Journal of Empirical Finance最新文献

Huang and Kilic (2019) demonstrate that gold to platinum price ratio (GP), which proxies for tail risk in the economy, is a priced risk factor in the cross-section of stock returns. We document that GP negatively affects the mutual fund flows of the active equity funds. In cross-sectional regressions, we find that funds with high betas with respect to the change in GP (${\beta }_{\Delta GP}$) have larger future fund flows, as such funds provide a hedge against economic distress. Further, ${\beta }_{\Delta GP}$ helps predict the future performance of the fund in the next few quarters. ${\beta }_{\Delta GP}$ also relates negatively to the downside risk of the fund, implying that funds could potentially reduce their left-tail risk by tilting towards securities with above average ${\beta }_{\Delta GP}$. We also examine the flows to active corporate bond funds and passive funds. While these effects of GP are largely observable for passive funds, they are not as strongly observable for corporate bond funds.

We investigate how shareholder-debtholder conflict of interest affects the corporate tax avoidance using a unique setting of the affiliated and unaffiliated commercial bankers’ board representation. Consistent with the notion that board representation grants lenders’ access to private information that helps monitor and influence firms’ tax practice, we find that appointments of affiliated banker directors significantly reduce firms’ tax avoidance behavior, while appointing unaffiliated banker directors shows no such effect. The impact of affiliated banker directors on alleviating tax avoidance is stronger among firms with severer conflict of interest between shareholders and debtholders, specifically among firms with weaker corporate governance, higher financial leverage and higher CEO stock ownership.

We evaluate the performance of eleven asset pricing models in the Chinese A-share market using a variety of test portfolios and statistical methodologies. To compile the test portfolios, we construct 105 anomalies and use the 23 significant anomalies as test assets for model comparison. The results indicate that, in time-series test and anomaly explanations, the Hou et al. (2019) five-factor q model demonstrates the best overall performance. The pairwise cross-sectional $R^2$ tests and multiple model comparison tests further affirm that the Hou et al. (2019) five-factor q model, the Fama and French (2018) six-factor (FF6) model, and the Kelly et al. (2019) five-factor Instrumented Principal Component Analysis (IPCA5) model are the top performers. Notably, the performance of the five-factor q model remains robust across various experimental designs.

Pseudo-market prices of infrequently traded assets with scheduled cash flows – commercial real estate appraisals and matrix prices of commercial mortgage backed securities – are compared against a VAR model to assess the extent to which these widely-used proxies are grounded in economic fundamentals. Property appraisals fail to fully incorporate the economic fundamentals underlying commercial real estate transactions. During the financial crisis, CMBS matrix prices captured underlying economic fundamentals and exhibited little pricing bias. However, matrix prices no longer exhibited such economic discipline after the financial crisis. Incorporating VAR forecasts considerably improves the predictive ability of appraisals and matrix prices.