchronicity. We find significant correlations of international R2 disparity with industry structure integrations. The derived industry integration indices that capture industry correlations significantly explain cross-sectional and temporal variations in price synchronicity. The results imply that tighter industry integration leads to higher R2, and also explain away the property rights factor found in the information hypothesis.


Variance Risk Premiums Of Commodity Etfs, Chyng Wen Tee, Christopher H. A. Ting May 2017

Variance Risk Premiums Of Commodity Etfs, Chyng Wen Tee, Christopher H. A. Ting

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We propose a model-independent method to account for the early exercise premiums in American options on non-dividend paying stocks. We find that our estimates of early exercise premium are generally larger than the estimates by existing methods. Given the American options on the Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) of gold, silver, natural gas, and crude oil, we find strong empirical evidence of variance risk premiums for these commodities, over a volatility term structure up to 18 months. Furthermore, we show that volatility indexes constructed by using existing methods tend to overestimate the risk-neutral variance, and consequently the magnitude of variance risk premium.


Does Wage-Inflation Targeting Complement Foreign Exchange Intervention? An Evaluation Of A Multi-Target, Two-Instrument Monetary Policy Framework, Taojun Xie, Jingting Liu, Joseph D. Alba, Wai-Mun Chia Apr 2017

Does Wage-Inflation Targeting Complement Foreign Exchange Intervention? An Evaluation Of A Multi-Target, Two-Instrument Monetary Policy Framework, Taojun Xie, Jingting Liu, Joseph D. Alba, Wai-Mun Chia

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We assess the inclusion of wage inflation as an intermediate target of an emerging central bank using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with sticky wages and prices calibrated for the South Korean economy. The model includes wage inflation as an additional target jointly with domestic price inflation and the output gap in a Taylor- type interest rate rule operating with a sterilized foreign exchange (FX) intervention rule. Our results show a complementary relationship between wage inflation targeting and price inflation targeting. That is, by supplementing price inflation targeting with wage inflation targeting, welfare improves for cases with and without …


Leviathan Inc. And Corporate Environmental Engagement, Po-Hsuan Hsu, Hao Liang, Pedro Matos Apr 2017

Leviathan Inc. And Corporate Environmental Engagement, Po-Hsuan Hsu, Hao Liang, Pedro Matos

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a special report in 2010, The Economist called the resurgence of state-owned mega-enterprises, especially those in emerging economies, “Leviathan Inc.”, and warned about the dangers of the state capitalism model. Traditionally, state-owned firms have been criticized for poor governance and questionable efficiency. In fact, they may be better positioned to deal with market failures and externalities. Our findings based on publicly-listed firms in 45 countries suggest that government-controlled companies engage more in environmental issues, and this engagement does not come at a cost to shareholder value. The effect is more pronounced among firms in emerging market economies and in …


Corporate Donations And Shareholder Value, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog Apr 2017

Corporate Donations And Shareholder Value, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Do corporate donations enhance shareholder wealth or reflect agency problems? We address this question for a global sample of firms whereby we distinguish between charitable and political donations, as well as between donations in cash and in kind. We find that charitable donations are positively related to financial performance and firm value, which is consistent with the value-enhancement hypothesis. This positive effect on firm value is stronger for cash than in-kind donations. In contrast, political donations do not appear to enhance shareholder value, but rather tend to reflect agency problems, as they are higher for firms with poor internal corporate …


Ethnic Social Network In Public Housing Market In Singapore, Sumit Agarwal, Hyunsoo Choi, Jia He, Tien Foo Sing Apr 2017

Ethnic Social Network In Public Housing Market In Singapore, Sumit Agarwal, Hyunsoo Choi, Jia He, Tien Foo Sing

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper investigates the ethnic social network in Singapore's resale public housing market using a unique dataset containing the Cash-Over-Valuation (COV) information for a sample of 73,107 resale public housing transactions from 2007 to 2012. We find that the COV per square meter (psm), which represents a premium above the "objective" housing value, significantly increases with the concentration of buyers' own ethnic group at a housing block level. The results imply that buyers value housing blocks with higher concentration of the same ethnicity group of households. However, the convexity in COV premium suggests that the premium is too large to …


Short Selling And Economic Policy Uncertainty, Xiaping Cao, Yuchen Wang, Sili Zhou Apr 2017

Short Selling And Economic Policy Uncertainty, Xiaping Cao, Yuchen Wang, Sili Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study the trading behavior of short sellers in the presence of economic policy uncertainty (EPU). Daily short selling activity at either the aggregate level or the individual stock level is increasing in the EPU index (Baker, Bloom and Davis, 2016). EPU has great explanatory power for short trading. Cross-sectional tests show that the increase in short interest under high political uncertainty is from shorting stocks characterized by higher mispricing, greater policy sensitivity, higher illiquidity, greater volatility or analyst dispersion. Short sellers earn abnormal profits by trading on public information related to EPU.


Mutual Fund Trading Costs And Diseconomies Of Scale, Jeffrey Busse, Tarun Chordia, Lei Jiang, Yuehua Tang Apr 2017

Mutual Fund Trading Costs And Diseconomies Of Scale, Jeffrey Busse, Tarun Chordia, Lei Jiang, Yuehua Tang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Larger mutual funds underperform smaller funds even though they have lower percentage transaction costs. Larger funds hold and trade a larger fraction of bigger, more liquid stocks, which leads to lower percentage transaction costs than smaller funds. Smaller funds outperform larger funds primarily when small cap stocks outperform large cap stocks. Overall, we find that it is not trading costs but fund holding characteristics, especially the market capitalization of stock holdings, that drive diseconomies of scale in the mutual fund industry.