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Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

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Full-Text Articles in Finance

Japanese Monetary Policy And Its Impact On Stock Market Implied Volatility During Pleasant And Unpleasant Weather, Marinela Adriana Finta Jun 2021

Japanese Monetary Policy And Its Impact On Stock Market Implied Volatility During Pleasant And Unpleasant Weather, Marinela Adriana Finta

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate the effect of Japan's Monetary Policy Meeting releases on the intraday dynamics of the Nikkei Stock Average Volatility Index and its futures during pleasant and unpleasant weather. We show that at the time of a monetary policy release when the temperature is pleasant, there is a significant decline in Japanese equities' implied volatility and futures, which lasts for about 10 min and 5 min, respectively. This decline is longer and exhibits a greater variation when releases occur during cold days. Finally, we emphasize the achievable economic profits and losses, given the reaction of Nikkei VI futures to the …


Earnings Momentum Meets Short-Term Return Reversal, Zhaobo Zhu, Licheng Sun, Jun Tu, Jun Tu Apr 2021

Earnings Momentum Meets Short-Term Return Reversal, Zhaobo Zhu, Licheng Sun, Jun Tu, Jun Tu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a joint strategy that exploits fundamental-based momentum and return-based reversal anomalies. This joint strategy is motivated by two considerations. First, reversal can serve as a natural hedge to momentum. Second, both fundamental and price-related information can contribute to stock return predictability. Consequently, we propose a new joint strategy that synthesises both earnings momentum and short-term reversal. We find that this joint strategy generates considerable economic gains and outperforms the sum of profits from two individual anomalies. Moreover, the proposed strategy appears to be quite robust, generating stable and persistent profits across different market conditions.


Japanese Monetary Policy And Its Impact On Stock Market Implied Volatility During Pleasant And Unpleasant Weather, Marinela Adriana Finta Mar 2021

Japanese Monetary Policy And Its Impact On Stock Market Implied Volatility During Pleasant And Unpleasant Weather, Marinela Adriana Finta

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate the effect of Japan’s Monetary Policy Meeting releases on the intraday dynamics of the Nikkei Stock Average Volatility Index and its futures during pleasant and unpleasant weather. We show that at the time of a monetary policy release when the temperature is pleasant, there is a significant decline in Japanese equities’ implied volatility and futures, which lasts for about 10 minutes and 5 minutes, respectively. This decline is longer and exhibits a greater variation when releases occur during cold days. Finally, we emphasize the achievable economic profits and losses, given the reaction of Nikkei VI futures to the …


Trust And Retirement Preparedness: Evidence From Singapore, Benedict S. K. Koh, Olivia S. Mitchell, Joelle H. Fong Feb 2021

Trust And Retirement Preparedness: Evidence From Singapore, Benedict S. K. Koh, Olivia S. Mitchell, Joelle H. Fong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Trust is an essential component of any financial system, and distrust can undermine savings and economic growth. Our study draws on the Singapore Life Panel to assess how trust ties to older respondents’ (1) pension plan participation and withdrawals; (2) life, health, and long-term care insurance holdings; and (3) stock market engagement. We show that the widely-used ‘trust in people’ question is uncorrelated with household behaviours related to retirement preparedness. Instead, trust in private and public financial representatives is positively associated with pension savings, investments, and insurance holdings. Financial literacy also plays an important and consistent role in retirement decision-making.


The Economics Of Hedge Fund Startups: Theory And Empirical Evidence, Charles Cao, Grant Farnsworth, Hong Zhang Feb 2021

The Economics Of Hedge Fund Startups: Theory And Empirical Evidence, Charles Cao, Grant Farnsworth, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines how market frictions influence the managerial incentives and organizational structure of new hedge funds. We develop a stylized model in which new managers search for accredited investors and have stronger incentives to acquire managerial skill when encountering low investor demand. Fund families endogenously arise to mitigate frictions and weaken the performance incentives of affiliated new funds. Empirically, based on a TASS-HFR-BarclayHedge merged database, we find that ex ante identified cold inceptions facing low investor demand outperform existing hedge funds and hot inceptions facing high demand and that cold stand-alone inceptions outperform all types of family-affiliated inceptions.


Trading Regularity And Fund Performance: Evidence In Uncertain Markets, Lin Tong, Zhe Zhang Dec 2020

Trading Regularity And Fund Performance: Evidence In Uncertain Markets, Lin Tong, Zhe Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

High trading regularity funds outperform low trading regularity funds more during periods of low market returns and greater market and economic uncertainty. Their trading also has strong return predictability on stock returns during periods of greater uncertainty. They trade more around news events, and their news related trading predicts stock return stronger during periods of greater uncertainty. They also profit from liquidity provision in highly uncertain market environment. Overall our evidence suggests that high trading regularity funds trade more frequently during periods of high uncertainty when information production and processing skill is more valuable and when the demand for liquidity …


Can Retail Investors Learn From Insiders?, Ekkehart Boehmer, Bo Sang, Zhe Zhang Nov 2020

Can Retail Investors Learn From Insiders?, Ekkehart Boehmer, Bo Sang, Zhe Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines the trading patterns of retail investors following insider trading and the corresponding price impact. Retail investors follow the opportunistic purchases by insiders, but not their routine purchases. Neither investor attention nor common information such as earnings announcements or analysts forecast re- visions explains the results. They keep following insider purchases in subsequent four quarters. Moreover, for stocks with opportunistic insider purchases, those that retail investors bought yield higher cumulative abnormal returns than those that retail investors sold. The effect is mostly driven by the information compo- nent of the retail trades, rather than liquidity provision or temporary …


Macroeconomic Stabilization In The Digital Age, John Beirne, David Fernandez Nov 2020

Macroeconomic Stabilization In The Digital Age, John Beirne, David Fernandez

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Macroeconomic Stabilization in the Digital Age provides insights into factors affecting the macroeconomic management of the economy in the digital age. Policy makers need to be aware of the increasing prominence of the digital economy and digital finance and seek to better understand how continued digitalization will affect policies aimed at managing the economy. For emerging market economies (EMEs), macroeconomic policy challenges have been exacerbated by the digital finance revolution in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, when many EMEs experienced large and volatile capital flows. Policy makers must also navigate through fluctuating …


Financial Knowledge And Portfolio Complexity In Singapore, Benedict S. K. Koh, Olivia S. Mitchell, Susann Rohwedder Oct 2020

Financial Knowledge And Portfolio Complexity In Singapore, Benedict S. K. Koh, Olivia S. Mitchell, Susann Rohwedder

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Financial literacy in Singapore has not been analyzed in much detail, despite the fact that this is one of the world’s most rapidly aging nations. Using the Singapore Life Panel®, we explore older Singaporeans’ levels of financial knowledge and compare them to those observed in the United States. We assess portfolio complexity for these older households, to examine how financial literacy is related to outcomes of interest. We show that older Singaporeans’ levels of financial literacy are comparable overall to those in the United States, even though older Singaporeans score slightly lower on some dimensions (knowledge of interest and inflation), …


Do Short Sellers Use Textual Information? Evidence From Annual Reports, Hung Wan Kot, Frank Weikai Li, Ming Liu, K.C. John Wei Sep 2020

Do Short Sellers Use Textual Information? Evidence From Annual Reports, Hung Wan Kot, Frank Weikai Li, Ming Liu, K.C. John Wei

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine short-sellers’ use of textual information in annual reports for shorting activities. We find that more uncertainty and negative words in annual reports are associated with greater abnormal shorting volume. Short selling motivated by textual information negatively predicts stock price reaction around the filing date of 10-K reports. We further provide some evidence that textual information used by short-sellers are related to revisions of analysts’ earnings forecasts, changes in firm fundamentals, and increasing crash risk subsequently. Our results suggest that textual information in annual reports forms an important part of short-sellers’ information advantage.


Why Commonality Persists?, Raja Velu, Zhaoque Zhou, Chyng Wen Tee Mar 2020

Why Commonality Persists?, Raja Velu, Zhaoque Zhou, Chyng Wen Tee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Studies on commonality in returns, order flows and liquidity find that the first principal component is closely aligned with the market factor. With the increasing presence of high-frequency trading, commonality in returns, order flows, and liquidity can potentially arise from the commonality in the interpretation of real-time signals. In this paper, we go beyond the first factor and show that the other dominant principal components consistently reflects investors' herding behavior, demonstrating the multi-dimensional aspect of commonality. Instead of relating the asset returns to order flows, we take both as endogenous, and provide empirical evidence showing that returns commonality is driven …


Time-Series Momentum: Is It There?, Dashan Huang, Jiangyuan Li, Liyao Wang, Guofu Zhou Mar 2020

Time-Series Momentum: Is It There?, Dashan Huang, Jiangyuan Li, Liyao Wang, Guofu Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Time-series momentum (TSM) refers to the predictability of the past 12-month return on the next one-month return, and is the focus of several recent influential studies. This paper shows, however, that asset-by-asset time-series regressions reveal little evidence of TSM, both in- and out-of-sample. While the t-statistic in a pooled regression appears large, it is not statistically reliable as it is less than the critical values of parametric and non-parametric bootstraps. From an investment perspective, the TSM strategy is profitable, but its performance is virtually the same as that of a similar strategy that is based on historical sample mean and …


A Behavioral Signaling Explanation For Stock Splits: Evidence From China, Chenyu Cui, Frank Weikai Li, Jiaren Pang, Deren Xie Mar 2020

A Behavioral Signaling Explanation For Stock Splits: Evidence From China, Chenyu Cui, Frank Weikai Li, Jiaren Pang, Deren Xie

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We propose a behavioral signaling explanation for the positive announcement effects of stock splits. There are two key behavioral ingredients in our model. First, (retail) investors have misconceptions about stock splits that make them view stock splits as good news. Second, investors are loss-averse and will be particularly disappointed if a splitting firm’s ex-post performance falls short of expectation. In a separating equilibrium, only managers with favorable private information use stock splits to signal. Using a comprehensive sample of stock splits in China over the period of 1998 to 2017, we find supporting evidence: (1) stock splits elicit positive announcement …


Commentary: Where Does The Talent Pools Of Smes Come From?, T. Mandy Tham Mar 2020

Commentary: Where Does The Talent Pools Of Smes Come From?, T. Mandy Tham

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a commentary, SMU Assistant Professor of Finance Mandy Tham explored how ‘family members’ is defined could affect the size of talent pool for SMEs and family businesses, and suggested some criteria for the selection of family members to be nurtured for the SMEs and family businesses.


Do Real Estate Agents Have Information Advantages In Housing Markets?, Sumit Agarwal, Jia He, Tien Foo Sing, Changcheng Song Dec 2019

Do Real Estate Agents Have Information Advantages In Housing Markets?, Sumit Agarwal, Jia He, Tien Foo Sing, Changcheng Song

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We use a large housing transaction data set in Singapore to study whether real estate agents use information advantages to buy houses at bargain prices. Agents bought their own houses at prices that are 2.54% lower than comparable houses bought by other buyers. Consistent with information asymmetries, agent buyers have more information advantages in less informative environments, and agent buyers are more likely to buy houses from agent sellers. Agent discounts are from both “cherry picking” and bargaining power, and bargaining power contributes more to the agent discounts. Agents’ advantage consists in their information of available houses and previous purchase …


The Unexpected Activeness Of Passive Investors: A Worldwide Analysis Of Etfs, Si Cheng, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang Dec 2019

The Unexpected Activeness Of Passive Investors: A Worldwide Analysis Of Etfs, Si Cheng, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The global ETF industry provides more complicated investment vehicles than low-cost index trackers. Instead, we find that the real investments of ETFs may deviate from their benchmarks to leverage informational advantages (which leads to a surprising stock-selection ability) and to help affiliated OEFs through cross-trading. These effects are more prevalent in ETFs domiciled in Europe. Moreover, ETF flows seem to respond to additional risk. These results have important normative implications for consumer protection and financial stability. (JEL G20)


Finance And Ideology: The Firm-Level Channels, Hao Liang, Rong Wang, Haikun Zhu Dec 2019

Finance And Ideology: The Firm-Level Channels, Hao Liang, Rong Wang, Haikun Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We provide firm-level evidence on how politicians’ ideologies affect economic outcomes and financial development by exploring a unique setting of ideological discontinuity in China from Maoism to Dengism around 1978. We find the ideological exposure during a politician’s early adulthood has an enduring effect on contemporary firm and city policies. Firms governed by “Mao’s mayors” have more stakeholder spending, lower pay inequality, and less internationalization than those governed by Deng’s. Further evidence suggests politicians’ ideology may affect economic activities through channels other than economic policy. Selection bias, endogenous matching and mayor age effect are unlikely to drive our results.


Long-Term Index Fund Ownership And Stock Returns, Ekkehart Boehmer, Wanshan Song, Ashish Tiwari, Zhe Zhang Dec 2019

Long-Term Index Fund Ownership And Stock Returns, Ekkehart Boehmer, Wanshan Song, Ashish Tiwari, Zhe Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine the implications of stock ownership by index funds for shareholder value. Consistent with recent findings that stock ownership by passive funds contributes to improved governance, we document a strong positive relation between the duration of passive fund holdings and subsequent stock performance. This positive relation is more pronounced for firms with recent poor performance, and for smaller firms and firms with higher allocation weights in passive funds’ portfolios. Our results support the view that index funds, although passive in their investment decisions, successfully contribute to long-term value creation by actively engaging with firms on matters of governance.


Understanding The Fundamentals Of Freight Markets Volatility, Kian Guan Lim, Nikos K. Nomikos, Nelson Yap Oct 2019

Understanding The Fundamentals Of Freight Markets Volatility, Kian Guan Lim, Nikos K. Nomikos, Nelson Yap

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We analyse empirically the drivers of freight market volatility. We use several macroeconomic and shipping-related factors that are known to affect the supply and demand for shipping and examine their impact on the term structure of freight options implied volatilities (IV). We find that the level of IVs is affected by the level of the spot rate, the slope of the forward curve, as well as by both demand and supply factors, especially the former. We demonstrate that the relation between the volatility of futures prices and the slope of the forward curve is non-monotonic and convex, that is, it …


Cooling Measures And Housing Wealth: Evidence From Singapore, Wolfgang K. Hardle, Rainer Schulz, Taojun Xie Oct 2019

Cooling Measures And Housing Wealth: Evidence From Singapore, Wolfgang K. Hardle, Rainer Schulz, Taojun Xie

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Excessive house price growth was at the heart of the financial crisis in 2007/08. Since then, many countries have added cooling measures to their regulatory frameworks. It has been found that these measures can indeed control price growth, but no one has examined whether this has adverse consequences for the housing wealth distribution. We examine this for Singapore, which started in 2009 to target price growth over ten rounds in total. We find that welfare from housing wealth in the last round might not be higher than before 2009. This depends on the deflator used to convert nominal into real …


Volatility Timing Under Low-Volatility Strategy, Poh Ling Neo, Chyng Wen Tee Sep 2019

Volatility Timing Under Low-Volatility Strategy, Poh Ling Neo, Chyng Wen Tee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The authors devise a volatility timing strategy based on statistical tests on the slope of the volatility decile portfolio return profile. Superior performance is obtained, with a 30% increase in Sharpe ratio and an order of magnitude improvement on cumulated wealth. The profitability of the volatility timing strategy can be attributed to holding a diversified portfolio during bear markets, while holding a concentrated growth portfolio during bull markets.


The World Predictive Power Of U.S. Equity Market Skewness Risk, Jian Chen, Fuwei Jiang, Shuyu Xue, Jiaquan Yao Sep 2019

The World Predictive Power Of U.S. Equity Market Skewness Risk, Jian Chen, Fuwei Jiang, Shuyu Xue, Jiaquan Yao

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study investigates the cross-country impact of U.S. equity market skewness risk. We find that a large decrease in the U.S. market skewness significantly predicts higher future returns on international equity markets. The predictability remains significant after controlling for a set of U.S. and local forecasting variables. Furthermore, we find strong predictability in- an out-of-sample setting and the predictability delivers a large economic value. The U.S. market skewness also forecasts U.S. economic recessions and international market conditions, consistent with the international three-moment capital asset pricing model (three-moment CAPM) and the intertemporal capital asset pricing model (ICAPM).


The Information In Asset Fire Sales, Sheng Huang, Matthew Ringgenberg, Zhe Zhang Sep 2019

The Information In Asset Fire Sales, Sheng Huang, Matthew Ringgenberg, Zhe Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Asset prices remain depressed for several years following mutual fund fire sales. We show that this price pressure is partly due to asymmetric information which leads to an adverse selection problem for arbitrageurs. After a flow shock, fund managers do not scale down their portfolio, rather, they choose to sell a subset of low-quality stocks that subsequently underperform. In other words, fund managers have stock selling ability. Our findings suggest an explanation for the tendency of asset prices to remain depressed following fire sales: information asymmetries make it difficult for arbitrageurs to disentangle pure price pressure from negative information.


Time-Varying Contemporaneous Spillovers During The European Debt Crisis, Marinela Adriana Finta, Bart Frijins, Alireza Tourani-Rad Aug 2019

Time-Varying Contemporaneous Spillovers During The European Debt Crisis, Marinela Adriana Finta, Bart Frijins, Alireza Tourani-Rad

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper considers contemporaneous spillover effects between Germany and four peripheral European countries that were most affected by the European Debt Crisis, and provides evidence of bidirectional spillovers among these equity markets. We document that there is asymmetry and time variation in contemporaneous spillovers. Particularly, contemporaneous return spillovers from Germany to the peripheral equity markets is higher than the other way around. We show that European Debt Crisis led to a decrease in the contemporaneous spillover effects.


Mortgage Dollar Roll, Zhaogang Song, Haoxiang Zhu Aug 2019

Mortgage Dollar Roll, Zhaogang Song, Haoxiang Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Mortgage dollar roll, the most common financing strategy for agency MBS, differs from repo in that the returned collateral can differ from those received. Also, MBS ownership changes hands in the funding period. We show that dollar roll “specialness,” how much implied financing rates fall below MBS repo rates, (1) increases in the value of the cheapest-to-deliver option, (2) decreases in the leverage of primary dealers, (3) decreases in prepayment risk exposure during the financing period, and (4) decreases in MBS returns. The Federal Reserve’s dollar roll sales in quantitative easing operations are associated with lower specialness.


Tail Risk Concerns Everywhere, George P. Gao, Xiaomeng Lu, Zhaogang Song Jul 2019

Tail Risk Concerns Everywhere, George P. Gao, Xiaomeng Lu, Zhaogang Song

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that the beta with respect to an index of global ex ante tail risk concerns (��ℝ����), which we construct using out-of-the-money options on multiple global assets, negatively drives cross-sectional return variations across asset classes, including international equity indices, foreign currencies, and government bond futures. The pricing power of ��ℝ���� becomes stronger when more asset-class-level tail risk concerns are incorporated in the index construction. ��ℝ���� also dominates asset-class-level tail risk concerns in pricing assets within each asset class. These evidences imply that the pricing effect of tail risk concerns works predominantly as a global channel. The ��ℝ���� pricing effect …


Transparency And Dealer Networks: Evidence From The Initiation Of Post-Trade Reporting In The Mortgage Backed Security Market, Paul Schultz, Zhaogang Song Jul 2019

Transparency And Dealer Networks: Evidence From The Initiation Of Post-Trade Reporting In The Mortgage Backed Security Market, Paul Schultz, Zhaogang Song

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine the introduction of mandatory post-trade reporting in the To-Be-Announced mortgage-backed securities market. With post-trade reporting, trading costs fell for institutional investors. Trading costs declined more for investors’ trades with peripheral dealers than for their trades with core dealers. Peripheral dealers’ market share dropped after the introduction of post-trade reporting, suggesting that opacity was protecting inefficient high-cost dealers. Interdealer trades and volume declined as transparency made it easier to find natural counterparties. Relationships between dealers became less important and, after controlling for the number of trades, dealers used more counterparties in interdealer trades.


Robust Measures Of Earnings Surprises, Chin-Han Chiang, Wei Dai, Jianqing Fan, Harrison Hong, Jun Tu Apr 2019

Robust Measures Of Earnings Surprises, Chin-Han Chiang, Wei Dai, Jianqing Fan, Harrison Hong, Jun Tu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Event studies of market efficiency measure an earnings surprise with the consensuserror (CE), defined as earnings minus the average of professional forecasts. Even if asubset of forecasts can be biased, the ideal but difficult to estimate parameter-dependentalternative to CE is a nonlinear filter of individual errors that adjusts for bias. We showthat CE is a poor parameter-free approximation for this ideal measure. The fractionof misses on the same side (FOM), by discarding the magnitude of misses, offers a farbetterapproximation. FOM performs particularly well against CE in predicting thereturns of US stocks, where bias is potentially large, than that of international …


Intraday Information From S&P 500 Index Futures Options, Kian Guan Lim, Chen Ying, Kian Leong Nelson Yap Jan 2019

Intraday Information From S&P 500 Index Futures Options, Kian Guan Lim, Chen Ying, Kian Leong Nelson Yap

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper we employ intraday transaction prices of liquid E-mini S&P 500 index futuresoptions to form 10-minutes ahead risk-neutral skewness forecasts and show profitable optionstrading strategy net of transaction costs. We do not find profitable trading based on 10-minutesahead risk-neutral volatility and only very marginal cases of profitable trading using kurtosisforecasts. The skewness profitability anomaly may be an indication of informational marketinefficiency in intraday S&P 500 futures options markets, which is contrary to findings usinglonger-span daily and weekly moments. Our results lend credence to the persistence of intradaytrading activities in the markets.


Climate Risks And Market Efficiency, Harrison Hong, Frank Weikai Li, Jiangmin Xu Jan 2019

Climate Risks And Market Efficiency, Harrison Hong, Frank Weikai Li, Jiangmin Xu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Climate science finds that the trend towards higher global temperatures exacerbates the risks of droughts. We investigate whether the prices of food stocks efficiently discount these risks. Using data from thirty-one countries with publicly-traded food companies, we rank these countries each year based on their long-term trends toward droughts using the Palmer Drought Severity Index. A poor trend ranking for a country forecasts relatively poor profit growth for food companies in that country. It also forecasts relatively poor food stock returns in that country. This return predictability is consistent with food stock prices underreacting to climate change risks.