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Accounting standard setters are considering the wider use of fair value accounting. This paper focuses on the financial stability implications of a move in the banking sector from the current accounting framework to full fair value accounting. A simulation exercise is performed on how various external shocks affect the balance sheet of an average European bank under the two frameworks. The paper further investigates the impact of the alternative framework on the main balance sheet items, and the interaction with banks' risk management, supervisory tools and statistical requirements. It also examines how the application of fair value accounting to banks' trading book has impacted their share price volatility. It is concluded that the introduction of full fair value accounting could have a significant effect in terms of income volatility, procyclicality of bank lending and more generally financial stability. Hence, any move towards this alternative accounting framework should be gradual.

The comparatively poor performance of traditional asset classes in recent years has driven the search for greater returns via alternative asset classes. The desire to reap higher risk adjusted returns from diversification into assets which offer low and even negative correlation with equities and bonds is extremely desirable. There has been a huge growth in the traditional alternative investments such as real estate, commodity futures, private equity and hedge fund investments. Additionally, a number of funds specialising in art have recently emerged. These also appear to offer a highly beneficial diversification strategy with extremely low correlation with traditional asset classes. It is important for investors to understand the risk and return characteristics of this new alternative asset class. In this paper we take a closer look at art as an alternative asset, and look specifically at how this new alternative asset is expected to perform, also during bear markets, when the benefits of diversification are most needed. We look at the risk and return characteristics of art using art market indices, and the prospects for portfolio diversification in the art market using a variety of data across art market sectors, including the Old Master, European Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art markets. Due to the low correlation of art with other asset classes, we find opportunities for portfolio diversification across art markets and across asset classes. The results hold, even allowing for the high transaction costs, which are encountered when trading art, when spread over a longer time horizon.

Restating 10-Ks has become an increasingly common phenomenon in financial reporting. Restatements clearly signal that the firm's prior financial statements were not credible and were of relatively lower "quality". In this study, we examine the effect of restatements on investors' and dealers' perceptions of the firm. First, we examine the market returns and the bid-ask spread effects at the announcement of the accounting problem that leads to restatement. We find negative market returns for accounting problem announcements, and we find that the negative reaction is most pronounced for firms with revenue recognition issues. We also find an increase in spreads surrounding the announcement of revenue recognition problems. Second we examine returns and spreads from the announcement of the restatement to the filing of the restated financial statements. We find a significant negative market reaction and a larger negative reaction for firms with revenue recognition problems. We find no change in spreads from before the announcement of the accounting problem to after the restatement is filed. Finally, we examine the effect of the restatement on earnings response coefficients, and find that the market reacts less to earnings after a restatement than to earnings prior to a restatement. In general, these results indicate that investors and dealers react negatively to restatements and are more concerned with revenue recognition problems than with other financial reporting errors.

We suggest an empirical model to analyze the investment style of individual hedge funds and funds of funds. Our approach is based on a mixture of the style analysis approach suggested by Sharpe (1988), the factor push approach used in stress testing, and historical simulation. An interesting and straightforward extension of this model is the estimation of value-at-risk (VaR) figures. This extension is tested using a very intuitive implementation over a large sample of 2,934 hedge funds over the 1994-2000 period. Both the in-the-sample and the out-of-sample results suggest that the proposed approach is useful and may constitute a valuable tool for assessing the investment style and risk of hedge funds.

An important milestone often reached in the life of an activist engagement is entering into a “settlement” agreement between the activist and the target’s board. Using a comprehensive hand-collected data set, we analyze the drivers, nature, and consequences of such settlement agreements. Settlements are more likely when the activist has a credible threat to win board seats in a proxy fight and when incumbents’ reputation concerns are stronger. Consistent with incomplete contracting, face-saving benefits and private information considerations, settlements commonly do not contract directly on operational or leadership changes sought by the activist but rather on board composition changes. Settlements are accompanied by positive stock price reactions, and they are subsequently followed by changes of the type sought by activists, including CEO turnover, higher shareholder payouts, and improved operating performance. We find no evidence to support concerns that settlements enable activists to extract rents at the expense of other investors. Our analysis provides a look into the “black box” of activist engagements and contributes to understanding how activism brings about changes in target companies.

This paper makes a breakdown of common Fama-French style equity factor portfolios into their long and short legs. We find that factor premiums originate in both legs, but that (i) most added value tends to come from the long legs, (ii) the long legs of factors offer more diversification than the short legs, and (iii) the performance of the shorts is generally subsumed by the longs. These results hold across large and small caps, are robust over time, carry over to international equity markets, and cannot be attributed to differences in tail risk. Portfolio tests suggest that the short legs are of limited value to most investors, while the long legs in small caps are most attractive. We also examine recent claims that the value and low-risk factors are subsumed by the new Fama-French factors, and find that this does not hold for the long legs of these factors. Altogether, our findings show that decomposing canonical factors into their long and short legs is crucial for understanding factor premiums and building efficient factor portfolios.

We document the growth of retail options trading and provide evidence that retail investors are drawn to options by anticipated spikes in volatility. Retail investors purchase options in a concentrated fashion before earnings announcements, particularly those with greater expected abnormal volatility. Comparing across asset markets, we also find retail investors disproportionately trade options over stocks as anticipated announcement volatility increases. In doing so, retail investors display a trio of wealth-depleting behaviors: they overpay for options relative to realized volatility, incur enormous bid-ask spreads, and sluggishly respond to announcements. These translate to retail losses of 5-to-9% on average, and 10-to-14% for high expected volatility announcements.

Accrual-based earnings is considered superior to cash flows. Accruals let managers communicate their private and inside information and thereby improve the ability of earnings to reflect underlying economic value. However, managers could engage in aggressive reporting of accruals that can seriously undermine the informativeness of reported earnings. Since outsiders cannot directly observe earnings, high-accrual firms face greater agency costs relative to low-accrual firms. Auditing plays an important role in mitigating these agency costs by constraining opportunistic management of accruals. This study examines whether there is a linkage between audit quality and pricing of discretionary accruals. The findings indicate that the association between stock returns and discretionary accruals is greater for firms audited by Big 6 auditors than for firms audited by non-Big 6 auditors. Further, discretionary accruals of clients of Big 6 auditors have a greater association with future profitability than discretionary accruals of clients of non-Big 6 auditors.

Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is one of the common techniques used in Risk modeling, i.e. statistical factor models. When using PCA to estimate the covariance matrix, and applying it to portfolio optimization, we formally analyze its performance, and find positive results in terms of portfolio efficiency (Information Ratio) and transaction cost reduction. We also propose using PCA to manage beta against alpha, and show how to apply the idea within Black-Litterman framework. Finally, we invent the technique 'Mean-Reverting PCA' to improve the stability of conventional PCA analysis.

Combining corporate sustainability performance scores based on environmental, social and governance (ESG) data with big data measuring public sentiment about a company’s sustainability performance, I find that the valuation premium paid for companies with strong sustainability performance has increased over time and that the premium is increasing as a function of positive public sentiment momentum. An ESG factor going long on firms with superior or increasing sustainability performance and negative sentiment momentum and short on firms with inferior or decreasing sustainability performance and positive sentiment momentum delivers significant positive alpha. This low sentiment ESG factor is uncorrelated with other factors, such as value, momentum, size, profitability and investment. In contrast, the high sentiment ESG factor delivers insignificant alpha and is strongly negatively correlated with the value factor. The evidence suggests that public sentiment influences investor views about the value of corporate sustainability activities and thereby both the price paid for corporate sustainability and the investment returns of portfolios that consider ESG data.

This paper develops and tests a model of how country characteristics, such as legal protections for minority investors and the level of economic and financial development, influence firms' costs and benefits in implementing measures to improve their own governance and transparency. We show that the incentives to adopt better governance mechanisms at the firm level increase with a country's financial and economic development. Further, these incentives increase or decrease with a country's investor protection depending on whether firm-level governance mechanisms and country-level investor protection are substitutes or complements. When economic and financial development is poor, the incentives to improve firm-level governance are low because outside finance is expensive and the adoption of better governance mechanisms is expensive. Using international corporate governance and transparency ratings for a large sample of firms from around the world, we find evidence consistent with this prediction. Our main empirical result is that country characteristics explain much more of the variance in governance ratings ranging from 39% to 73%) than observable firm characteristics (ranging from 4% to 22%). Further, we show that firm characteristics explain almost none of the variation in governance ratings in less-developed countries and that access to global capital markets sharpens firms'incentives for better governance.

Using one of the greatest hedge fund database ever used (2796 hedge funds including 801 dissolved), we investigate hedge funds performance using various asset-pricing models, including an extension form of Carhart's (1997) model combined with Fama and French (1998), Agarwal and Naik (2000) models and a new factor that take into account the fact that some hedge funds invest in emerging market bond. We find out that our combined model is able to explain a significant proportion of the variation in hedge fund returns over time. This latter particularly suits for Event-Driven, Global Macro, US Opportunistics, Equity non-Hedge and Sector funds. We analyse the performance of hedge funds and the persistence in performance for different subperiods including the Asian Crisis period. Then, after having studied dissolution frequencies, we made the same calculations for several individual hedge fund strategies. We showed there is a proof of persistence in performance in some cases but that persistence is not always constant over time.

With the growing competition on the inflation derivatives market and the resulting tightening of trading margins, it has become crucial to include seasonality in inflation models. In this paper, after reviewing how to estimate seasonality component on CPI data, we examine its impact on the pricing of various inflation linked derivatives.

Using a dataset that classifies firm-level ESG news as positive and negative, we examine how stock prices react to different types of ESG news. We analyze 111,020 firm–day observations for 3,126 companies and find that prices react only to issues identified as financially material for a given industry by sustainability accounting standards, and the reaction is larger for news that is positive, receive more attention, and that is related to social capital issues. We conclude that investors differentiate in their reactions based on whether the news is likely to affect a company’s fundamentals, and therefore their reactions are motivated by a financial rather than a nonpecuniary motive.

This paper investigates the stock market reaction to sudden changes in investor mood. Motivated by psychological evidence of a strong link between soccer outcomes and mood, we use international soccer results as our primary mood variable. We find a significant market decline after soccer losses. For example, a loss in the World Cup elimination stage leads to a next-day abnormal stock return of -49 basis points. This loss effect is stronger in small stocks and in more important games, and is robust to methodological changes. We also document a loss effect after international cricket, rugby, and basketball games.

We extend the Fama-MacBeth regression framework for cross-sectional return prediction to incorporate big data and machine learning. Our extension involves a three-step procedure for generating return forecasts based on Fama-MacBeth regressions with regularization and predictor selection as well as forecast combination and encompassing. As a byproduct, it provides estimates of characteristic payoffs. We also develop three performance measures for assessing cross-sectional return forecasts, including a generalization of the popular time-series out-of-sample R-squared statistic to the cross section. Applying our extension to over 200 firm characteristics, our cross-sectional return forecasts significantly improve out-of-sample predictive accuracy and provide substantial economic value to investors. Overall, our results suggest that a relatively large number of characteristics matter for determining cross-sectional expected returns. Our new method is straightforward to implement and interpret, and it performs well in our application.

Spanish Abstract: En esta monografía se describe la estructura temporal de los tipos de interés, la curva de rendimientos cupón-cero, los tipos de interés a plazo implícitos, la teoría de las expectativas del mercado sobre los tipos de interés, la teoría de la preferencia por la liquidez, la teoría de la segmentación del mercado, la teoría del hábitat preferido, la ETTI como un proceso estocástico, y su capacidad predictiva de la actividad económica.English Abstract: This monograph describes the term structure of interest rate, the zero-coupon yield curve, forward interest rates, the theory of expectations, the liquidity preference theory, the segmentation theory, the preferred habitat theory, the term structure as a stochastic process, and its predictive ability about the economic activity.

Portfolio construction and risk budgeting are the focus of many studies by academics and practitioners. In particular, diversification has spawn much interest and has been defined very differently. In this paper, we analyze a method to achieve portfolio diversification based on the decomposition of the portfolio's risk into risk factor contributions. First, we expose the relationship between risk factor and asset contributions. Secondly, we formulate the diversification problem in terms of risk factors as an optimization program. Finally, we illustrate our methodology with some real life examples and backtests, which are: budgeting the risk of Fama-French equity factors, maximizing the diversification of an hedge fund portfolio and building a strategic asset allocation based on economic factors.

This paper aims to improve transparency in the market for direct, leveraged and inverse exchange-traded notes (ETNs) on VIX futures. The first VIX futures ETNs were issued in 2009. Now there are about 30 of them, with a market cap of about $3 billion and trading volume on some of these products can reach $5 billion per day. Yet volatility trading is highly complex and regulators are rightly concerned that many market participants lack sufficient understanding of the risks they are taking. We recommend that exchanges, market-makers, issuers and potential investors, as well as regulators, read this paper to improve their understanding of these ETNs. We provide a detailed explanation of the roll yield and convexity effects that drive the returns on VIX futures ETNs, and we track their volatility and assess their performance over an eight-year period starting in March 2004, by replicating their values using daily close VIX futures prices. We explain how ETN issuers can construct almost perfect hedges of their suite of ETNs and control their issue (most ETNs are callable) to make very significant profits under all bootstrapped scenarios. However, market knowledge has precipitated front-running of the issuer’s hedging activities, making profits more difficult to control. Moreover, for hedging the ETNs such large positions must be taken on VIX futures that the ETN market now leads the VIX futures that they are supposed to track. The result has been an evident increase in the volatility of VIX futures since 2009. If this increase in statistical volatility induces an increase in VIX futures implied volatility, a knock-on effect would be higher prices of VIX options whilst S&P options are unaffected. A previous discussion paper, Alexander and Korovilas (2012), provided incontrovertible evidence that single positions on direct VIX futures ETNs of any maturity – including mid-term and longer-term trackers – could only provide a diversification/hedge of equity exposure during the first few months of a great crisis of similar magnitude to the banking collapse in late 2008. By contrast, the present discussion paper shows that some highly attractive long-term investment vehicles can be simply constructed by holding certain portfolios of VIX futures ETNs. In particular, we introduce a new class of 'roll-yield arbitrage' ETN portfolios which we call ETN2 (because they allocate between direct and inverse VIX futures tracker ETNs) and ETN3 portfolios (that allocate between static and dynamic ETN2). These portfolios have positive exposure to mid-term direct-tracker ETNs and (typically) negative exposure to short-term direct-tracker ETNs (equivalently, positive exposure to short-term inverse-tracker ETNs). Their unique risk and return characteristics make them highly attractive long-term investments, as well as superb diversifiers of stocks, bonds and commodities.

Finance is in the midst of a paradigm shift, from a neoclassical based framework to a psychologically based framework. Behavioral finance is the application of psychology to financial decision making and financial markets. Behavioralizing finance is the process of replacing neoclassical assumptions with behavioral counterparts. This monograph surveys the literature in behavioral finance, and identifies both its strengths and weaknesses. In doing so, it identifies possible directions for behavioralizing the frameworks used to study beliefs, preferences, portfolio selection, asset pricing, corporate finance, and financial market regulation. The intent is to provide a structured approach to behavioral finance in respect to underlying psychological concepts, formal framework, testable hypotheses, and empirical findings. A key theme of this monograph is that the future of finance will combine realistic assumptions from behavioral finance and rigorous analysis from neoclassical finance.

I investigate the determinants and economic consequences associated with firms' financial reporting choices. Recognizing the endogeneity associated with these choices, I find evidence of a positive association between investors' demands for firm-specific information and financial reporting quality. I also find that higher proprietary costs are associated with a lower quality of financial information. As for the economic consequences, the evidence suggests that firms with high quality financial reporting policies have reduced information asymmetries. However, after accounting for the endogeneity associated with the reporting quality choice, I find no significant evidence that firms choosing to provide financial information of higher quality enjoy a lower cost of equity capital. These results demonstrate the importance of explicitly modeling the endogeneity of financial reporting choices in investigating the associated economic consequences.

Medium frequency trading strategies include all trading activities, that do not require market microstructure analysis on one side and signicantly depend on market impact on the other side. The most important dierence from high frequency trading is the ability to analyze big amount of data using complex algorithms. Portfolio management in this case is the dynamic process, combination of signal (alpha) discovery and optimal execution on the level of trading scheduling. We used close price and trading volume time series for the list of S&P 500 companies that exist in an index since the beginning of 2008 at least. In this paper we present signal generation approaches as well as optimization of portfolio transactions. Formally the performances of medium frequency statistical arbitrage strategies are much better than the performance of their benchmarks, but they are very sensitive to the quality of trading engine and optimization software. In this minor revision we added the results of out-of-sample tests and explanations of terms and methodology.

Accruals are the non-cash component of earnings. They represent adjustments made to cash flows to generate a profit measure largely unaffected by the timing of receipts and payments of cash. Prior research uncovers two anomalies: expected returns increase in profitability and decrease in accruals. We show that cash-based operating profitability (a measure that excludes accruals) outperforms measures of profitability that include accruals. Further, cash-based operating profitability subsumes accruals in predicting the cross section of average returns. An investor can increase a strategy's Sharpe ratio more by adding just a cash-based operating profitability factor to the investment opportunity set than by adding both an accruals factor and a profitability factor that includes accruals.

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can fundamentally change the way investors process information. We probe the economic usefulness of these tools in summarizing complex corporate disclosures using the stock market as a laboratory. The unconstrained summaries are remarkably shorter compared to the originals, whereas their information content is amplified. When a document has a positive (negative) sentiment, its summary becomes more positive (negative). Importantly, the summaries are more effective at explaining stock market reactions to the disclosed information. Motivated by these findings, we propose a measure of information “bloat.” We show that bloated disclosure is associated with adverse capital market consequences, such as lower price efficiency and higher information asymmetry. Finally, we show that the model is effective at constructing targeted summaries that identify firms’ (non-)financial performance. Collectively, our results indicate that generative AI adds considerable value for investors with information processing constraints.

In this paper, we examine the economic impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) by analyzing foreign listing behavior onto U.S. and U.K. stock exchanges before and after the enactment of the Act in 2002. Using a sample of all listing events onto U.S. and U.K. exchanges from 1995-2006, we develop an exchange choice model that captures firm-level, industry-level, exchange-level and country-level listing incentives, and test whether these listing preferences changed following the enactment of the Act. After controlling for firm characteristics and other economic determinants of these firms' exchange choice, we find that the listing preferences of large foreign firms choosing between U.S. exchanges and the LSE's Main Market did not change following the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley. In contrast, we find that the likelihood of a U.S. listing among small foreign firms choosing between the Nasdaq and LSE's Alternative Investment Market decreased following the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley. The negative effect among small firms is consistent with these marginal companies being less able to absorb the incremental costs associated with SOX compliance. The screening of smaller firms with weaker governance attributes from U.S. exchanges is consistent with the heightened governance costs imposed by the Act increasing the bonding-related benefits of a U.S. listing.