Journal of Financial Markets最新文献

Regulators use measures such as a fee on high order-to-trade ratio (OTR) to slow down high-frequency trading. Their impact on market quality is, however, mixed. We study a natural experiment in the Indian stock market where such a fee was introduced twice, with differences in motivation and implementation. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that the fee decreased OTR and improved market quality when it was imposed on all orders, while it had little effect when it was imposed selectively on some orders. Improvement in liquidity was driven by a reduction in adverse selection costs following lower OTR.

Investor sentiment is an important condition for style investing in affecting asset price predictability. We find that style returns have predictive power for future stock returns in high sentiment periods, but not low sentiment periods. The correlation between style returns and stock returns explains the variation in momentum profits in high sentiment periods, but not low sentiment periods. Sentiment has an interaction effect with style returns, but not market returns. While positive style returns predict future stock returns under high sentiment, negative style returns do not. The effect of investor sentiment on style investing is independent of prior market returns.

We investigate how market power or price impact of market makers affects the participation decisions of investors with ambiguity aversion. Limited participation exists because some investors are ambiguous about the asset fundamental, but the market power of market makers mitigates limited participation. As a result, when market makers become less competitive, the non-participation range decreases, while return volatility increases; thus, market makers and ambiguity-averse investors are better off, but investors with liquidity needs are worse off. However, the non-participation range and uninformed investors’ welfare can increase or decrease when information is more asymmetric, depending on the importance of liquidity demand.

We analyze the underlying source of gender differences in earnings estimates on a crowdsourcing platform, Estimize, to understand the mechanisms driving analyst ability. Estimates made by females are more accurate than those made by males. This outperformance is not consistent with explanations based on females’ innate ability to process information, females utilizing more up-to-date information, superior stock selection among females, copycat estimates, gender bias, or survivorship bias. Instead, our evidence is consistent with females learning more quickly through making estimates, leading to their outperformance.

Taxes create distortions in financial markets. A tax credit attached to dividend payments in Australia creates a wedge in valuations as it can be utilized only by certain investors. Individual investors, who benefit most from the credit, buy aggressively cum-dividend and sell aggressively ex-dividend, demanding liquidity from institutional investors. Stocks with higher net purchases by individual investors operating through discount brokers in the cum-dividend period have ex-day returns that are 25 bps lower. The tax distortion allows individual investors to capture the tax credit and institutional investors to increase trading profits. Individual investor trading influences ex-dividend pricing.

We examine the effect of single-stock futures (SSFs) trading on the price discovery and market quality of underlying stocks during the 2008 short-selling ban in the United States. We find a significant increase in SSFs trading volume for banned stocks during the ban period. We show that the contribution of SSFs trading to underlying stock price discovery also increased significantly. Moreover, SSFs trading helped mitigate the negative effect of the short-selling ban on market quality. Although SSFs trading in the U.S. still lags other countries, our findings project an increasingly important role for them in the U.S. financial market.

We find that the relation between the idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) anomaly and the beta anomaly is quite different at long horizons than at short horizons. At short horizons, neither anomaly can fully explain the other. At long horizons, the IVOL-alpha relation is explained by the beta-alpha relation. A long-window estimate of idiosyncratic volatility measure popularly used by the investment industry behaves more like beta than IVOL in predicting returns and alphas. Our findings suggest that the short-horizon and long-horizon low-risk effects are different and warrant different explanations.

We show that individual stock returns comove more with market returns when there are climate disasters such as hurricanes and floods. Comovement increases in the month of and the month following the disaster before declining back to normal levels. The disaster impact is stronger in recessions and crisis periods but is evident in all periods. The increased return correlation stems more from an increase in covariance than an increase in stock or market standard deviation. Moreover, we show climate events have a greater impact on comovement in stocks with greater sensitivity to their local economy and higher information asymmetry.

We conduct a tone-based event study to examine the aggregate abnormal tone dynamics in media articles around earnings announcements. We test whether they convey incremental information that is useful for price discovery for non-financial S&P 500 firms. The relation we find between the abnormal tone and abnormal returns suggests that media articles provide incremental information relative to the information contained in earnings press releases and earnings calls.

Leading economic indicators assist in forecasting future business conditions. Can they also predict aggregate stock returns? To answer this question, we examine six decades of data from 39 countries. Short-term changes in the composite leading indicator (CLI) positively correlate with future stock returns in the cross-section. The quintile of markets with the highest CLI increase outperforms the quintile with the lowest CLI change by 1.43% per month. The predictive power of the CLI survives multiple robustness checks and cannot be absorbed by established risk factors. Our findings imply an exploitable investment strategy that can be pursued with exchange-traded funds.