Knowledge that Transforms

Discussions about insider trading regulation veer between the poles of forbidding insider trading to protect market integrity and allowing insider trading to foster informational efficiency. We study traders’ preferences for regulation by offering them concurrent markets with different regulatory regimes in an experimental setting. We find that informed traders’ preference for the unregulated market causes both informed and uninformed traders to be more active in the unregulated market. This market, thus, sees more trading volume, lower spreads, and less mispricing. Nevertheless, uninformed traders suffer greater losses in unregulated markets, while informed traders profit from the absence of regulation.

I provide a new monthly cross-sectional measure of stock market tail risk, SCSTR, defined as the average of the daily cross-sectional tail risk, rather than the tail risk of the pooled daily returns within a month. Through simulations, I find that SCSTR better captures monthly tail risk rather than merely the tail risk on specific days within a month. In an extended period from 1964 until 2018, this difference is important in generating strong in- and out-of-sample predictability and performs better than the historical risk premium and other commonly-used predictors for short- and long-term horizons.

We extract an option-implied measure for systemic risk, the Systemic Options Value-at-Risk (SOVaR), from put option prices that can capture the buildup stage of systemic risk in the financial sector earlier than the standard systemic risk measures (SRMs). Our measure exhibits more timely early warning signals of main events around the global financial crisis than the main SRMs. SOVaR shows significant predictive power for macroeconomic downturns as well as future recessions up to one year ahead. Our results are robust to various specifications, breakdowns of financial sectors, and controlling for other main risk measures proposed in the literature.

Managed futures funds are predominantly trend-followers. By analyzing positioning data, we provide novel evidence for this claim and estimate signals applied by these funds. We write trend-followers aggregate position as a weighted sum of past daily returns and use a generalized ridge regression for regularization and parameter estimation. This procedure prevents overfitting but remains flexible enough to capture various patterns. For the 23 commodities considered, trend-following can explain speculators’ position changes with an average R2 of more than 40%. Finally, we document that producers act as contrarians in a way that closely mirrors the behavior of momentum traders.

Using the large-scale index-linked exchange-traded fund (ETF) purchase program of the Bank of Japan (BOJ), we examine the role of unconventional equity-based monetary policies in the market liquidity of the underlying securities. Using a large sample of Japanese stocks, we document a significant increase in stock illiquidity when a firm's ownership by the BOJ increases. Intensified ETF arbitrage activities partially mediate such effect. The increased illiquidity is concentrated among small and young firms and those whose shares are likely subject to strong buying pressure. Finally, BOJ ownership increases comovement in liquidity and reduces informational efficiency.

We examine the role of information from the options market in forecasting the equity premium. We provide evidence that the equity premium is predictable out-of-sample using a set of CBOE strategy benchmark indices as predictors. We use a range of econometric approaches to generate point, quantile, and density forecasts of the equity premium. We find that models based on option variables consistently outperform the historical average benchmark. In addition to statistical gains, using option predictors results in substantial economic benefits for a mean–variance investor, delivering up to a fivefold increase in certainty equivalent returns over the benchmark during the 1996–2021 sample period.

The long-run underperformance of initial public offerings (IPOs) suggests that aftermarket prices are overvalued. According to the theory of heterogeneous beliefs and short-sale constraints, the aftermarket price of IPOs is overvalued; in addition, their performance deteriorates when the mean level of optimism and degree of divergence of investors’ opinions increase. I examine this phenomenon by estimating the mean and divergence of investor opinion distribution by focusing on Japanese auction-method IPOs. According to the results, both optimism and divergence cause the overvaluation of IPO’s first-day market price; however, only the mean level of optimism is statistically significant in explaining post-IPO underperformance.