Knowledge that Transforms

By using a unique data set on the organizational structure of fixed-income portfolio managers, that is, mutual funds and insurance companies, we study the effects of organizational hierarchy within a fund management team on bond investing. We document that team hierarchies reduce the portfolio managers’ incentive to collect and share soft information. Funds with multiple hierarchies invest less in bonds of local firms, hold less concentrated portfolios, and herd more with the market. Overall, they deliver lower portfolio performances. We also show that changes in fund hierarchy subsequently find their way into fund behaviors.

Our paper investigates extended abnormal returns for S&P 500 index changes in a comprehensive 1979-2015 sample. The literature’s depiction of longer window returns lacked both appropriate nuance and cross-sectional analysis. Solid evidence for reversion appears in the 2000s. Stocks no longer experience permanent shifts in investor demand when they are either added to or removed from the S&P 500. Received April 19, 2016; editorial decision January 23, 2017 by Editor Jeffrey Pontiff

Corporate loans increasingly have become an important part of portfolio management with the advent of a liquid and transparent secondary market. This paper examines the pricing of characteristics and betas in the cross-section of expected loan returns. Expected loan returns decrease with default beta. Default beta contains information not captured by rating or spread-to-maturity. Among loan characteristics, a 3-month formation momentum strategy earns a monthly premium of 122 bps. Momentum is prominent in loans issued by the lowest-rated borrowers.

Counterparty risk could hamper trade and worsen a financial crisis. A central clearing party (CCP) insures traders against counterparty default and thus benefits trade. Default of the CCP however becomes a new systemic risk. CCP risk management does not account for risks associated with crowded positions. This paper proposes a CCP exposure measure based on tail risk in trader portfolios. It identifies and measures crowded risk and assigns it to traders according to the polluter pays principle. CCP data show that crowded positions increase CCP exposure most (about one-third) on turbulent days, when exposure is high already.

Journal Article Subscription Page Get access The Review of Asset Pricing Studies, Volume 6, Issue 2, December 2016, Page i3, https://doi.org/10.1093/rapstu/rav017 Published: 15 November 2016

This paper examines the effects of macro-level disagreement on the cross-section of stock returns. Using forecast dispersion measures from the Survey of Professional Forecasters database as proxies for macro disagreement, I find that high macro beta stocks earn lower future returns relative to low macro beta stocks following high macro disagreement states. This negative relation between returns for macro factors and macro disagreement is robust and exists for a large set of macroeconomic factors, suggesting that high macro beta stocks are overvalued compared with low macro beta stocks due to their greater sensitivity to aggregate disagreement

We document that speed of information dissemination within mutual fund families positively affects fund performance. This suggests that the resultant benefits of higher information precision far outweigh free-riding costs associated with fast internal dissemination. The performance effect is stronger when information travels across managers from different, rather than the same, styles. This is consistent with fast information diffusion aggregating complementary insights that sharpen information precision, but also with fewer free-riding opportunities among managers from different styles. Managers rationally exploit the resultant higher information precision by trading more, relying less on public information, and investing differently than unaffiliated peers.

This paper examines whether investors receive compensation for holding stocks with a strong sensitivity to extreme market downturns in a sample covering forty countries. Worldwide, stocks with strong crash sensitivity deliver average returns of more than 7% p.a. higher than stocks with weak crash sensitivity. The effect is robust across geographical subsamples and is not explained by systematic risk factors and alternative firm characteristics. I show that the risk premium is particularly pronounced in countries that display negative market skewness, high income per capita, and rank high on Hofstede’s individualism index.

Asset pricing models predict a strong connection between the real risk-free interest rate and the macroeconomy, but prior research finds little empirical support for the connection when examining expected growth. This paper documents a robust relation between the interest rate and macroeconomic uncertainty (i.e., conditional variance). Consistent with precautionary savings, high uncertainty is associated with a low interest rate using numerous data sources, time periods, and measures. A relation between habit and the interest rate disappears after including uncertainty, and the relation is stronger using long-run uncertainty. The results imply that analyses of the interest rate without uncertainty are seriously incomplete.