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Exchange traded funds (ETFs) have a novel design that allows them to “open up” illiquid markets hitherto resistant to index products. We demonstrate that such ETFs also have the potential to alter the informational efficiency of underlying markets and introduce fragility via herding. Specifically, while these ETFs bring more information to the markets at the aggregate level, individual asset prices may face persistent dislocations. We also show that such ETFs can exacerbate herding, where speculators across markets trade similarly, unhinged from fundamental value. All results arise from the distinct characteristics of inter-market learning in ETFs on hard-to-access underlying settings.

The past couple of decades have seen a significant shift from active to passive investment strategies. We examine how this shift affects financial stability through its impacts on: (i) funds’ liquidity and redemption risks, (ii) asset-market volatility, (iii) asset-management industry concentration, and (iv) comovement of asset returns and liquidity. Overall, the shift appears to be increasing some risks and reducing others. Some passive strategies amplify market volatility, and the shift has increased industry concentration, but it has diminished some liquidity and redemption risks. Finally, evidence is mixed on the links between indexing and comovement of asset returns and liquidity.

The Enron case challenges some of the core beliefs and practices that have underpinned various positions in the debates about corporate law and governance, including mergers and acquisitions, since the 1980s. In particular, Enron raises at least the following problems for the received model of corporate governance: First, it provides another set of reasons to question the strength of the efficient market hypothesis, here, the company's dizzyingly high stock price despite transparently irrational reliance on its auditors' compromised certification. Second, it undermines faith in the corporate governance mechanism - the monitoring board - that has been offered as a substitute for unfettered shareholder access to the market for corporate control. In particular, the board's capacity to protect the integrity of financial disclosure has not kept pace with the increasing reliance on stock price performance in measuring and rewarding managerial performance. Third, it suggests the existence of tradeoffs in the use of stock options in executive compensation because of the potential pathologies of the risk-preferring management team. Fourth, it shows the poor fit between stock-based employee compensation and employee retirement planning. More generally, it raises questions about the shift in retirement planning towards defined contribution plans, which make employees risk bearers and financial planners, and away from defined benefit plans, which impose some of the risk and fiduciary planning obligations on firms. Although the disclosure, monitoring and other failures may lead to useful reforms, Enron also reminds us that there is a problem that cannot be solved but can only be contained in the tension between imperfectly fashioned incentives and self-restraint.

The aim of this paper is to explore the literature regarding sustainability and extended reporting frameworks, to catalogue various typologies of reporting frameworks, to investigate the motivation by organisations to adopt such frameworks, and to identify the extent of their use in Australia. We start by defining corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability and provide a brief overview of the historical development of the concepts of sustainability. Key to this is understanding stakeholders and their importance as a motivator for organisations to adopt sustainability reporting frameworks. We outline the background to the development of new reporting frameworks by examining the academic literature in the area of sustainability research. We identify and catalogue 11 new reporting and social accounting guidelines, and focus on the development of one particular framework, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and investigate the extent of its use in Australia. We find the motivation for adopters of sustainability reporting frameworks is to attempt to communicate with their stakeholders the performance of management in achieving long-run corporate benefits, such as improved financial performance, increased competitive advantage, profit maximisation, and the long-term success of the firm.

Placing the Asian economies onto a sustainable development pathway requires an unprecedented shift in investment away from greenhouse gas, fossil fuel, and natural resource intensive industries towards more resource efficient technologies and business models. The financial sector will have to play a central role in this ‘green transformation’. This study discusses the need for greening the financial system and the role of financial governance. It reviews the state of green lending and investment in Asia and provides an overview of green financial governance initiatives across Asia. It also identifies market innovations to increase green finance in Asia, barriers to green investments, and financial policy and highlights priority areas for policy makers.

My answer to the question in the title is NO. It is crystal clear that CAPM and its Betas do not explain anything about expected or required returns. There are mountains of evidence to support my stance.If, for any reason, a person teaches that Beta and CAPM explain something and he knows that they do not explain anything, such a person is lying. To lie is not ethical. If the person “believes” that Beta and CAPM explain something, his “belief” is due to ignorance (he has not studied enough, he has not done enough calculations, he just repeats what he heard to others…) For a professor, it is not ethical to teach about a subject that he does not know enough about.It is very important to differentiate between a fact (something that truly exists or happens) and an opinion (what someone thinks about a particular thing). It is a fact that Beta and CAPM do not explain anything about expected or required returns.I welcome comments (disagreements, errors…) that will help the readers to think about using and teaching CAPM and calculated betas. The paper also incorporates 107 comments from readers of previous versions.

In this document we show how to handle counterparty risk for Interest Rate Swaps (IRS). First we establish a general formula, showing that counterparty risk adds one level of optionality to the contract. Then we introduce the default probabilities using a deterministic intensity model where the default time is modeled as the first jump of a time-inhomogeneous Poisson process. We consider Credit Default Swaps as liquid sources of market default probabilities. We then apply the general formula to a single IRS. The IRS price under counterparty risk turns out to be the sum of swaption prices with different maturities, each weighted with the probability of defaulting around that maturity. Then we consider a portfolio of IRS's in presence of a netting agreement. The related option cannot be valued as a standard swaption, and we resort both to Monte Carlo simulation and to two analytical approximations, investigating them by Monte Carlo simulation under several configurations of market inputs. We find a good agreement between the formula and the simulations in most cases. The approximated formula is well suited to risk management, where the computational time under each risk factors scenario is crucial and an analytical approximation contains it.

This paper seeks to uncover the drivers of the idiosyncratic momentum anomaly. We show that: (I) idiosyncratic momentum is a distinct phenomenon that exists next to conventional momentum and is not explained by it; (ii) idiosyncratic momentum is priced in the cross-section of stock returns after controlling for established and recently proposed asset pricing factors, including the ones that explain a host of momentum-related anomalies; (iii) some of the prominent explanations for the momentum premium, such as crash risk, and investor overconfidence and overreaction linked to market states and dynamics cannot explain idiosyncratic momentum profits; (iv) long-term return dynamics of idiosyncratic momentum support the underreaction hypothesis for its existence; (v) idiosyncratic momentum generates robust returns across a range of developed and emerging markets.

The valuation of corporate debt is an important issue in asset pricing. While there has been an enormous amount of theoretical modeling of corporate bond prices, there has been relatively little empirical testing of these models. Recently there has been extensive development of rating based models as a type of reduced form model. These models take as a premise that groups of bonds can be identified which are homogeneous with respect to risk. For each risk group the models require estimates of several characteristics such as the spot yield curve, the default probabilities and the recovery rate. These estimates are then used to compute the theoretical price for each bond in the group. The purpose of this article is to clarify some of the differences among these models, to examine how well they explain prices, and to examine how to group bonds to most effectively estimate prices.

Our objective in this paper is to examine whether one can use option-implied information to improve the selection of mean-variance portfolios with a large number of stocks, and to document which aspects of option-implied information are most useful for improving their out-of-sample performance. Portfolio performance is measured in terms of volatility, Sharpe ratio, and turnover. Our empirical evidence shows that using option-implied volatility helps to reduce portfolio volatility. Using option-implied correlation does not improve any of the metrics. Using option-implied volatility, risk-premium, and skewness to adjust expected returns leads to a substantial improvement in the Sharpe ratio, even after prohibiting shortsales and accounting for transactions costs.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of four popular investing formulas—the F-Score, Magic Formula, Acquirer’s Multiple, and Conservative Formula—within a unified framework over an extensive period. Each formula generates significant raw and risk-adjusted returns, primarily by providing efficient exposure to well-established style factors. However, no single formula consistently outperforms across all metrics. The Acquirer’s Multiple achieves the highest returns for top decile portfolios, the Conservative Formula leads in CAPM alpha and return spread, and the Magic Formula exhibits the highest remaining alpha after adjusting for common factors. While all formulas remain successful for concentrated long-only portfolios in the post-2000 period, we observe some performance decay relative to earlier periods, underscoring the need for continuous innovation in investing strategies.

Recently, Kat and Palaro (2005) showed how dynamic trading technology can be used to create dynamic futures trading strategies (or 'synthetic funds' as we call them), which generate returns with predefined statistical properties. In this paper we put their approach to the test. In a set of four out-of-sample tests over the period March 1995-April 2006 we show that the Kat and Palaro (2005) strategies are indeed capable of accurately generating returns with a variety of properties, including negative correlation with stocks and bonds and high positive skewness. Under difficult conditions, the synthetic funds also produce impressive average excess returns. Combined with their liquid and transparent nature, this confirms that synthetic funds are an attractive alternative to direct investment in popular alternative asset classes such as (funds of) hedge funds, commodities, etc.

Microblogging forums have become a vibrant online platform to exchange trading ideas and other stock-related information. Using methods from computational linguistics, we analyze roughly 250,000 stock-related microblogging messages, so-called tweets, on a daily basis. We find the sentiment (i.e., bullishness) of tweets to be associated with abnormal stock returns and message volume to predict next-day trading volume. In addition, we analyze the mechanism leading to efficient aggregation of information in microblogging forums. Our results demonstrate that users providing above average investment advice are retweeted (i.e., quoted) more often and have more followers, which amplifies their share of voice in microblogging forums.

As both investors and firms globalize, it should come as no surprise that valuing these firms brings special challenges. In this paper, we look at firms that not only operate in many countries but also in diverse businesses. The different risk, growth and cash flow profiles of the cash flow streams generated by these firms requires us to reconsider how we estimate discount rates and approach valuation. We consider how best to value these firms as consolidated entities and contrast these valuations with an alternative, where we value each part of the firm separately and use the sum of the parts to value the businesses.

We present an explicit formula for European options on coupon bearing bonds and swaptions in the Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM) one factor model with non-stochastic volatility. The formula extends the Jamshidian formula for zero-coupon bonds. We provide also an explicit way to compute the hedging ratio (Delta) to hedge the option with its underlying.

This paper examines the association between expected cost of equity capital and three types of disclosure (annual report, quarterly and other published reports, and investor relations). Our sample consists of 3,620 firm-year observations with Value Line data, which are also included in the AIMR's Annual Reviews of Corporate Reporting Practices dated from 1985/1986 through 1995/1996. The disclosure rankings produced by the AIMR are employed to proxy for disclosure level. Four alternative estimates of expected cost of equity capital estimates are examined. However, we conclude that two of these approaches, that employed in Botosan (1997) and an approach based on a finite horizon specification of the Gordon growth model, dominate the other two. As expected, we find that cost of equity capital is decreasing in annual report disclosure level. The magnitude of the difference in cost of equity capital between the most and least forthcoming firms is approximately one-half to one percentage point, after controlling for market beta and firm size. Contrary to our expectations, we find a positive association between cost of equity capital and the level of more timely disclosures, such as the quarterly report. The magnitude of the difference in cost of equity capital between the most and least forthcoming firms is approximately one to two percentage points, after controlling for market beta and firm size. This result, while contrary to that predicted by theory, is consistent with managers' claims that greater timely disclosures increase cost of equity capital, possibly through increased stock price volatility. Finally, we find no association between cost of equity capital and the level of investor relations activities. These results confirm and extend the results of Botosan (1997) to include larger, more heavily followed firms, across a diverse group of industries, over a number of years. In addition, they suggest that aggregating across different types of disclosure results in a loss of information and potentially erroneous conclusions.

Daily pricing of mutual funds provides liquidity to investors but is subject to valuation errors due to the inability to observe synchronous, fair security prices at the end of the trading day. This may hurt fund investors if speculators strategically seek to exploit mispricing or if the net flow of money into funds is correlated with these pricing errors. We show that mutual funds are exposed to speculative traders by using a simple day trading rule that yields large profits in a sample of 391 U.S.-based open-end international mutual funds. We propose a simple "fair pricing" mechanism that alleviates these concerns by correcting net asset values for stale prices. We argue that fund companies and regulators should look at alternatives that allow funds to offer fair pricing to investors, which in turn decreases the need to resort to monitoring for day traders and redemption penalties.

Spanish Abstract: Este documento analiza 21 tipos de bonos estructurados y 9 tipos de participaciones preferentes. English Abstract: This document analyzes 21 different structured bonds and 9 preferred shares issued in Spain in the period 2004-2015.

In this article we build a rigorous theory of discount curve construction and suggest a dual curve framework for pricing single and cross currency swaps consistently.

We use the cross-section regression approach of Fama and MacBeth (FM 1973) to construct cross-section factors corresponding to the time-series factors of Fama and French (FF 2015). Time-series models that use only cross-section factors provide better descriptions of average returns than time-series models that use time-series factors. This is true when we impose constant factor loadings and when we use time-varying loadings that are natural for time-series factors and time-varying loadings that are natural for cross-section factors.

Our paper suggests a simple recursive residuals (out-of-sample) graphical approach to evaluating the predictive power of popular equity premium and stock market time-series forecasting regressions. When applied, we find that dividend-ratios should have been known to have no predictive ability even prior to the 1990s, and that any seeming ability even then was driven by only two years, 1973 and 1974. Our paper also documents changes in the time-series processes of the dividends themselves and shows that an increasing persis-tence of dividend-price ratio is largely responsible for the inability of dividend ratios to predict equity premia. Cochrane (1997)'s accounting identity—that dividend ratios have to predict long-run dividend growth or stock returns—empirically holds only over horizons longer than 5-10 years. Over shorter horizons, dividend yields primarily forecast themselves.

Should laws criminalizing animal abuse apply to animals raised for food? The answer is yes, and yes especially because farm animals are generally now under the control of business corporations. State and federal criminal law have proved critical in modifying corporate policy and practice in other areas, a current example being worker safety. Criminal liability today would include criminal liability of the corporate entity itself, and would thus also introduce the most effective regulation of individual handling of farm animals - regulation by the corporation, which has methods and resources public agencies cannot match.

This paper develops a closed-form option pricing formula for a spot asset whose variance follows a GARCH process. The model allows for correlation between returns of the spot asset and variance and also admits multiple lags in the dynamics of the GARCH process. The single factor (one lag) version of this model contains Heston's (1993) stochastic volatility model as a diffusion limit and therefore unifies the discrete GARCH and continuous-time stochastic volatility literature of option pricing. The new model provides the first option formula for a random volatility model that is solely a function of observables; all the parameters can be easily estimated from the history of asset prices, observed at discreteintervals. Empirical analysis on S&P500 index options shows the single factor version of the GARCH model to be a substantial improvement over the Black-Scholes (1973) model. The GARCH model continues to substantially outperform the Black-Scholes model even when the Black-Scholes model is updated every period while the parameters of the GARCH model are held constant. The improvement is due largely to the ability of the GARCH model to describe the correlation of volatility with spot returns. This allows the GARCH model to capture strike price biases in the Black-Scholes model that give rise to the skew in implied volatilities in the index options market.

Corporate finance decisions are not made at random, but are usually deliberate decisions by firms or their managers to self-select into their preferred choices. This chapter reviews econometric models of self-selection. The review is organized into two parts. The first part reviews econometric models of self-selection, focusing on the key assumptions of different models and the types of applications they may be best suited for. Part two reviews empirical applications of selection models in the areas of corporate investment, financing, and financial intermediation. We find that self-selection is a rapidly growing area in corporate finance, partly reflecting its recognition as a pervasive feature of corporate finance decisions, but more importantly, the increasing recognition of selection models as unique tools for understanding, modeling, and testing the role of private information in corporate finance.

Common risk metrics reported in academia include volatility, skewness, and factor exposures. The maximum drawdown statistic is rarely calculated, perhaps because it is path dependent and estimated with greater uncertainty. In practice, however, asset managers and fiduciaries routinely use the drawdown statistic for fund allocation and redemption decisions. To help such decisions, we begin by quantifying the probability of hitting a certain drawdown level, given various return distribution properties. Next, we show that drawdown-based rules can be particularly useful for improving investment performance over time by detecting managers that lose their ability to outperform. This can happen as a result of structural market changes, increased competition for the type of strategy employed, staff turnover or a fund accumulating too many assets. Finally, we show that drawdown-based rules can be used as a risk reduction technique, but this impacts both expected returns and risk.